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Time
Oct 26, 2004 23:19:35 GMT -5
Post by Andrew on Oct 26, 2004 23:19:35 GMT -5
Theoretically speaking there is no such thing as time, no physical object defined as “time”. Technically there is a theoretic assumption stating that there is indeed a time continuum in space, everywhere. Where time begins, there it also ends. Chapter One: The Default Theories. The Beginning and Ending of Entropy with a touch of Theory.
The Physical Time Theory.
“Dr. Breuer describes the problem: My cup of coffee cools in the direction of the future and becomes hotter in the direction of the past. But the behaviour of heat is not reversible in time and characterizes according to the second law of thermodynamics a direction in time. That the coffee cools off ought to astound everyone. For ultimately according to classic mechanics the movement of each single particle of which the coffee consists is reversible in time. “
Time is all around us, in space, on earth, in other galaxies. We “measure” time in segments known as seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, solar years, galactic years, light-years, beyond and so such. Where do we get the default value of a second, minute, hour, etc. From “Greenwich”, correct? Then why is a second on earth and on Jupiter, according to OUR definition of time, the same length?
If all particles on Earth climax at the same time, why then is there a difference in the measurement? If I’m talking to my friend in New Zealand, and it’s 10 pm Sunday for him, and 6 am Saturday for me, does that mean that he has already done actions between the hours of 6 am for me and 10 pm Sunday for him? It all occurs at the same time! It’s simultaneous; there is no time loop or jump. If I am talking to him, and take a plane from San Francisco to Auckland, New Zealand, at 6 am Saturday my time, 10 pm Sunday his time, and fly thirty-two hours, I would land at 6 am Monday Auckland time, and 10 pm Sunday Pacific time. Therefore, if time was a physical editable object, I wouldn’t be able to talk to my mother at 10 pm Sunday Pacific Time.
Theory One Dismissed.
Entropy based Theory.
So, let’s pretend I am still in Auckland. I am at the airport in San Francisco at 5 am Saturday my time; it’s 11 pm in Auckland, Sunday. So, therefore I am already in the plane in the “future”. According to entropy, there are more then one me’s for each “time zone” in the world. So, I land at 6 am Monday Auckland time. 10 pm Sunday pacific time. If I were to call my mother, it would be 10 pm pacific timing, but oh! I landed at 6 am Monday! Therefore I cannot call her. Because at that physical place and time I am technically not in New Zealand yet.
Theory Two Dismissed. Time Travel (Basic Theory) As stated above, time is not a physical object. Speed does not matter. The time travel theory can easily be dismissed. If you go 9,999,999 KPH you will not “escape time”. You will just go around the earth many times in a short period of time. Unless of course you make the earth rotate faster, this will make “Days” shorter, not time. Even that is not possible! We would get demagnetised and spin away from our solar system. Preferably into the sun.
Theory Three Dismissed.
(Copy Pasted from a EasyWord document I wrote.)
P.S. , to Grave: I'm 100% sure this doesnt go against any beliefe, except...psycho...ward...people. I showed it to my teacher and she approved of it. Im writing chapter two, but i need to explore more of the Proton version of time travel. Where protons can go the speed of light, but my dismissal is this: Protons go the speed of light in a striaght line. and according to Einstein, and whoever else, you need a spherical or a large...area of space. So unless we shoot over 150 billion protons, in a striaght line, every dirrection, without them hitting eachother, we can travel time. If time was a fabric of force. In which it is not.
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Time
Oct 26, 2004 23:43:08 GMT -5
Post by Archagon on Oct 26, 2004 23:43:08 GMT -5
It's all quite simple, in my opinion. "Human" time - that is, the time measured in minutes, seconds, and hours - is created by humans to better compare different things, and is irrelevant in science. "Physical" time, however, is different, and can be explained by physics. I don't know enough about the latter to make any positive claims, but I'm certain that this "time" depends more on the relative "age" of particles and not on the past or future.
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Time
Oct 27, 2004 1:24:16 GMT -5
Post by Andrew on Oct 27, 2004 1:24:16 GMT -5
im doing physics next quarter, so im waiting a little while, maybe in the summer i'll finish it. This proton theroy is tricky.
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Time
Oct 27, 2004 20:33:02 GMT -5
Post by Arachis on Oct 27, 2004 20:33:02 GMT -5
Look. Alexie is exactly right. There are two kinds of time. There is a second... which measures the passage of one second. Then there is the second, which measures the relative angle of a point on the earth to the sun... in varying degrees... The first is alexies "physical" time, while the other time is simply our way to make a universal (or global in this case) constant so that people dont get confused about time.
The physical time is simply a unit of measurement to measure the passage of time, and is in no way related to the movement of Earth. When you gave the example of a rocket moving at 999,999,999 kph, you were comparing two different time systems. In order to simply measure the velocity, you need to have a unit for time (in this case hours, as in kilometers per hour). You then compared this time to earth time, days, or months or seconds, etc, and in this way came up with answers that make no sense.It doesnt involve much physics unless you want to start to prove that... in which case... its going to need a lot more physics than you will know until you take some 4th level physics at college.
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Time
Oct 27, 2004 22:29:02 GMT -5
Post by BlueDolphin on Oct 27, 2004 22:29:02 GMT -5
Protons have mass and therefore can't go at the speed of light. You may be refering to photons?
Could you explain what entropy has to do with having more than one of you for each time zone?
I also agree with Alexei and Arachis. Physical time is merely placed to correspond to the rotation of the earth. Therefore one is not in the future because their time zone is ahead any more than if someone set the clocks in the house ahead 1 hr would be in the future.
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Time
Oct 27, 2004 23:23:14 GMT -5
Post by Arachis on Oct 27, 2004 23:23:14 GMT -5
Well said Jeff! Well put.
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Time
Oct 31, 2004 1:25:40 GMT -5
Post by Hans Lemurson on Oct 31, 2004 1:25:40 GMT -5
Many of your arguments about time depend on the usage of time-zones...which have no effect on time what-so-ever. They are merely in place to correct for the fact that the sun shines on different parts of the world at different times. With this system in place, you do not have to have your sunrise at 10pm. But everything still happens simultaneously on the earth. (Except for minute relativistic effects)
Also, you could very easily change the length of a day by slowing the earth's rotation with no effect on the orbit (but perhaps magnetic chaos). A day is merely defined as the time it takes for the earth to rotate once. Time is still en elusive external factor in this case.
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Time
Oct 31, 2004 1:33:28 GMT -5
Post by Archagon on Oct 31, 2004 1:33:28 GMT -5
But the time the Earth takes to revolve IS your typical wristwatch-variety time! There is hardly a difference, except for the fact that the latter has different starting points.
"Time", when used in a comparative context, is an abstract-ism.
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Time
Nov 1, 2004 2:55:00 GMT -5
Post by Andrew on Nov 1, 2004 2:55:00 GMT -5
Protons have mass and therefore can't go at the speed of light. You may be refering to photons? Could you explain what entropy has to do with having more than one of you for each time zone? I also agree with Alexei and Arachis. Physical time is merely placed to correspond to the rotation of the earth. Therefore one is not in the future because their time zone is ahead any more than if someone set the clocks in the house ahead 1 hr would be in the future. If that were possible, entropy would go whack, universe dies.
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Time
Nov 1, 2004 19:07:31 GMT -5
Post by BlueDolphin on Nov 1, 2004 19:07:31 GMT -5
What do you mean by that?
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Time
Nov 1, 2004 21:50:49 GMT -5
Post by Monolith on Nov 1, 2004 21:50:49 GMT -5
Why doesn't everyone shut up and leave the thinking to the proffessionals. I'm afraid I might get a brain tumor if I actually tried to read any of this.
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Time
Nov 1, 2004 21:54:44 GMT -5
Post by Archagon on Nov 1, 2004 21:54:44 GMT -5
Professionals don't just spring up overnight.
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Time
Nov 2, 2004 0:49:22 GMT -5
Post by Arachis on Nov 2, 2004 0:49:22 GMT -5
Why doesn't everyone shut up and leave the thinking to the proffessionals. I'm afraid I might get a brain tumor if I actually tried to read any of this. then dont...
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Time
Nov 2, 2004 1:52:14 GMT -5
Post by Andrew on Nov 2, 2004 1:52:14 GMT -5
Time travel for beginners
John Gribbin
Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1895, H. G. Wells classic story The Time Machine was first published in book form. As befits the subject matter, that was the minus tenth anniversary of the first publication, in 1905, of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. It was Einstein, as every schoolchild knows, who first described time as "the fourth dimension" -- and every schoolchild is wrong. It was actually Wells who wrote, in The Time Machine, that "there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space, except that our consciousness moves along it".
Since the time of Wells and Einstein, there has been a continuing literary fascination with time travel, and especially with the paradoxes that seem to confront any genuine time traveller (something that Wells neglected to investigate). The classic example is the so- called "granny paradox", where a time traveller inadvertantly causes the death of his granny when she was a small girl, so that the traveller's mother, and therefore the traveller himself, were never born. In which case, he did not go back in time to kill granny . . . and so on.
A less gruesome example was entertainingly provided by the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his story By his bootstraps (available in several Heinlein anthologies). The protagonist in the story stumbles on a time travel device brought back to the present by a visitor from the far future. He steals it and sets up home in a deserted stretch of time, constantly worrying about being found by the old man he stole the time machine from -- until one day, many years later, he realises that he is now the old man, and carefully arranges for his younger self to "find" and "steal" the time machine. Such a narcissistic view of time travel is taken to its logical extreme in David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself (Random House, 1973).
Few of the writers of Dr Who have had the imagination actually to use his time machine in this kind of way. It would, after all, make for rather dull viewing if every time the Doctor had been confronted by a disaster he popped into the TARDIS, went back in time and warned his earlier self to steer clear of the looming trouble. But the implications were thoroughly explored for a wide audience in the Back to the Future trilogy, ramming home the point that time travel runs completely counter to common sense. Obviously, time travel must be impossible. Only, common sense is about as reliable a guide to science as the well known "fact" that Einstein came up with the idea of time as the fourth dimension is to history. Sticking with Einstein's own theories, it is hardly common sense that objects get both heavier and shorter the faster they move, or that moving clocks run slow. Yet all of these predictions of relativity theory have been born out many times in experiments, to an impressive number of decimal places. And when you look closely at the general theory of relativity, the best theory of time and space we have, it turns out that there is nothing in it to forbid time travel. The theory implies that time travel may be very difficult, to be sure; but not impossible.
Perhaps inevitably, it was through science fiction that serious scientists finally convinced themselves that time travel could be made to work, by a sufficiently advanced civilization. It happened like this. Carl Sagan, a well known astronomer, had written a novel in which he used the device of travel through a black hole to allow his characters to travel from a point near the Earth to a point near the star Vega. Although he was aware that he was bending the accepted rules of physics, this was, after all, a novel. Nevertheless, as a scientist himself Sagan wanted the science in his story to be as accurate as possible, so he asked Kip Thorne, an established expert in gravitational theory, to check it out and advise on how it might be tweaked up. After looking closely at the non-commonsensical equations, Thorne realised that such a wormhole through spacetime actually could exist as a stable entity within the framework of Einstein's theory.
Sagan gratefully accepted Thorne's modification to his fictional "star gate", and the wormhole duly featured in the novel, Contact, published in 1985. But this was still only presented as a shortcut through space. Neither Sagan nor Thorne realised at first that what they had described would also work as a shortcut through time. Thorne seems never to have given any thought to the time travel possibilities opened up by wormholes until, in December 1986, he went with his student, Mike Morris, to a symposium in Chicago, where one of the other participants casually pointed out to Morris that a wormhole could also be used to travel backwards in time. Thorne tells the story of what happened then in his own book Black Holes and Time Warps (Picador). The key point is that space and time are treated on an essentially equal footing by Einstein's equations -- just as Wells anticipated. So a wormhole that takes a shortcut through spacetime can just as well link two different times as two different places. Indeed, any naturally occurring wormhole would most probably link two different times. As word spread, other physicists who were interested in the exotic implications of pushing Einstein's equations to extremes were encouraged to go public with their own ideas once Thorne was seen to endorse the investigation of time travel, and the work led to the growth of a cottage industry of time travel investigations at the end of the 1980s and in to the 1990s. The bottom line of all this work is that while it is hard to see how any civilization could build a wormhole time machine from scratch, it is much easier to envisage that a naturally occurring wormhole might be adapted to suit the time travelling needs of a sufficiently advanced civilization. "Sufficiently advanced", that is, to be able to travel through space by conventional means, locate black holes, and manipulate them with as much ease as we manipulate the fabric of the Earth itself in projects like the Channel Tunnel.
Even then, there's one snag. It seems you can't use a time machine to go back in time to before the time machine was built. You can go anywhere in the future, and come back to where you started, but no further. Which rather neatly explains why no time travellers from our future have yet visited us -- because the time machine still hasn't been invented!
So where does that leave the paradoxes, and common sense? There is a way out of all the difficulties, but you may not like it. It involves the other great theory of physics in the twentieth century, quantum mechanics, and another favourite idea from science fiction, parallel worlds. These are the "alternative histories", in which, for example, the South won the American Civil War (as in Ward Moore's classic novel Bring the Jubilee), which are envisaged as in some sense lying "alongside" our version of reality.
According to one interpretation of quantum theory (and it has to be said that there are other interpretations), each of these parallel worlds is just as real as our own, and there is an alternative history for every possible outcome of every decision ever made. Alternative histories branch out from decision points, bifurcating endlessly like the branches and twigs of an infinite tree. Bizarre though it sounds, this idea is taken seriously by a handful of scientists (including David Deutsch, of the University of Oxford). And it certainly fixes all the time travel paradoxes.
On this picture, if you go back in time and prevent your own birth it doesn't matter, because by that decision you create a new branch of reality, in which you were never born. When you go forward in time, you move up the new branch and find that you never did exist, in that reality; but since you were still born and built your time machine in the reality next door, there is no paradox.
Hard to believe? Certainly. Counter to common sense? Of course. But the bottom line is that all of this bizarre behaviour is at the very least permitted by the laws of physics, and in some cases is required by those laws. I wonder what Wells would have made of it all.
Mind you, this is why i posted it:
Henry Moore To know one thing, you must know the opposite.
I find that so true.
Edit:
I dont know if i put this in my essay but; There is no actualy point in time travel for our generation.
Becuase if we build a time machine, and 10 eyars from now we want to goto 1902 and prevent Hitler from bieng born, thats impossible. What WOULD happen (if time existed as a four deminsional object) is, before you eyes, you would see the time machine slowly go back to what it was in 1902. Well, in this case. Really really fastly.fastly.. is that a word? nevermind. Quickly*
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Time
Nov 4, 2004 3:33:16 GMT -5
Post by Hans Lemurson on Nov 4, 2004 3:33:16 GMT -5
interesting article, but I don't quite understand what you're saying at the end...
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