Fallen_Angels._By_Wong_Kar-wai_Fallen_Angels._By_Wong_Kar-wai_.jpg
  • Fallen Angels By Wong Kar-wai

The formulation of the second law of thermodynamics provided teeth to the notion of time as having a direction. Laplacian reversible time came under attack. Mathematics could dream of reversibility, but chemistry could have no such illusions. "You cannot run the universe backward," wrote the Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stenger in Order Out of Chaos. A broken egg can never be made whole again. Once it's shattered, it's shattered for good. This situation may certainly not be how a universe has to work. But it is how the one we find ourselves caught in does work. They call this relentless directionality the "arrow of time." "The whole universe is, in fact, aging," write Prigogine and Stenger. There is no way of halting or resting or escaping this aging. We can only go with the force of this particular cosmic flow. And this, maybe, is where art enters. A beautiful moment in a work (the smoke, the end of the tunnel, the morning light, the towers of the business district) might be nothing other than a window with a view of a place outside of this irreversible time, outside of this one-way movement, this unstoppable journey to the heat death of the universe—which is nothing else than the end of this time we are in and we owe our lives and deaths to.