Sean Carroll Entangles Time and Entropy

Sean Carroll Entangles Time and Entropy... but is he correct in doing so?

In the following Scientific American online special it suggests...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sean-carroll-entangles-time-and-entropy/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20141103

A timely conversation with physicist Sean M. Carroll about how our one-way trip from the past to the future is entangled with entropy and the origin of the universe

By John Matson

• • From Eternity to Here: Sean M. Carroll's Quest to Understand Time

Physicists often describe the fabric of the universe we inhabit as four-dimensional spacetime, comprising three dimensions of space and one of time. Yet whereas we spend our days passing freely through space in any direction we wish (gravity and solid obstacles permitting), time pushes us along, willingly or not, in a single, predetermined direction: toward the future.

This is the arrow of time—life carries us from the past, through the present, and into the future. Back to the Future plotlines notwithstanding, no one knows how to reverse the arrow—how to move backward in time—and the logical paradoxes that would result from such a trip into the past render it a thorny proposition at best. (Thanks to a prediction of special relativity called time dilation, travel into the distant future is relatively easy: just move really, really fast.)

But I think the nuts and bolts of “ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES” aren't really considered carefully here, e.g...

“Sean Carroll Entangles Time and Entropy”, but is he correct in doing so?

I'm not so sure about this, consider the idea, “time pushes us along, willingly or not, in a single, predetermined direction: toward the future.”, this might sound sensible, but consider what you actually observe if you see, say, a car going along a street. In actual fact the car doesn’t actually seem to head “into a future”, or leave a “temporal past” behind it.

Likewise, the idea “ life carries us from ‘the past’, through the present, and into ‘the future’ ”, doesn’t actually seem to be observed... do we actually have any scientific evidence at all that there is a place or thing called “the past” behind us, or that we are heading not just towards what is just in front of us, but also into a “future”?... doesn’t it just actually appear that everything is just here, and you, I, and everything around us is just moving and interacting?... do the patterns that form in our minds as we observe things around us really count as scientific evidence to suggest there also actually “is” a “past”?

If there actually isn’t a past or future, then isn’t the idea of an arrow of time just, and only an “idea”?.

Quote “Thanks to a prediction of special relativity called time dilation, travel into the distant future is relatively easy: just move really, really fast.”... we might read this a lot, but have you actually checked Special Relativity for yourself? i.e. “ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES”?

You should, "Electrodynamics" "section 1 Kinematics “ actually says...

If we wish to describe the motion of a material point, we give the values of its co-ordinates as functions of the time...

If, for instance, I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o'clock,” I mean something like this:

“The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.”

This seems perfectly acceptable, unless you realise that the paper says we compare the co-ordinates ( location) of one thing to a thing called “time”, But in fact the co-ordinates of one thing (a train) are only compared to the coordinates of another thing ( the location of a rotating pointer).

(surely calling a rating pointer a “clock”, doesn’t prove there is a thing called time that exists, or flows?)

So, logically, because SR doesn’t actually give any scientific evidence to suggest there is a thing called “time”, that flows or passes, then surely what is described as “time” dilation really just shows us that moving oscillators (e.g. those in GPS satellites), “are” oscillating more slowly than ground based ones?

If there is no proof of a past, or of a future actually existing, and if relativity provides no evidence to suggest a clock is anything more than an oscillator, then that would (sadly) suggest fast moving things do not “travel into ‘the future’ “, but are just “changing more slowly”.

Professor Carroll suggests that the un-reversable universal entropy indicates the irreversible “arrow of time”, but, without proof that moving things head into a future, or leave a past behind them, perhaps entropy is just entropy..i.e. just eh fact and observation that a whole load of matter “is” expanding outwards away from itself. And if so, perhaps entropy in no way proves the “existence and one way flow of a thing called time”, it may just be if we have extreme confirmation bias towards the idea there is a “one way flowing thing called time”, we apply it to all we see, and try to make it fit?

Just my opinion

Matthew Marsden

(auth “A Brief History of Timelessness”)

Time travel, Worm hole, billiard ball' paradox, Timelessly. (re Paul Davies- New scientist article)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc5cRGOGIEU