2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past

cyberspittle sends this excerpt from Scientific American: Tentative new work ... suggests that perhaps the arrow of time doesn't really require a fine-tuned, low-entropy initial state at all but is instead the inevitable product of the fundamental laws of physics. Barbour and his colleagues argue that it is gravity, rather than thermodynamics, that draws the bowstring to let time's arrow fly. Their findings were published in October in Physical Review Letters.

Comments

Yes, I saw a movie that explained this once.

[SeaFox]

It was Back to the Future, Part II.

Re:Arrow of Time

[visualight]

Time cannot go backwards because time, as an independent phenomenon doesn't exist. The passage of time, and what enables "change" is the expansion of the universe. It expands slower or faster near or away from the influence of gravity as time passes faster or slower near or away from the influence of gravity. Time and space aren't simply "relative". The are the same thing. Entropy is strongly correlated but not actually coupled.

IANAP, and I haven't actually convinced anyone that the way I see it is true. But I think the universe described by Renate Loll is probably the closest to my own mental picture. Or, at least, the idea that there are not really three spacial dimensions but one made my own mental map easier to "run" in my mind.