Story: "Timeline"

 

Timeline

 

The coffee pot was dripping its last efforts in the theoretical physics laboratory. The clock read 11:32   am and the screen of an oscilloscope was blinking uselessly in one corner.

The two men were sitting at a table littered with papers, cables and a cup of coffee grounds that could easily date back to the Big Bang.

Diego was a programmer who had become a writer for several years. At that moment he asked his friend - "Let's see, Gabriel, explain this to me again because my brain is still tied to the 20th century. You say that time does not exist. Ok, but my watch insists on contradicting you." 

Gabriel, who was a professor of theoretical physics, tried to explain to him : "Your watch doesn't measure time, Diego, it measures changes. It's like an odometer of the universe. But time itself... is pure illusion." 

Diego retorted , "How the hell do we live in an illusion? Isn't this a very sophisticated way of saying "carpe diem" with scientific words?" 

Gabriel smiled as he responded to his friend's quip . "Not exactly. You see, Julian Barbour's idea is that the universe is not a movie in which time flows, but a collection of static frames. Each instant, each 'now', exists independently of the others. There is no past that flows into the future; there is only a big photo album of the universe that your consciousness is flipping through." 

Diego was hesitant - "So, time is just a bad slide show?" 

Gabriel tried to explain - "More or less. Imagine you open your code editor and instead of seeing one line of execution, you see all the states of the program at once. You choose which one to look at, but in reality, all the states already exist." 

Diego hesitated . "Wait. If all moments exist at once, does that mean the future is already written?" 

Gabriel nodded . "Not exactly. What we call 'the future' is just another page in the album, but no one tells you what order to turn them in. The illusion of time comes from the way our consciousness jumps from one state to another. But those states are not ordered by any cosmic entity." 

Diego asked incredulously , "So time is like a video game where all the frames are already rendered, but I only see one at a time... Am I trapped in a bad graphics engine of reality?" 

Gabriel explained patiently , "Rather, you are a character in a game where all possible games already exist, but you only experience one of them." 

Diego continued to doubt - "What about causality? You can't tell me that if I jump off the roof now, I won't break a leg on another page of the album." 

Gabriel nodded . "Of course, because in the great album of the universe, there are pages where you made the decision not to jump and others where you did. But it's not like time carries you from one to the other like a river. You, your consciousness, are the one who jumps between them, and each 'I' that experiences each page believes that time flows, when in reality, everything is already there." 

Diego doubted the theory - "I mean, I'm a kind of traveler who glides through a collection of static 'nows' ..." - 

Gabriel nodded again . "Exactly. Now you're getting it. But you can only travel one way because your consciousness is tied to a specific direction of those jumps." 

Diego seemed confused - "And why only in one direction? Why can't I jump to the past?" - 

Gabriel tried to explain it to him - "Because consciousness is a process that follows the rules of entropy. As we experience successive states, the information in our brain is reorganized in an increasing direction of complexity. Your memory only accumulates new data, it never erases the old. That's why you remember the past, but you can't remember the future. If you could jump into the past, you would be in a "now" where your consciousness doesn't have the memories of the present, and you would simply live that instant without knowing that you have experienced it before." -

Diego opened his eyes –“I’m sorry, I can’t understand it”-

Gabriel explained patiently – “Because consciousness is a process that follows the rules of entropy. As we experience successive states, the information in our brain is reorganized in an increasing direction of complexity. Your memory only accumulates new data, it never erases old data. That is why you remember the past, but you cannot remember the future.”

It was a pretty interesting concept.

According to Gabriel, consciousness is the result of physical processes in the brain. These processes follow the laws of physics, including the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy (or disorder) always increases with time.

Every human experience leaves a trace in the brain. That trace is information stored in neural connections. But here's the key: those connections can only be organized in one direction: from the past to the future. They cannot spontaneously "disorganize" themselves and return to a previous state.

The brain works like a recorder of information. Every moment a person lives is like writing in a diary: once the diary is written, it is recorded and people can reread it (or remember it), but pages that have not yet been written (the future) cannot be read.

If the brain could remember the future, it would mean that information about that future is already recorded in the brain. But entropy tells us that information in a closed system (like the brain) only accumulates and increases in complexity over time. It cannot spontaneously "travel backwards" and bring to mind something that has not yet been experienced.

According to Julian Barbour's theory, all moments (or "nows") exist simultaneously, like pages in a book. But our consciousness only moves in one direction, because the way we store information is tied to the increase in entropy.

To understand this, imagine that you are looking at a deck of cards spread out on the table. Each card is a “now.” They all exist at the same time, but the brain can look at one at a time, and the way you see those decks is influenced by the order in which the brain accumulates information.

To understand this, you can think of a glass that falls to the floor and breaks. A person remembers the entire glass because in the past its information is organized in the simplest form. When the glass breaks, entropy increases and the system becomes more complex.

The brain then registers the event, but in only one direction: from the whole glass to the broken glass. No brain will ever remember having seen the glass spontaneously recomposing itself, because that would imply that entropy had decreased in perception, which does not happen.

The same goes for consciousness: it can only "move" in the direction in which the entropy of the universe increases. That is why time seems to move only forward.

Consciousness is like a movie that only plays forward because each new frame is more complex than the last. No one can "remember the future" because the information of that future is not yet recorded in the brain. It is the physics of the universe that dictates how we experience time!

Diego tried to reason with it - "I mean, my mind is a train that only moves forward because the entropy machine pushes it forward..." 

Gabriel nodded at his friend's reasoning . "Exactly. It's not that time moves forward, but that our perception can only work in that direction. The brain actually registers changes in state, where entropy increases. That gives us the illusion of time, which doesn't really exist. We live in an eternal now."

Diego's   head seemed to explode - "This is brutal. I mean, everything already exists! My future novel is already written on one of those pages, I just haven't looked at it yet. I'm a fraud! The universe already did everything before me!"

Gabriel smiled heartily . "Well, if it's any consolation, every decision you make creates new 'nows' in which that novel exists or doesn't exist."

Diego seemed very excited - "So I'm going to write about this. A story about a guy who discovers that time doesn't exist and becomes obsessed with finding a way to flip through the album in the opposite direction..." - 

Gabriel celebrated the idea - "If you succeed, let me know. I want to know if I'm a millionaire on any page of the album." 

Diego responded laughing as he greeted his friend - "If I'm famous somewhere, I'll let you know." 

He stood up and headed for the door with the enthusiasm of someone who had just discovered that reality is just bad quantum software.

Gabriel stood in the lab, watching the coffee pot drip, and for a moment he wondered if that drip was part of another 'now' that only seemed to flow. He smiled, shaking his head in amusement.

The clock marked 12:05 pm

END