The arrow of time.

Yesterday's post about time was both confusing and fascinating. Here's another fascinating thing about time: it only moves in one direction.

The arrow of time points toward entropy. Things tend to get more disorganized. That's why scrambled eggs don't seem to reassemble themselves or divers jump out of the water and land on the side of the pool completely dry.

But why does time's arrow point in one direction? I don't know. You can argue that it needs to point this way in order for there to be a cause-and-effect relationship between events and things.

Yet I heard that from a purely mathematical angle, it doesn't matter which way time flows. Physicists' calculations work both forwards and backwards.

There may be other parts of the universe where time flows backwards. Or perhaps in the vast multi-verse, there are universes that exist in which time flows backwards. We just can't see them.

I think it would be cool if, at the end of the universe, time reversed itself and ran backward until the big bang again. Then our bodies would reform and be resurrected and we'd live until we got smaller and smaller and eventually disappeared inside our mother's bellies.

If sports were played backwards...

The season would start with randomly placed standings and the teams would play the schedule, evening out all the wins and losses until the final game of the season, which would end in a 0-0 tie, with the team having a record of 0 wins, 0 losses and 0 ties.

The season would start with one team jumping around and cheering, then calming down and returning the championship trophy.

Players would go to the penalty box and after a few minutes the referee would blow the whistle and tell the players to leave the box. The best players would spend the whole game trying to take back their points, and the opposing team would spend the whole game trying to stop them.

Fans would come to the game excited and cheering, then as the game started, they'd calm down and relax until the game ended, when they'd stand up head to the concourse, buy a program, return their tickets to the box office and head back to the parking lot.

Coaches would start the game by shaking hands, then yell at their players, then calm down as the score decreased to 0 and then leave the playing field, ignoring everything except the game's strategies, which they think about in detail.

They'd think about the game for the next few days until the beginning of the next game.

The players would show up to practice, exhausted. Then, as they practiced, would gain more and more energy until practice ended, at which point they wouldn't feel tired at all.

The coaches would explain a complicated instruction and the team would practice the instruction well, but get worse and worse at it, the more they practiced; until eventually they couldn't perform it anymore.

Legendary athletes would return all their awards, come out of retirement, do amazingly well, then get worse and worse as they grew younger and younger. Slowly everyone would forget about them.