I happened upon an interesting article about time and the laws of thermodynamics today. I don't claim to be knowledgeable in the realm of math or physics by any means, but my understanding is that these scientists are conjecturing that despite our traditional understanding of time, entropy, or the chaotic state toward which all things tend, exists regardless of the direction that time is flowing. In other words, if you have a room full of particles moving around, their arrangement will, over time, become more chaotic, but according to these scientists, if you run time backwards the arrangement will be equally as chaotic. This presents a really interesting problem, because the big bang was theoretically a moment of extremely low entropy, but how can that be if, in reverse, the universe would un-bang into an equally chaotic arrangement as it is heading toward now? Furthermore, if it's true that we are moving toward entropy in our universe (and we think it is, as we see the universe expanding and becoming less organized), how do we explain cosmological changes that result not in more disorder, but in order--for example, the birth of a star. Maybe that's not a good example (again, not a physicist!) but we also see examples of increasing order in our lives.
In some ways, we always become disorganized. I think I have written before about how I think that this ever increasing state of entropy is a symptom of a world which is fundamentally broken. Stephen King's Dark Tower series writes about a 'winding down' of the world, where time doesn't move as it should and things that should work or have order don't. It's a beautiful metaphor for how we live. It feels like the world has "moved on." We lament the way things were, when it seemed like they made more sense. But in some ways, it's not the world that's becoming more off. Objectively, the world is getting better in a lot of ways. MLK said that the arc of history is long and bends toward justice, and we can see that all over the place from the introduction of child labor laws to women's suffrage and civil rights. Yet some people would see recent progress (such as marriage equality or sexual freedom) as a sign of increasing societal decay. So we have this strange paradox between entropy and order, which varies based on our perception.
There's an interesting episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Captain Sisko meets aliens who exist in non-linear time. They have difficulty understanding Sisko's grief over the death of his wife because for them all moments exist simultaneously and are accessible. Sisko is a linear creature who can't go back in time, but he's also stuck in the moment of his wife's death. These aliens struggle to grasp the problem of human entropy--our lives heading toward death, having an awareness of it, but being bound by it at the same time. Whether he went back or forward, his life was still trapped in a moment of the ultimate entropy of death. And yet these aliens existed outside of this time. It got me thinking about how these scientists mentally experimented. Is it possible that the problem isn't entropy in all directions, but our perspective on things?
The story of the walk to Emmaus is a perfect example of this. Two disciples are walking along the road toward this town of Emmaus three days after Jesus' death, where they encounter a man on the road. They have lost all hope, buried in a moment in time in which the man they thought would redeem Israel had died, stuck in a moment of grief and an irreparably altered future. However, it turns out that this man on the road is actually Jesus, though they aren't capable of perceiving him as they knew him. On this road, Jesus walks with them, teaches them, and ultimately they beg him to stay. He goes with them to eat, and it's only through the meal that they are released from the trap of their linear, finite reality and opened up to the resurrected Christ sitting across the table from them.
We are stuck in this reality where whether we go forward or backward we face pain, decline, helplessness. The parallel between infancy and old age has been pointed out by many people, and it's true. In this world, we are largely helpless either way. This article on time made me think, though, not about our own constraint, but the way that God breaks into it. Although time's arrow moving both backward and forward looked like increased entropy in the minds of those scientists, I suspect that in the mind of God who created all things, it makes a lot more sense. The arc is truly too long for us to perceive. And yet we have a little puncture hole into that reality, when we are met by the presence of a being who is both divine and mortal in bread and wine and water. Through the sacraments, and through our daily encounters with the Spirit of God in the world, we are introduced to a glimmer of the reality that defies our understanding of thermodynamics. Often our existence does look and feel pretty chaotic, but I think that is only because "now we see dimly, as in a mirror." (1 Cor. 13:12) When the reality of a defiant, grave escaping Jesus returns to us in fullness and we see him face to face, I expect that things will look mighty different to us as well.
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