Who will win the election? Are the polls right? This is the question on everyone’s mind this morning. Given our collective focus on “what’s going to happen”, it’s a really good moment to take a step back and ask a simple question.

Why do we have to ask what’s going to happen? Why don’t we know?

This is clearly a question about Time. I don’t have to ask “What happened yesterday?” The past is knowable. But I do have to ask “What will happen tonight?” The future is unknowable.

Why?

Why is time so asymmetric? What force in the Universe forces time to flow just one way? The unstoppable movement of time from past to future gets even weirder from a physics perspective when you learn that the fundamental, basic, rock bottom laws governing all the particles we’re made of are ignorant of time’s direction.

There’s nothing built into Newton’s equations, or the equations of quantum mechanics, that distinguish past from future. For basic interactions like two pool balls bouncing into each other, you can run the flow of time forward or backward and there’s no way to tell the difference.

So why does time flow just forward?

The answer only appears in crowds. What I mean by that is the flow of time only shows up when you have lots of stuff interacting together. That’s where the remarkable idea of entropy shows up. According to the famous 2nd law of thermodynamics the entropy of any closed system (like the entire Universe) must always increase. I could go on at length about the 2nd law (Einstein said it was the only part of physics that could never be overturned). It’s very beautiful. Today, however, I want to point out that there’s still lots of mystery to go around about the flow of time.

One mystery is that the Universe’s entropy must have started really low. If cosmic entropy begins high, then nothing ever changes. There can be no evolution and nothing interesting ever happens. In a sense nothing happens at all. But why did the Universe start with low entropy? There’s no law which sets its value at the Big Bang.

Another question is the human experience of “Now”. When it comes to time, physics only has infinitely precise readings on a clock. That’s its meaning of “now”. But as the great philosopher Henri Bergson wrote, time for us is about duration. Our “nows” are always kind of spread out a bit. “Now” for us pulls a little of the past along as well as leaning a bit into the anticipated future. Listening to music is a good example. Towards the end of his life, Einstein really worried that physics did not have an account of this kind of “Now”.

All of this gets us back to the polls. One big reason we invented science was to wrestle time to the ground. In an uncertain and dangerous world we wanted tools that could tell us what was coming: a big storm, a disease, a change in political power. Polls are definitely scientific tools based on sophisticated ideas about statistics and social behavior. But, once again, our need for them is based on this strange imbalance between past and future.

So as you think about - and wait for - the results today you can stop, look around at this strange world we all inhabit and ask why?

Why do I have to wait for the future?

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PS: If you have specific questions or issues you want me to address leave a comment on the website or email me at [email protected]

PPS I could not get this proof-read so please excuse typos etc.

— Adam Frank 🚀