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The Physics of Time: Degrees of Freedom
“The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.” -Ashim Shanker
Time makes us tick… or rather, our consciousness makes time tick. When you fall asleep, you are plunged into a timeless unconscious state, whereas the neurons of your brain never stop “talking to each other,” then while you’re still asleep, consciousness reemerges — that’s when your mind plays a kaleidoscope imagery in the form of dreams. Only when you wake up, time starts “ticking” for you again — in one direction.
To all intents and purposes, time seems to have a direction. Although we experience time in one direction — we all get older, we have records of the past but not the future — there’s nothing in the laws of physics that insists time must move only forward. For example, the laws of motion make no distinction about the direction of time. If you watched a video of a pendulum, you wouldn’t be able to tell if the video was being run forwards or backwards. The same time symmetry is found in the equations of quantum mechanics. So what aims the time’s arrow?
There’s a long-standing answer to this, which has been worked out in the late 19th Century by the Austrian…
