The Arrow of Time

         It happens often enough. I decide to watch something on TV that is actually edifying and educational, get half-way through it and run out of I.Q. This never happens while watching Taxi reruns, during which I identify perhaps a bit too strongly with Reverend Jim. 

        But I digress. 

        Recently I started watching some segments of a TV show called The Great Courses.  These are lectures about various things hosted by high-powered, qualified people in various fields. Previously, I watched a few on the Black Death--the plague in the 14th Century world--as it seemed relevant to our own 21st Century pandemic, but it got rather scholarly, not to say boring. But, yeah, less and less relevant, seemed to me. One take-away, though: probably if that particular plague returned, it would be less of an issue due to modern medicine, not to mention the fact that it sort of depended on humans cohabiting with rats, which--I hope, at least--is not so common nowadays.

        On to the "arrow of time." As the imminently qualified Dr. Sean Carroll tried to explain to me during the first few episodes of "The Great Courses--Mysteries of Physics--Time," physics treats time as a component of "spacetime," and it seems as though the past, present and future all exist. This, opposed to the idea that the past does not exist anymore, and the future does not exist yet. Maybe?  Nothing in physics demands that the past is not the same as the future. Instead, there is an "arrow of time," where entropy increases all the time and the universe moves forward in the way that we have come to think it does. 

        Intriguing, yes. Comprehensible, no. I don't think I'm going to try to finish the series, (especially as Amazon Prime is charging me $2 per 30 minute episode,) but I leave with a little more understanding of just how ignorant I am, which is something I've always found tends to keep me out of trouble, to some degree, even though, of course, as always, there's nothing wrong with thinking you know something as long as you don't act on it.