POTENTIAL AND ACTUAL TIME CONCEPTS

摘要

The direction of time has been associated with the increase of entropy. The validity of this statement is limited, because the law was formulated only for closed and irreversible systems. There are open and not certainly irreversible systems. The most important processes, where the matter of the universe evolves, are such open systems. Their volume is negligible compared to the whole universe (or their surrounding closed system); nevertheless, the processes taking place in them are decisive from the aspect of the creation of higher level material structures. However, the whole universe can be considered as a closed system. The direction of the global time of the universe (the direction of its evolution) thus can be fixed to the (increase of the) full entropy of the universe. The symmetry of the universe is decreasing, because matter is evolving in the universe by violating symmetry at more and more places locally when higher organised material structures come into existence. At the same time, the symmetry may increase globally, as regards the distribution of those material structures which actually do not interact with each other. The orderedness of the universe is decreasing; more and more local formations destroy the order whilst matter globally tends towards more symmetric, i.e., ordered, distributions, provided we disclose the local environments of productive events. The entropy of the universe as a whole (globally) is increasing, simultaneously with the constituting many local decreases of orderedness and symmetry. However, locally, where interactions take place which produce new, higher level organisational forms of matter, entropy may not increase. The global time behind these opposite processes is the same.