Elusive Consciousness

Author(s): Narendra Bhandari, Surendrasingh Pokharana, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 35

from one state to another till it settles down to an equilibrium state If the initial state of the system is said to be in an ordered state its evolved state would be considered as in a disordered state. Consider a drop of milk put in the middle of a tea cup at t = 0.
As time passes it spreads slowly with particles of milk executing random walk. After sufficient time, when the entire system approaches equilibrium, the milk particles will be distributed over the entire volume,but completely in a disordered way. Now, however long, we leave this system, it will never return to its original state, with tea and milk separated and milk particles aggregating to form the original drop. The degree of disorder is known by the name Entropy and thus the transition from order to disorder evidenced in the above experiment is termed as the increase of entropy. While this is happening some of the internal energy of the system gets utilized, and thus the potential energy of the equilibrium state will be less than that of the initial state. As in this case the system by itself can never get back to the initial state the process is 'irreversible', and has increased Entropy.
The above phenomenon of increasing the entropy of a system is known as due to thermodynamic arrow of time. Similarly one has the Cosmological arrow of time, which deals with the expanding Universe scenario, from the event of the Big Bang. which is considered as the beginning of Time, going forward with the expanding Universe, again indicating the increase of entropy as all matter move away in the form of clusters of galaxies, and continue being so as depicted by the cosmological red shift.
One also distinguishes the Psychological arrow of Time, as it is associated with the perception of an individual, and is purely subjective as it is related to the changes and experiences of the individual. Here again the direction is from past to future for all material bodies. How far can one quantify the comprehension of Time by the Mind? One may argue, that an individual's Mind can transgress this restriction as one can in principle go back in time in his/her mind to recollect the events past, but one cannot relive that experience or alter it to change the history. For matter in bulk, Conscious meaning of Time has to agree with the other two arrows of moving from past to future through the present.
Universe as we see today seems to have had a beginning called the BIG BANG, when all of Space, Time and Matter (Energy) came into existence. With time, the matter started expanding and created Space and the way the processes happened with matter in space and time expressed in terms of Mathematics are, what we call the
35