Physics does not explain flow of time at all. If one films a thrown ball, physics can tell from few frames its speed or where the ball is on the following or previous frames. But it tells nothing about why, when see the film, we perceive the ball moving. Articles like the above misses this.
In fact there is no even notion of direction of time in physics. All physical models are time-reversible. And even if we observe violation of, say, CPT, in nature, it still will not explain while we perceive time flowing in a particular direction.
This is very well discussed in the book “Time’s Arrow” by Huw Price.
The author discusses some of these points. One excerpt:
> But even at a much more mundane level there’s a certain crucial relationship between space and time for observers like us. The key point is that observers like us tend to “parse” the world into a sequence of “states of space” at successive “moments in time”. But the fact that we do this depends on some quite specific features of us, and in particular our effective physical scale in space as compared to time.
> In our everyday life we’re typically looking at scenes involving objects that are perhaps tens of meters away from us. And given the speed of light that means photons from these objects get to us in less than a microsecond. But it takes our brains milliseconds to register what we’ve seen. And this disparity of timescales is what leads us to view the world as consisting of a sequence of states of space at successive moments in time.
> If our brains “ran” a million times faster (i.e. at the speed of digital electronics) we’d perceive photons arriving from different parts of a scene at different times, and we’d presumably no longer view the world in terms of overall states of space existing at successive times.
> The same kind of thing would happen if we kept the speed of our brains the same, but dealt with scenes of a much larger scale (as we already do in dealing with spacecraft, astronomy, etc.).
This still misses the biggest question about the nature of time. The problem is not that we perceive the world as a set of space-like frames. The problem is why our consciousness perceives the frames moving from one to another at all and in particular direction.
This does not explain the flow of time nor the direction of how consciousness perceives it. A low entropy is just a low probability state. Such state in the past is just as unlikely as in future as physical models are time-reversible.
Moreover, there is no evolution in physical models. The universe is just 4-dimensional thing. Surely time in physics is different from space as we can predict across time based on on the condition in 3-d space-like surface, while if one make a slice in the 4-d universe with 2 space dimensions and one time-dimension, predicting across the remaining space dimension is impossible.
But that does not explain why our perception flows from one space-like slice to another and in particular direction. Surely some of the slices are less common (low entropy) then others (high entropy), but there is no movement or evolution.
A good analogy is a rod with a color gradient from white on one end and black on another with white turning into black quickly so most of the rod is black. We can arbitrary call the white side first and even say that the color evolves from white to black. Then as the white side is a low probability as a randomly selected slice of the rod will be black, we can even say that the color evolves from a low probability to high probability stare. But this is arbitrary as in reality color does not evolve and there is just the single colored rod.
In fact there is no even notion of direction of time in physics. All physical models are time-reversible. And even if we observe violation of, say, CPT, in nature, it still will not explain while we perceive time flowing in a particular direction.
This is very well discussed in the book “Time’s Arrow” by Huw Price.