From Eternity to Here

by Sean Carroll

A dynamical law demonstrates its validity over and over again; at every moment, the law takes the current state and evolves it into the next state. But the boundary condition is just imposed once and for all; its nature is more like an empirical fact about the universe than an additional law of physics. There isn’t any substantive distinction between the statements “the early universe had a low entropy” and “it is a law of physics that the early universe had a low entropy” (unless we imagine that there are many universes, all with the same boundary condition).275 Be that as it may, it’s undoubtedly possible that this is the most we’ll ever be able to say: The low entropy of the early universe is not to be explained via a better understanding of the dynamical laws of physics, but is simply a brute fact, or (if you prefer) an independent law of nature. An example of this approach has been explicitly advocated by Roger Penrose, who has suggested what he calls the “Weyl curvature hypothesis”—a new law of nature that distinguishes explicitly between spacetime singularities that are in the past and those that are in the future. The basic idea is that past singularities have to be smooth and featureless, while future singularities can be arbitrarily messy and complicated.276 This is an explicit violation of time-reversal symmetry, which would ensure that the Big Bang had a low entropy.