Possible And Impossible Futures

Time is the only dimension in which we can travel in one direction only; the past is forever behind us and we march into the future at a steady pace.

This "arrow of time" is explained in physics as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, often referred to as "entropy". I'm not a scientist, but roughly this law says that entropy was lower in the past and will increase in the future, where entropy can be described as chaos, or disorder.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time. The total entropy of a system and its surroundings can remain constant in ideal cases where the system is in thermodynamic equilibrium, or is undergoing a (fictive) reversible process. In all processes that occur, including spontaneous processes, the total entropy of the system and its surroundings increases and the process is irreversible in the thermodynamic sense. The increase in entropy accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes, and the asymmetry between future and past.
_{source: Wikipedia}

In the future all form and structure will eventually be lost, and the universe will die as a cold, dark place, with elementary particles aimlessly moving about, and nothing else. This is the future most scientists see now; the universe will keep expanding and entropy will get higher. And time is irreversible because it's easy to break an egg, but impossible to put it back together; that's why the past is ordered (egg) and the future disordered (mess). But now quantum mechanics gives us a new asymmetry between future and past.

Elementary particles aren't really particles; they are in a "superposition" of all possible locations and speeds, a wave with many values, and they only "collapse" into a final position when observed by an observer. This is called the wave function collapse:

So, in my simple mind this translates to the analogy that the universe, on a fundamental level, resides in a state of all possibilities, until an observer observes all those possibilities. This is how we humans experience life; we imagine the possibilities first and then we realize the one we've chosen. Everything in human history, every invention, everything begins in our minds before we realize it. And if this human truth is extrapolated to physics, you get quantum mechanics! Okay, that's too simple: like I said, I'm not a scientist...

But I found two people discussing this very subject who know a lot more than me: science-journalist Robert Wright and cognitive scientist David Chalmers discuss the possibility that the collapse of the wave-function is caused by consciousness. The more popular view in mainstream science is still the "many worlds" interpretation of the wave function, where all possibilities happen, resulting in the multiverse. I've never understood why scientists are so willing to believe in uncountable parallel universes, yet are so opposed to exploring the consciousness-possibility; in my mind both are equally fantastical and equally magnificent, but the explanation with a starring role for consciousness is more elegant and more satisfying, as it makes free will possible again and it opens up the possibility that there is a purpose to the universe.

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