[PREV - THERMAL_DREAMING]    [TOP]

SEA_OF_TIME

                                                        April 15, 2010

  As far back as 1892, C.S. Peirce commented that in
  the "law of the mind" there's an oddity about time
  and the way we perceive it, compared to the role
  it plays in...

      "... the law of physical force, where there
      is no more distinction between the two opposite
      directions in time than between moving northward
      and moving southward."

                "The Law of Mind" (1892)
                _The Monist_                     p.221 of the collection
                                                 "Love and Chance"


      Eddington, in 1928 in "The Nature of the
      Physical World" expounded on this,
      introducing the phrase "The Arrow of Time".        Or so says
                                                         wikipedia.



    The point is that if you take a simple system
    described by classical mechanics, such as the
    elastic collison of a few billard balls, you
    could film it and then show the film either
    backwards or forwards without any appearence
    of strangeness.

                                            Except, perhaps, in a game like
       With just a few balls                "pool" where in the reverse case
       (or particles) bumping               you might notice that the eight
       into each other it's                 ball had been used as a cue,
       straightforward to                   contrary to the rules.
       calculate what will
       happen; and it's
       easy to contrive
       reversed cases
       where the results
       become the causes.

         So: is time an illusion of
         consciousness, with no
         real physical existance?

            But if you radically increase
            the number of balls in the
            system, a different sort of
            behavior emerges.

                                                  (January 24, 2010)
   Shoot a film of someone upending a bottle
   full of beads: the beads pour out of the
   bottle and rattle around in a tray until
   settling in a layer at the bottom.

   If you run the film backwards you get
   an insanely impossible looking scene,
   where the beads bounce around and leap
   up and get sucked into the bottle.

   Even if you invert the image (so
   everything is being pulled downward in
   the usual way) the reversed film still
   looks fundamentally wrong.

   If you upended the tray with the bottle
   under it, in the absence of a funnel
   you'd expect very few beads to land
   inside the bottle.  Mostly they would
   fall straight down and miss it entirely.

       Nothing prevents a bead from
       dropping into the tiny mouth of a
       bottle by chance, and given enough
       beads, there's a good chance it'll
       happen a few times... but the odds
       against every one of them managing    It would be quite a trick to
       to rattle around and score a          find a way to shoot all of
       hole-in-one is so immense that we     these beads together so that
       can call it a "practical              they all slip into the mouth of
       impossibility" without a stretch.     the bottle without interfering
                                             with each other.

                                               'Tis much easier to empty
                                               a bottle than to fill it.


              Time matters: there *is* a direction
              to physical phenomena, and it comes
              straight out of probability.

              Eddington's point: the arrow of time
              points in the direction of increasing
              randomness, increasing disorder,
              increasing entropy.



--------
[NEXT - BLUE_SPARKS]