TIME EXPLAINED

[Farsight]

TIME EXPLAINED

Time is very simple, once you get it. But “getting it” is so very difficult. That’s because your current concept of time is so deeply ingrained. You form a mental map of the world using your senses and your brain. You use this mental map to think, and you are so immersed in it that you can’t see things the way they really are. You are locked into an irrational conviction that clocks run, that days pass, that time flows, and that a journey takes a length of time.

It takes steely logic to break out of this conditioning. First of all we need to look at your senses and the things you experience. Let’s start with sight. Look at the picture below:


(image copyright Edmund Adelson).

Now, squares A and B are the same colour. They’re the same shade of grey. Oh no they’re not, I hear you say. Oh yes they are I insist. Oh no they’re not you answer back. We could do this all day, but I’m right and you’re wrong. They really are the same colour. Squares A and B are the same shade of grey. The apparent difference in colour is an illusion. I’ll prove it. It’s very simple. Just look at the screen from a narrow angle. You can check online if you wish, google on “checkershadow illusion” or go to http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelso ... usion.html. Check it out for yourself. Satisfy yourself. Be empirical, test yourself, then you realise that A and B really are the same colour.



What this tells you is that colour is subjective. It isn’t a real property of things in the world. It’s perception, it’s in your head. A photon doesn’t actually have a colour. It has a wavelength, an oscillation, a frequency. What’s it’s got is a motion.

Let’s move on to sound. Imagine a super-evolved alien bat with a large number of ears, like a fly’s eye. This bat would “see” using sound, and if it was sufficiently advanced it might even see in colour. But we know that sound is pressure waves, and when we look beyond this at the air molecules, we know that sound relies on motion.



Pressure is related to sound, and to touch. You feel it in your ears on a plane, or on your chest if you dive. This pressure of air or water is not some property of the sub-atomic world. It’s a derived effect, and the Kinetic Theory of Gases tells us that pressure is derived from motion.

You can also feel kinetic energy. If a cannonball in space travelling at 1000m/s impacted your chest you would feel it for sure. But apologies, my mistake. It isn't the cannonball doing 1000m/s. It's you. So where's the kinetic energy now? Can you feel it coursing through your veins? No. Because what’s really there is mass, and relative motion.

You can also feel heat. Touch that stove and you feel that heat. We talk about heat exchangers and heat flow as if there’s some magical mysterious fluid in there. And yet we know there isn’t. We know that heat is another derived effect of motion.



Taste is chemical in nature, and somewhat primitive. Most of your sense of taste is in fact your sense of smell. Do you know how smell works? Look up olfaction and you’ll learn about molecular shape. But the latest theory from a man called Luca Turin says it’s all down to molecular vibration, because isomers smell the same. That’s motion again.

The point of all this is there’s a lot of motion out there, and most of your senses are motion detectors. But it probably never occurred to you because you’re accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of how you experience it, rather than the scientific, empirical, fundamental, ontological things that are there. And nowhere is this more so than with time.

So, what is time? Let’s start by looking up the definition of a second:

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom...

So, a second is nine billion periods of radiation. But what is a period? We know that radiation is electromagnetic in nature, the thing we commonly call light. We also know that light has a frequency. So let’s look at frequency:

Frequency = 1 / T and Frequency = v / ?

This says frequency is the reciprocal of the period T, and is also velocity v divided by wavelength ? . Combining the two, we can say T = ? / v, which means a period T is a wavelength ? divided by a velocity v. To try to find out more, we can drill down into wavelength and velocity. We know that a wavelength is a distance, a thing like a metre:

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second...

And we know already that a velocity is a distance divided by a time. So if a period is a wavelength divided by a velocity, that means a period is a distance divided by a distance divided by a time. So let’s do some simple mathematics. Let’s work it through. We can combine T = ? / v and v = ? / t and write it down as:

T = ? / ( ? / t)

Then we can cancel out the ?s to get:

T = 1/(1/t)

Then we cancel the double reciprocal to leave:

T = t

The answer we get is T = t. A period of time is a period of time. This mathematical definition of time is circular. The mathematics tells us nothing about its base terms. So what is its true nature? How do we dig down and get to the bottom of it? Let’s look at frequency some more. What’s the definition in English?

Frequency is the measurement of the number of times that a repeated event occurs per unit of time.

Our unit of time is the second. Frequency is the number of events per second. A second is nine billion periods of electromagnetic radiation. A period of radiation is an electromagnetic event, caused by an electromagnetic event happening inside an atom. For an event to happen, something has to move. Some component of the caesium atom has to travel some distance. A hyperfine transition is to do with magnetic dipole movement, a flip-flop interaction between the nucleus and an electron. It’s magnetic, so it’s electromagnetic in nature. Like the electron is electromagnetic in nature. Like the photon is electromagnetic in nature. So in some simple respect, we can consider some vital component of the atom to be electromagnetic just like light.



The answer comes with a rush. It’s a form of light moving inside the atom, and it causes more light, radiation with a frequency, waves with peaks, We sit there counting them as they go by, and when we get to nine billion, we say its a second. Then we use this second to measure the speed of light. We measure the speed of light in terms of the speed of light. In caesium atoms, in hydrogen atoms, in our own atoms, in the atoms of everything. No wonder it never changes.

And so the penny drops: the interval between events is measured in terms of other events. And the interval between those events is measured in terms of other events. Until there are no events left, only intervals. And intervals are frozen timeless moments. But you need events, not frozen timeless intervals to mark out the time. The events aren’t in the time, the time is in the events. Because time is merely the measure of events, of change, measured against some other change. And for things to change, there has to be motion. You don’t need time to have motion. You need motion to have time.

You don’t need regular atomic motion to mark out time. Any regular motion will do. Yes, we counted nine billion oscillations and called it second. One, two, three… nine billion. But you don’t have to count microwave wavepeaks emitted by a caesium atom. You could count beans in a bucket. Ping, ping, ping, chuck them in, regular as clockwork.



You’re sitting there counting beans into the bucket, ping, ping, ping, regular as clockwork. Now, what is the direction of time? The only direction that is actually there, is the direction of the beans you’re throwing, and that direction is the direction of motion through space. A fuller bucket is not the direction of time. More beans is not the direction of time. The direction of time is the direction of your counting, and I could have asked you to count the beans out of the bucket. There is no real direction. It’s as imaginary as the direction you take when you count along the set of integers.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 ?

It’s imaginary, so you cannot actually point in this direction. Nor can an arrow. There is no Arrow of Beans, so there is no Arrow of Time. And since there’s no direction, there’s no direction you can possibly travel in. And since you can’t travel, you can’t travel a length, and a length can’t pass you by. It’s all abstraction, a false concept rooted in the language we use to think. Yet we never ever think about what the words actually mean. Instead we say the clock is running slow as if a clock is an athlete. We say the day went quickly but it didn’t go anywhere. We say years pass, but they don’t go by like buses.



The only directions that are there, are the directions of the spatial motions that make the events that we use to measure the intervals between the other events. What’s there is the motion of light, the motion of atoms, and the motion of clocks, buses, and rivers. What’s there is the motion of the earth, and the sun, moon, and stars. And these motions are being counted, incremented, added up. We count regular atomic motion to use as a ratio against some other motion, be it of light, clocks, or buses. All of these things have motion, both internal motion and travelling motion. And all those motions are real, with real directions in space. But the time direction isn't real. It's as imaginary as a trip to nine billion.

That's why the past is only in your head, in your memory, in your records. It isn’t a place you can travel to. It’s just the places where things were. All those places that are still here in the universe. And while the past is the sum of all nows, now lasts for no time at all. Because there’s no time like the present, and time needs events, and when you take away the events, you take away the time. A second isn’t some slice of spacetime. It’s just nine billion motions of light from a caesium atom. Accelerate to half the speed of light and a second is still nine billion motions of light from a caesium atom. But there's only half the local motion there used to be, because the other half is already doing the travelling motion through space. That’s why time dilates.

It’s easy to understand time dilation. Imagine yourself as a metronome. Each tick is a thought in your head, a beat in your heart, a second of your time. If you’re motionless with respect to me I see you ticking like this: |||. If you flash by in a spaceship, I see you ticking like this: /\/\/\. If you could reach c and we know you can’t, you wouldn’t tick at all. Your time would flatline like this ______ because any transverse motion would cause c to be exceeded. You wouldn’t tick for me, you wouldn’t tick for you, and you wouldn’t tick for anybody else in the universe.

That’s the thing we’re interested in. The universe. That’s the thing that’s out there, the thing we’re a part of, the thing we’re trying to understand. It’s full of motion, and this is what it’s like:



What can you see? What can you measure? You can measure the height. You can measure the width. And if it wasn't just a picture you could measure the depth. That's three Dimensions, with a capital D because we have freedom of movement in those dimensions. What else can you see? What else can you measure? You might imagine a fourth dimension, a time dimension. But the picture comes from the wikipedia temperature page. It’s a gif, a moving image, and in that image, those red and blue dots are moving. The thing you can measure is temperature.

Temperature is an aspect of heat, an emergent property, a derived effect of atomic and molecular motion. When you measure the temperature, you are measuring an aggregate motion. If you were one of those dots, you would not talk of climbing to a “higher temperature”. There is no real height. You can’t literally climb to a higher temperature. Hence we don’t call temperature a dimension. But people did. Temperature used to be called a dimension, but the word has gradually changed from its original meaning of “measure”, and is now assumed to be something that offers a degree of freedom, something you can move through.

We are immersed in time like the dots are immersed in temperature. It’s a different measure, but just as we cannot travel in temperature because there is no real height, we cannot travel in time because there is no real length. Because time is a dimension with a small d. There is no degree of freedom. I can hop backwards a metre but not backwards a second. Because time is a measure of change rather than a measure of place, and it has no absolute units, because you can only measure one change of place against another. It’s a relative measure of motion. The units are relative, and that’s what Special Relativity was telling us all along.

Special Relativity tells us that your relative velocity alters your measurement of space and time compared to everybody else. You increase your relative velocity and space appears to contract while time dilates by a factor of ?(1-v²/c²). If you travel at .99c, space appears to contract to one seventh of its former size. So your trip to a star seven light years away only takes you a year. But physics is about the universe, and in that universe it took you seven years. The star didn’t become a disc because you flashed by. The space in the universe didn’t really contract because you travelled through it. But your time did.



Einstein didn’t quite understand the full meaning of relativity until later in life. He started off by saying there is no absolute time, using a postulate that says the the speed of light is always measured to be the same. But when he did general relativity, he said the speed of light varies with position. It it wasn’t until he was with Godel in Princeton that he really got it:

"It is a widely known but insufficiently appreciated fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. They walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is that in 1949 Godel made a remarkable discovery: there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He added a philosophical argument that demonstrates, by Godel's lights, that as a consequence, time does not exist in our world either. If Godel is right, Einstein has not just explained time; he has explained it away... (Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time)".



And what he got was this: time exists like heat exists. It’s real because it does things to us. But just like heat it’s an emergent property, a derived effect of motion. It means time is not fundamental. It isn’t a dimension like the dimensions of space. We don’t see four dimensions. We see space and motion through it. The thing called c is a conversion factor, between the measure of distance and the measure we call time, and both are derived from the motion of light. It’s the motion that’s king, the universe is not a block universe, it is a world in motion. The worldlines are only in mathematical space, and in your head. There’s no place that’s the future, and no place that’s the past. There’s only this place, and the time is always now. We don’t travel in time at one second per second. We don't travel in time at all. To travel backwards in time we'd need to unevent events, we’d need negative motion. But motion is motion whichever way it goes. You can’t have negative motion, just as you can’t have negative distance. Just as you can’t have negative carpets. So you can’t travel in time. There are no time travel paradoxes, because there is no time travel, and there is no time travel because time is just a relative measure of motion. And motion is travel. You can’t travel through travel.

So those celebrity physicists who talk earnestly of time machines are wrong. Dead wrong. Not even wrong. And all those folk who puzzle about the beginning of time are chasing the wrong horse. There never was any beginning of time. Time didn’t start thirteen point seven billion years ago. Because time didn’t start in the first place. It was motion that started in the first place. It was a place, not a time. And it’s this place, the place we call the universe, marked out by every light path you can track through timeless space. That’s how far we’ve come. A long long way, in no time at all.

But now we can move on. Because now we’ve got the key that unlocks all the doors in physics.

[Farsight]

Actually I was looking for Butterworth, but hey, I saw somebody asking about time travel, so I thought I'd give you this. I'm not one for spiritualism myself, but about three months back my wife dragged me along to some shindig at the Arts Centre where people were selling baubles and crystals and doing Tarot cards and stuff, and I got talking to a woman who photographed auras. She was talking about energy, and Mr Relativity that I am, I kicked in with E=mc² and said you're made out of this stuff. We got on like a house on fire. Anyway, if you want to ask me about physics, fire away. It's all quite simple really.

[whoknows]

hi farsight

i will get back to you on your post
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3343

the poster you seek is here

[whoknows]

hi again farsight

time and motion is based on time and motion being linear?

but is that just a theroy?

couldn't it actualy be cylindrcal?

spiritualism has more depth than tarot readers and cyrstals, and physics and spirituaism are both incomplete arts and are closely connected especially when digging abit deeper than fortune telling

[Farsight]

Thanks, whoknows.

It isn't just a theory, it's evidential. Hold your hand up a metre apart, and the gap between them is space. Now waggle your hands, and that's motion. You can see these things, but you can't see time. All "measures of time" are derived from motion. A year is derived from the motion of the earth round the sun, a day is derived from the motion of the earth round its axis, a clock clocks up motion. And yet people dream up theories involving travelling through time or unseen dimensions and parallel worlds which have absolutely no supporting evidence.

Yes, physics and spiritualism do seem closely connected at times, and IMHO both are burdened by excess baggage that detracts from the really interesting stuff.

[whoknows]

yes i suppose you can perceive it in that manner,

think of time in this way, you can't see air but you know its effects, just as one knows the effect of time


other diminsion no supporting evidance?

what string and m theroy all about then?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_theory


yes people belief in many crazy stuff and i probably means, can't see the wood for the bloody trees LOL
i think this is why its refered to as a path

spirit is of the mind, so any spiritual is mental(probebly not the best word to use)

[Farsight]

There's direct evidence for air, whoknows. You can feel it moving. It's different for time. You can't see it flowing, or feel it either. All you can see or feel is things moving. There's no evidence for M-theory, none at all. In terms of physics, it's passe now. I mean this, I know my stuff when it comes to physics. I'm the "Relativity+" guy, check out the Institute of Physics PhysicsWorld website, browse a couple of pages and you should see an advert for it down on the right.

[whoknows]

so you telling me that you don't feel the effects of time passing?

book looks interesting, but it doesn't make you right, its just your belief ,after all as the title says it's theroy

and if you didn't noticed i ask you to explain what it was all about

so what is spiritualism if you know the theroy of everything?


ohhh do you want to do a post on physic 101 i'm abit rusty

[whoknows]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del

is this what your work is based on so i can get up to speed?

[whoknows]

okay know found a pdf by you can you explain realitivty +?

didn't wish to post it, i didn't know how intusive that is to you ?

so time doesn't exist it just another perception of space?