if everything goes the speed of light, is time real?

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
1

for those not familiar with einstein, the title doesnt seem to make much sense i bet. well when you increase your velocity relative to an observer, time moves slower for you. in the original planet of the apes, chuck heston goes real fast in a space ship for a long time and ends up back at earth thousands of years later while only a few years passed on the spaceship.

this effect is real, it has been observed with orbiting satellites going thousands of miles an hour for years and the clock onboard was a few seconds behind the one on earth.

according to the math, the closer you get to the speed of light (which is the maximum speed), the more time slows down for the spaceship, and the more time passes for the world outside.

the way the math works i assume is some sort of calculus where there is an asymptote as you approach the speed of light, and no actual experiments or math to describe what happens to matter when it goes the speed of light, and therefore nobody knows if time travels forward for particles going at the speed of light (since all particles that do go the speed of light dont change at any known rate). they say matter never goes the speed of light, and if enough energy was put into matter, it would turn into energy, or its mass would increase or something real weird.

one thing i want to know is what is the difference between matter and light? i mean when you look at the tiny fundamental spec, in what way is a quark fundamentally different from a photon? i get the feeling that we dont actually know the fundamental difference, or a difference that is closer to being “fundamental” than the large scale effects these particles have in particle accelerators.

i like to think the universe is as simple as possible, i think 3 of the four fundamental forces have pretty much been utilized and that gravity is just a large scale effect of those forces. one way to really simplify the universe would be to say that both matter and light are somehow essentially the same.

what if a matter particle like a quark or proton is essentially the same as a photon, except its orbiting in a tiny circle. like when we observe a photon, its like the planet earth flying in a straight line with the sun following behind it, and when we observe a matter particle, its like observing the solar system sitting relatively still.

the reason why im writing this is because if matter particles are fundamentally energy particles travelling in tiny circles, and all energy particles constantly travel at the speed of light, does that mean that every particle in the unvierse is experiencing infinite time dilation?

if a particle goes near the speed of light, time slows down. science kind of assumes i guess that if you go at the speed of light, time stops. if every particle goes the speed of light, and every particle i guess is not moving forward in time, what the heck is time??

do energy particles travel constantly at the speed of light (although not in a straight line)? does that mean that they dont travel forward in time? what is the diifference between matter and energy and is there a way to believe that this difference is not fundamental?

2

You want to question ? You think you know more than Einstein ? Well you may be right.

  1. How can elementary particles really be indistinguishable ? There must be some minimum variation between them ( virtual particles surrounding electron clouds ?) or else they would be pure metaphysical entites, just like numbers.

  2. Then if they were slightly different, how could they not be infinitely different ? How can there be any possible relationship between points in space ? Why is there any regularity at all ? Maybe each point is INFINITELY DIFFERENT from another, but so different that no possible relationship can be even conceived.

  3. Why do we have the LAWS OF PHYSICS ? If there were a universe without any laws, all would be possible, measurements in themselves would not mean anything anymore; we measure things against limitations, interdictions, because they have a meaning with respect to our PAIN/PLEASURE dicotomy.

  4. Did you know that there is an infinite number of all the items that you see ? Everything in the universe exists with one quantity INFINITE. There are an infinite number of electrons, numbers, oldsmobile 98s, planets, planet earths etc. Numbers are just an illusion, everything exists in a quantity of infinite but since you can’t distinguish betweenn them they seem like ONE.

Everything is a symbol, a denotation like a Flag or the Cross.

3

a string vibrating at different rates can have different effects on the world, but its still the same string. although im not sure how something can vibrate if it isnt moving forward in time.

that seems pretty weird to me. i like to think the universe is like the surface of a 4 dimensional sphere. finite but no borders.

4

Ha. So I couldn’t live without ILP.

I find a post with FM, and I’m loving this one. =D>

Of course. It’s just that everything balances out, at least from a certain perspective/standpoint.

5

Einstein was wrong.

For starters-

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512614

6

If you could clarify your questions a little bit Future Man (perhaps number them off like old6598), I’d be happy to give you facts and my opinion on the subject.

7

Doubtful, no offense to Future Man, but Einstein’s qualifications exceed anyone here’s (to my knowledge), and would surely be able to spot any paradoxes or strange behaviors (but hey, who knows).

To be elementary is to be basic - in this case, indistinguishable. There certainly is variation in the position of the particles, but this doesn’t affect the output in any way (in any way we know of through data, but we certainly don’t know everything).

Points in space (exact position) don’t define behavior or output, but rather the composition and function of such particles define output (matter formations, so on).

Could you clarify the question a little? I’m not sure how to answer.

I’m not sure I understand this, either. Infinity is most certainly not present with physical knowledge thusfar, it is simply an arbitrary idea. If you were to freeze a moment in time, the smallest measurement (quarks - up quarks, down quarks, so on - to our knowledge, unless String Theory is proven true) would reveal a quite finite number. A draconian number to be sure, but finite nonetheless.

8

There are no answers to these questions. We just invent arbitrary answers based on measurements which are arbitrary because the LAWS OF PHYSICS are pure inventions, paintings, designs that have no necessity outside of the fact that they just happen to be these quirky regularities that this quirky universe has.

A lawless universe exists, just as the concepts of existence and non-existence are fairy tales. Without laws you cannot measure anything, everything is free, possible. Why measure ?

Infinity exists just like the cosine of an angle is equal to the angle multipled any number times 2pie. cos(angle + 2pie*k) where k can be any number.

check out :

ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=151880

quoted from there :

"Lets imagine we have a brain - mind and a simulator of reality attached to this mind. So we simulate a given lifetime of a given person. Another different simulation will simulate another person’s life. Now the set of all possible simulations, all the possible combinations of signals would represent all possible lives and experiences conceivable. All possible persons, universes and experiences that are even imaginable.

Now if this simulator works at very high speed and is able to execute all the possibilities in a finite time, then after exploring all of the “state space”, all of the combinations, it would return back and resurrect the life of person that previously lived. So you would have an eternal return of your life, but even if you have already lived this life an infinite number of times and will live it again an infinite number of times, THE FACT THAT YOU CAN’T REMEMBER IT SINCE YOUR MEMORIES AND MENTAL CONFIGURATION IS ALWAYS THE SAME, means that living it once or an infinite number of times is equivalent. A case where one is equal to infinity.

Of course this justifies inventing false memories since there is a life where those memories actually occured and therefore are real. The simulator itself could be in a universe where the laws of physics are different and allows an infinite speed computer, AND WE MAY ACTUALLY REALLY BE LIVING IN THIS SIMULATOR WITHIN A UNIVERSE THAT HAS OTHER LAWS OF PHYSICS.

Or our own universe may evolve up to the point of creating this simulator - mind machine in the future (or already has and we are in it) by using quantum computers etc. Even if the universe is an open universe, the universe would last forever and the quantum exploration of all of the state space would make it possible. But we would never notice…"

9

Good topic.

Perhaps one of the most trainwrecked and intellectually stagnant sectors of modern physics, cosmology has become a religious authority unto itself.
I used to be big into the whole super string movement until I read “Trouble With Physics” and “Not Even Wrong”. From there it became a simple path of cosmological deconstructionism. Observe:

First and foremost, what do we mean by infinite? Deleuze described infinity as a concept derived from “super being”. That is, it is an absurd concept which somehow makes sense but has no referent in reality. In other words, nothing infinite has ever been observed empirically and it defies logical comprehension, still the idea is retained to make sense of mathetmatics and science and is invoked in such fields. Deleuze also made light of difference. Difference was in traditional metaphysics the outcome of contrast between two ideas. Deleuze demonstrated that the inverse is true: ideas are derived from contrasting differences. Difference is not a negation of anything, but the only true actuallity. What effect this has on any atomic theory is worth deeper meditation on my part.

Let us discuss time. Quentin Smith reveals the most compelling argument in favor of an infinite time:

qsmithwmu.com/the_new_theory … _space.htm

I still disagree with his conclusion and feel that he is just dancing with semantics. Any system which contains an infinite amount of time is atemporal by definition. How can infinite have any natural divisions (durations)? The fact is that it cannot. Time may still be retained as a name for “(insert arbitraty existential name here)” but any attempt to link it to causation or some transcendental substantia is absurd.

As Smith illustrates in his work, physics conciously believes it has divorced itself from metaphysical presumptions and reduced itself to hard empirical date yet it unconsciously preserves notoriously old notions of time. The problem of time didn’t even bother Einstein, who makes a theory of tomato soup without knowing what a tomato is. Heidegger warned against the dangers of relativity and other modern cosmological theories in Being and Time by noting that physicsts hold presupposed notions of what constitutes time and space.

A big example would be the Big Bang. Most would find it absurd to run up against this theory in light of all the “facts”. I find it amusing that an entire big bang chronology has been laid out by thinkers such as Hawkings, when it relies on little more than the observation of the red shift and GR equations. If a scientist holds that the universe should in fact be a certain way they will likely lean towards data that solidifies their prejudices. In this case, the assumption that the universe “began”. Be it from a singularity, nothinginess or the act of a god, it all leaves us puzzled and bewildered and in direct opposition to actual science.

10

Two things:

  1. I also think that the Big Bang is probably wrong. I think the 20 billion year life span of the universe is way to short for life to evolve. You can read many of similar posts about evolution and intelligent design I have posted here.

  2. I think that our entire LOGICAL REASONING is very limited. We try to put everything inside our little boxes, our division of the world in cause and effect, items, time and space, logical consequences etc. This can only be used in probably a small range of interactions and only in a very limited way. But we only have this instrument of logic because that is the way our brain is hardwired. So even I can’t get out of using it, but I really feel that in the end it is very limited, can only bring us up to a certain point and not further is like a language that is simply talking to itself and a combination of symbols.

check out:

ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=153243

ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=152219

ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=151816

and many other similar.

11

Good topics. My personal prejudice is that the universe is atemporal, infinite, and material. It does not posses alternate dimensions or multiple universes. Causation is an illusion constructed through difference. Again, none of these ideas have been proven, but they remain my hypothesis. It is always good to be flexible with knowledge, as I must often discard my most firmly held notions of reality at least once a year. :angry:

12

We are problem solvers, that is why we are always thinking. We think against “constraints” or “interdictions”. We think to modify items of reality, to change them from point A to point B. We think and measure against limitations or goals that we create or desire and according to pain/pleasure. Even if we had no problems we would create them because we can never shut off our mind or our activity, our desire to manipulate and interact and change items and to have goals.

13

Future Man:

I’m going to answer your questions insofar as physics can answer them and insofar as I know the answers. That will help to identify where genuine puzzles lie.

  1. You can think of the speed of light as a kind of cosmic speed limit. Nothing can go faster than that, and nothing with a nonzero mass at rest can ever go even that fast.

You know the old Newtonian equation for the relationship among force, mass, and acceleration, F=MA? Start with that. Do a little algebra to come up with A=F/M. Set M=0. Apply any amount of force whatsoever, and you get infinite acceleration, something moving instantly at infinite speed.

But with the speed of light being a cosmic speed limit, nothing can accelerate to infinity, it can only accelerate to the speed of light. So any amount of energy applied to something without mass (like a photon) instantly accelerates it to the speed of light, and it can never slow down from that speed. Instead of affecting its velocity, the amount of energy contained in a photon affects its wavelength/frequency and the amount of energy it will transfer on impact and absorption by something.

  1. Einstein provides a more complex equation to describe relativistic mass. I can’t properly express it in symbols in this text box, but I can say it in words as “The mass of a moving object is equal to its rest mass divided by the square root of (1 minus (its velocity squared over the square of the speed of light)).” So everything that starts with a rest mass and moves, gets more massive as it moves faster.

If you plug the speed of light in as a velocity for a moving object, you can see that the relativistic mass will become infinite for any massive object moving at the speed of light. Infinite mass would require infinite force to accelerate it to that speed. That’s why it’s impossible for anything that isn’t massless to move at the speed of light. Also, the faster you go, the heavier you become, and so the more energy is required to make you go a little faster still. There’s no limit to how close you can come to the speed of light, you just can’t ever actually get there, and it becomes harder and harder to speed up the closer you get to it.

  1. Time stopping at the speed of light is another of those “limit” things. The faster an object is moving, the slower time flows from its perspective. At the speed of light, time stops altogether. But since there’s no way actually reach the speed of light, you can’t make time stop, all you can do is slow it down more and more, and the slower it becomes, the harder it gets to make it slow further (by moving faster).

So, the answer to your “if” question is “no, time would not exist if it stopped for everything.” But since that can’t happen, it doesn’t create a paradoxical situation in the real world.

But now here’s the one that really bakes the brain. We already have a lot of energy moving around at the speed of light, and so moving without internal time. It’s called light. That means light is timeless. Does this have religious connotations, perhaps?

14

newton is like 5 steps above where i want to describe.

what is mass? when you set M to values that are getting closer and closer to zero, the only information you can use to make that judgement is what the experiments say about particles that are in some undefined way different from energy particles. when you say that those energy particles “dont have mass,” what i think might actually be the case is those energy particles “dont produce the same effect on the universe that a particle with mass would”

im asking whether or not the leptons and quarks that live inside all particles that “have mass” are travelling at the speed of light in tiny circles inside the little ball we call a proton or neutron? are they simply tiny photons, with a different frequency and a different value that is similar to mass but is shared by both bosons and hadrons, or energy particles and matter particles.

if they are travelling at the speed of light in tiny circles, what actually is the fundamental difference between a quark and a photon? is a quark just a tiny gluon, and a lepton just a tiny photon? wait… do quarks and leptons “convey a force” in the same way that energy or “messenger” particles like the electromagnetic photon and strong-force gluon do?

wait a minute start over. i think im gonna scrap this whole thing and change my entire perception. the energy particles are just waves in the medium and matter is the one thing that has the thing we call mass. and there is no such thing as infinite time dilation or “photons that never travel forward in time”. that certainly simplifies things. although why the medium through which light waves travel is so insanely unintuitive ill have to discover sometime soon. maybe it has something to do with our brains’ perceptive abilities, and not the physical properties of photons. maybe everything that happened in the universe already did, in one “instant”, and “the passage of time” is merely our brain processing the information and conveying it into our extra-universal consciousness.

uh i guess as far as my first post here goes… nevermind.

15

There is more than one kind of “time”, as there is motion beyond light speed, there is more than one dimension or class of existence. Woof.

16

Think four-dimensionally.

Everything IS moving at the speed of light. That is the Universal constant. What we call time is movement through the fourth dimension at or near the speed of light.

The reason I say “or near” is because when we move through space, some of our energy which was previously devoted to moving through time, is now redirected in the given spatial direction. If we were to move through space at the speed of light, we have redirected ALL of our energy in that given spacial direction, and we are no longer moving through time at all.

That is time dilation. Time “slows down” when we move through space.

Think of an airplane traveling south at 500 MPH. If that plane begins a 45 degree ascent while maintaining its 500 MPH speed, it’s movement southward will no longer be at a 500 MPH clip, because half of it’s 500 MPH speed is now devoted to moving “upward.”

Time dilation is the same thing only you add a dimension.

17

12.06.06.1756

Cool thread FM, and very good questions. Loved your first post; very interesting. I’d love to know the answers myself. It’s nice to see a topic pop up that you don’t usually see much of. I’d take a stab at it myself if I was much of a physicist, but at least I can understand what you’re getting at. Einstein may not have had all the answers, but right now, like Darwin’s theory, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to explaining how the universe works.

18

i dont see how time can exist separately from space itself, separately from the medium through which everything moves. because you look at a chunk of space in between all the particles (yes, a very small space) and you can say “now it is empty, and then it is not.” the area of space that exists in the three spatial dimensions must pass through time just like matter. would you say that there is no such thing as empty space, and that all of the universe is actually composed of energetic particles that travel forward through time?

no such thing as empty space? (i know that seemingly empty space is full of the zero point field, but that thing is described as a sea of chaotic, colliding particles. thats an image that seems to contain space between the things.

if you pretend that the universe has four spatial dimensions and the “time” dimension is the fifth, then use einsteins general relativity to describe the gravity in that universe and it will be described by the exact same equations that maxwell used to describe the electromagnetic force. how bout that?

actually i think it is slightly different because darwin is essentially a final theory in the field of biology. the question is “why is there diversity” and the answer is “the laws of physics and chemistry mutate the dna, which seeks to replicate itself because of the laws of physics and chemistry.”

so therefore thats the end. obviously it has quite a way to go before it proves that this is true. but its different from einsteins theory in that einstein is answering the question “whats the deal with gravity” and he says “gravity behaves like this way that we observe.” he doesnt know a darn thing about the interactions going on that determine the effects, he is just describing the effects. like “the marine iguana swims underwater because thats the only food” is a lot different from “he evolved to get the only food because he is created by a blueprint that seeks to replicate itself because of the laws of physics, and random mutations caused by the laws of physics caused his marine abilities to form.”

if einstein’s theory was as ‘final’ as darwins, he would have to hand off the answer to the question to the next higher level of study. “gravity does this because the strings doing the behaving are created and defined by… quantum mechanics.” we are almost there but not yet. and when we get there, heisenberg’s uncertainty may actually prevent us from ever answering the question “why is quantum mechanics behaving like that.” i have no idea what form the answer could possibly take.

19

Nothing moves through the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension itself has a relative motion to the spatial dimensions. It’s the opposite of the spatial dimensions.

There is no such thing as empty space. All quantum motion mimics cosmological motion, it’s just slower.

Time dialation is also wrong. The speed of light is not constant, it’s deceleration is constant. SOL dialates and time is the constant.

When speed approaches the maximal or minimal there are dimensional distortions that are accounted for by considering changes in time.

20

It is equally difficult to imagine empty space as it is to imagine disconnected chunky space on a minimum scale. But I vote for the second. Quantized spacetime would need to be small and chunky, whether it summed up to a set of dimensions or not. Same with time. Then time on the small scale does not need to be dimensional, just minimal in discrete steps, all of which add up to a virtual continuum.