The Arrow of Time

There's this term, "The Arrow of Time," that refers to the way time is unidirectional, always pointed to future from past. This simple fact is maybe the defining trait of life itself. So we wonder, quite naturally, if it could be different. Whether the nature of the arrow is necessarily fixed. 

 

I've been reading a book about the concept called From Eternity to Here by a Caltech physicist named Sean Carroll (he actually was one of my friend's professors). His writing is dense and hard to follow at times, unsurprisingly, but it's made me think of time in a different way; as a dimension, a coordinate in 4-D spacetime. That in itself is challenging enough to conceptualize, much less moving on to understand singularities or closed timelike curves. 

 

One insight that has especially stood out is how we orient ourselves in time. Carroll says we use the Big Bang to create temporal asymmetry the way we use Earth to do the same for space. Out in dark matter, all directions are symmetrical, equally filled with nothing. On Earth we recognize up and down because the planet is our reference point. The Big Bang serves as a similar reference point for time, clarifying the distinction between the low entropy past and higher entropy future.

 

I found Tenet, the newest Christopher Nolan movie, to be no help at all in this mindbending exploration. The concepts and budget he toyed with made for cool scenes but the logic, lost in an opaque, convoluted storyline, the mumbling dialogue, the total intentional confusion injected into the soul of the entire project, made for a personally unfruitful watch. I also found it neck-deep in the worst of action movie tropes; one man responsible for stopping the end of the world, he must choose between saving everything or saving his love, a doe-eyed attractive woman who lacks any defining trait besides those innocent and vulnerable optics. It somehow managed to not make any sense and be numbingly predictable at the same time. I do like Nolan's other movies, though. 

 

I'm not sure where all this thinking about time and reality has left me. I think it might be limited as just a mental exercise, a stirring not disruptive or imminent enough to spill over the levee separating daily life from the lake of my thoughts. Which is fine. I don't expect every endeavor to bear juicy revelations that turn my world.

 

Nevertheless, time ceaselessly marches on. The only thing to do is embrace it. I can be grateful for the good, like my new job, and thankful for what once was so, like Playboi Carti's vibe. I don't think any other response is appropriate.