The illusion of time and does it have an arrow?

I decided to continue on the subject of time on this post for it's such a rich source of philosophical ponder and paradoxes. Time is too complex term to be described as a line, line of historical events until the time stops into the moment you recon as the present. Humans have intuitive hunch, similar as described above, of the nature of the time, which is linked with consciousness. Yet when the concept of time is put under scientific though, interpretation of what time is or can be start to straggle.

Time is a good companion of scientific diagrams. When you have one scientific quantity on one axis of Cartesian plane, it's in many cases informative to have time on the other. Still nobody cannot exactly tell what is time. A moment which is passed before you could really get hold of it? Maybe a periodic function in which phase is the only thing that truly matters?

The more you stop and think about time the less it makes sense. Then after awhile you realize you've been thinking quite a long time.

After reading Etienne Klein's Conversations With the Sphinx book I truly realized how incredibly complex and irrational the concept of time is. Time seem so familiar and essential thing that it is hard to accept that there is not a "right" scientific way to picture time. Perhaps the most important issue about time is that some events suggest that time is irreversible and other suggest that it is reversible. In other words it's a battle of a line like, and universal and dynamic time. Surely it can't be both at the same time?

Entropy as far as I know points out the direction of time and suggest that there is only one way to go. Then again many quantum mechanical processes (like strong interaction) can occur "both ways" and entangled photons can somehow transfer information instantly, reacting as if they were liberated from the tides of time. One could state that time marches on and swings back and forth simultaneously.

The basic unit of time, second was originally defined by the earth's orbit period around the sun. Nowadays it's about "the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.1" So we have gone from huge macroscopic event to theoretical (since ground state means 0K) quantum mechanical event that is basically a matter of probability. These two cannot really be compared, still they both have posed as the ultimate description of nature.

Even though for us humans time seems to be lost for good once it's gone by in our macroscopic world, quantum physic suggest even that the time travelling could be possible someday. Well at least for a single particles according to Wheeler and Feynman. This following video will show you why this time travelling would be a very bad idea if it could be executed in a human scale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75nBenOWul0

Lead us to the new age, chosen one

Ancient time, modern times. Prehistory, contemporary history. We have many different names for different times. These classifications are usually overlapping, subject of debate and sometimes not all that scientific. They however make our perspective towards our past more meaningful. Efforts made today will lead to brighter future in contrast to what world used be.

Innovations are usually considered to be the fuel for advancing into a new age and at first glance it really seems to be that way. Watt's steam engine triggered industrial revolution, advances in metallurgy led to iron age and so on. Any more detailed analysis will fall flat any fantasy of sudden intuitive leap in development of the history of mankind.

Watt's steam engine was an improvement to Tomas Newcomens engine which wasn't the first steam engine around either. Iron age has been scaled between 1200 BC - 700 AD varying in different locations(1). But then again, iron was acquired from meteorites already couple of thousand years before 1200 BC and smelting technologies slowly evolved without any certain dramatic event. Some even suggest that the shortage of tin used in bronze alloy forced bronze smiths to seek alternative natural resources thus leading mankind to another era because simply it needed to happen.

Past is history. But when does time stop being the present? Picture taken in 2009 at a dock.

Let's skip to time being

What about now? Where do we stand now? Information age? Well I'm writing my thoughts to be published in the world wide web. That has certainly changed since industrial age. If I lived in the 19th century I could only hand out these silly thoughts in leaflets on the streets in Finland. There is however not a single innovation that would make the difference between industrial and information age. And there won't be a single magical event that will make the difference between this information time and the next one. More important will probably be the social aspect. The new age will already be there when it's wanted and needed, whatever it will be called. Maybe a quantum age? Yeah, I vote for quantum age.

There innovations for new age are already here. LASER for example is device based on a quantum phenomena. It has revolutionized communications but it has not revolutionized the way we common people look at the world or ourselves. Scientist have also performed magical things like teleportation in laboratories. These are particularly those kind of examples that cannot be explained using previous classical ideas, suggesting that there is a need for a turn of a page. Perhaps when man discovers practical ways to exploit entanglement and superposition in computing, historians will mark a point for new era.

I cannot predict the future but eventually we are forced to accept that our description of the physical world has not been complete. And that is the point we start to look at the past as if it was a "different" era than we presently live. I cannot but wish to live long enough to experience that exiting turn up, which will occur indistinguishably. There is already proven theoretical basis for the turn up in quantum mechanics, but perhaps it still lacks a proper practical interpretation for it.