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What Is Time? One Researcher Shares His Exploration
Physicist Sean Carroll has built up a bit of a name for himself by tackling one of the age old questions that no one has been able to fully explain: What is time? Earlier this month he gave an interview with Wired where he tried to explain his theories in layman's terms. "I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg."
Except ... medical studies show that 'Deja Vu' is really just brain glitches that are nothing more than thinking after the fact that you knew it was going to work that way. You're having a minor seizure, not predicting the future.
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It seems like it is just on the tip of the tounge, but just out of reach. Has anyone been able to announce a reasonaby random event before it happened while experiencing a deja vu? Something like "Bob will walk in though that door now" or "Bob is going to spill his drink".
No, they can't because it's an illusion. Your brain gets into a tight sensing/remembering loop for a short time, so it seems like you're recalling stuff that just happened, but it's the other way around. You're not used to that, so it's confusing and easily misinterpreted.
There's no more reason to be embarrassed by this than being fooled by optical illusions (happening in your visual cortex, not your eye in many instances) - our brains aren't perfect arbiters of the physical world, they interpolate quite a bit, so occasionally they get tripped up. This imperfection lets us laugh at Penn & Teller - it's all good.
Besides, we already know that memories are chemically encoded, so the only way to have memories of the future is magically putting chemical patterns in your brain. And between 'magic' and 'brain fart' - well, apply Occam's Razor.
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Thermodynamics is one of two sets of phenomena that are irreversible. The other is rather obscure, but is related to the fact that "ordinary" matter seems to be so much more abundant in our universe than anti-matter.
All other phenomena in our universe are reversible in time, which raises an interesting question: are we unable to see the future because our brains work on thermodynamic operations?
Not only biologic brains, but digital computers also depend on non-reversible operations. A two-input AND gate has a "0" output in three different input conditions: "00", "01", and "10". Now imagine a computer that uses a reversible logic system that is reversible, would that computer have a time-symmetric operation?