Question: what is the flow of time?

Cesar Lopez-Monsalvo answered on 12 Jun 2011:

The flow of time is the impression we have that things are “moving” towards the future. If someone would show you a video in which a smashed egg in the floor suddenly puts all its pieces together, reforms itself, and jump from the floor to the edge of the table, you would know that the movie was played backwards. However, you know that because nobody has ever seen such a thing actually happening!

Most of the “theories of physics” happen to be “symmetric in time”. They work both ways, towards the future and towards the past. But there is something in the REAL world that is not quite like that. In reality there are many things which happen in one direction only: we all seem to grow old every year and not the other way around.

There is a way to account for this “time-asymmetry” and it is given by the “laws of thermodynamics”, but the name is not important. What matters is that we do not understand the origin of this time asymmetry at all! We have ideas, but we do not know where does it come from. Some of the NEWEST ideas point towards a combination of gravity and quantum theory….but we simply do not know how to do that yet!!