This is the content I visit the orange site for. Thanks.

To add something substantive, my question to the thread is: anyone here have thoughts on how these questions relate to McTaggart's unreality of time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_series_and_B_series

It's not creating new energy, right? It reads to me like causality violating configurations simply move energy around time as we'd move mass through space.

The second law, like all physical laws, does not violate conservation of energy. However, reversing causality can cause the reversal of entropy, which is what the second law deals with.

I don't believe it reverses entropy, if we consider the entire system to include all of time.

Moving energy around through time may serve to increase entropy overall.

It's not necessarily about reversing causality, it can simply be breaking it (ie, the effect happens before the cause without being able to influence the cause).

I would envision two chambers A and B connected by two vents X and Y, like Maxwell's demon but with two vents instead of one and both vents permanently open. Whereas X is an ordinary vent, Y has the property that any particle passing from A to B through it reaches B shortly before it leaves A. Any particle passing from B to A through Y disappears for a short time before reappearing in A. It seems to me that this setup would induce a current of air blowing from A to B through Y and from B to A through X, but I'm only an amateur and could be full of hot air myself.

Let's look at the two possible timelines here:

At some point a particle pops up into existence in B, increasing B's pressure.

Some time later, a particle from A disappears, decreasing A's pressure.

This pressure differential would cause flow from B to A through X.

Alternatively, a particle randomly disappears from B, decreasing B's pressure.

Some time later, a particle appears in A, increasing A's pressure.

This would cause flow from A to B through X.

The more particles that cross from A to B via Y, increasing B's pressure, the more likely it is for particles to pass from B to A via Y, keeping these two effects equal.

These two pressure differentials would cancel out for large numbers of particles.

You've essentially just hooked up the system to itself, but at a future point in time. Unless the overall pressure of the system is changing, there is nothing to induce the flow. If you are increasing the pressure, valve Y is essentially just a standard one-way valve.

I don't think we know that time's arrow is caused by the second law. Isn't that just a theory?

8. Bonus misuse: The term "science words" is not really used in academic literature

You can't be a scientific american if you keep using the science words bad.

It's like cargo culting science: Use these words correctly if you want to seem to know what you're talking about!

But anyone who actually knows what they are talking about would use these words correctly, or at least not be mistaken about their meaning.

So this article is teaching people that have no idea what they're talking about, how to sound like they do.

Maybe it's time we start using another language for science. Clearly it's confusing the Scientific Americans.