Quote Originally Posted by MMI View Post
Best thread in a long time!
I have to agree with you there.

It might help explain why things never grow younger, or why coffee goes cold, but does not heat up.
But coffee does heat up! You just have to add energy to it. Perhaps time can be reversed by the proper application of energy?

The ice block falling back up into the glacier ... surely gravity trumps time here?
Same problem as the coffee. If you apply enough energy, at the right time, you can push that ice block back onto the glacier.

The arrow of time tends towards entropy (chaos, waste). Does it? Throughout all of elapsed time so far, it seems to me the universe has evolved, not disintegrated. Maybe that will change, but will it affect the direction of time?
The law of entropy only applies in a closed system. The universe as a whole is a closed system, since it contains everything in existence. Parts of the universe temporarily reverse entropy, which is why we have life on Earth, for example, but overall, entropy rules.

Whatever caused the universe to come into being is/was not bound by the laws of physics
We don't know that, though. There could be (and probably are) physical properties which we have yet to unravel. There are many cosmologists who are speculating about how the universe could have formed, using what we know about the current universe. One, or more, of these speculations could prove to be right.

Nothing escapes a black hole: Thorne suggests gravity can. I also seem to think that black holes can be identified by the material they eject back into space in their polar streams.
That material is taken from the accretion disk of material whirling around the black hole, not from the black hole itself. But Hawking hypothesized that the black hole would give off radiation on it's own, and I believe this radiation has been detected. This is what would cause the black hole to evaporate.

Will I live again? I think not. Maybe some of the atoms making up my body at the moment will be incorporated into another living being sometime, but I suspect the chances are small.
Actually, the chances are quite large. Most of the decay of your body will be caused by the organisms both inside of you and in the ground in which you are buried. If you go the cremation route, some of your molecules will be distributed into the atmosphere, and be breathed in by many creatures. All of your waste products eventually wind up in the gut of some form of bacterial life. One thing life is good at is recycling.

If it will happen, then it will most likely happen here on Earth before our sun goes supernova (will it do that?).
No, it won't. It will eventually expand into a red giant, probably encompassing the Earth itself, before collapsing down into a white dwarf.