Who is the patriarch? I think that he is someone who has managed to fathom the mysteries of spacetime and so is able to travel even the most distant corners of the universe. In four-dimensional spacetime, we can move back and forth in three of the four dimensions – those that define position – but we can only move forward in time. Why does time have this fixed direction? Is it a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system, entropy can only increase or remain constant? I can understand that our universe is polarized by the event that occurred about 14 billion years ago, the Big Bang, which started the process of development from a very low energy system, probably very small, to the expansion that is still going on. But what I don’t know is whether entropy actually defines the arrow of time, or whether it too is a consequence of the dimension of time and of that explosion that brought our reaches of spacetime into being. It may be that our universe is just a tiny part of a larger multiverse, but is our dimension of time a property of just our universe, and so came into existence with the spacetime initiated with the Big Bang, or it time an even more fundamental dimension, existing outside and before our own universe?
In any case, I guess he knows.