Time

  • Einahpets

    Einahpets (150)

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    I never managed to get my head around the whole thing about time being different depending on gravity or the speed you're moving.
    Like the theory that you could time travel by going faster than the speed of light because less time would pass for you than it did for everything else. Doesn't your body just age at the same rate?
    It's something I want to understand, but just don't. An hour is an hour no matter how fast you're travelling. =/
    Can anyone explain it?
    April 20th, 2009 at 08:02pm
  • kafka.

    kafka. (150)

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    JustSteph:
    I never managed to get my head around the whole thing about time being different depending on gravity or the speed you're moving.
    Like the theory that you could time travel by going faster than the speed of light because less time would pass for you than it did for everything else. Doesn't your body just age at the same rate?
    It's something I want to understand, but just don't. An hour is an hour no matter how fast you're travelling. =/
    Can anyone explain it?
    The thing is that all is relative.
    Firstly according to Newton's gravity law there is no absolute space: if you're in a train and I'm somewhere outside looking at the train I will think/feel/perceive that the train is moving while I am sitting still, on the other hand you will think that you're still while I am moving, so there is no way of telling who is truly moving. However this means that if you were to throw a ball on the floor (of the train) and it would jump up and then back down in the exact same place after a second and you would think it hasn't moved at all, while I would think it has moved 40 meters (or some other distance, depending on how much the train has moved while the ball was in the air).
    Newton thought that time is the same for all observers, so if a light bean would pass between point A and B two different people could think AB has different lengths, but they must think that the light bean reached from A to B in the same time-thus different observers would think light has different speeds. The problem here is that we know light speed is -always- constant. This proves that there is no absolute time either, and each observer has its own way of measuring time. And this is why time is relative too.
    So an hour is an hour to you no matter how fast you're traveling indeed, but it might be less than an hour to somebody who is watching you move.

    I'm rather bad at explain, so I wholeheartedly recommend books like George Gamow Mr Tompkins books or Stephen Hawking's A Brief(er) History of Time, they're much better than me at explain it all.
    April 20th, 2009 at 09:51pm
  • Einahpets

    Einahpets (150)

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    But, I know that when I'm on a train that it's me that's moving. And the only reason i percieve the ball to land in the same place is because I'm moving at the same speed as the ball.
    And even if people can percieve AB to be different lengths, it's obviously still one length.
    Sorry, still don't get it XD Thanks for trying though.
    I'll have a look and see if the library has those books. Failing that, I'll try amazon, they have everything.
    April 21st, 2009 at 06:52pm
  • ThePiesEndure

    ThePiesEndure (115)

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    I haven't read the whole thread but thought I'd put in my two cents. [Be aware that I believe in God so this will colour my responses]

    Potential Discussion Questions
    1- What is time?
    Time is the fourth dimension

    2- Does time have a beginning/end?
    Time as we know it had a beginning. God created time. Whether it will have an end or not, I don't really know.

    3- Does time exist in it's own dimension?
    As I already mentioned above, yes. It is the Fourth Dimension. Not the fourth physical dimension because that's a Tesseract.

    4- How does this relate to time travel possibilities, or impossibilities?
    I'm not sure how this relates really. Though in a sense time travel does happen. My friend in Biddeford says I live in the future, because I live in Australia :D

    5- Should our ideas on time's existence be based around the big bang theory?
    Yes, I believe so. At least our concept of what time is begins there. Perhaps it existed "Before", but time as we know it started at The Big Bang.

    6- Is time relative, absolute or universal? (or a combination of the three)

    I think because time is the fourth dimension I think it's a combination of all three.
    January 28th, 2012 at 03:10pm
  • Ayana Sioux

    Ayana Sioux (1175)

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    ^ The ironic thing about this is that I have to write a story for my class, and the first chapter is all about time travel. I did a lot of biased research though.

    But, I believe that time is our concept as human beings. It's how we mark what we believe as the start of the world we live in, to the ending of it. The ending of human existence is the ending of time because it is our concept (it's also ironic because my friend Hamzah asked me this question about time. He likes to do things like that to me).

    As for time dimensions, there could be a possibility that there is more than one time dimension. In the many-worlds interpretation, our lives are mapped out (dealing with time travel here) and in different time dimensions (what I think) there are different possibilities of things that can happen in our life that run a different course in time. This can sort of come in religiously with the believe that god has a plan for us all (although I don't believe in a higher divinity). Because I don't believe in god, there are different possibilities of our lives that are taking places in different dimensions.
    This sounds confusing as fuck.
    For example, in another time dimension, I could be dead right now. Or I could have been a boy, instead of a girl. Or my father could be dead in another dimension. My mother could be dead in another. Both of my parents could be dead. My brother and sister can be dead. They could all be dead and I could be a foster child. And so on. All the possibilities of our lives could be mapped out in different dimensions. This is something I discovered yesterday. =))
    January 29th, 2012 at 02:26pm
  • Ayana Sioux

    Ayana Sioux (1175)

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    Crap. Accidental spam.
    January 29th, 2012 at 02:26pm
  • lovecraft

    lovecraft (100)

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    Question to think about: If everything in the universe stopped moving (down to electrons in atoms), would time stop?
    January 31st, 2012 at 05:39am
  • Ayana Sioux

    Ayana Sioux (1175)

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    ^ Because of our concept of time, yes. Time is just a concept that we have. We apply it to everything that happens in our life. Like a name for something that we give.
    January 31st, 2012 at 10:26pm
  • wxyz

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    lovecraft:
    Question to think about: If everything in the universe stopped moving (down to electrons in atoms), would time stop?
    I would think so, because time is intrinsically linked to the universe itself, if I'm not wrong here. A bit like how time speeds up or slows down according to the speed of light, or something. I should probably do my research, haha.
    March 6th, 2012 at 01:06am
  • wx12

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    Alex; periphery.:
    I would think so, because time is intrinsically linked to the universe itself, if I'm not wrong here. A bit like how time speeds up or slows down according to the speed of light, or something. I should probably do my research, haha.
    But none of those things are matter. Time is intertwined with space, but neither are confined to the same physical laws as matter (ie, the electrons). It isn't like we're talking about a hypothetical idea either; scientists know what absolute zero is and have conducted experiments at very near absolute zero and have a pretty solid idea of what happens.
    June 28th, 2012 at 06:14am
  • folie a dru.

    folie a dru. (1270)

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    I was watching Grand Design with Stephen Hawking and he said that the reason time stops making sense as you approach the moment of the Big Bang happening is that there was no time. Nothing existed before the universe did. (According to him.)
    June 29th, 2012 at 06:51pm
  • archivist

    archivist (660)

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    If you think about it, time's just as malleable and fragile as the three physical spatial dimensions.
    Consider it this way: you are on the Sun. (Disregard the temperature for a moment.) You perceive events exactly as they happen. Now, you are on the Earth. You perceive the Sun as it was about eight minutes ago. Time and space are intricately, eternally, and irrevocably linked as one.
    December 15th, 2013 at 07:40am
  • wx12

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    arthur dent:
    If you think about it, time's just as malleable and fragile as the three physical spatial dimensions.
    Consider it this way: you are on the Sun. (Disregard the temperature for a moment.) You perceive events exactly as they happen. Now, you are on the Earth. You perceive the Sun as it was about eight minutes ago. Time and space are intricately, eternally, and irrevocably linked as one.
    You perceive it as it was 8 minutes ago because of the speed of light, not because of the nature of time. The same is true of any distant star.
    December 17th, 2013 at 06:04pm
  • archivist

    archivist (660)

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    @ Kurtni
    Oops, true. I must've been asleep as I forgot to state that it takes eight minutes for light to travel, so 4:00 PM on Earth and the same 4:00 PM on the Sun would be seen as different times.
    December 18th, 2013 at 12:43am
  • wx12

    wx12 (10125)

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    aeons:
    @ Kurtni
    Oops, true. I must've been asleep as I forgot to state that it takes eight minutes for light to travel, so 4:00 PM on Earth and the same 4:00 PM on the Sun would be seen as different times.
    If an airplane leaves China at 6 am and doesn't arrive to the US until 4 pm, that doesn't mean that 6 am in China and the US were different times. It means that the plane travels slowly through space. In your example, photons are like a plane. They're doing the traveling through space, not time.
    December 20th, 2013 at 06:31pm
  • Collin Berend

    Collin Berend (230)

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    @ Kurtni

    @ Dujo
    Wow I am late and I apologize if this is a no no in terms of necro'ing.

    However, I noticed you both and brought up time and the Big Bang. While Hawking is one of the most known people for saying in ,at least in modern day, other scientist have disagreed with time starting at the big bang. In the sense that, as Hawking explained to a religious question, 'there was no time before the big bang for God to bang it'.

    Even though it is a good thought, I wouldn't hold time not existing at all before the big bang when we do not know too much about what came before.
    January 2nd, 2015 at 01:24am
  • wx12

    wx12 (10125)

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    Collin Berend:
    @ Kurtni

    @ Dujo
    Wow I am late and I apologize if this is a no no in terms of necro'ing.

    However, I noticed you both and brought up time and the Big Bang. While Hawking is one of the most known people for saying in ,at least in modern day, other scientist have disagreed with time starting at the big bang. In the sense that, as Hawking explained to a religious question, 'there was no time before the big bang for God to bang it'.

    Even though it is a good thought, I wouldn't hold time not existing at all before the big bang when we do not know too much about what came before.
    I'm trying to think of a good analogy to lay out what I'm trying to say, and I'm struggling, but here it goes. Spacetime in our universe is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, where space and time are the peanut butter and the jelly, forever intertwined inside the bread or universe. You could say the Big Bang was like George Washington Carver inventing peanut butter. Before that, we had peanuts and grapes and all the ingredients, but they weren't combined into a PB&J sandwich. Before the big bang, everything was in a singularity and we didn't have spacetime. That doesn't mean there wasn't something else, something like time, but it wasn't spacetime. We don't know what it was, we just know that it was different and did not obey the laws of our universe. It was no PB&J sandwich.

    This is the prevailing, most researched substantiated theory, not an idea unique to Stephen Hawking, nor did it even originate with him (though he certainly is awesome for making it mainstream outside of the science community).
    February 5th, 2015 at 09:24pm
  • blondie52

    blondie52 (100)

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    I never thought that time had a definition. But what I do know is time started in the beginning of the world, and the end of time is not here yet, it just keep going???
    April 29th, 2015 at 12:10am