About Time

I am obsessed with the essence of time, because I have been searching for the meaning of life for so long, because it is a very confusing matter. All of us interact with time on every single moment: we are required to be on time, otherwise we cannot get to the destination just by missing a train, or we would be blamed by the managers if a meeting was missed. If someone asks me, where is the time? The prompt response is that time exists in the clicking of the clock. But time is not the clock, just as we cannot define a person by his measure.

Then after a second thought, I would say, time exists in the change.The time is noticed in the change of the sun's position in the sky, from the east-end to the west, it was noticed in the change of the color of leaves, from the light green to a yellow red, it is noticed in the change of our face from a soft new-born to a wrinkled old. It is very easy to ignore the flow of time until suddenly, we see the first wrinkle on the face; we would not realize there is not too much time remaining in our life until we see the first white hair. If I were not to die, I wouldn't care about the time; it is just the fact that there is no eternity in the world, that we define the time, which is seems to be itself an eternal and irreversible flow from the past into the future.

But time is not the change, it comes with the change. We've been taught in the school, by Newtonian mechanism, to think about the world as a threatre stage, on which what happened to our life, and what is happening, are played. The stage is defined as the space, and the time is supposed to be an external clock. The clock is external, it is independent of the play, and it is flowing continuously. However, this image of time was destroyed in 20th century. Einstein, who started his professional life as the time keeper in the train station, later published his research on the relativity, that there is no 'uniform' time in the world, the time interval for an object depends on its speed to the speed of light. The concept of flow of time was invalidated by an astonishing progress in quantum physics, that the time is granular, and that it has a minimum scale around \(10^{-33}s\).

If time is not a uniform variable, it cannot be a fundamental variable in physics. The truth is, it is indeed not. Schrödinger equation ¹ put the variable time with an imaginary number \(i\), which is merely an imaginary small creature created the mathematicians. The imaginary number is imaginary is because it does not exist in the real world. Hence am I allowed to make a bold conclusion that, time does not exist in real world neither?

Time is surely the biggest lie that the world presents to us. By saying us, I am not referring to only the human, but also all the livings that we observe ion this planet. We have seen from the telescope that the universe is expanding, by means of the Doppler effect, then we question ourselves, the universe should be smaller in the past than in the present; there must be in one moment when the world cannot be smaller, just as what was supposed by the metaphysical illusion, there must be a reason which is the ultimate reason of all the casualty, the god says, let there be light, and that the world was born, that the light comes out from nothing, that the time begins, that the universe is scrolled and unfolded. To describe the un-retrospective process, we even create a concept, the 'entropy', to describe all possible configurations of a system at a certain 'time' point. The great second law of thermodynamics law states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases. That is exactly what we infers from the hypothesis that the universe has the time, it has a singular point which is its origin of the universe, and that we have a future, we are running into that disordered future.

But if the universe has its origin, what was the role of the quanta of time? We know that there is no such time zero, which is surely below to the plank scale of time.

And I feel a sense of arbitrary to obey the rule of increasing entropy. Why my world (and my life) has to be more and more disordered?

A potential reason is that, the definition of entropy is not complete. Clausius was the first people presenting this idea, and this idea is that in the evolution of a thermodynamics, the only way the observer can tell the difference between the past and the future is the heat was created (or transferred from the energy). Think about a ball movement, if it runs along a straight line forever, we then cannot mark the flow of time because the past and the future are the same; only when the ball slowed down because of the friction, that we realize the trace of time. Friction creates the heat, the thinking of human's brain also creates the heat, it is the fact that the heat was created so that the time was unveiled, by human's brain. And the irreversible progress to create the heat indicates the uni-direction of time, and Clausius gave the process a Greek representation:

Boltzmann thinks about this process in a more rigorous way. He is a statistician, so that are used to describe the world by the randomness and possibility. He defines \(S\) as the configurations of all possible states for a given time for a given system, so that the increase of entropy means you will have a larger ensemble of possible states with time going. To define a system, you need to list all the descriptive variables and for each of the variable, all the possible values. Thus think about a system of the egg, originally it was put on the edge of the table. The state of the system is that the positions of all the molecules are inside the egg, no egg yolk or white was outside the egg: the configuration is very special. Now the egg was fallen on the floor, the shell was cracked, the molecules was spread out. The position of molecules is seemed to be more random. The molecules are the same, so physically you cannot distinguish one particle with another, so the position of molecule A and molecule B can be exchanged while keeping the mess identical: therefore in phase space, we have more possible states to describe the messy situation. The fact that we cannot glue back the messy egg into its original state, when the egg yolk was constrained in the shell, unless the external energy is paid, is exactly the entropy increasing, and exactly why we can feel there is something irreversible, flowing into the future.

But there are two problems with Boatsman's definition. First one is that, if we trace back into the past, what was the most probable state from which the egg evolved to the current state, being uniform and constrained perfectly in the shell? By saying the possible states, that means the ensemble of the past is also larger than the current ensemble, so it means that the entropy was bigger in the past?!

The second one is that, to define the entropy, people is required to list out ALL the variables and all the possible values, which is as difficult as understanding the whole universe. What if the reason of entropy is always increasing, is because the system in which we live, is described with only a subset of variables, and our human being just happens to live inside this subset of the universe, so that we infers that the universe has the same phenomena? I can imagine how the life inside a constant entropy world, it should be like Plato's World of Idea, everything is eternal, no time passing, energy keeps constant, no interactions and no heat creation; but I cannot imagine how the life looks like, inside a world with the entropy decreasing, all reasons happen after the results perhaps? But in overall, is it possible that the world has a constant entropy?

Kant should like the idea that there is no concept of time in the idea world. In his 《Critique of Pure Reason》, he states that that time is a pure and a priori intuition that renders mathematics possible.Time and space cannot be regarded as existing in themselves. They are a priori forms of sensible intuition. And intuition is people's original sin; intuition is the evidence that people have limited life and limited reason.

I don't believe in his time, Kant has any knowledge about the quanta of time or the critiques on the entropy. He lived in the world that Newtonian dominated people's thought, everybody thought the time and space as the stage that allows the happening of events. But Kant thinks we have time and space is not because it really exist, it is out of our intuition; it is just this intuition is special and shared by all the human being. Perhaps the reason why we all shared the same intuition of time is the same as why all people have two legs and two eyes, it was encrypted in the genes, probably not just from the time when our Apes ancestor walking out from Africa, but since long ago.