I just read about this, but I can't remember the particulars of a theory about why time has an arrow.

I think there's entropy involved... somewhere....

Then there's the theory that time is an illusion, as everything in the entire history of the universe has already happened. Fun.

So, Canadians, should be some fun times tonight, huh? God damn, I wish we had the no-con in the US.

Whooo! Most people are predicting some form of minority government, so we could be doing this again next year.

I am home sick today. I didn't think it was possible to sleep as much as I have slept in the last 24 hours.

I think there's entropy involved... somewhere....

Yep, it's in there.

Then there's the theory that time is an illusion, as everything in the entire history of the universe has already happened. Fun.

Certainly the concept of absolute time is an illusion. Since time is a part of the universe you can't really speak of universe having already happened, it just is and we're at a particular coordinate that has a location in both space and time.

nsm relaxing as like a stay in Guantanamo

Heh. This is pretty much how I feel about knitting and crocheting and the like.

Since time is a part of the universe you can't really speak of universe having already happened, it just is and we're at a particular coordinate that has a location in both space and time.

Come again? Are you saying that the concept of something happening simultaneously (or an hour and a half apart) on opposite sides of the universe is bollocks?

I don't see how that jibes with the ability to posit a coordinate system with time as an axis.

Come again? Are you saying that the concept of something happening simultaneously (or an hour and a half apart) on opposite sides of the universe is bollocks?

Yes, according to relativity.

True evil.

That's why she couldn't believe, years later, that she had actually done that.

something akin to gravity, as we experience it right now

So "gravity", not in the physics-after-general-relativity sense (twisting and curving the time-space), but in the Newtonian sense? I'm just trying to understand what you mean.

I'd never stopped to wonder why does time just go forwards, and why so inexorably.

I don't really know much about it, but the direction of all the processes that take place in the universe goes is that where the entropy (sort of amount of disorder) is enlarged. That's pretty much what governs all the multi-particle interactions and processes in the universe, and since everything is 'built', in one way or another, from lots of smaller particles, it plays that major role. So we may see it as the direction of time, but it's actually the direction of entropy.

It's like, if you drop a mug to the floor, and it breaks to pieces. When all the little pieces are mug-shaped, and whatever liquid is inside is inside-of-mug-shaped, they have just the one way (or very few) to be ordered like that. However, when it's all smashed to pieces on the floor, the material of the mug in all different pieces and places and the liquid inside all over the place, you have many more options for the particles which build the material to arrange themselves. You enlarged the entropy. So you see the direction of the mug being broken as the 'regular' flow of time, and the direction that reduces the disorder, the one in which pieces get back together and liquid gets put back inside, as the opposite, as time going backwards. But it's not a quality of time, per se, but of the entropy.

House, who really bothers me.

What about him disturbs you? I've only seen the one episode, mind you, so I may have no idea as to what you're referring to.

Doctors more often than not seem to be like detectives, in a way - they have to find the solution to the mystery, based on clues that the body gives them.

Yes, according to relativity

I totally buy that -- I just don't see how the rest of the sentence is possible then.

Are you saying that the concept of something happening simultaneously (or an hour and a half apart) on opposite sides of the universe is bollocks?

No. I just saying you can't talk about the Universe existing in time outside of the Universe because time is part of the Universe.

Is it just me, or does this look photoshopped?