It's one of those profundities of adolescence that you suddenly come to realize that time -- or at least the way we mark time -- is an artifice, something we just mutually agree on for our general convenience. There is no universal requirement, no rule of physics that says
this is one o'clock, or that is Tuesday. We simply name it so because otherwise we have a hard time keeping track of stuff.
But it's actually much more mind blowing that that. Lately, a couple of articles addressed the actually physics of it -- the rule that would say why this is Tuesday -- and it turns out that there is a problem with time, or at least with the way we perceive it.
Einstein in 1921 by F Schmutzer
As
one article points out, according to the science of it, there really is no time. According to
Brainy Quote,
Albert Einstein said, "
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." He famously had to stop using time as a constant to make the math of his Theory of Relativity work. Now, physicists say (because of that math Einstein did) everything actually does happen all at once. Or, rather, everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen already exists as a dimension, like height or distance. It's just
there.
But here's the thing: We only move along the dimension in one direction. It's as if you could only go up, but never down again, or if you drove to Cleveland along the interstate, there was only one lane and no return. Why can't we move up and down time like we go from here to there and back?
Ludwig Boltzmann
A piece on the BBC website says it apparently has something to do with
entropy and a guy named
Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann was a classic example of the man before his time. He argued for the existence of atoms before the consensus of scientists agreed as well as a number of other basic principles that we now consider obvious truisms (and he was ostracized for his beliefs). He died in 1906, 10 years before Einstein published and won the Nobel for Relativity and physics generally came around to agree with pretty much everything Boltzmann said.
As the article explains it: "According to thermodynamics, every object in the world has a certain
amount of entropy associated with it, and whenever anything happens to
it, the amount of entropy increases. For instance, if you put ice cubes
into a glass of water and let them melt, the entropy inside the glass
goes up." But like time, entropy only works in one direction, and the two, Boltzmann thought, might be related. Time moves in that way because it's forced to by entropy. Or rather we move through time that way because of entropy, because time doesn't move, just our place in it. Or ... well, one can end up in the thick weeds fairly quickly, especially (as the BBC piece explains) if you start getting into the math of it all, which often still insists that time is a dimension like all the others and we
ought to be able to move in either direction on it.
This is a lot more complicated that getting a Delorean to 88 miles an hour ... but I think it's a lot more interesting.
