[ExI] Which direction does the arrow of time point in Conway's Game of Life?

[William Flynn Wallace]

Well thanks so much for blowing away my cosmic religion.  Everybody said
that was a Big Bang, and now they changed their minds (or more likely, in a
fit of pique, decided that the way to clean house for newer and different
theories was to just decide that everyone in the past was a big dope).
Just can't get the data to fit, I suppose.  Why can't they just do what
people in economics and psychology do - make up your own.

You know this makes monkeys out of a lot of intelligent people who we now
know knew no more about it than your mophead.  But thanks to John, I
finally have an appropriate name for my house:  Larger Entropy (with more
than one Fibber McGee's closets as special features -old radio show - in
the intro Fibber refers to 'my big old fat wife..' Imagine that nowadays).

If entropy continues to get larger there may be a day when not even Martha
can organize a two car funeral.

bill w

On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 3:16 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 2:33 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> > Ignorant, idle, and possibly stupid question:  why not?  When the Big
>> Bang occurred, didn't everything go out from there?  Has too much time
>> passed such that we cannot reverse the motions of the galaxies and find out
>> where that is?
>>
>
> The Big Bang wasn't like a modern day explosion where matter expanded into
> empty space, the Big Bang created empty space which expanded into nothing.
> So the Big Bang happened where I am and where you are and where everybody
> is, there is no unique place where the Big Bang happened. But there is a
> unique time when it happened, 13.8 billion years ago.
>
> In addition to that I can think of 4 other differences between space and
> time:
>
> 1) None of the 3 spatial dimensions has a preferred direction but the time
> dimension does, from the past to the future. The Second Law of
> Thermodynamics can explain part of the reason for that.  Entropy will be
> higher tomorrow than today because there are just more ways to be
> disorganized than organized so if things are going to be different tomorrow
> then things will almost certainly be more disorganized tomorrow (have a
> larger Entropy) than today. However by that exact same line of reasoning
> you'd have to falsely conclude that yesterday the Entropy was lower than
> today too, UNLESS you take into account initial conditions. For reasons
> that nobody understands in the first instant of the Big Bang the universe
> must have been in a very low Entropy state and it's been increasing ever
> since. In fact I think the Big Bang should have been predicted in the mid
> 19th century as soon as the laws of thermodynamics became clear.
>
> 2) I can imagine a consciousness existing in a time without a place but
> not in a place without time.
>
> 3) For reasons nobody understands there are 3 spatial dimensions but only
> one time dimension.
>
> 4) A straight line path on a flat surface or a geodesic on a curved
> surface is always the shortest distance between 2 points in space, but a
> straight line in flat Minkowski space or a geodesic in curved spacetime
> will always be the longest proper time distance, that is to say a clock
> following that path will show the longest time duration, any other path
> will show a shorter elapsed time. A straight line or geodesic is also the
> path taken by a body that is not being accelerated by a force, and in
> General Relativity gravity is not considered a force. That's why you've got
> to use non-Euclidean geometry in General Relativity, a minus sign for the
> time dimension creeps into Pythagoras's Theorem for calculating the
> distance s in Spacetime and it becomes s^2= x^2 +y^2 +z^2 - ct^2 where c is
> the speed of light.
>
> Or to put it another way, you want the spacetime distance to be
> proportional to the difficulty of making a trip, and the larger the spacial
> distance is the harder it is to make a trip, but the larger amount of time
> you have to make a trip the easier it is. So when figuring the spacetime
> distance the spacial dimensions have a positive sign but the time dimension
> has a negative sign.
>
>  John K Clark
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