Time Thread

If you aren't in for an intellectual discussion, I suggest you pull out now.

There are theories abound regarding the relativity of time to our [so far undetermined] point of existence. Philosophers and physicists have debated about the reality of time for ages. It is construed by some as the 4th dimension. Height, width, and depth being the first 3. But their reasoning for our inability to perceive it as a tangible measurement lies in the fact that our world exists in only 3 dimensions.

It is a hard concept to explain in one post, but some of you I'm sure have in inkling of what I'm talking about. We try to put a value on time by counting in minutes, days, and years...but we really have no understanding of it as a force.

Einstein theorized that if we were to travel at the speed of light, we would be able to exceed the rate of time and therefore pass a ripple in spacetime. He wrote that if we were to travel at light speed for 10 minutes away from the Earth, and ten minutes back towards Earth, that everyone here would be 40 years older but the traveler would have only aged a bit less than a half hour. Star Wars and other sci-fi legacies have used light travel [or commonly "hyperspace"] to refer to their abilities to traverse between star systems...but nothing is based on true fact.

If it were fact, then that would mean that time is a tangible force. All of this refers back to the theory of relativity, but that's a whole other textbook. If time were able to be passed and altered, then that would mean it was the 4th dimension. If it were the 4th dimension, and we have lived our entire lives thinking in 3 dimensions, then who is to say that there aren't more dimensions to be explored? Our limited knowledge as a species prevents us from perceiving them, but maybe they are there?

I want to know your opinions or ideas on this. I might not get many responses since this is a strange subject, but all comments are welcome.

You're all bastards.

Not in the mood :o

Ugh

Hooray. Philosophy.

Time is not a dimension. Instead the FLOW of time is.

Human perception of time is based on hours/minutes/seconds etc. and this is constant, the value of a second will never change since the only devices to measure it are mechanical or based on celestial observations (which are basically big mechanics).

Time FLOW (the 'timestream') is different, and could possibly be construed as another dimension like up, down and sideways. It has been proved that going faster does indeed increase your movement through the timestream, but the measure of time, the 'second', will never change. When you return to static (i.e. not moving in any of the 4 dimensions) since everything remains in the same point in the timestream time as such does not flow, but human time perception continues. Since you can (in theory) move infinately fast in any dimension (sorry Einstein, the general and special theories do say this if you apply some tortured logic) you can move infinately fast in time, your point in the timestream moves which places you slightly ahead or behind of the rest of the world, possibly a long way ahead or behind of the rest of the world. Everyone stays still everyone stays in the same point in time but still ages, if you move (or a planet moves around and does this for you) you move in the timestream. Since only fast speeds make anything like a measurable difference nobody notices.

Ye gods I talk too much,
/me passes out from too much brain work.

@ azz0r and Seien - What, you don't like philosophical discussion? Bah!

*cracks knuckles in preparation for a long rebuttle*

Well, er...I agree.

I didn't mean time in the literal minutes/seconds clock sense of the word, but as you put it: as a moving force. I intended to comment further than this, but I'm surprisingly in agreement with you on most everything you say. I've talked about this before with some people and ended up arguing a whole lot.

Phew!

*passes out*

Interesting but I heard when you are going light speed your weight is infinite. If this true then if a mass object was going light speed it will create a gravitual pull 'sorry for the spelling' As I would say turn you into a moving giant as or just the size of your ship BLACK HOLE. You would turn into a mass sucking vortex including destroying yourself. One way you will go is sucking yourself into no longer existance or exploding causing a ripple in force that I do not want to think of. For remeber like is not made of matter/ mass. It is like electricity 'sorry for the spelling' it is a kind of element. Electricity, light, darkness, and fire.. These are factors in physics that have no mass. For I tell you another thing is you know that darkness can travel at light speed? Or is there a 'sun' that instead of shining light it shines darkness? Some where out there is the truth. Remeber infinite mass means infinite gravity so you will turn yourself into a fucken magnet. GOOD LUCK!

The fact is I've already bickered a ton about time in one of the other Cosmos threads.

Dammit, that quick post box is annoying, I just lost my awesome post

Time can be mathematically treated as a 4th dimension, yes, and theories/equations don't really care if you move fowards/backwards. But what exactly is a dimension? Take, for example, colour. You could say a painting has 5 dimensions- it's X/Y spatial coordinates, and 3 more for the RGB value of each pixel/fundamental point of colour (i.e. particles of paint), and perhaps further this to say that the real world has 7 dimensions (4 + 3 RGB dimensions). However, we now know that different colours come about through different light wavelengths (which has some analogy to spatial dimensions, but should also be thought of in terms of energy), so really these 3 extra dimensions are only variations in our 3 spatial ones. How do we know time isn't merely an 'extension' of them too?

(this idea © me )

I'm pleased to see there is actually intelligent conversation in these forums.

I would just like to extend on what Szukala said, Einsteins theory of relativity says that an increase in spead causes an increase in mass and therefore making it more difficult to increase in spead further. Light is said to travel in a way beyond this theory due to its wave/partical duality. So if you were to attempt to travel at the speed of light you would increase in mass so much that it would require an infinite amount of power to increase your speed up to the speed of light, meaning that travelling at the speed of light is considered impossible, but lets say hypothetically that someone/thing was to travel at the speed of light. This person or object would increase to infinaite mass and create a gravitation force strong enough to effect the travel of light (and possibly time?). This is what a Black hole is, a force of gravity strong enough to prevent light from escaping.
Szukala said 'somewhere out there is the truth' when talking about a star the 'shines darkness'. Well the truth is actually known, it is not known as 'shining darkness' but as absorbing light, and a star that absorbs light is a black hole. Simple !

As for this talk of a 4th dimension, if I could draw little diagrams to show you I could probably explain it. Stephen Hawking writes that there 11 dimensions!! but I don't understand anything from the 5th upwards.

Have any of you heard about the experiment where scientists took 2 atomic (synchronised, of course). They placed 1 in a concorde and flew it around... Well I don't know how long for but the important thing is that it was travelling at the speed of sound. Anyway when the plane landed it was out of sync with the other atomic clock, proving that speed has a direct effect on time, meaning that time is probably in someway something physical. Hence...

Leperous wrote: How do we know time isn't merely an 'extension' of them too?

I am sorry for writing such a long post, but please read it and tell me what you think.

Leperous wrote: Dammit, that quick post box is annoying, I just lost my awesome post

Time can be mathematically treated as a 4th dimension, yes, and theories/equations don't really care if you move fowards/backwards. But what exactly is a dimension? Take, for example, colour. You could say a painting has 5 dimensions- it's X/Y spatial coordinates, and 3 more for the RGB value of each pixel/fundamental point of colour (i.e. particles of paint), and perhaps further this to say that the real world has 7 dimensions (4 + 3 RGB dimensions). However, we now know that different colours come about through different light wavelengths (which has some analogy to spatial dimensions, but should also be thought of in terms of energy), so really these 3 extra dimensions are only variations in our 3 spatial ones. How do we know time isn't merely an 'extension' of them too?

(this idea © me )

I understand your view, however the world doesn't operate like Photoshop. It runs on red, yellow, and blue. So the same theory applies, just a Y instead of G.

Don't you mean Paint? The point is that you can describe all colours with 3 parameters, maybe the analogy isn't perfect but the point still remains. Why is time apparently so different to our 3 spatial dimensions- why should there be different 'types' of dimensions? It doesn't seem to make sense unless time is simply an extension of space, rather than an extra dimension. Of course our 3 dimensions do change with time (compare to a dimension less- think about taking slices of a ball: a 2D slice would change size with it moving in a 3rd dimension), and relativity uses time as a 4th dimension to explain our Universe pretty well, but it could just be that time is really just something which is deeply connected to space, rather than something seperate. Maybe it could explain why time only seems to travel in one direction, and why we need to heavily alter space in order to change time...

Szukala- If 'darkness' was something that could travel, then think about looking off into infinity- as you'd see nothing, surely it has an infinite speed. So it doesn't make sense to think that it moves at the speed of light (or faster in order to escape a black hole!) as darkness is nothing, it's a lack of light.

space and time are considred to be two aspects of the same thing. space/time

40ozFreak wrote:

Leperous wrote: Dammit, that quick post box is annoying, I just lost my awesome post

Time can be mathematically treated as a 4th dimension, yes, and theories/equations don't really care if you move fowards/backwards. But what exactly is a dimension? Take, for example, colour. You could say a painting has 5 dimensions- it's X/Y spatial coordinates, and 3 more for the RGB value of each pixel/fundamental point of colour (i.e. particles of paint), and perhaps further this to say that the real world has 7 dimensions (4 + 3 RGB dimensions). However, we now know that different colours come about through different light wavelengths (which has some analogy to spatial dimensions, but should also be thought of in terms of energy), so really these 3 extra dimensions are only variations in our 3 spatial ones. How do we know time isn't merely an 'extension' of them too?

(this idea © me )

I understand your view, however the world doesn't operate like Photoshop. It runs on red, yellow, and blue. So the same theory applies, just a Y instead of G.

d00d, wake up

red yellow and blue are the primary [bpigment[/b] colors... what u see is reflected light, and the three primary colors of light are red, green and blue

hmm, i hope one day we will beable to travel faster than c, and i was reading somewhere about tachyons or somethin, once they are out of energy it becomes infinit, i really dont know but light has no mass and we do , plus money cost, and we would be usnig prolly dangourus chemicals, but maybe one day we will have speed to travel around our galaxy at pretty good speeds i dunno

we wont be able to with any standard form of propultion... It would need to be something special

40ozFreak wrote: Einstein theorized that if we were to travel at the speed of light, we would be able to exceed the rate of time and therefore pass a ripple in spacetime. He wrote that if we were to travel at light speed for 10 minutes away from the Earth, and ten minutes back towards Earth, that everyone here would be 40 years older but the traveler would have only aged a bit less than a half hour. Star Wars and other sci-fi legacies have used light travel [or commonly "hyperspace"] to refer to their abilities to traverse between star systems...but nothing is based on true fact.

I remember watchin a video on that in final year physics last year. It came up with some very interesting ideas, one of which stated that as you apporach a star (in ot case the sun) time slows down as you apporach it, because you are approachingthe source of the light an also because time must 'bend' around the star.

The video was made in the late 80's but many of the questions raised have not been answered yet, evan though they predicted that we could be exploring such theories as soon as the early years of the 21st century.

time bending... interesting theory

do you know anyhting more about that

PsychoFarmer wrote:

40ozFreak wrote:

Leperous wrote: Dammit, that quick post box is annoying, I just lost my awesome post

Time can be mathematically treated as a 4th dimension, yes, and theories/equations don't really care if you move fowards/backwards. But what exactly is a dimension? Take, for example, colour. You could say a painting has 5 dimensions- it's X/Y spatial coordinates, and 3 more for the RGB value of each pixel/fundamental point of colour (i.e. particles of paint), and perhaps further this to say that the real world has 7 dimensions (4 + 3 RGB dimensions). However, we now know that different colours come about through different light wavelengths (which has some analogy to spatial dimensions, but should also be thought of in terms of energy), so really these 3 extra dimensions are only variations in our 3 spatial ones. How do we know time isn't merely an 'extension' of them too?

(this idea © me )

I understand your view, however the world doesn't operate like Photoshop. It runs on red, yellow, and blue. So the same theory applies, just a Y instead of G.

d00d, wake up

red yellow and blue are the primary [bpigment[/b] colors... what u see is reflected light, and the three primary colors of light are red, green and blue

according to the laws of physics, the colour that you see on an object, lets take a green apple for instance. The green colour that you see, is actually certain sections or frequencies of the light around it. These frequencies are absorbed by the apple, leaving the remaining frequencies. And thus you have a green apple.
If something is white, say a piece of paper, allt eh freqiencies of the light are being absorbed my the paper. On the otherhand, if something is black none of the frequencies are being absorbed...

(i think i got the while and black examples arounf the right way... i did the sight and light topic (includig colours in the light section) over a year ago)

yes arvey-Haynos i will expand on that, but not now... maybe in a day or 2 because i'll be busy and i'm goin to bed now

- Edited By BigBird On Fri 16th, May 2003 @ 12:44:52am

Time is a state of mind.

Birdie you got them flip-flopped. Something being white means that all the color frequencies are being reflected, and black means they are all absorbed.

yeh i wasn't too sure with the white and black, it was either what you said or what i said, and what you said sounds right

everything has a frequency

Very good, Szukala. lol

*claps*
Well that sure made one hell of an impact in my thinking and thoughts! jk