Pierced by Time's Arrow

Is it odd that I ponder a Quantum world:
Einstein's space-time, warped and curled,
With ten or eleven dimensional space
Being "relative" all over the place?
Or should I very Newtonian be,
And use Absolute Space as my theory --
Surrounding Earth, above and beneath her:
Newton's luminiferous aether...?

This is what happens when you can't sleep - your thoughts get deeper and deeper into strange territories - for example, some of my old mental stomping grounds: information theory, quantum mechanics, Newton's Bucket, and the awful reality of Time's Arrow. Although physical laws make no distinctions regarding a temporal direction, only Merlin was said to be able to "remember" the future. Why does information, when incomplete, tend to propagate and fill in the gaps, behaving like an entity as alive as crabgrass, and just as hard to manage? Is a probability wave faster than the speed of light, just like the thought that carried it instantly to the edge of the universe, is it a moot point because of quantum entanglements making us all one, though light-years divide our physical locations? Finally, if all of space and time are relative (thank you, Einstein!), does the idea of "now" even have a meaning?

That's why I think my friends will eventually find me, totally sleep-deprived and pierced through the heart by Time's Arrow…

Mick

Pierced by Time's Arrow

How long can my fragile sanity last,
When stretched and torn between future and past?
How do I navigate life's river run,
When I should be two, but am only one?
You see, what's causing the problems for me,
Are those pesky old laws of entropy.
Specifically, what's caught in my craw,
Is that Thermodynamics Second Law:
Despite my best efforts, I have one fate -
My life moves toward a disorganized state,
And though I try hard to "live in the now,"
That now just keeps moving away, somehow...
Till when I die, in frustration's barrow -
Pinned to the past and pierced by Time's Arrow.

Mick McKellar
June 2007