Why time is the way it is?
Why time is the way it is?
Time is what a clock ticks. Usually the clocks ticks in a way that the intervals between each tick seem very even. If nature does not maintain that order in a clock, and in each atom and molecule, the time that each clock ticks would be uneven for different agents walking around you. This unevenness is not relativity. This article explores the nature of time and its unevenness with the agent.
What does our everyday experience of time tell us?
Have you ever wondered why time is always flowing in one direction? Our everyday experience of time does it in a way that we don’t see a chicken going back to its shell or a coffee getting dispersed into milk and coffee powder.
To put it precisely, we can’t usually imagine the backward direction of time without an agent who does a backward walk-in time. In the case of chicken, the agent is the chicken itself, and for coffee, it might be your friend or a relative doing it for you. So to explore what an agent does is also to investigate the physical and neuroscientific perspective of time. Yes, by an agent, for this purpose, I mean a human only.
Who is an agent?
A few years back, during an immense scientific discussion, my friend Varun asked me why can’t time be a subjective perception of human senses? He was so enthusiastic about the preceptory aspects of time and the agent consciously experiences the flow of events. It was his view that caught me with such an idea of time to find that neuroscience also have a similar argument on time.
According to some scientists and psychologists, the brain assimilates the idea of time in terms of a sequence of events to say what succeeds what. The spatial order where our circadian rhythm is organized also depicts the notion of temporality the agent is experiencing. For this purpose, I agree with Varun to say that an agent is someone who could gauge the physical world using space and timer. But is that the end of the story? Or is Varun taking me to a bigger question of consciousness?
Does entropy operates the agent?
From an analytic point of view, yes. An agent in this aspect of time should be able to solve problems based on logical propositions. It is well known that entropy is associated with the flow of time. Entropy in this sense assures that a chicken is never going back to its shell neither a coffee going to disperse into milk and coffee powder. More fundamentally, entropy implies that nature is an isolated system that always likes to run in more chaos.
Is computer an agent? I could say, any system with some set of information capable to analyze the order in which the information is stored itself is an agent. It is those tiny bits of information what entropy offers to preserve the natural essence of time. For a computer, a given proposition (order of information) encoded into the setup would serve this purpose. Thus, a computer could store more information or lose some in the form of energy and heat while preserving the flow of entropy. And for humans, our brain acts like a computer that stores information with a certain threshold to provide this ability.
Is time travel possible or is it just an experience?
Nature loves time to be unidirectional. Popularly in physics, time plays this role that it would love to be symmetric with the physical laws of nature. In all sorts of physics, including classical and quantum physics, we could see the implication of a time-symmetric equation playing around. The funny thing is that no one ever has experienced such equations in the real world unless someone does some high-energy experiments that might achieve this task.
There is also this misconception of traveling greater than the speed of light would help us to travel backward in time. Light as quanta of particles called photons doesn’t possess any mass to achieve this. But clearly, from a physical point of view, anything with mass won’t able to do it.
Time travel, in contradiction to science fiction movies, nature forbids anything in doing that. Even if an agent invented a time machine and travel backward in time, the information that he/she is used to do the traveling will still be increasing. Unless, as Varun suggested, there has to be a preceptory mechanism that embraces and control the flow of time. For time being, the experiential point of view is that the information in our brains is always increasing and It’s mostly coming from the movement of things around us, from order to disorder.
Then what is the most fundamental question about time?
This has to be addressed from the point of view of physics and somewhat from neuroscience. If there exists anything fundamental other than time, it will be a huge concern to modern-day scientists as well as to all time traveling enthusiasts.
From a physics standpoint, there is nothing to call itself in time without a clock that measures it. And of course, this means clocks ticks relative to the
observer in the different reference frames. Else, you should travel to the event horizon of a black hole where time seems to freeze inn time itself. In other words, there is no relevance to time, without being subjected to time itself.
Perhaps quantum computers might change this definition of time. To be more precise, there is always room in sciences to ask why things are in the way it is. Some recent studies conducted by google researchers claim to achieve something called time crystals in real-life computation. These are not time-traveling machines or substances. But rather a powerful structure that repeats itself in time. As something does it, without losing any energy to its environment, there will be spontaneous symmetry breaking [Krzysztof Sacha, 2018).
Time and space form our four-dimensional perception of reality where every event occurs within. To address the fundamentality that one sees in this relationship is a question of decades. At this point, all I can say is, until the universe as a giant clock containing the sequence of events stops ticking itself, the relationship is uncertain.
From a neuroscience point of view, things are a little bit certain. In their paper [ Dennett, D, and Kinsbourne, M ]stated there is a specific place in the brain where consciousness treats the subjective timings of the event. They conclude that the temporal order of subjective events is a product of the brain’s interpretational processes. And not a direct reflection of events making up those processes.
Hence, I could ascertain on the term agent and ask how the conscious mechanism (or a memory) is playing the role in manifesting the order of information. But, to address the infamous question of what a conscious agent means is still unclear in sciences.
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