  Late in his life Boltzmann responded to the objections to the probabilistic theory by offering a time-symmetric interpretation of the theory. Systems were probabilistically almost always close to equilibrium. But transient fluctuations to non-equilibrium states could be expected. Once in a non-equilibrium state it was highly likely that both after and before that state the system was closer to equilibrium. Why then did we live in a universe that was not close to equilibrium? Perhaps the universe was vast in space and time and we lived in a “small” non-equilibrium fluctuational part of it. We could only find ourselves in such an “improbable” part, for only in such a region could sentient beings exist. Why did we find entropy increasing toward the future and not toward the past? Here the answer was that just as the local direction of gravity defined what we meant by the downward direction of space, the local direction in time in which entropy was increasing fixed what we took to be the future direction of time.