Time-Neutrality of Natural Laws Challenged: Time Is Not an Illusion but Ongoing Energy-Driven Information Loss

Abstract

It is shown that the time of entropy increase, here called action time, is caused by a dynamically understood energy. It drives time by decreasing its presence per state, that is by abandoning order, information, and creating entropy. This mechanism can be derived from basic principles via the Lagrange-Euler formalism, just considering the properties of really experienced, oriented time and thus abandoning the paradigm of time neutrality. It describes nature driven by a dynamically understood principle of least action, which is identified as manifestation of fundamental irreversibility in nature. This readily explains the second law of thermodynamics and also yields the entropy law for non-linear irreversible thermodynamics: maximum entropy production within the restraints of the system. Dynamic energy-driven time, action time, and time asymmetry is generated via the process of erasing information and liberating its energy irreversibly as heat. It is not an illusion but information-based reality. It is the loss of information to the past and different from clock-time, which is just an artificial scale, using information for tracking real time, action time. Energy-driven fundamental irreversibility of nature can better describe experienced reality and opens the way to understand and finally imitate the self-organizing creativity in nature. It also draws far reaching consequences for understanding quantum physics, gravitation and cosmology as well as biology. From the point of view of irreversibility, nature turns out to be more elegant, simpler and rationally understandable. For the first time, it can be explained in a few words what energy and nature basically represent and why it must have been information, which has started the universe.