Directionally Unchallenged (Meta)

You continue to dazzle, day after day and week after week. Thank you for another winner!

I took the advice to do Unchallenged to up the meta difficulty. Dunno if that really happens, because of the helpful prompt, but I'm kinda glad I didn't have to read those backwards clues with my morning bleary eyes!

My memory from some years ago is that despite "macro-level" obvious physical differences between "going backwards" vs forwards in time (puddles of milk never leap up into glasses going forwards, but they do going backwards), the fundamental physical laws (Newtonian, relativistic, and even quantum) are symmetrical. So if you played the movie of the spilled milk in reverse and plugged in the positions and apparent (backwards) velocities of the particles into the laws of motion, you would correctly predict that the milk would leap up into the glass. It's just that the positions and (forwards) velocities of particles in milk puddles are never in fact like that, maybe because at the big-bang end of time the universe is in such an "orderly" (unmessy, low-entropy) state that statistically it's only downhill from there in terms of orderliness---any given random low-entropy state is almost always headed, by fundamental laws, towards higher-entropy ones; things rarely clean themselves up. Never fully understood that part of it, but that's what's supposed to explain things like why we don't remember the future and can't manipulate the past -- why there's an "arrow of time" in macroscopic nature and human experience. But when last I paid attention, there seemed to be an exception at the fundamental level to do with the weak nuclear force, which would let you tell backwards from forwards movies if you looked closely enough.

yeah i wouldve needed a much much much much longer arrow of time to figure this one out

thanks for another great puzzle, still wishing i can one day figure out how you geniuses do what you do

Wow this had to be harder to construct than to solve! I’m amazed. At first I thought we’d be using “time and tide …” since I had both circled, but the real answer soon emerged. Brilliant!

Fantastic! Thanks Ben!

OK -- doing this one after the other was more of a memory challenge. But I did appreciate the new clues and entries that were necessary in the SW. And I realize why this one was dubbed as harder meta-wise. Particularly nice to have that LEVER front and center with this version. A fantastic duo, Ben!

Thanks, Ben!