The Direction of Time

Physicists tell us that there is no reason in principle why time should not run backwards.  Yet they also tell us that the overall entropy of the system is destined to increase until we live in a universe of maximum disorder.  The movement towards disorder is a way that we mark the progress, forward, of time.

Like Pigpen in the "Peanuts" comic strip, I leave behind me a dense trail of dirt and dust.  In principle, my entire life history could be reconstituted from the dirt and the dust.

In principle.

 

A Classic Case of Hubris

It has been seven years now.  I thought that, using my own powers of discernment and focus, I could ride the bus towards "Big-D" disclosure of what is behind the veil.  But the veil frustrates all such attempts.  The closer one gets to it, the faster it seems to recede.

Moses did not make it to the Promised Land.  Magellan did not complete the circumnavigation.  J.D. Madden's concept of the "hyperobject" comes into play. 

Picture the monolith of Kubrick's Space Odyssey, but on a scale like that of the Great Wall of China.  The perfect blackness, the perfect flatness, do communicate something to us, but what they communicate is impenetrability.  We can touch it.  Indeed, touching it can change us, perhaps change the trajectory of humankind.  But we can't know it.