How do you experience the flow of time if the past, present, and future are equally real? And how does causality work, when nothing in the past really caused anything to happen in the present (since past and present both exist)?
In: Physics
So this is pretty philosophical, and we probably don’t know enough to really answer it perfectly, but this interpretation might help:
Imagine you’re in space, far enough from other celestial objects to not feel their gravity. There, directions are pretty arbitrary. You know you’re in 3 dimensions, but assigning which one is left/right, front/back, and up/down is rather meaningless. However, when you’re near a celestial body, while left/right and front/back are still arbitrary, up/down is suddenly very clear. On Earth, we know that ‘up’ is away from Earth, and ‘down’ is towards Earth, thanks to gravity.
Now do the same with time. Consider time a direction in the fourth dimension. Under the influence of entropy, which started with the Big Bang, we experience constant change, and a general (though occasionally reversed) decay of order. When we move far enough away from the Big Bang, in trillions and trillions of years from now, the universe is the same everywhere, and things have as much of a chance to spring onto existence and defy entropy as they are to decay, because there’s nothing to decay. There’s nothing to happen, so forwards and backwards are the same.
Summarized:
– The nearby presence of a **celestial body** will subject one to **gravity** and give a clear direction to **up and down.**
– The nearby presence of the **Big Bang** will subject one to **entropy** and give a clear direction to **time.**
_Again, this is a philosophizing about things we don’t know a lot about._
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