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Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

Time is the direction in which entropy always increases. It's the most real thing there is.

Or at least tends to increase. Entropy can always spontaneously decrease, or can simply not increase for a moment. This was actually discussed a week ago! [1] As discussed in those comments, entropy isn't well-formulated outside of equilibrium states, and is subjective: it is a function of an observer's knowledge of the system (particularly microstates).

I'd say time is very real, and an inescapable part of experience (no experience without change). As for time being the most real, we only know it through experience, so I think of it as secondary, along with space, etc.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31164725

In my—undergraduate, not-very-specialist—days of being taught something or other about entropy now and then, I felt like we were being told "This state is special, so the entropy is low, and then it probably ends up in one of these other states, and none of them are special, so the entropy has increased”, and it would seem to me that we could appreciate all of the states as equally special if we were big-brained enough. Maybe like the integers being Ramanujan’s personal friends.

Yes, good book on that is The Order of Time, for anyone who hasn’t read it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36442813-the-order-of-ti...

does entropy always increase? are there systems or forms of matter that literally cheat entropy?

Any system can cheat entropy as long as it's not a closed system, by decreasing locally but increasing it globally. Life is a good example.

life and information are good examples, yes.

i sometimes wonder if our understanding of physics is somewhat limited to what we can see/observe/measure (include instruments here) and wonder if the laws of physics as we perceive them are only a set of laws that are not necessarily universal and apply anywhere where matter exists (that a long way of saying that maybe entropy comes with only one set of laws of physics that just so happens to be the ones that we are experiencing right now)

A plant is what a seed does to the dirt around it.

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