8:21 PM
@Mitch well yeah that was it. If he died he would have entered a dreamless state, and the couple of real hours would have felt like 50 years. That was the pain that should've been avoided
@Mitch Well, we have three clocks. The biological clock; the time we perceive. Stuff happens and time moves forwards and if you drop a cup that was on the table, it shatters. But, I mean, when you bring space–time continuum into this, just like when you can draw a diagram of a moving object, you can draw a diagram of a moving object through time, so it gets weird and some physicists claim that the past, present and the future exist simultaneously and stuff. Anyway.
The second clock is cosmic. Time moves forward as the universe expands, and if you go back on that diagram, you can mathematically say the time goes backwards as the universe contracts.
The third clock is thermodynamic. We know that entropy (the random arrangements of things and stuff and crap) increases as the time moves forward, that's just the famous second law of thermodynamics. A cup shatters when you drop it on the floor into pretty disorderly and sharp pieces. So, again, if you look at the parts of the mathematical diagram of an earlier time, you can say the entropy decreases as you go backward in time
You can prove that the second and third clocks always work in unison. The entropy will always increase when the universe is expanding.
So, you encounter a question: We know that the rate of the acceleration of the expansion of a universe is pretty close to a critical value where it would have expanded forever. Nearly, but not quite. So the universe will have a contracting phase, just like it's now in an expanding phase. What happens to the other clocks at the contracting phase?
Well, since entropy used to increase with expansion, now it's going to decrease simultaneously with the contraction of the universe. A shattered cup will patch itself up and get back on the table and yell "ANAKIN, I HAVE THE HIGH GROUND"
That's what we expect will happen. If life manages to be present in the contracting phase, we would be remembering the future, but not the past (because what's happening in our brains is a physical process that has the same cosmic and thermodynamic clocks, it would happen in reverse when those clocks reverse)
The late prof. Hawking used to say it's unlikely life will exist then, I forgot why, but the entirety of Tenet hinges on the reversal of the thermodynamic clock for some objects, and how it sounds cool when we try to apply our normal biological-clock logic to it.
It's like Nolan was going backwards and forwards on a diagram at the same time
Some objects got more orderly (a shattered glass got fixed), cups unshattered themselves
I dunno how will works with all this though. It's not like you tell the shattered cup "here kitty kitty kitty" and it will decide to land on your palm, as the film seemed to suggest