detrevnI

(Rescued from G+ 21 Nov. 2012)

She said, “I see.”

He continued, “When everything is inverted, it turns out that time runs backward.

“Effects lead to causes, as you’d expect, and those causes are effects for other causes.  The teacup is broken.  We know it was a teacup, but we don’t know how it broke.  We can guess; in the same way, someone on the other inverted universe could guess that the teacup on the edge of the counter will fall, but it is not guaranteed.

“Take the example of the teacup,” he said.  “We just see a teacup broken on the floor.  Fortunately, we had a broom in our hand.  Why did we pick up the broom?  Obviously, we needed it.  If we had not picked up the broom, we would not have seen a broken teacup.  Or if we had, we would have first picked up the broom, swept up the broken pieces, put the broom away, then come back to the spot where the teacup is broken without the broom, realise we need the broom, then walk away.

“Gravity repels, and plus charge is negative; south and north poles of magnetism are reversed, and spin is reversed.  Negative numbers are larger than zero, and positive numbers are smaller.  This is normal and what you expect.  However, on the other side, the inverted side, it’s the other way round.  How does that possibly work?  We can only guess, but we assume that gravity must attract and positive charge is negative, and so forth.  That’s like running everything backward.

“Entropy in a closed system must decrease, everyone knows that.  It is a rule of the universe that cannot be broken.  Notwen figure that out with his infinite law of coldo-statics.  If this were inverted, then somehow the world would become more orderly.  The tables in front of us would be broken down, unscrewed, layers of extra wood added, assembled into a large fallen tree, limbs would be added back, the tree would tip up, the tree would shrink and shrivel down to a sapling, and so forth.

“Predestination is a strange concept that implies that the future is fixed.  Clearly it cannot be so, as we have no way of knowing what will or will not happen.  We cannot know that we are going into a car because we came from some other place?  Which place?  Did we come from the store?  Perhaps we have groceries.  But what if we had visited the doctor’s office afterward?  And so forth.

He said, “If the world were inverted, it would be a strange place indeed.  Cause would precede effect, entropy might increase monotonically, the universe would be expanding, light would come rather than go…  One shudders to imagine the causes of such a nightmare."

“What if the world became inverted?” she asked.

“Yes, you, Shen,” said Professor Pascal during his class.

by Pascal Theramin