Feynman thrills an audience of Cornell students by a lecture on the Distinction of Past and Future or the Direction of Time and Irreversibility (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4):
- If you drop a cup and it breaks, you can sit there a long time waiting for the pieces to come together and come back into your hands.
- We remember the past, we do not remember the future.
- Basic laws of physics are time-reversible, without distinction between past and future.
- Many ordinary phenomena based on reversible atomics are irreversible. How come?
- It comes from the characteristic that if we start with an ordered system and have the irregularities of nature of bouncing then the thing goes one way.
- The thing goes from ordered to disordered.
- How did it get ordered in the first place?
- We have to add the hypothesis that the past was more organized than the present.