
What insights can an LCD display give us about time's arrow? - retupmoc01
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160913-the-physics-of-time-puzzle/
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stephengillie
This article ends disappointingly in a series of mental exercises. The "LCD"
involved is the 8-shape commonly used in LCDs to allow any digit to be
displayed. There is no discussion about how light traversing a liquid crystal
display illuminates time's arrow, nor the change undergone when a liquid
crystal is electrified.

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0xdada
I'm also not sure why LCD is used as the example. Wouldn't a cellular automata
(or a simplification of one) be a better example here?

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jerf
That is a cellular automaton, whether or not they call it one.

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lallysingh
Sorry, naive question here: how do we know that time's moving forward? If it
moves back and forth, wouldn't we, being inside time and our own internal
states dictated by the physical state of our own matter, be unable to perceive
that differently from time going forward-only?

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jerf
The question of "time" and what you might call "metatime" are two different
ones. "How does time work?" is a legitimately interesting question on its own
without considering "metatime", and amenable to at least a certain amount of
investigation. "Does time perhaps get scrambled around in ways we can't
possibly observe?" is at least academically interesting, but in contrast, not
very amenable to investigation. How could we _prove_ that the multiple-world
hypothesis is true? How can we _prove_ that the universe does not simply stop
five minutes from now? Or ram into what proves to be something else that we
intersect in our future? How could we _prove_ whether or not the Great
Simulator does or does not roll back the simulation sometimes because It did
not like the particular set of results? If there are ways of investigating
these questions, they are much less obvious.

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antirez
> Why is the time we call “now” so special to us in the real world, but not at
> all special in any way in physics

Isn't this, trivially, just that it represents the most updated information we
have in order to elaborate what to do next?

