You might have noticed that we’re slowing down the posts here at Pop Physics HQ. That’s because summer is in full, sweaty swing, the students are busy forgetting everything they’ve learned sitting at their school desks, and I want to make sure this site’s got some momentum when we pick up the pace again in September.
But the public demands more. With that in mind, here’s a good article about the basic ways physicists think about Time, written by author Paul Davies. I’ll be talking about some of these ideas in greater detail in later chapters.
“Thinking of past and future brings us to another problem that has foxed scientists and philosophers: why time should have a direction at all. In every day life it’s pretty apparent that it does. If you look at a movie that’s being played backwards, you know it immediately because most things have a distinct time direction attached to them: an arrow of time. For example, eggs can easily turn into omlettes but not the other way around, and milk and coffee mix in your cup but never separate out again.”
Read the full article here!