Who is McDougal?: What the clock?

I have awakened this morning to a bizarre shift in the space/time continuum. You must understand I am a heavily medicated man. The pills are the only silence for the demons that haunt my black, black soul.

I have just returned from the McDonald's eatery nearest my home, where they were no longer serving breakfast. Why had they desisted with preparation and serving of the most important meal of the day? Because to their reckoning, it is after 9:30 a.m.

Their reckoning could not be more wrong, despite the staunch arguments of my loyal and devoted Red Cross volunteer, Anne Marie.

I own a $44,000 Rolex.

And if that minimum wage burger jockey wants to argue about the merits of his grease-stained $34 Fossil hunk of tin shit and his notion of time versus my brilliant time piece and even more brilliant mind, then I shall continue this argument in Hell.

So I gave him a fucking swirlie in the deep fryer. I'll be joining him in the next two thousand years. We shall continue this conversation then.

In the interim, the manager was far more reasonable. Shortly after I fried his fry cook (that's funny, right? No, don't type that. I was asking you a question. Please stop typing now.)

No, type this. Just don't type that part I was saying to you.

No, I just want to tell them the physics part.

I don't know who. The people who read this glog. What are you laughing at?

Glog, blog. LIke I give a fuck what it's called. You know what I meant. Now type what I mean, not what I say. Thank you.

Tell them what I told the manager.

No, I don't remember it now. The thing about the wormholes.

I don't know. Just copy and paste some shit from the Internet. Tell them that's what I said.

THE INTRIGUING notion that time might run backwards when the Universe
collapses has run into difficulties. Raymond Laflamme, of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico, has carried out a new calculation which
suggests that the Universe cannot start out uniform, go through a cycle of
expansion and collapse, and end up in a uniform state. It could start out
disordered, expand, and then collapse back into disorder. But, since the COBE
data show that our Universe was born in a smooth and uniform state, this
symmetric possibility cannot be applied to the real Universe.

Physicists have long puzzled over the fact that two distinct "arrows of
time" both point in the same direction. In the everyday world, things wear out
-- cups fall from tables and break, but broken cups never re- assemble
themselves spontaneously. In the expanding Universe at large, the future is the
direction of time in which galaxies are further apart.

Many years ago, Thomas Gold suggested that these two arrows might be
linked. That would mean that if and when the expansion of the Universe were to
reverse, then the everyday arrow of time would also reverse, with broken cups
re-assembling themselves.

More recently, these ideas have been extended into quantum physics.
There, the arrow of time is linked to the so-called "collapse of the wave
function", which happens, for example, when an electron wave moving through a TV
tube collapses into a point particle on the screen of the TV. Some researchers
have tried to make the quantum description of reality symmetric in time, by
including both the original state of the system (the TV tube before the electron
passes through) and the final state (the TV tube after the electron has passed
through) in one mathematical description.

Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle recently extended this idea to the
whole Universe. They argued that if, as many cosmologists believe likely, the
Universe was born in a Big Bang, will expand out for a finite time and then
recollapse into a Big Crunch, the time-neutral quantum theory could describe
time running backwards in the contracting half of its life.

Unfortunately, Laflamme has now shown that this will not work. He has
proved that if there are only small inhomogeneities present in the Big Bang,
then they must get larger throughout the lifetime of the Universe, in both the
expanding and the contracting phases. "A low entropy Universe at the Big Bang
cannot come back to low entropy at the Big Crunch" (Classical and Quantum
Gravity, vol 10 p L79). He has found time-asymmetric solutions to the equations
-- but only if both Big Bang and Big Crunch are highly disordered, with the
Universe more ordered in the middle of its life.

Observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation show that the
Universe emerged from the Big Bang in a very smooth and uniform state. This
rules out the time-symmetric solutions. The implication is that even if the
present expansion of the Universe does reverse, time will not run backwards and
broken cups will not start re- assembling themselves.