Time is An Elephant; Goldilocks Universe
Channel: mrfaithandphysics
Date: 2013-03-02

The Goldilocks Universe:  Our Universe is "fine-tuned" just for us.  Because if the parameters were changed by just a smidgen, we would not exist.  If the, say, electron voltage had any other value, or if the value of black energy were different planets and galaxies would not form and we would not be here.  So we find ourselves in a universe that is perfectly "tuned" for our existence.  This is the Goldilocks Universe; it's "just right" for life to exist.

Time is not another dimension, but it does, however, represent a real problem in physics because it appears to break the universal symmetry that pervades our perfect little universe.  This breaking of time symmetry makes time a similar enigma to the missing (or hidden) dimensions predicted by string theory, and explaining it will be a measure of the effectiveness of any proposed TOE (Theory Of Everything) in our quest to merge the physical laws of the macro (Standard Model of Physics) with the micro (Quantum Physics).

My special thanks to Nick Harvey who produced the mirrored video included in this production:  https://www.youtube.com/user/nickharvey7.

In essence, the re-emission of the absorbed photon by an atom, sending it back out in any of many possible directions, "breaking" its original trajectory, is the shaking of the dice by God that Einstein at first rejected and later accepted (Heisenberg's Uncertainty), that seems to be behind the breaking of time symmetry that would allow for free will; but put a BS sticker on religious ideas like prophecy, since religious prophecy seems to rely on the same cherished concept of time symmetry that physicists cherish.  

Personally, I'd rather this be wrong, but observation of time, and uncertainties in the quantum world, both point to time being asymmetrical, with the past a fixed set of data, while the time ahead of us is like a cosmic random number generator, that is, data that is in constant flux (based partially, we assume, on the freewill choices of humans riding the wave of the present).  Fun, eh?

Actually, as we understand it today, it is not even our freewill choices, but simply our act of observation that "collapses the wave function" turning the infinite sea of possibilities (waves) into the actual reality that we see (particles).  Don't look behind you, you might find there is nothing there - when you are not looking!

Dig it.