We observe this journey because heat flows towards the cold things and one day all the heat will have dissipated, and we will experience neither past nor future. There is, according to Rovelli, just one basic equation that points to an arrow of time: the second principle of thermodynamics, which says that entropy is always increasing, that the journey from order to disorder is down a one-way street. At the deepest level of mathematical physics, time does not exist at all. There is a more profound puzzle underlying this spacetime confusion. People who live at altitude really do have more time, as do people who stay still Time shifts with both mass and velocity, to be different at every point in the universe: we live, Rovelli says, in a “spiderweb of time”. But everything in the universe is in motion everything feels gravity’s grasp. The difference as measured on an atomic clock is counted only in billionths of a second, and we on Earth can conveniently ignore this temporal untidiness. People who live at altitude really do have more time, as do people who stay still. In 1972, physicists sent a quartet of caesium clocks jetting around the planet in different directions to confirm Einstein’s special relativity. Forget about universal time, a simultaneous now across the cosmos.
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