Anon

Time.. I have some questions.. Is ALL time in the universe moving at the same ratio? I think i read somewhere that in some parts of the universe, 10 minutes is equal to 10 seconds on earth and I also saw this in a movie.. Im not very educated in this area but it is very interesting so maybe you can give me some info

Is there such thing as an place outside of time? If there is a god, did he create time or has it simply always existed? There has to be a begining to the universe, but where did it all begin?

Post your thoughts..

forseti-6

whoah, tough topic....

The way I've always seen it, is that time is like a really big trip (as in acid trip). Time is constantly dynamic in nature. You know how sometimes time seems slowed or hastened? Well, I think it's all because time is only defined by the individual experiencing it. The way I perceive an hour, is totally different from how you might perceive. And how do you explain what an hour is? 60 minutes? Then what is a minute? 60 seconds? Then what is a second? and so on.... it's weird...

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Shokan

Ive had this file on my hd for awhile, i thought it was an interesting read.

----------------------------------------------------------------

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: 13 OCTOBER 1999 AT 14:00 ET US
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/ns-dtr101399.html

UK Contact: Claire Bowles
claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk
44-20-7331-2751

US Contact: New Scientist Washington office
newscidc@idt.net
202-452-1178

New Scientist

Does time really exist?

TIME seems to be the most powerful force, an irresistible river
carrying us from birth to death. To most people it is an
inescapable part of life, a fundamental element of the Universe.

But I think that time is an illusion. Physicists struggling to
unify quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of
relativity have found hints that the Universe is timeless. I
believe that this idea should be taken seriously. Paradoxically,
we might be able to explain the mysterious "arrow of time"-the
difference between past and future-by abandoning time. But to
understand how, we need to change radically our ideas of how the
Universe works.

Let's start with Newton's picture of absolute time. He argued that
objects exist in an immense immobile space, stretching like a
block of glass from infinity to infinity. His time is an invisible
river that "flows equably without relation to anything external".
Newton's absolute space and time form a framework that exists at a
deeper level than the objects in it.

To see how it works, imagine a universe containing only three
particles. To describe its history in Newton's terms, you specify
a succession of sets of 10 numbers: one for time and three for the
spatial coordinates of each of the three particles. But this
picture is suspect. As the space-time framework is invisible, how
can you determine all the numbers? As far back as 1872, the
Austrian physicist Ernst Mach argued that the Universe should be
described solely in terms of observable things, the separations
between its objects.

With that in mind, we can use a very different framework for the
three-particle Universe-a strange, abstract realm called Triangle
Land. Think of the three particles as the corners of a triangle.
This triangle is completely defined by the lengths of its three
sides-just three numbers. You can take these three numbers and use
them as coordinates, to mark a point in an abstract "configuration
space" (see Diagram, p 30).

Each possible arrangement of three particles corresponds to a
point in this space. There are geometrical restrictions-no
triangle has one side longer than the other two put together-so it
turns out that all the points lie in or on a pyramid. At the apex
of Triangle Land, where all three coordinates are zero, is a point
that I call Alpha. It represents the triangle that has sides all
of zero length (in other words, all three particles are in the
same place).

In the same way, the configurations of a four-particle universe
form Tetrahedron Land. It has six dimensions, corresponding to the
six separations between pairs of particles-hard to conceive, but
it exists as a mathematical entity. And even for the stupendous
number of particles that make up our own Universe, we can envisage
a vast multidimensional structure representing its configurations.
In collaboration with Bruno Bertotti of Pavia University in Italy,
I have shown that conventional physics still works in this strange
world. As Plato taught that reality exists as perfect forms, I
think of the patterns of particles as Platonic forms, and call
their totality Platonia.

Platonia is an image of eternity. It is all the arrangements of
matter that can be. Looking at it as a whole, there seems to be no
more river of time. But could time be hiding? Perhaps there is
some sort of local time that makes sense to inhabitants of
Platonia.

In classical physics, something like time can indeed creep back
in. If you were to lay out all the instants of an evolving
Newtonian universe, it would look like a path drawn in Platonia.
As a godlike being, outside Platonia, you could run your finger
along the path, touching points that correspond to each different
arrangement of matter, and see a universe that continuously
changes from one state to another. Any point on this path still
has something that looks like a definite past and future.

Now's the place

But we know that classical physics is wrong. The world is
described by quantum mechanics-and in the arena of Platonia,
quantum mechanics kills time.

In the quantum wave theory created by Schrsdinger, a particle has
no definite position, instead it has a fuzzy probability of being
at each possible position. And for three particles, say, there is
a certain probability of their forming a triangle in a particular
orientation with its centre of mass at some absolute position. The
deepest quantum mysteries arise because of holistic statements of
this kind. The probabilities are for the whole, not the parts.

What probabilities could quantum mechanics specify for the
complete Universe that has Platonia as its arena? There cannot be
probabilities at different times because Platonia itself is
timeless. There can only be once-and-for-all probabilities for
each possible configuration.

In this picture, there are no definite paths. We are not beings
progressing from one instant to another. Rather, there are many
"Nows" in which a version of us exists-not in any past or future,
but scattered in our region of Platonia.

This may sound like the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum
mechanics, published in 1957 by Hugh Everett of Princeton
University. But in that scheme time still exists: history is a
path that branches whenever some quantum decision has to be made.
In my picture there are no paths. Each point of Platonia has a
probability, and that's the end of the story.

A similar position was reached by much more sophisticated
arguments more than 30 years ago. Americans Bryce DeWitt and John
Wheeler combined quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of
general relativity to produce an equation that describes the whole
Universe. Put into the equation a configuration of the Universe,
and out comes a probability for that configuration. There is no
mention of time. Admittedly, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is
controversial and fraught with mathematical difficulties, but if
quantum cosmology is anything like it-if it is about
probabilities-the timeless picture is plausible.

So let's take seriously the idea of a "probability mist" that
covers the timeless Platonic landscape. The density of the mist is
just the relative probability of the corresponding configuration
being realised, or experienced, as an instantaneous state of the
Universe-as a Now. If some Nows in Platonia have much higher
probabilities than others, they are the ones that are actually
experienced. This is like ordinary statistical physics: a glass of
water could boil spontaneously, but the probability is so low that
we never see it happen.

All this seems a far cry from the reality of our lives. Where is
the history we read about? Where are our memories? Where is the
bustling, changing world of our experience? Those configurations
of the Universe for which the probability mist has a high density,
and so are likely to be experienced, must have within them an
appearance of history-a set of mutually consistent records that
suggests we have a past. I call these configurations "time
capsules".

Present past

An arbitrary matter distribution, like dots distributed at random,
will not have any meaning. It will not tell a story. Almost all
imaginable matter distributions are of this kind; only the tiniest
fraction seem to carry meaningful information.

One of the most remarkable facts about our Universe is that it
does have a meaningful structure. All the matter we can observe in
any way is found to contain records of a past.

The first scientists to realise this were geologists. Examining
the structure of rocks and fossils, they constructed a long
history of the Earth. Modern cosmology has extended this to a
history of the Universe right back to the big bang.

What is more, we are somehow directly aware of the passing of
time, and we see motion-a change of position over time. You may
feel these are such powerful sensations that any attempt to deny
them is ridiculous. But imagine yourself frozen in time. You are
simply a static arrangement of matter, yet all your memories and
experience are still there, represented by physical patterns
within your brain-probably as the strengths of the synapse
connections between neurons. Just as the structure of geological
strata and fossils seem to be evidence of a past, our brains
contain physical structures consistent with the appearance of
recent and distant events. These structures could surely lead to
the impression of time passing. Even the direct perception of
motion could arise through the presence in the brain of
information about several different positions of the objects we
see in motion.

And that is the essence of my proposal. There is no history laid
out along a path, there are only records contained within Nows.
This timeless vision may seem perverse. But it turns out to have
one great potential strength: it could explain the arrow of time.

We are so accustomed to history that we forget how peculiar it is.
According to conventional cosmology, our Universe must have
started out in an extraordinarily special state to give rise to
the highly ordered Universe we find around us, with its arrow of
time and records of a past. All matter and energy must have
originated at a single point, and had an almost perfectly uniform
distribution immediately after the big bang.

Hitherto, the only explanation that science has provided is the
anthropic argument: we experience configurations of the Universe
that seem to have a history because only these configurations have
the characteristics to produce beings who can experience anything.
I believe that timeless quantum cosmology provides a far more
satisfying explanation.

In Platonia, there are no initial conditions. Only two factors
determine where the probability mist is dense: the form of some
equation (like the Wheeler-DeWitt equation) and the shape of
Platonia. And by sheer logical necessity, Platonia is profoundly
asymmetric. Like Triangle Land, it is a lopsided continent with a
special point Alpha corresponding to the configuration in which
every particle is at the same place.

From this singular point, the timeless landscape opens out,
flower-like, to points that represent configurations of the
Universe of arbitrary size and complexity. My conjecture is that
the shape of Platonia cannot fail to influence the distribution of
the quantum probability mist. It could funnel the mist onto time
capsules, those meaningful arrangements that seem to contain
records of a past that began at Alpha.

This is, of course, only speculation, but quantum mechanics
supports it. In 1929, the British physicist Nevill Mott and Werner
Heisenberg from Germany explained how alpha particles, emitted by
radioactive nuclei, form straight tracks in cloud chambers. Mott
pointed out that, quantum mechanically, the emitted alpha particle
is a spherical wave which slowly leaks out of the nucleus. It is
difficult to picture how it is that an outgoing spherical wave can
produce a straight line," he argued. We think intuitively that it
should ionise atoms at random throughout space.

Mott noted that we think this way because we imagine that quantum
processes take place in ordinary three-dimensional space. In fact,
the possible configurations of the alpha particle and the
particles in the detecting chamber must be regarded as the points
of a hugely multidimensional configuration space, a miniature
Platonia, with the position of the radioactive nucleus playing the
role of Alpha.

Ageless creation

When Mott viewed the chamber from this perspective, his equations
predicted the existence of the tracks. The basic fact that quantum
mechanics treats configurations as whole entities leads to track
formation. And a track is just a point in configuration space-but
one that creates the appearance of a past, just like our own
memories.

There is one more reason to embrace the timeless view. Many
theoretical physicists now recognise that the usual notions of
time and space must break down near the big bang. They find
themselves forced to seek a timeless description of the
"beginning" of the Universe, even though they use time elsewhere.
It seems more consistent and economical to use an entirely
timeless description. But for these ideas to be more than
speculation, they should have concrete, measurable results.
Fortunately, Stephen Hawking and other theorists have shown that
the Wheeler-DeWitt equation can lead to verifiable predictions.
For example, established physical theories cannot predict a value
for the cosmological constant, which measures the gravitational
repulsion of empty space. But calculations based on the
Wheeler-DeWitt equation suggest that it should have a very small
value. It should soon be possible to measure the cosmological
constant, either by taking the brightness of far-off supernovae
and using that to track the expansion of the Universe, or by
analysing the shape of humps and bumps in the cosmic microwave
background. And a definitive equation of quantum cosmology should
give us a precise prediction for the value of the constant. It is
a distant prospect, but the nonexistence of time could be
confirmed by experiment.

The notion of time as an invisible framework that contains and
constrains the Universe is not unlike the crystal spheres invented
centuries ago to carry the planets. After the spheres had been
shattered by Tycho Brahe's observations, Kepler said: "We must
philosophise about these things differently." Much of modern
physics stems from this insight. We need a new notion of time.

###

PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF
PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO :
http://www.newscientist.com

The author of this article, Julian Barbour is an independent
theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, UK.

Further reading: Julian Barbour's The End of Time is published by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20

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Lebell

I recall reading not that long ago that current theories on time and the number of dimensions of reality indicate that time travel is possible but that it maybe impossible to go back and change events.

There is a good book called, "The Doomsday Book" (sorry, forgot the author) that uses this as a premise. A very very good read for men and women, geek and non-geek alike.

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Anon

Ill read it for sure

ARTelevision

current ish of sci am gives additional creedence to the necessity of multiverse(s)

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...A5809EC5880000

given multiple universes, the paradoxes of time travel are unraveled.

...the problem of "altering the past" for example...

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gibber71

Time passes as a new thought begins.

impirius7

the universe is expanding faster the farther out you go. so let's pretend we are at the middle of the universe and there is another planet on the outside edge of the universe. a minute wouldn't last the same amount of time in each place because one is accelerating. that might be where that idea came from. i have convinced myself to believe that there is some kind of higher power to use as a scapegoat for the existence of the beginning of time. i would go with the notion that time is infinite, but i simply cannot comprehend infinity.

nefarious

To me, time is simply a entity of our own creation. much like the question that if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, then it did not make a sound.

Time is an element with which we comprehend our existance. It would be impossible to talk if there was no such way to express something that happened and something that is happening.

All in all, i think time is created as it is experience. So therefore i think time travel is not possible...

Unless you were to go with the theory that there is an alternate universe or dimension where we exist .. but in the past...

Just my thoughts there!

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nefarious

Someone once said that if you were able to look close enough at the shadow of a sundial, the sunlight would not be steady. it would be moving back and forth slightly.. so does that mean time is constantly moving backwards and forwards?

just an added thought to Pheonix' post

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Phoenix

Time is an arbitrary creation by humans based on the movement of our Sun and our planet. We could have decided that the movement of our sun in our sky would be divided into 100 increments of time and called these hours...but we decided on 24 for reasons unknown to me.

All time is equal everywhere. If for some reason you are 2 billion light years away on some remote planet...you will age just as fast as someone on Earth. However once we find a way to travel faster than light (impossible according the Einstein), we can experience time in a different way. Someone could travel faster than light thousands of times around our galaxy in a short period of time and then return to Earth where they realize a hundred years have passed. I'm not sure how to explain this to you but it makes sense if you can find somewhere that explains this. So this is a way of traveling into the future...traveling to the past however is probably unlikely.

madsenj37

Time can 'slow down' or 'speed up' compared to what we are used depending on how fast we are taveling. If I was to travel for 1 light year and come back to earth, only one year of my life would pass, but people here on earth would experience much more time in that frame.

As far as going backwards, it does not seem logical to me.

As far as going forwards, if it was possible to get near a black hole but not go in, it might be possible to travel into the future in terms of what was the current universe like before you entered and when you came out.

Thats about all I know.

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Macheath

Assume that your physical body remained in the same position in space as you travelled through time. If the earth was moving around the sun, the sun through the galaxy and the galaxy through the universe; wouldn't time travel change your position in space? Would the earth, sun and galaxy move on whilst you remained in the exact same position in relation to the universe? How far away from you starting point on earth would you be after just a few seconds of time travel? Metres, miles, millions of miles?

This has always creeped me out..

pazza

Time travel is theoretically possible forwards into time, when travelling at/near the speed of light, time dilates. Travelling at speeds this high a trip that to the inside observer seems like 2 years, the outside observer will see 100 years as passing. As far as i know the only ideas of travelling back in time are based on wormholes in space, which are so far theoretical.

p.s time is man made. Yeah.. you think about that

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hrdwareguy

Time is a measurement made by man. An hour on earth would still be an hour on Pluto. However, because of rotation, it would probably take more than 24 horus to make a day, and more than 365 days to make a year.

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Hycdubg

All I know is that talking about time in this fashion makes my head hurt.

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nefarious

so when they say that a black hole sucks up everything around it, including time and space. . how does that work?

i must read up more on this subject..

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SeXuaLSoYBeaN

I read all the theories and junk and I'm still not convinced that it's possible.

I don't believe you can.

louiedog

nefarious

here's an article i found on Popular Science:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science...1498-1,00.html

It explains the theory of time travel..

In a nutshell, we have a black hole that sucks everything around it including space-time matter. To quote the article:

A black hole is infinitely dense, which means that it pulls the fabric of space-time to the breaking point—creating a deep pockmark, complete with a tiny rip at the bottom.

... In 1935, Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen developed a scenario in which the tiny rip in a black hole could be connected to another tiny rip in another black hole, joining two disparate parts of space-time via a narrow channel, or throat.

So their theory was that if you could use anti-gravity to hold the black hole open long enough to fit a man or space station through, you would end up in another space-time. Perhaps 1,000,000 years in the future.

Needless to say, i'm VERY skeptical about that!

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Nhanced1

I will be going through this thread thoroughly because I have a deep fascination with Time and Time Travel. I have tried to read everything I could get my hands on and I would love to hear your personal theories. Such as, Do Tachyons exist, or Wormholes for that matter. Can We Travel back in time to a point where the time machine did not exist? Ill have more discussion stimulating questions soon. For now, Ive got some reading to do.

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nefarious

dont you think that if time travel was possible .. someone from the future would have already contacted us? .. or history would have some story to tell about someone from the future contacting them?

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Orodinn

Time travel into the future is possible. It's called time dilatation. In fact, at the limit, we could even say that everytime you walk somewhere, you are travelling into the future, but at such an insignificant way that it doesnt have any impact on anyone. If you travel near the speed of light, time around you passes way more quickly. If you were to travel near light speed in a space shuttle for some time and came back to earth, most of your friends and family would probably be long gone while you would have barely aged.

I've had this same discussion in another board. It was pretty interesing. I'm not going into dept cause it would take forever, but just to make it quick, it seems that travels into time backward is possible (wormhole theory) but it would require something that moves near the speed of light and a source of energy as immense as a nova. The weird thing is that while science seems to allow backward time travel, for logical reasons, it just seems impossible (grandfather paradox).

nefarious

one question: why does time around you pass faster when you're traveling at the speed of light?

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jets

This topic trips me out.

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Orodinn

You can never reach the speed of light. If you were to travel at such speed, time around you would simply stop. Even if you were (hypothetically) travelling at 250 000 km/s (the speed of light being 300 000 km/s) and something travelled the opposite way at the same speed, you wouldn't see it travel at 500 000 km/s (which would be impossible). It's speed to you would be more something near 270 000 km/s.

4thTimeLucky

Scientific evidence indicates that time can travel more slowly in one of three situations:
i) lectures, particularly early morning and late evening.
ii) first kisses
iii) imminent death
Deciding which of these three situations pertain when you feel time travelling slowly can be difficuly. Scenarios (i) and (iii) can be particularly difficult to distinguish.

As for time travel. Theoretically it is possible both forwards and backwards. One can imagine impossible-causal-chains, but these would simply not arise, they are impossible! For example, one can wonder about the chain of events "what if I went back and killed my younger self", but the chain of events "I killed my younger self" would never arise. Some seemingly bizarre things may occur to prevent this happening, but that does not entail logical inconsistency.

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Daval

Would be neat if you could time travel though. Would go back and kick my self in the ass a couple of times before I made a few life altering choices.

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4thTimeLucky

Sorry Daval the one thing about time travel to the past is that you couldn't change anything. Either you did fuck up or you didn't. Either you have already been a visitor from the future (and presumably missed the opportunity to tell yourself not to fuck up) or you haven't. You can't both have fucked up and not have fucked up.

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warrrreagl

Time flies when you're having fun, but fruit flies like a banana.
----Groucho

And I be done seen 'bout ev'rything when I see a elephant fly.

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Orodinn

"Sorry Daval the one thing about time travel to the past is that you couldn't change anything. Either you did fuck up or you didn't. Either you have already been a visitor from the future (and presumably missed the opportunity to tell yourself not to fuck up) or you haven't. You can't both have fucked up and not have fucked up."

Of course you could. That's what the parallel dimension theory is all about.

4thTimeLucky

Orodinn,

I guess by "parallel dimension" theory you mean that there are a set of parallel universes in which all possibilities occur, is that right?

If so then there is no point going back to change the past so that you don't f-up, because there already is a past where you don't f-up.
Of course you now have the problem of what is "you". After all, does it make sense to say that you have a past in which you both simultaneously did and didn't f-up? I don' think so.

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Antagony

How the fuck has STEPHEN HAWKING not been mentioned in this thread?

Also, I would like to point out a couple of ideas for thought:

1.) Time is a concept created by mankind. Many would say that time is completely arbitrary, all the measurements are made relative to something more tangible.

2.) An interesting idea to think about is perception of time. There was a novel I was reading that presented the idea that time isn't linear at all. Everything happens simultaneously. Because of our lack of perception, we can only see a small section of time. We see in three dimensions, not four.

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stingc

Um... there are a lot of misconceptions here. I'd recommend anyone who is really interested to carefully read Hawking's book, or something similar. I'd like to try to give a concise explanation, but I don't think it would help. There's a reason that there are entire books written on this subject.

The simple answer (not an explanation!) to the original question is that time does flow differently in different parts of the universe, but even defining what that means is very difficult. Time is on the one hand a very arbitrary way of labeling events, but the fact that we all experience it identically is a clue that it does also have a very "real," invariant character. That statement can be made rigorous, but again, it takes a lot of explanation.

Also, most of the parallel universe etc stuff you read about is what I like to call PR physics. I doubt it has much relation to reality (I am a physicist myself, so I'm not talking out of my ass here). Most of those things are more properly classified as mathematical playtime than proper physics. One takes a HIGHLY idealized solution, extends it beyond the realm where it MIGHT resemble a real situation, and then uses some trick to extend it beyond where the equations would naturally "give up." The problem is not that these people are doing poor science. Its just that in the translation from original paper(s) to scientific american article, the focus/purpose of the work is completely reworked.

Evans

the whole Time-space continueum(sp?) and movement of time thing has fascinated me. I loved the movie "Contact" when she like traveled through those supposed narrow channels of time rips between black holes, at the speed of light, to reach an alternate section of the universe. She deduced that what she was doing there in the other world probably wouldnt happen for many many years from the time when she left earth (in an earth perspective). Although when she returned to earth, in that time it had seemed like she had only been gone a matter of a couple seconds. Which brings me to this theory, the Twins theory i think it is called. If there were two twins, and one went on a rocket travelling the speed of light around the universe, when he came back he would be very old and the one who stayed on earth would be only seconds older? So is there seperate time frames of travel?

Forgive if some sounds not right or stupid, its really late and i dont feel well.

stingc

You have the twin paradox reversed. The guy who left travelling at high speed would come back to find everyone he knew long gone. This sort of "traveling forward" in time has actually been measured, and correcting for it is required for GPS satellites to work correctly. The satellites move fast enough for the clocks to desynchronize with those on earth very quickly. Actually with GPS, their speed accounts for only about half of the discrepancy. The rest is from the the earth's gravitational field being weaker up there (that also changes the rate of time flow).

phyzix525

Well I did not read through all of this so this may have been said before, but I do not believe time is anything more then our finite minds unable to precieve everything at once. It then gives us the illusions of time.

Mathmaticly look at it this way. Take a line A which is time. on line A, If you take point B, how far does the line extend if you go to the left? Infinite. How far to the right? Infinite. So if you take point C and do the same you get the same answers, infinite and infinite. Therefore point B and Point C are both the same point!

line A
<----------B------------C------------>

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duckznutz

I agree with Jaelin. Time is manmade. It is not possible to measure time unless energy is expended (a watch needs wound up, computers need electricity, the sun or planets need to be in motion). So I think that time is just a representation of energy and 'change'. It always intrugues me how the Astronauts arrive back on earth 10 minutes younger than everyone else who didnt go into space?

nate_dawg

yes,but you are looking at two separate points on this line which extends infinitely in both directions (forward in time and backwards in time)........therefore you could be at point B in time and time will extend infinitely in both directions, and the same can be said for point C, you are just farther along in time at this point.......

ph|sh

i also believe time is a human creation,
think about it, if we didnt' have time the world woudl pretty much go crazy, everyone on earth reolves around time.

time travel i believe is not psosible though., it is possible to slow down time, the faster you go, the slower time goes for you, but this is all based on yoru own perception, time for you will seem to go at the normal rate, but for you time on earth will seem to go a hell of a lot slower (depending on the speed yoru going, say .5c (c = speed of light)) so if you travel for say 1 year, 14 years may have pased on earth (i dont' have the formulas in front of me so i dont' feel like figuring this out right now) but, to the people on earth they will think they are going normal time spee dand that you are going increadbly fast,. now technicaly it is possible to go back in time, but only if you go faster then the speed of light, and seing as how it is imposible for anythign that has mass of any level to go faster then the speed of light, this is not possible.

well that was a long post so i think i'm done for now.