How Time Got Its Arrow - The Nature of RealityIf you want a reading experience that will mess with your head, give his column a try. He is proposing as radical and new something we non-cosmologists have taken for granted all our lives, something cosmologists have viewed as coincidental or accidental.
What is this earth-shaking notion? The idea that time is irreversible, can only go forward, not in either direction.
You and I experience life this way, notwithstanding jokes about second childhoods. Nobody gets born old and finishes life as an egg and a sperm. Nobody starts large and ends up tiny.
Smolin begins with the admission that, late in his professional career, he finally believes time is real. Who knew? Answer: most of us, although we'd never be able to prove it scientifically.
