But where does time come from?
Time is often assumed to flow in one direction, always the same. But when did it begin to do so? At the beginning of the Universe? Physics journalist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan attempts to answer these complex questions in the British magazine “New Scientist.”
Where does time come from? This is a question people often ask me when they learn that I'm a science journalist specializing in physics. The answer isn't clear-cut, but to better understand the subject, it's helpful to consider the concept of the "arrow of time."
Emerging in the 1920s, this concept stems from the principles of thermodynamics that describe energy, heat, and entropy. It is the latter that interests us here, because time seems to flow toward states of increasing entropy: this movement, from a low-entropy state to a high-entropy state, is what we call the “arrow of time.”
Entropy has a bad reputation for being associated with disorder. However, it could more accurately be seen as the set of possible microstate configurations that make up a macrostate.
For example, a cutlery drawer with spoons and forks jumbled together is a macrostate that can be decomposed into many microstates. This drawer has a higher degree of entropy than a drawer with forks neatly arranged on the left and spoons on the right.
If you organize your drawer this way, but after a while the cutlery gets mixed up, it's because
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