Carl's long day
Carl flinched. It felt sort of like those times when you are half-asleep, then come fully awake with a jerk. There in front of him was Mrs. Haughtie's drink, chilled and ready with a little ice left, just the way she demanded it. Only Carl couldn't remember preparing it. And what was Hoff's latest invention doing on the table next to it? Carl quickly carried it to her office. Misplacing the Entropy Box could get him into a lot more trouble than a botched drink preparation.
Carl exited her office just in the nick of time, as Mrs. Haughtie burst into the foyer and threw her purse down on the table. "I assume Dr. Hoefer's device has arrived?" she inquired.
"Yes, the Entropy Box is in your office. I was just checking to make sure it hadn't caused too much chaos in there."
"Terribly amusing," Mrs. Haughtie intoned with no amusement at all. She grabbed the lemonade and took a sip. "Quit the stand-up comedy, and stick with buttling: your lemonade is actually good. Make sure Drs. Hoefer and Ismael are prepared for the board meeting tomorrow. And tell them to leave the science lectures behind, that only puts the board to sleep. Other than that, you're free until dinner." She took the lemonade upstairs with her. Carl could hear the voice of her personal assistant fading into the distance.
He headed toward his own quarters and called up Hoff - a.k.a. Dr Hoefer - on his cell. He was about to relay Haughtie's warning about boring lectures, but Hoff asked excitedly, "Well? Did it work?"
"Did what work?" Carl returned.
"The Entropy Box, of course!" Hoff rejoined. "Did it solve your problem? Please tell me you followed my instructions on how to use it!"
"What?! I didn't use your Entropy Box," Carl answered.
"Why not? Not fifteen minutes ago, you were begging me to use it! You were complaining about how the drink was ruined, you just used up the last of Haughtie's special Himalayan ice and she would definitely know if you tried to use ordinary ice, blah blah whine whine moan moan."
"You must have dreamed it," Carl commented. "I did have to use the last of the ice, but the drink came out fine, and the new ice shipment will arrive soon. So why would I need your little anti-entropy device?"
"It's not exactly anti-... wait! Aha! It did work!" Hoff crowed. "You just don't remember it!"
"Um, noooo," Carl sing-songed, "I'm pretty sure I would remember messing with that thing. No offense, but it's pretty scary, even if I wouldn't get in trouble for using it, which I definitely would."
"You should be scared, if you abused it the way you must have," Hoff replied. Before Carl could answer, Hoff added, "Do you actually remember making the drink and checking the ice level?"
"Well - no," Carl admitted. "I must have dozed off, or prepared the drink in a trance or something. But when I snapped awake it was done, and damn near perfect if I do say so myself."
"Snapped awake, ha! More like, returned to normal entropic environment. Tell me - can you look at the box, now? Does the distance setting still read 3 meters?"
Carl snuck back into the office and peered at the machine. "The dial says 3 meters, yes," said Carl, who swore to himself that this was his first time reading it.
"And the two numbers to the left of that, what do they read? Starting at the left-most."
"Zero seconds, and 500 seconds," Carl read aloud. "Why?"
"So," said Hoff, "you set the device to run immediately - zero delay - for a little over eight minutes. And the radius of 3 meters definitely would include yourself in the entropy-reversed zone. You wasted a finite resource of low-entropy future spacetime, but maybe it's good that you didn't listen to my instruction to set it to 1 meter. If you had been partly-in and partly-out of the zone, it could have gone very badly for you. As it was, all you lost was 8 minutes worth of memories. All to un-melt and re-form a few special ice cubes!"
"So you're claiming that your box can erase memories?" Carl questioned.
"Can, and just did," Hoff answered. "Where did you think your memories reside, in a ghostly soul? No, they're encoded in neural structures made of atoms, and subject to the same laws of physics as any other atoms. And in the context of a localized reversed flow of entropy, ordinarily impossible things - like an egg getting un-scrambled, or an ice cube un-melting from an above-freezing liquid, or a memory un-making itself, can happen. They not only can happen, they're overwhelmingly likely to happen."
"But you remember me using the machine?" Carl asked.
"Well sure, at least I remember you convincingly saying you would. But I'm outside the radius of the machine, subject to the normal entropy gradients, so that's not surprising."
"But if my physical processes were reversed, wouldn't I un-call you on the phone, and un-ask for your help?" Carl pressed.
"I'm sure you did, but time-reversed digital signals coming out of your cell phone probably looked like garbage to the nearby cell towers, and no call was placed," Hoff reasoned. "Although that raises some interesting..."
"What about this article in phys.org?" Carl interrupted. "It says that Lorenzo Maccone 'shows that entropy can both increase and decrease, but that it must always increase for phenomena that leave a trail of information behind.' Your memory of the event would be evidence left behind, so it violates the laws of quantum physics."
"Oops, I never thought of that," said Hoff, and he, Carl, the box, and a tall cool glass of lemonade, all vanished in a puff of physics.
The above tale is inspired by a thought experiment in Carl Hoefer's article "Freedom from the Inside Out" in C. Callender, ed., Time, Reality & Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 201–222).
Carl exited her office just in the nick of time, as Mrs. Haughtie burst into the foyer and threw her purse down on the table. "I assume Dr. Hoefer's device has arrived?" she inquired.
"Yes, the Entropy Box is in your office. I was just checking to make sure it hadn't caused too much chaos in there."
"Terribly amusing," Mrs. Haughtie intoned with no amusement at all. She grabbed the lemonade and took a sip. "Quit the stand-up comedy, and stick with buttling: your lemonade is actually good. Make sure Drs. Hoefer and Ismael are prepared for the board meeting tomorrow. And tell them to leave the science lectures behind, that only puts the board to sleep. Other than that, you're free until dinner." She took the lemonade upstairs with her. Carl could hear the voice of her personal assistant fading into the distance.
He headed toward his own quarters and called up Hoff - a.k.a. Dr Hoefer - on his cell. He was about to relay Haughtie's warning about boring lectures, but Hoff asked excitedly, "Well? Did it work?"
"Did what work?" Carl returned.
"The Entropy Box, of course!" Hoff rejoined. "Did it solve your problem? Please tell me you followed my instructions on how to use it!"
"What?! I didn't use your Entropy Box," Carl answered.
"Why not? Not fifteen minutes ago, you were begging me to use it! You were complaining about how the drink was ruined, you just used up the last of Haughtie's special Himalayan ice and she would definitely know if you tried to use ordinary ice, blah blah whine whine moan moan."
"You must have dreamed it," Carl commented. "I did have to use the last of the ice, but the drink came out fine, and the new ice shipment will arrive soon. So why would I need your little anti-entropy device?"
"It's not exactly anti-... wait! Aha! It did work!" Hoff crowed. "You just don't remember it!"
"Um, noooo," Carl sing-songed, "I'm pretty sure I would remember messing with that thing. No offense, but it's pretty scary, even if I wouldn't get in trouble for using it, which I definitely would."
"You should be scared, if you abused it the way you must have," Hoff replied. Before Carl could answer, Hoff added, "Do you actually remember making the drink and checking the ice level?"
"Well - no," Carl admitted. "I must have dozed off, or prepared the drink in a trance or something. But when I snapped awake it was done, and damn near perfect if I do say so myself."
"Snapped awake, ha! More like, returned to normal entropic environment. Tell me - can you look at the box, now? Does the distance setting still read 3 meters?"
Carl snuck back into the office and peered at the machine. "The dial says 3 meters, yes," said Carl, who swore to himself that this was his first time reading it.
"And the two numbers to the left of that, what do they read? Starting at the left-most."
"Zero seconds, and 500 seconds," Carl read aloud. "Why?"
"So," said Hoff, "you set the device to run immediately - zero delay - for a little over eight minutes. And the radius of 3 meters definitely would include yourself in the entropy-reversed zone. You wasted a finite resource of low-entropy future spacetime, but maybe it's good that you didn't listen to my instruction to set it to 1 meter. If you had been partly-in and partly-out of the zone, it could have gone very badly for you. As it was, all you lost was 8 minutes worth of memories. All to un-melt and re-form a few special ice cubes!"
"So you're claiming that your box can erase memories?" Carl questioned.
"Can, and just did," Hoff answered. "Where did you think your memories reside, in a ghostly soul? No, they're encoded in neural structures made of atoms, and subject to the same laws of physics as any other atoms. And in the context of a localized reversed flow of entropy, ordinarily impossible things - like an egg getting un-scrambled, or an ice cube un-melting from an above-freezing liquid, or a memory un-making itself, can happen. They not only can happen, they're overwhelmingly likely to happen."
"But you remember me using the machine?" Carl asked.
"Well sure, at least I remember you convincingly saying you would. But I'm outside the radius of the machine, subject to the normal entropy gradients, so that's not surprising."
"But if my physical processes were reversed, wouldn't I un-call you on the phone, and un-ask for your help?" Carl pressed.
"I'm sure you did, but time-reversed digital signals coming out of your cell phone probably looked like garbage to the nearby cell towers, and no call was placed," Hoff reasoned. "Although that raises some interesting..."
"What about this article in phys.org?" Carl interrupted. "It says that Lorenzo Maccone 'shows that entropy can both increase and decrease, but that it must always increase for phenomena that leave a trail of information behind.' Your memory of the event would be evidence left behind, so it violates the laws of quantum physics."
"Oops, I never thought of that," said Hoff, and he, Carl, the box, and a tall cool glass of lemonade, all vanished in a puff of physics.
The above tale is inspired by a thought experiment in Carl Hoefer's article "Freedom from the Inside Out" in C. Callender, ed., Time, Reality & Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 201–222).