Warning - Your time is tick-tick-ticking away

In a system, a process that occurs will tend to increase the total entropy of the universe. – Second Law of Thermodynamics

This week I will be doing something that I didn’t think I would do. I am taking last week’s post and somewhat building off of it. Go back and read it now, it will save me a lot of explaining. So let’s start with the idea of life being a series of brief moments, think of it like a frame in a movie. Keep that though in the back of your head as you read this. Also, it might seem like I am going nowhere. That might be true, but we’ll have to wait and see until the end,

Time is weird. So is our perception of time. So is others’ perception of our time. You can thank Einstein for that one. It is part of Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The property is called time dilation. Let’s say there are two people in space, Robert and Candice, just kind of floating at the same velocity. They both have clocks that are in sync with each other. Let’s also say it’s currently 5 o’clock, and we are drinking manhattans, although that is somewhat irrelevant.

As they drift along, their clocks remain synced. Bur Robert is somewhat impulsive (he also might have had one too many manhattans) and he decides to turn on his super futuristic jet-pack-type-thing and zoom off at a significant percentage of the speed of light. Pretend that Candice can read Roberts clock at great distances, Candice looks down at her clock and sees it ticking away normally, the second hand moving around the clock at a normal pace. She then looks at Robert’s clock. Something strange as happened. The second hand on his clock is moving very slow. Robert then catches a glance at Candice’s clock. It seems to be moving very slow too. He checks his own clock to make sure; it’s moving at the “correct” speed.

This is the world of relativity. Other cool stuff happens too, but I won’t go into that right now. The important concept for this article is as follows: the faster you travel relative to another observer the slower time will pass for you. The same happens when you are close to a high gravity body (slowing of time). The math behind this is fascinating and beautiful. And it’s been tested too! On the Apollo missions they had two clocks that were synced when they left Earth, and when Apollo returned, more time has passed on the clock in the ship (due to the ship being further away from Earth’s gravity, time moved quicker). When you fly on an airplane time will move slower, but at those speeds the difference is just about insignificant.

And this brings me to a complaint I have about science fiction, especially Star Trek. They never account for time dilation, probably because it you make for less interesting stories. Imagine the hero flying to rescue a planet form the evil empire that is invading, traveling at a large percentage of the speed of light he arrives at the planet to find that not only is he too late to rescue the people, but the evil empire has collapsed long ago and now monkeys rule the planet (note, this is kind of what planet of the apes is about, which is cool!). Most science fiction invent some kind of faster light plot device like hyperspace to get around this problem, but I almost feel like that is cheating.

So we have established that time is elastic, but what about its flow? Can time go in reverse? What about sideways (I’m not even sure if that’s a real concept)? Take a look at the quote at the beginning one more time and give it a think.

What does that mean? What is entropy, and what does it have to do with time? Entropy is a complex subject, with lots of sub topics, so I’m going to use a simple version of it. In large systems, such as a room or a universe, entropy is the universe evening itself out. Say we have a large room. It is completely closed off, and because we have magic powers we are able to put a hot gas at one end of the room, and a cool gas on the other end. We let the imaginary barrier down and the gases mix. As this happens, the higher energy hot gas particles will have random collisions with the lower energy cool particles, transferring some of the heat via kinetic energy. If we let the room sit long enough the temperature will be consistent throughout the entire room. This is entropy. Statistically, it is possible for the system to separate itself again, but the chances are very small.

It also occurs at the atomic level through radioactive decay. Over a period of time (sometimes minutes, sometimes millions of years, depending on the element) the atom will decay from one element to another, until it has shed all of its sup atomic particles. If the universe keeps expanding, its ultimate fate will be a universe that is full of these subatomic particles drifting through space. No planets, no stars, no gas clouds. It will be very boring. If you want to read a really cool story about this, check out Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html).

Entropy moves forward. It is the arrow of time. Although in the short term it is possible to reverse entropy (like in biological systems), in the long run it is inevitable. In this grand scale time seems to flow with entropy. Only one direction is possible when the scale gets large enough.

Time to bring everything together! Last week I talked about how life is a series of chance events. This combined with entropy leads me to believe that time is forward flowing, a small event occurs, time moves on, and another small event occurs. These events make up the flow of time. Once something has happened you cannot go back and undo it. The universe has split and we are in the one that we are in. Time can move slower or faster depending on our perception of it, but never backwards.

However, because of other properties of relativity, you might be able to curve space-time and…well…that’s another entry.

From my world to yours,
Elijah Xavier