if you watch too carefully you cannot understand it

Richard Feynman, a scientist in the last century, theorized about the irreversibility of time. One of his analogies/examples went as follows...

"Suppose we have blue water, and white water, that is without ink in a tank with a little seperation, then we pull the seperation very delicately. The water starts seperate blue on one side and white on the other side. Wait a while. Gradually the blue mixes up with the white and after a while the water is "luke-blue," I mean it is sort of fifty-fifty the color uniformly distributed throughout. Now if you wait and watch this for a long time it does not by itself, seperate...it does not by itself go the other way.

That gives us some clue, let us look at the molecules. Suppose that we take a moving picture of the blue and white water mixing. It will look funny if we run it backwards, because we shall start with uniform water and gradually the thing will seperate... Now if we magnify the picture, so that every physicist can watch, atom by atom, to find out what happens irreversibility - where the laws of balance of forward and backward break down. So you start and you look at the picture. You have atoms of two different kinds (blue and white) jiggling all the time in thermal motion. If we start at the beginning we should have mostly atoms of one kind on one side, and atoms of of the other kind on the other side, we see that in their perpetual irregular motions they will get all mixed up and that is why the water becomes more or less uniformly blue.

Let us watch any one collision selected from the picture, and in the moving picture the atoms come together this way and bounce off that way. Now run that section of film backwards and you find the pair of molecules moving together the other wayand bouncing off this way. And the pysicist looks with his keen eye and says, "That's all right, that's according to the laws of physics. If two molecules came this way they would bounce this way." It is reversible. The Laws of molecular collision are reversible.

So if you watch too carefully you cannot understand it at all, because every one of the collisions is absolutely reversible, and yet the whole moving picture shows something absurd, which is that in the reversed picture the molecules start in the mixed condition - blue, white, blue, white, -and as time goes on, through all the collisions, the blue seperates from the white. But they cannot do that - it is not natural that the accidents of life should be such that the blues will seperate themselves from the whites. And yet if you watch this reveresed movie very carefully every collision is O.K. "


i like this article. it seems science often gets all hung up on breaking things down to a smaller unit in order gain better or even ultimate understanding. you know, examine dopamine and serotonin receptors and inhibitors to understand more about depression; or look at single-cell life forms to understand better about our beginninings; etc.

well as Dr. Feynman illustrated...not necessarily.