7 Theories on Time That Would Make Doc Brown's Head Explode
There are a few things in this world that we can always rely on as constants: The sun will always rise each morning, the seasons will always change and time will inevitably march forward at its predictable clip. Except the sun doesn't actually rise, seasons are disappearing and time ... well, see, time is tricky, too.
For example ...
#7. We May Not Live in the Present
What if we told you that what you think of as "the present" is actually slightly in the past? Basically, your life isn't a live feed: It's a delayed broadcast that your brain is constantly editing and censoring for your convenience.
The delay isn't much -- what's 80 milliseconds between you and your brain? Nothing, right? Well, a group of neuroscientists disagree. They've come up with some freaky time-altering experiments to prove that this difference can change your perspective of cause and effect. For example, in one experiment the volunteers were told to press a button that would cause a light to flash, with a short delay. After 10 or so tries, the volunteers were beginning to see the flash immediately after they pressed the button -- their brains had gotten used to the delay and decided to edit it out. Yes, that's a thing your brain can do.
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"Being a brain is kind of boring, but we've got lots of time for pranks."
But that's not the freaky part. When the scientists removed the delay, the volunteers reported seeing the flash before they pressed the button. Their brains, in trying to reconstruct the events, messed up and switched the order. They were seeing the consequence first and the action second.
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"You really don't want to see the copies."
Not convinced? Try this: Touch your nose and your toe at the same time. Logic says that you should feel your nose first, because it's right there in your face (hopefully) and therefore the sensory signal doesn't have to travel too long before reaching the brain, whereas your toe is at the extreme opposite end. The physical distance a message has to travel on neurological pathways is much longer from toes than from nose, and yet you feel both things at the same time. According to neuroscientist David Eagleman, that's because your brain always tries to synchronize the sensory information that it gets from your body in a way that will make sense to you, but it can only do that by pushing your consciousness slightly into the past, like a radio station that's always on a five-second delay in case somebody curses on air.
The bizarre real-world implication is that the taller you are, the further back you live in the past, since it takes longer for the information to travel through your body -- and if you're a little person, you live closer to the present.
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The shortened reflex time gives them an enormous advantage at bull fighting.
But we're only talking about our perception of time here. It's not like time itself can actually slow down or speed up in reality ... right?
#6. The Higher You Live, the Faster You Age
If you want to experience a real time warp, simply walk up some stairs. It turns out that time isn't the same all over -- it actually runs faster in higher places. In a recent experiment, scientists placed two atomic clocks on two tables, then raised one of the tables by 33 centimeters ... and found out that the higher clock was running faster than the lower one at a rate of a 90-billionth of a second in 79 years.
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"Timmy, you get down from there before you get cataracts!"
These are the most precise clocks ever made, and the only difference between them was their distance from the Earth. That means people who live in higher places age slightly faster than people at the ground level. So for anyone keeping score, that's giant people 0, dwarfs 2.
This is called time dilation, and it happens because (as Einstein's theory of relativity predicted) gravity warps time as well as space. The closer you are to the ground, the more you are affected by the Earth's gravity and the slower time moves. On the other hand, as you get higher, gravity's pull weakens and time speeds up.
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"Finally! First thing I'm doing is moving away from Colorado."
Keep in mind that this is an insignificant amount of time we're talking about here. It has absolutely no bearing on your life -- unless you rely on GPS equipment, that is. Because a clock inside a GPS satellite runs at 38 microseconds per day faster than the same clock would run on Earth, a computer has to constantly adjust everything to make up for that difference. Otherwise the consequences would be disastrous: In only one day, the entire system would be off by 10 kilometers, and it would just get worse from then on.
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"You have arrived in Calgary. Probably."
Oh, and by the way, gravity isn't the only thing that can mess up time ...
#5. The Faster You Go, the Slower Time Moves
Another thing GPS satellites have to take into account is speed: The faster you travel, the slower time moves. Now you almost certainly knew that already, thanks to Einstein -- if you're going the speed of light, time pretty much stops. But it turns out that you don't need an ultra fast spaceship to slow down time -- your shitty car will do.
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Seriously, man, just let it go. It's time to move on.
Using the extremely precise atomic clocks we just mentioned, scientists have proven that the same thing happens to you every day, on a much smaller scale. Making one of the clocks move at only 36 kilometers per hour (around 20 mph) caused it to slow down its tick by almost 6 x 10-16. In numbers we can understand, that translates to "Not a whole lot, but still, holy shit, you guys."
So, let's say you're driving to work at around 40 mph -- that right there is apparently enough to cause time to move 0.0000000000000002 percent slower than it would if you were standing still.
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And, no, that doesn't explain the actions of the asshole in front of you.
In another experiment, one atomic clock was taken on a plane trip around the world while the other one stayed home (admit it -- if you had an atomic clock, you'd constantly be thinking up shit like this). Even though the clocks were perfectly synchronized at first, the traveling clock came back from its 50-hour, 800-kilometer trip missing 230 or so nanoseconds.
And it transformed into a beautiful, majestic moose.
So the clock gained time from being farther from the Earth than the other one, but it lost even more just by going faster. What's even weirder is that from the perspective of the clock on the plane, the clock back home is the one that's running faster than normal. You don't actually feel time slowing down or speeding up: Only someone outside your conditions can tell the difference. And that leads us a little further down this rabbit hole ...
#4. Time Doesn't Run at the Same Speed for Everyone
A trippy consequence of the stuff we just explained is that, apparently, different people can witness the same events happening at different speeds. Einstein claimed that events that appear simultaneous to a person in motion may not look simultaneous to someone who is standing still. So reality may actually be a mess of people walking around in slightly different timelines that sometimes synch up or intersect, depending on their conditions. This would help explain why everyone from Cream looks like a mummy now except for Eric Clapton.
Via Classicrock.about.com
And why he's dressing as if he thinks it's still 1978.
Neuroscientist Warren Meck conducted studies to prove that brain time is relative. In one experiment, he trained lab rats to push a small lever after a certain period of time -- and found out that the exact same interval could be timed differently depending on the rats' conditions. This means that 10 seconds can sometimes seem like 30 seconds, and 30 seconds can sometimes seem like 90 seconds, and so on. But you didn't need lab rats to know that: Surely you've been cornered at parties by someone who wants to tell you what really happened on 9/11.
Well, according to Meck, this happens because there isn't a single "clock" that tells the time in our brains: There are multiple brain clocks, all running at different speeds. So basically, the guy in the speeding train, the guy way up in the GPS satellite and the guy at the party working out an exit strategy all coexist inside our heads and our brain decides which one to believe at any given time.
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"It's been six minutes. Man, science is a dick."
There are lots of other things that can alter our perception of time, like drugs, mental disorders, old age or even distance. With all these variables, time is constantly in flux for everyone. So the next time you're late for something, just lay that nugget of truth on anyone waiting for you. They may think you're an asshole, but at least it won't be for your tardiness.
#1 is right, time will stop for some. God lives in a dimension of timelessness, He created time&space&matter for us humans. Saved Christians at death will also live with God, and have no reasons to keep their watches.
ReplyFor reasons unknown, this article depresses me.
ReplyMy big problem with time is that-and I'm talking big picture, not "in comparison to a guy higher than you", I mean time all over the universe- it could slow down and speed up, and you would never know because all those clocks will speed up and slow down with it. You can all just guess what I was doing when i came up with that theory.
ReplyMy take is that there is no such thing, there is only consciousness.
ReplySo, say a buncha scientists were getting ready to do that Message Back In Time idea, maybe 1 hour back in time. 1 hour before the experiment is supposed to take place... BAM! They get the message. Maybe via text or something. Success! But they then don't do the test in 1 hour because, obviously, it worked. So, multiverses. Smoke that one, guys.
Replyi think Bill and Ted did it best. Just say what you are going to do in the past and it happens.
I'm surprised you didn't regurge that hypothesis that time doesn't exist or that we live in the 17th century, just more Einstein trivia...
ReplyAs far as the time thing, it might get "Slower" or something but it won't "Big Rip". Or rather, ever consider that perhaps there was a universe just as vast and dynamic as ours that lived in the first SECOND!? That alien as it was, perhaps our universe was engineered in part by the beings that lived in the first second so they'd have plenty of high density/high energy environments to live a much colder, slower life, like the cores of stars and Jupiter's liquid metallic hydrogen seas?
On the scale of the sub-atomic time operates on the Femtosecond in which if one of our seconds passed on that scale there's not enough time passed in the history of the universe to make one second. And on the scale of the higher universe beyond this one, the realm of the "Gods" it operates on the Kalpa...
But what if time just gets slower and slower, NOT stop completely?
ReplyIt could take like a quadrillion years for a "second" to pass, but if EVERYTHING is slower, meaning we aswell, and our thoughts, then we woudn't see the difference. Our lifes could keep going...
...until the universe explodes or something.
Neutrinos do not travel faster than light. All the tests are in, and a combination of computer error and bad cabling was the source of the error.
ReplySadly. But we'll get there someday, of that I have no doubt.
We won't be frozen forever and ever, because forever and ever will no longer exist. JK, I'm not that big of a douche.
ReplyBut, clearly, I am, because I said that.
Every time I try to mull over the fact that the world and everything in the universe may just stop at any point, my brain slowly melts into mush.
ReplyIgnorance truly is bliss.
But the question is: how would u liked to be immortalized, if #1 occured?
ReplyMost cracked readers would say "fucking".
But the sad truth is, most will be immortalized with 24 tabs open, a bag of cheetos in one hand, and an orange dick in the other.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
ReplyTea time.
For the whole probability issue, you could argue that probability is a formula, not law. Also, as soon as the Earth dies, that puts a definite end to some possibilities. Also, without even factoring in time, you could say that everything is happening an infinite number of times. If outer space is infinite, then everything has an infinite chance of happening. The universe itself has been proven to be expanding, so it isn't infinite. but what about the vacuum outside of it? If it isn't infinite, then there has to be something stopping it. What is beyond there? In an infinite amount of space, why wouldn't there be another universe? If it could happen once, in an infinite amount of space it would have to happen again, and again, and so on, right? And in an infinite amount of universes, there would have to be another Earth. If there's a chance of it, then it has happened an infinite amount of times again. This would mean there are an infinite number of yous and every thing that there's even of possibility you could do, you have done.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesOr not. I'm sick, taking cold medicine, and haven't even taken probability yet. So...no idea if that makes sense or not. Just a possibility. But think about it.
Dude, either you're more intelligent than the scientists working on this stuff, or the "I'm not" part is true.
That kind of stuff really falls into the realm of pseudo-science, at best. But a lot of theoretical physicists make those kinds of claims. This is the problem with theoretical physicists: a lot of them lack basic logic skills and common sense, and some of them take sc-fi and fantasy way too seriously. Some of them say that, assuming the universe is infinite (which is unlikely but let's go with it for the sake of argument), within that infinite universe there can only be a finite number of ways to arrange matter. And so, they say, eventually you would find another earth the same as ours. Do you see the problem with that? The very nature of infinity dictates that the number of ways to arrange matter is limited only by the space that the matter is arranged in. To simplify, imagine a piece of lego, then attach another imaginary piece of lego to it, and so on. If there is infinite space then that could go on forever. You can always just add one more. Forever. That's what infinity is. Thus there is an infinite number of ways to arrange matter in an infinite universe. There can only be a finite number of ways to arrange matter if the universe in question is finite. And if the universe in question is finite, there is no reason to assume that you would find extremely complicated arrangements of matter, such as THE ENTIRE f*****g PLANET EARTH AND EVERYTHING ON IT being repeatedly replicated. This is common sense, people. Physicists can be idiots too.
'Pseudo-science' is what I meant. Damn, they should let you edit comments on this website.
lol 11 days later, CERN finds possible causes of the incorrect faster-than-light neutrino
ReplyWas going to comment on it. The first test was wrong because the cables weren't properly put in place. Therefore, the results were off and no, neutrinos are not faster than light.
... What happened a little after that was they found yet another error, which according to the CERN, could totally mean neutrinos are actually faster than light.
Did you know that if time just stopped right now nobody would even know? If somebody had a remote control to freeze time and just left it for 1 million years nobody would know. It could have happened just right now...
ReplyA clock slowing down does not mean time is slowing down.Time is consciousness-our thoughts move from thought to thought. Time does not exist outside consciousness.
ReplyTranslation: "I'm not a scientist who has done extensive study on time and I don't know even what an Atomic Clock is but I'm still right. I have my opinion to back it up, they only have data from experiments they ran on the subject...and what good is that?"
#3, sadly, has been found to be related to a timing error in the experiment caused by equipment malfunction. They fixed it and couldn't recreate the results, so it would seem that the light-speed barrier has yet to be broken.
ReplyObviously. If time travel were possible, I wouldn't still be working part-time jobs to pay off a mortgage.
No mention that time is a human construct? There are no scientific equations that have time pointing in a certain direction. Going "back in time" is just an entropy reversal, which is kinda tough to do.
ReplySo is just about everything. Name one thing we understand about the universe that is not a construct (not necessarily human. Animals can have them too). We couldn't do anything with out a construct to work by, same as you can't make a building without materials to work with.
Of course, there is the chance I'm crazy/stupid/misinformed about this kind of stuff.
Verve: Going back in time is more than just entropy reversal. A lot more. If I reduced the amount of entropy in your body right now, you would not get younger, you'd just get less damaged.
Racercowan: You're using the wrong definition of construct. Verve means that time as we know and understand it only exists because our brains require it to, not that we use a model to understand time. Also, thermodynamics comes to mind as something we understand that isn't a construct (though the words we use to express them arguably are).
Your numbers can't be right for that last one--everything I've ever heard says thirty billion years, minimum.
Replyim confused if we could send messages or people at the speed of light (or faster) since time is slowing down wouldnt you be in the future when you stop...how would you get to the past
ReplyRe-read #5, and think very hard about any possible implications that has for going the speed of light or faster.
bear with me on this one.
Relativity is a matter of perspective. While the people standing "still" perceive the traveler as being frozen in time, the traveler still experiences time normally and instead views the observer as being frozen in time. But to make it even weird, length contraction dictates that from the travelers perspective, there will be essentially zero distance between all points in space.
At the heart of the matter is that this only occurs while the traveler and the observer are in two different constant velocity reference frames and only from their individual perspectives. to the observer, it would still take twelve years to send a light speed traveler to alpha centauri and back. Nothing goes back in time and its only when the traveler slows back down to the observer's reference frame that there is a noticeable difference.
Getting to the past is a little more.... difficult. Once an object with any mass (even a proton) is traveling at ~3/5th's the speed of light, the amount of additional energy it takes to go even 1 mph faster starts to balloon and is mind bogglingly huge. Actually accelerating that object to the speed of light would require, quite literally, an infinite amount of energy. It would require going FASTER than the speed of light to go back in time (maybe, keep reading), but having more than an infinite amount of energy is very obviously impossible. But let's assume that for some reason you happen to have more than an unlimited supply of energy laying around. Time dilation is proportional to 1 / sqrt(1 - (v / c) ^2); where v is your velocity and c is the speed of light. As you go faster, v / c gets closer to one. At the speed of light, you're dividing by zero. (insert end of the world joke here). But once you're above the speed of light, you end up with the square root of a negative number which isn't possible without invoking imaginary numbers. Many have claimed that this means traveling back in time, but honestly, nobody really knows what this means. Its true that without the imaginary number, you'd get a value that implies experiencing negative time, but you still can't resolve the imaginary number or what that means for time itself. Imaginary numbers have their place in all kinds of real life things (especially electronics, but also in some mechanical calculations), but the implications this has on time are wonky to say the least. For this reason and for the infinite energy problem, its easiest just to say that one cannot travel backwards in time provided the understood laws of physics are correct.