4 ms·
Things may reverse in an unlikely fashion in the case of the water separation, but your shattered glass will never jump back into your hand and become whole aga
by dagav 7y ago
Things may reverse in an unlikely fashion in the case of the water separation, but your shattered glass will never jump back into your hand and become whole again no matter how long you wait.
Some things are truly irreversible because death is a one way door.
It's no wonder we have different psychological feelings about past and future. Some aspects of the future are potential which have yet to crystallize, and so they can be changed before they set. Some things in the future are inevitable. Some aspects of the past are set in stone and you must accept that they cannot be changed. Some aspects of the past can change with new found understanding of past events. Hence the distinction in emotions. It doesn't take a scientist to figure that out, although I appreciate the line of thinking.
- lacker 7y agoI think you are missing the point. There's no difference between the water separation and a shattered glass. Both are based on physical laws that, on a molecular scale, will run backwards just as well as they run forwards. But in practice entropic processes only run one way.
- dagav 7y agoTime is the non-spatial fourth dimension along which things travel in only one direction. Even if in the three physical dimensions the process could go in reverse, has it really reversed in time? The history of it breaking and being fixed has persisted, and so now it's not the same glass that it was before. It's now a glass which had been broken but is now fixed. It's a non-material distinction, but time is non-material. And in that way, it hasn't reversed at all.