What's the big mystery about time? Why can't time go backward? Isn't this a mystery? — Metaphysician Undercover
Time needs initial conditions.
Obviously, you see two mutually exclusive types of time, so you really do not see what time is. — Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. There is the clock time and entropic time. I understand both. The clock time truly existed before inflation. The state of the universe back then
constituted a perfect clock. A perfect periodic state, which has no temporal direction yet. You can't tell if a perfect pendulum (or Aristotle's eternal circular motion) goes forward or backwards in time. It just fluctuates. Then, when the conditions on the 4D substrate were right, the closed 3D Planck volume, containing virtual particles only (represented by Feynman diagrams of closed propagators, circles with an arrow, so the virtualcparticle rotates in space and time), "bangs" into real existence and the perfect clock is gone, replaced by the irreversible process of entropic time. These processes can be quantified by introducing a clock, which can never be realized, as there are no perfectly periodic reversible processes. Only in the mind, and before inflation (caused by the negative curvature of the 4D substrate from which two 3D universes came into being) they exist. Non-inversible processes don't evolve
in time, but
constitute time. The notion of a time axis on which one can move is a chimaera. What is done (by Einstein) is to put an ideal, imaginary reversible clock (a constant periodic motion not found anywhere, except in the mind) besides of these irreversible processes (
constituting entropic time), objectify it by constructing a time axis, and then retroactively state that processes move in it.