If the big crunch occurred, would time go backwards?

[Dremmer]

Causing people to start walking backwards, uneating, undrinking, undoing everything they've ever done.

 

[Phyisab****]

Yes, absolutely.

 

[Chronos]

How would we know? Our future would become our past, and our past would become unpredictable.

 

[korquad]

How would we know? Our future would become our past, and our past would become unpredictable.

i fail to see what you mean.. if the big crunch were a possibility then why would the process leading to it affect the way we perceive time? events would not roll backwards.. (i thought the first reply to dremmer's question was sarcastic, but i doubt your's is, so i had to ask..)

 

[granpa]

look up entropy

 

[korquad]

look up entropy

ok.. i understand that the concept of big crunch comes along with a certain flip of entropy in order to be valid and thus reversing its overall state from a thermodynamic point of view.. but that doesn't change the fact that time, as we perceive it, remains the same.. (we will still continue to struggle with the invariability of our own past and the annoyance of an unwanted future..)

 

[bcrowell]

No, there is no reason for the thermodynamic or psychological arrows of time to reverse. The thermodynamic arrow of time comes from the fact that we had (for unknown reasons) a big bang with much less than maximal entropy.

 

[nickthrop101]

ima not sure, but doesn't entropy always increase, causing time to move in a forward way
if the universe began to decrease in size, that doesn't mean entropy does, so time stays forward :D

 

[Imax]

It depends on the physics of a shrinking universe. If entropy increases in an expanding universe, then it could be decreasing in a shrinking one. If entropy decreases, then things would tend to clump up instead of falling apart. Gravity would go up, which could bend space-time.