Sebastien broke a cracker the other day. Lately, he has been trying to put the broken ones back together before eating them. This invariably frustrates him and he looks to me while making that pouty face. I tell him "Sorry, you just can't fight entropy - it's always gonna win in the long run!"
All the different ways that cracker could break - so many possibilities. Yet, only a very few, carefully lined up ways to put it back together. Statistically, it's just not gonna happen with the two of us pushing the pieces together with our fingers. Statistically, it's much more likely to remain broken, or, to break further as we try. I know this from experience - he's just finding out the cruel nature of entropy for the first time.
We are going "forward in time" for the same reason: entropy. The only thing giving a "direction" to time is that statistically crackers are more likely to break than they are to be made whole again. Break a few more crackers and now you are 40 years old instead of 20 months old.
"Aha," Sebastien may be thinking, "I will cheat time by making a cracker factory in which we turn cracker crumbs into crisp new crackers!"
That is all fine and well inside your factory, but the cost to the outside universe! You will be dumping waste heat and sowing disarray with your discards at a rate exceeding your cracker making capacity. Global entropy increases and time moves forward.
Sebastien scratches his head (very cute) and then thinks "What if I am very, very small and I don't interact at all with the rest of the universe? Then can I cheat time?"
Hmm, he has a point there. If you completely isolate yourself and don't break any crackers yourself then you may indeed have made time an irrelevant concept. That's what's happening with different quantum states for subatomic particles when we say "we know they're in there somewhere but we don't know exactly where until we go looking for them". Those isolated, non-cracker-breaking subatomic particles are not "buzzing around, skipping from state to state" - there is no sequence of events to them. For time has no meaning to them and all their options stack up on top of each other into one big past-future-now stack called a "superposition". No remembrances of things past and no excitement for the future in that world.
Maybe breaking crackers is a good thing?
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