On 11/4/2010 12:52 PM, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>>    Time must exist, or else it would be impossible to postulate essential
>>> properties of physics such as the second law of thermodynamics.
>
>> The second law is statistical.
>
>    It still states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.
>
>>> You can unambiguously distinguish if a closed system is going forward in
>>> time by measuring its entropy.)
>
>> No you can't, because time is reversible.
>
>    That would mean that entropy is also reversible, which would break the
> second law.
>

Well, in point of fact, Hawkins has proposed that time is an artifact of 
probability, in a sense. I.e., *now* is not a strict result of then, but 
rather than now is a product of all possible "thens" that could have 
produced this moment. This means that time does pass, but the state of 
the universe at any moment is merely the constrained result of the 
statistical probabilities of the prior moment. So.. How do you reverse 
time, if the further back you go, the greater the degree of variance you 
end up with, with respect to what *could have* happened prior, and still 
have the same "now" as a result? Basically, you can't, since you can't 
know what of the N number of possible "exact" conditions existed in the 
last moment, so the farther back you end up, the more likely you are to 
land at a state where the odds or 50/50 that you can get back to now, or 
worse, slightly in favor of *never* getting back to the same point at all.

At least I think that is what he was getting at, but the article 
mentioned the concept in like 2-3 sentences...

Biggest issue though is, there is probably nearly absolute zero 
probability of events, i.e., entropy (since it is one of the constraints 
itself) actually changing in a way that would result in the prior 
moment, instead of the next one. Now.. Whether or not you could create 
some sort of "local" change is another matter, but.. just guessing, you 
might end up with something more like the Stargate SG1 case where some 
guy tried to go back in time using a huge mass of linked gates, and time 
reversed "locally", but only from the perspective of those inside the 
resulting bubble. To change events such that the rest of the universe 
didn't protest the anomaly...

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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