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Entropic Inevitability and the Arrow of Time

SleepWise · 2023

"The perceived unidirectional flow of time is not a fundamental property of the universe's mechanics, but an emergent psychological symptom of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and cosmic entropy."

The idea

The fundamental laws of physics are time-symmetric — a video of colliding billiard balls looks valid forward or backward. Yet macroscopically, time strictly moves forward: an egg cracks but never un-cracks. This asymmetry, the Arrow of Time, is dictated entirely by entropy, a measure of disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says entropy in an isolated system must always increase, so the direction of time is simply the direction in which cosmic disorder grows.

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