Where Does Our Arrow Of Time Come From?

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

Every moment that passes finds us traveling from the past to the present and into the future, with time always flowing in the same direction. At no point does it ever appear to either stand still or reverse; the “arrow of time” always points forwards for us. But if we look at the laws of physics — from Newton to Einstein, from Maxwell to Bohr, from Dirac to Feynman — they appear to be time-symmetric. In other words, the equations that govern reality don’t have a preference for which way time flows. The solutions that describe the behavior of any system obeying the laws of physics, as we understand them, are just as valid for time flowing into the past as they are for time flowing into the future. Yet we know from experience that time only flows one way: forwards. So where does the arrow of time come from?

Many people believe there might be a connection between the arrow of time and a quantity called entropy. While most people normally equate “disorder” with entropy, that’s a pretty lazy description that also isn’t particularly accurate. Instead, think about entropy as a measure of how much thermal (heat) energy could possibly be turned into useful, mechanical work. If you have a lot of this energy capable of potentially doing work, you have a low-entropy system, whereas if you have very little, you have a high-entropy system. The second law of thermodynamics is a very important relation in physics, and it states that the entropy of a closed (self-contained) system can only increase or stay the same over time; it can never go down. In other words, over time, the entropy of the entire Universe must increase. It’s the only law of physics that appears to have a preferred direction for time.

More here.