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| Star Trek TNG: "Time's Arrow, part II" |
As the visit from my brother and sister-in-law end: we think of time. How it's flown. How children we used to diaper are in college. Planning to do cruises; family and "class of 50" reunions, this is more a philosophical take on time, not an avocation of time travel...
TAKE a few steps forward, turn around and walk back. No problem. Now let a few seconds pass, then turn around and head back a few seconds in time. No luck? …Of course not. As we know only too well, time, unlike space, has only one direction - it flows from past to future, and never the other way round.
That all sounds like the natural order of things, but if you look closely enough at nature, you will find that it isn't. A thorough search of the laws of physics turns up no such arrow of time. For example, you can use Newton's laws of motion to work out where a ball was thrown from in the past just as well as where it will land in the future. And when it comes to particles, the laws and forces that govern their behavior do not change if you swap the future for the past.
"The truly odd thing is that the laws of physics, which surely ought to be responsible for what we see in the world, can work just as well both forwards and backwards in time," says Dean Rickles, a philosopher of science at the University of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia. "There shouldn't be an arrow."
New Scientist: More "About Time"
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