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Thought experiment proposed to reconcile psychological versus thermodynamic arrows of time:
A pair of physicists has proposed a thought experiment to help reconcile the seeming disparity between the psychological and thermodynamic arrows of time. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review E, Leonard Mlodinow and Todd Brun claim their thought experiment demonstrates that the two seemingly contradictory views of time, must always align.
When ordinary people think about time, they see the past as something that has come before and the future as a great unknown yet to come. We can remember the past, because it has happened already, but not the future, because it hasn't. Physicists, on the other hand see time as able to move either forward or backwards (towards greater entropy), which implies that we should be able to remember events in the future. So, why can't we?
It's because of the way our memories work the two say, and they've created a thought experiment to demonstrate what they mean. Imagine, they write, two chambers connected by an atomic sized tube with a turnstile in it. If there is gas in one of the chambers, individual atoms of it will move through the tube to the other chamber (towards higher entropy) tripping the turnstile as they go, in effect, counting the atoms as they pass by, until both sides have equal numbers of atoms-creating a state of equilibrium.
http://phys.org/news/2014-05-thought-psychological -thermodynamic-arrows.html
http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/47
http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysR evE.89.052102
(Score: 1) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday May 07 2014, @11:32AM
"Faith" has been used as a reason for those things, but the actual reason in each case was bigotry. As an agnostic, I've seen as much of that among the hardcore atheists as I have among the hardcore religious, and possibly more.
Faith has been how people explained their urge to protect the lives of children or adults, to risk their lives repeatedly helping runaway slaves reach freedom, and to fight homophobia/racism/xenophobia or other forms of hatred. It's really no different from my urge to do ethical things even when it's to my own detriment, they just put a different label on it.
On the other side, I've seen a lot of "scientific" non-believers that insisted people like me would be better off being killed as soon as it was clear we couldn't be made 'normal' like them, and that blew off any scientific studies or evidence to the contrary. I've also seen non-believers come up with pseudoscientific BS about how other races are naturally inferior (including as a justification for slavery), or claim gay people need compulsory 'treatment' for their 'disorder.'
Let's also not forget, for that matter, that clear sexism or misogyny (in the classic sense of clear hostility) is more common in both the atheist and tech communities than it is in the rest of society. Given we're not led by ancient texts as they are, the opposite should apply -- or maybe I should figure if the ancient texts or belief was really the problem, we should be far more egalitarian or far less patriarchal.
"Faith" in this context is just what religious people like to blame or credit for their urges -- really no different from non-believers like us blaming/crediting our intelligence, parenting, or other things. Both sides are making the claim from the same psychological/emotional stance, and can cause just as much harm or good acting on those impulses; they're emotions either way, and neither side is intrinsically superior to the other.