More on Time

Last night I had a couple things running through my mind and they came together into one idea that had a bearing on a previous post - the one on Time and Time Travel. I read a little while ago about someone who was able to solve every possible game of checkers. that reminded me that back when I was in 10th grade, Stan Chase and I sat inthe back of our math classroom and worked out every pssible combinations of moves for tic-tac-toe. (Since the corners and sides are equivalent in tic-tac-toe, the number of unique combinations is pretty small.) The number of possible checkers board positions is 10 with 20 zeros, whcih is a pretty big number and much more money than I have in my bank account. It took 18 years to "solve" this puxzzle. (I find it interesting that I read about this in a Web site called NewScientistTech. Exactly when did solveing all board positions of a gasme become science? More o nthat later.)

What does this have to do with time? One of the examples people use for the "direction of time" is the movie analogy. When I was a kid, my Dad filmed one of my brothers climbing out on a swing set, hanging for a few seconds, pulling his legs through his arms in a move we called 'skin the cat,' and then dropping to the ground. We owuld always run the movie backward at that point and my brother would spring from the ground, flip over and cach the bar. It was obvious that the movie was played backwards. In some peoples minds, that shows that time has a direction.

Not so fast, if you filmed a game of checkers (see the connection now?) and played it backwards, you would know that it was played backwards. owever, there is no time associated with checkers, only a series of sequential moves. The rules of checkers allow you to determine a direction. If we came up with a new version of checkers with the following rules:

1. Start with the checkers in a random position - red on red squares and black on black squares.
2. Pieces can move any direction.
3. When you "jump" another piece, the pieces stay on the board.

Besides being a pretty stupid game, I submit that a movie of this game could be shown backwards and forwards and you could not determine which was which. So the set of interations along with some rules of interaction give the illusion of time.

Again, there is no time, it is a human invention.