There’s so much to learn about time.

I think it’s one of the most counter intuitive, interesting

and least understood parts of physics.Time seems so clear to us. It seems to have a clear
direction, a clear speed, it seems to flow Universally, it doesn’t seem to have much to do
with space. There only seems to be a “now” of it, with a gone past and a non-existent future,
and there seems to be only one single time-line.But, as often the case with physics, things
are not always as they seem…

The direction of timeThere are three arrows of time that are probably not connected with
each other;the one given by the Weak Interactionsthe one given by entropythe one given by
the expansion of the Universe (red shift)The arrow of time given by the Weak
InteractionsThere is a symmetry, implied by Quantum Field Theory, that is never violated by
any known process. It’s called the CPT (charge-parity-time) symmetry, and it says that if you
take the Universe and everything in it and flip the electrical charge (C), invert everything as
though through a mirror (P), and reverse the direction of time (T), then the base laws of
physics all continue to work the same.You might think that by just reversing parity, all laws
of physics should also work exactly the same, since everything still looks perfectly normal if
we’d only change parity. I mean, looking at how our mirror image behaves, it doesn’t look
unnatural to us at all. All of Newton’s Laws of Motion still behave exactly similar. But this is
where the first arrow of time, given by the weak interactions, comes in.When neutrons decay
into a proton, it shoots off an electron and an anti-electron neutrino. But since a neutron
has spin, so defining a “north” and “south” in analogy to the way Earth rotates, it turns out
that the electron emitted during β- decay is always shot out of the neutron’s “south pole”.

But inside a mirror this spin reverses, so the mirror would show a completely impossible
situation!When time and charge are also reversed, this behaves perfectly normal again.
What we call anti-particles, are charge and parity (CP) reversed particles, that therefore
behave exactly like time reversed normal particles. It’s only that there are so many more
regular particles, that we prefixed the short-lived CP reversed versions of these with “anti”.

When an anti-neutron decays into an anti-proton and shoots off a positron and an electron-
neutrino, the positron pops out of its “north pole”.What for us, in this Universe, are
considered regular particles, can equally be seen as the anti-particles of the less regular
other versions. When a particle meets her anti-particle, they annihilate.The arrow of time
given by entropyBut the arrow of time given by the Weak Interactions of the more common
particles we happen to have in this Universe, has nothing to do with what makes us know
the details of the past so much more clearly than the details of the future.

It is the continuous increase of entropy towards one direction of time that is completely
responsible for what we call ‘time’ in our day-to-day lives.Think of entropy as the measure
of disorder of a system, referring to the number of microscopic states it can be in. For
instance, when we shoot pool, and hit the orderly cluster of billiard balls inside the triangle,
entropy will be most likely to increase. But if all those balls somehow happen move in the
exact opposite direction and speed, after our first shot, they would actually meet again in
the lower entropy triangle shape.

According to physics there is nothing that says that the reverse situation is
animpossible  situation, but it is just highly unlikely. Imagine then how incredibly unlikely this
must be for the particles that makes up our Universe! When we look at a video recording
that’s played back in reverse, all the things that look strange to us there, are phenomena
that simply show an unnatural decreasein entropy. All the strange phenomena in reverse
are explained by it. All of it.Balls starting motionless and suddenly bumping higher and
higher, because the chaotic motion of molecules (heat) from the floor are suddenly
‘tunneled’ in unison at just the right moment into one single direction into the ball. Luke
warm water in a bathtub, changing to hot water on one side, and cold water on the other
side. Shaking a box with black and white balls, resulting in neatly separated black balls on
the left and white on the right.

Infants solving Rubik’s cubes. Eggs un-frying. Etc., etc….Even though all these unnaturally
entropy-decreasing phenomena are technically physically possible to occur like that in real
life, it is just ridiculously unlikely, similar to the (much likelier) situation of billiard balls
meeting up into an orderly triangle shape. But if we’d actually zoom in to only a few
particles within any of these weird entropy reversed examples, it now actually looks perfectly
normal. Every single interaction between just a few particles always looks perfectly natural,
played either forward in time or backward in time, just like any collision between two billiard
balls always looks perfectly normal when played either backward or forward. It all has to do
with there being more possibilities for the system at large to go into an increase in entropy,
than a decrease in entropy.

The only reason for why there are so many more possibilities for an increase in disorder,
why we always see entropy increasing, and why we experience this direction of time, is
because at one side of the time dimension there somehow was this extremely low state of
entropy, right after what we call the Big Bang. With a Big Bang at the “other side” of the
time dimension, we’d simply experience time flowing away from that direction of low
entropy, but our current particles would then look like their CP reversed anti-particles.
Maybe all of time before the Big Bang has entropy increasing towards the other direction,
and is that the side where all our missing anti-particles went.Time seeming to have a
fundamental direction is somewhat analogous to space seeming to have a direction for us
as well, being near a source of gravity.

The reason it is so much easier for us to know the details of the past, and not the details of
the future, is because it ends up being more precise and easier to calculate towards
the lower entropy direction, even when only processing just a fragment of the information
provided, like for instance a small part of the light reflected by a surface.The higher entropy
direction of time on the other hand is much less precise to calculate to, especially when
handling only a fragment of information. With just a small calculation error, the difference
might escalate to set other things in motion that wasn’t taken into account, even ignoring
the probabilistic nature of our reality. If just one billiard ball happens to hit some other
orderly triangle of billiard balls on the table, we see a completely different situation at the
future side of time. But calculating the other way around is much easier.We just have to look
at a broken egg on the ground, and we immediately know that was an unbroken egg
before. But when we look at an unbroken egg, we don’t know if it’s gonna fall, gets eaten, or
ends up rotting away somewhere: there’s just too many branches for which we need more
detailed information to calculate. Of course, our brains calculate both the future and the
past side, it’s just that one side is a lot clearer than the other, even though we lose a lot of
details of history as well, the further we go.

But we lose the details of the future side much http://faster.As long as we are alive, our
evolved bodies are fighting against increasing entropy where it’s unwanted, by consuming
low-entropy energy sources, and excreting back what we've eaten in a higher-entropy form.
It’s not enough to just receive energy, we need free energy: F≡U−TSF≡U−TS, where FF is
free energy, UU is regular energy, TT is the temperature, and SS is the entropy. Note that
the term TSTS comes with a negative sign.For instance, the sea has a lot of heat energy, but
it’s by no means free energy. We get a lot of free, low-entropy energy in the form of short-
wavelength radiation from the Sun, which then largely re-radiates back into space. The
difference? Earth's radiation goes out as long-wavelength light with added entropy:Our own
bodies consume low-entropy energy from food and emit high-entropy long-wavelength
radiation back, and tries to keep itself in a low entropy state, by continuous “repairing”. The
information in our brains, on the other hand, depends a lot on the natural mechanism of
increasing entropy. Just think of a nice, orderly packet of data in the form of photons,
entering our eyes and hitting our retinas, which sets off this collision course of
interpretations inside our brains. Again, the reverse is also technically possible, but
extremely improbable: our brains setting off signals to our eyes, shooting off photons from
our retinas.

Complexity vs entropyThe reason we see a lot of complexity around us, like for instance
the wide range of complex atoms and molecules, making up incredibly complex living
creatures, instead of just having simple hydrogen and a bit of helium, is because we are
living at a highly complex “mid-phase” of our Universe. To demonstrate this we can use a
cup of coffee and milk as an analogy.in the first situation there is low entropy, accompanied
with low complexity. With the cup in the middle we find the greatest complexity, and a
somewhat increased entropy, but the 3rd cup has maximal entropy, but went back again to
a state of very low complexity.

Think of the information of the situation in the second cup as being the hardest to
compress into a zip-file. This situation is the way we see our Universe today.When entropy
has become maximal, this arrow of time is lost. This is known as the Heat death of the
universe.The relativity of timeSpace is not unlikely to actually emerge from Quantum
Mechanics, where parts that are highly entangled are considered to be nearby, while
unentangled parts are far away. The Schrödinger equations don’t have space in it, only time,
and we have a conversion factor for space: one light-second of space for a second of Uhren
& Schmuck, Landeck-Imst quantum level, within the matter of, for instance, our bodies,
there are fundamental forces interacting, that result in all the possible change at an atomic,
molecular and cellular level, and so on. These fundamental forces at quantum level are
interacting inside all of matter at the constant speed of light, which is therefore the limit to
our observed rate of change.When we look at an object that's not in relative motion, we
only see the effectof the fundamental forces at light speed inside it, in the form of rate of
change, or: http://time.So don't think of a static object being completely still: inside it, its
interactions are continually communicating at light speed, even for holding status quo. It
turns out that the relative rate of change within matter works perfectly synchronous to
Einstein's light clock;This is a clock that has a certain distance between two mirrors, and it
simply counts the received light pulses on top. When we see a clock that's not moving in
respect to us (left image), we see a faster moving clock, than when it moves in respect to us
(right image), because for us, these light pulses need to travel a longer distance at its always
observed constant speed.But for the person that's moving along, together with this clock,
it's not observed going slower at all, since the rate of change within that person's brains,
and all other matter at this velocity, is going exactly in sync with the light clock next to him.
For him, the other clock will actually be observed going slower (I'll get back to that later).So,
the sum of the observed speed of motion, together with the internal speed of the
fundamental forces, which cause the observed of rate of change, always adds up to the
constant speed of light for all inert observers in flat spacetime.

The relativity of simultaneityWhat’s interesting about time, is that our intuitions gives us
the notion that we should be able to define a Universal clock, so we can clearly define what
events happened before other events, independent of their spacetime distance between
them. This is simply not true. Every object has a personal time, and it’s impossible to define
absolute http://simultaneity.To understand this, think of how we are able to precisely define
what has happened simultaneous within our surroundings by making use of the constant
speed of light, by sending out light pulses to our surroundings: everything that is reflected
back at the same time must've been happening at the same time, at the same distance. See
the below example, where depth and width represent 2 dimensions of space, and height
represents time. If a certain distance up represents a second, then the same distance wide
and deep represents a light-second, so light is always shown moving at 45° angles;A' and A
were happening simultaneous, because the first sent pulse was received simultaneous, after
being reflected by these two events. Event 0 happened simultaneous to A' and A, because it
was exactly in between the moment of sending and receiving of the initial light pulse.But
when in linear motion, a static observer will 'see' light gaining you slower from behind: you
have moved a bit during the time that light, at its constant speed, was traveling towards
you. This is, for similar reasons, observed reaching you faster for light coming in from the
front.These differences are not observed by the traveler himself, because the rate of change
within all matter is observed being asymmetric across its length of motion: an Einsteins light
clock on its side will be observed by the static observer with light moving slower from back
to the front, and faster from front to the back, in relation to the ship. The traveler, on the
other hand, will always observe it at a constant, symmetric rate.This asymmetry is observed
by the static observer to cause the following artifact, when the traveler defines his spatial
simultaneity;The moment we, as static observers, define event 0 (in the middle) to be
happening simultaneous to us, with a 'horizontal' view on simultaneity, the traveler moving
away will define a moment in our past to be happening simultaneous. And the further he
travels, the further he 'looks' into our past. This looking further and further into the past,
while time keeps on passing, will make the traveler observe us as being time dilated as
well.Note that there's not  really  a different mechanism behind this symmetrically observed
time dilation between the two observers, where one seems to have 'actual' time dilation,
while the other subjectively looks towards the other's past. They're only different views on
the exact same phenomenon. Understand there's no such thing as absolute motion: the
traveler can also be seen as static, with the other moving away from him.Here are two
insightful examples of how different opinions on simultaneity will always observe the other
being time dilated;At event 0, the meeting point, they actually agree with each
other's http://time.So, in our Universe, every thing has different outcomes for simultaneity,
depending on relative motion and gravity. Because of this there’s just no way to absolutely
know which spacelike events have “really” already happened. For example, for someone
moving at near light speed away from a particular source of Cosmic microwave background
radiation, the source of those events are not 14 billion years old anymore, but have only just
happened.Our Universe is measured being the oldest at one particular velocity, where the
CMB shows the least amount of anisotropy. Our local group, which includes the Milky Way,
appears to be moving at around 627 km/s relative to the CMB, which is why we measure the
CMB differently on one side vs the other. The upper image is before correction, the lower
after correction for http://anisotropy.So spacelike events (which we can’t see just yet) can
swap from our past into our future, after we accelerate. Spacelike events are the dots within
the left and right triangle of these successive Minkowski space-time diagrams, and what is
simultaneous is everything that’s on a horizontal line from the origin (clip might not work
on mobile phones);So you see how spacelike events can go back and forth from past to
future, depending on relative motion, while they can cross the future and past light-cone
only once?Partly because of this, time is often interpreted by physicists as “all being out
there”, as Professor Brian Greene explains in this clip;

The Many-worlds interpretation of Quantum MechanicsA strange aspect of quantum

mechanics is that we can only ever measure particles, and never waves, even though they
are fundamentally waves, according to quantum field theory. Whenever we seem to
measure waves, we are merely measuring multiple particles that statistically behave like
interfering waves.Where and when the particle is measured along a single wavelength of a
field is impossible to predict, and is completely random. After measurement the
wavefunction collapses. This collapse somewhat of a thorn in the side of physics,
because it doesn’t clearly follow out of anything, it’s not a logical result of something
fundamental.But the Many-worlds interpretation tries to fix this by saying there’s really no
collapse at all, but the collapse is a branching point of which we can only measure our
branch, even though all possible branches are actually happening next to our personal time-
line.TimeAs clear as time intuitively may seem to us, in reality it doesn’t have a fundamental
direction, its rate is only relative, it is deeply connected with space, and there’s no clearly
defined past or future. Furthermore the past and future might not be gone or non-existent
at all, and there may be more than one single time-line.Time appears very similar to
quantum mechanics that way: as soon as we think we understand it, we probably don't .