How Does The Arrow of Time feat. Sean Carroll Work?

Time always moves forward, never backward, because the universe loves to spread out and get messy.

Imagine your bedroom. When you jump out of bed, your room is neat. But by bedtime, it is a total mess with toys everywhere. You never see your room clean itself up without help. This is called entropy, which is just a fancy word for disorder. The Arrow of Time points in the direction where things get more mixed up.

Think about dropping a raw egg on the floor. It splatters into a sticky puddle. You never see the puddle jump back up to become a whole, unbroken egg. Why? Because there are millions of ways for the egg to be broken, but only one way for it to be whole. Nature prefers the messy, mixed-up state. Sean Carroll explains that the universe started very orderly at the Big Bang, like a freshly made bed. Now, it is slowly getting messier. This constant shift from order to disorder is what makes clocks tick forward and not backward.

We remember the past because it was more ordered, and we move toward a future that is less ordered.

This one-way street is why you can scramble eggs but not unscramble them.