Why Do Clocks Move Forward But Not Backward?

Imagine you have a box of toy blocks. When they are all piled up neatly, the box looks organized. But if you shake it and spill them everywhere, they become messy. The messier state is much more likely to happen than staying neat forever. This getting messier is called entropy, and it is why time moves forward.

In our daily lives, we see things break but never fix themselves. A glass falls and shatters; it does not jump back up to your hand. This happens because there are billions of ways for the glass to be broken pieces on the floor, but only one specific way for all those pieces to float up and snap together.

Think about mixing milk into your coffee. Once you stir it, the white swirls turn into a uniform brown color. You never see the brown liquid suddenly separate back into pure white milk. This is because nature prefers disorder over order. Moving from neat to messy is easy and natural. Going from messy back to neat is possible but extremely unlikely.

So, clocks move forward because the universe is constantly moving toward a messier, more disordered state. Every second that passes is a little bit of energy spreading out and making things less organized.