In Luc Besson’s movie, Lucy, starring Scarlett Johannson, Lucy
delivers a soliloquy on the meaning of time.
She explains, in part, “Humans
consider themselves unique, so they've rooted their whole theory of existence
on their uniqueness. ‘One’ is their unit of ‘measure’—but it’s not. All social
systems we've put into place are a mere sketch: ‘one plus one equals two,’ that's
all we've learned, but one plus one has never equaled two— there
are in fact no numbers and no letters….Time is the only
true unit of measure, it gives proof to the existence of matter, without time,
we don’t exist.” Others have glimpsed time.
Stephen Hawking (1942—) is one of the
world's renowned theoretical physicists.
His view of time relies on earlier thinking by Newton and Einstein. Hawking
visualizes time as three arrows: the thermodynamic arrow, the
cosmological arrow, and the psychological arrow. The concept of these arrows
helps explain why we see time as moving forward and what this flow of time
actually is in terms of the expansion and contraction of the universe. These
arrows help distinguish the past from the future, and they give time a
direction.
“In our current state of
the universe, all these arrows are pointing in the same direction, however,
this will not always be the case, according to Hawking. The thermodynamic arrow
is derived from the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in any
closed system, disorder (entropy) always increases with time. Take an
example of a glass falling from a table. The glass begins in a state of
heightened order; it is all in one piece. As time passes, the glass hits the
floor, and shatters into many pieces, increasing the disorder, or entropy,
tremendously.
See Threes,
Chapter Four, “Threes and Science” for more.
