Reading this article in the onion i came across the term “Vonnegutian reverse-entropy universe”. It is in the last paragraph of the article. I assume it refers to Kurt Vonnegut but what is a reverse-entropy universe?
thanks,
Mogiaw
This might help:
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/sm1/lectures/node42.html
Thanks, Maralinn! I get to go home early from work because my brain exploded!
I think the “Vonnegutian” bit is an allusion to Slaughterhouse-Five, whose main character is “unstuck in time” and doesn’t experience the moments of his life in chronological order. More information here.
And maralinn’s link, when distilled to its essence, is essentially the statement that it’s a lot more likely for a ordered system to become disordered than the other way around, i.e. the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This explains why we see coffee cups fall off of tables & smash themselves to bits, but we never see the bits spontaneously reassemble themselves into a coffee cup and jump up onto the table. Physicists use a concept called “entropy” to mathematically describe the amount of disorder in a system, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy always increases; presumably someone in a “reverse-entropy” Universe would always see entropy decrease instead.
On preview, I see that if I’d read all the way to the bottom of maralinn’s link I wouldn’t have had to type all of this is. Ah well.
There’s a specific part of that book where Billy comes slightly unstuck in time and sees a war movie on late night tv backwards. So bombed cities are reassembled and soldiers grow backwards to become innocent kids, Hitler turned into a baby.
I tried to read the article in maralinn’s link. I really did. I got a little goggle-eyed at the formulae with the Martian letters. Then I came to the part where “v=the number of moles,” and I got dizzy and fell off my chair.
Many thanks to MikeS and pokey for explaining in it English. Some of you mathmaticians and physicists are rolling your eyes and pigeonholing me as a primitive being; you know who you are. Hey, I can accomodate your esoteric glossolalia, but please understand that it’s vertigenous for some of us. 
“Mathematicians,” that is.
Even better timereversed SF is the episode of Red Dwarf called “Backwards.”
I think a true example of a reverse-entropy universe is well illustrated in David Brin’s novel, The Practice Effect.
(Note: for Brin fans, this is an uncharacteristic space-opera-style romp, rather than the hard SF Brin is noted for. And a mediocre one at that.)