Re: tangent off of Order being born from disorder?

["Steven T. Ratliff" <str@nwc.edu>]

On Tuesday, May 20, 1997 Michael Monce wrote:

> 	These comments by Leigh raise a related issue that I've had
> trouble understanding.  Hawking, and others, state that the directionality
> of time is related to entropy; something I don't quite grasp.  When Leigh
> says 'long timescales' is this referring to time's directionality?  If
> the uncertainty was not related to timescale, would there be a
> directionality?  
>
> 	I tried taking Leigh's example of a deck of cards: Imagine a
> universe that consisted of just a deck of cards and a mechanical shuffler
> that only shuffled when, say, a radioactive decay occurred within the
> mechanism; sort of a Schrodinger's cat type machine.  In between shuffles
> when the deck's mechanism is idle, is there a directionality to time,
> since nothing is contributing to the entropy? 

The smallest unit of time in such a universe would be proportional to 
the inverse of the decay constant of the radioactive substance.  I 
don't think that time would be defined on any finer scales (i.e., we 
could not ask what was happening to time between shuffles).  




Steven T. Ratliff
Associate Professor of Physics
Northwestern College
3003 Snelling Av. N.
Saint Paul, MN  55113-1598

Internet:  stratliff@nwc.edu (or str@nwc.edu)