But the killers in Criminal Minds are rarely satisfied with murder methods as pedestrian as stabbing or strangling. The sheer number of serial killers the BAU finds over the years is frightening enough, like some country-wide version of Murder, She Wrote’s Cabot Cove. Even the soundtrack, consisting of omnipresent ambient cues and the occasional needle drop, is similar to what one would find on NCIS.īut what sets Criminal Minds apart from NCIS is that Criminal Minds is unhinged. The production has that slick CBS sheen which brings to mind time spent on a couch watching reruns on a Saturday afternoon. The character archetypes are familiar: there’s a stern father figure in charge, there’s a stuttering nerdy genius, there’s a playful tech expert, and over the course of the series there are many no-nonsense women with brown hair. There are exceptions, especially as the show neared its end, but for the most part, that’s how episodes unfold.Įvery element of Criminal Minds is of a piece with other network procedurals. (In real life, the BAU rarely leaves their headquarters, but television’s gonna television.) In the average episode, a new threat is established, the BAU banter their way through the case, and catch the baddies in the nick of time. Criminal Minds centers on the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, or the BAU, a clever and attractive bunch of criminal profilers who travel across America to solve crimes with the power of psychology. Like those two venerable institutions, it adheres to a strict formula, as easy for the showrunners to make as it is for audiences to binge-watch. I study information theory and entropy in grad school (for physics).In many ways, Criminal Minds is similar to countless other police procedurals that popped up on network television in the wake of Law & Order and CSI. heat death of the universe), there would be no meaningful distinction between past and future since the arrow of time in the direction of increasing entropy would no longer work as a concept. Alternatively, if there were some point in the far distant future, where the entropy was maximal (think. big bounce scenario), then before that time, the arrow of increasing entropy would be pointing in the opposite direction in time that it does now. Getting a bit more speculative, if there were some point in the far distant past where the entropy was minimal (think. This isn't entirely satisfactory because all that it means is that the entropy is always smaller in the past and larger in the future, and that the arrow of time points toward increasing entropy (kind of circular). There are much MUCH fewer ways that the atoms in the shell and yolk could be arranged to come back together again than there are for the shell and yolk to remain an icky mess on the floor. The reason we never see this is that it is so incredibly unlikely that every atom will happen to be arranged just so. We never see an egg unscramble, even though it's theoretically possible that every atom's trajectory could happen to be just so that it ends up coming back together again. ![]() There is an obvious direction to time as we know it. The obvious exception to this is the second law of thermodynamics. A planet orbiting a star would look the same except it would be moving in the opposite direction, still described accurately by the same laws. On the level of single particles, we can't tell if a film of a trajectory is being played forward or backward. So why do we see time having an obvious direction (the past is different than the future)? All the laws of motion from particles to galaxies are symmetric in time. The big question touched on here is one that's still unresolved in physics.
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