Sunday, July 29th, 2012
Copyright 2012-2015, Randy Strauss, All Rights Reserved.
These are some thoughts I've had about physics. They're not sophisticated or particularly correct. But I imagine these are the sorts of thought scientists have had over the years. Add some math and sometimes they lead somewhere...
I had the inkling of this idea years ago and then saw
a webpage (I think) which said something like the first paragraph.
Then I got busy and now can no longer find the page...
Then two days ago I heard Science Friday with Adam Riess, and
decided to write it down and run it by him. I was too late to get
my questions to him, though... At least I wrote it down
Everything's traveling through time-space as fast as it can.
Since we can go at MOST the speed of light,
if we accelerate in any of the spatial dimensions,
it makes sense that we'd go slower through time.
The whole notion of having a velocity in the direction of "time" doesn't make much sense since velocity is SpacialDistance/time. In math, we could add a parameter, call it "clicks" and express velocity as SpacialTemporalDistance/click. Since TemporalDistance/click is usually close to 0, we don't think in these terms too often...
Assuming this is our model, what does the parameter correspond to?
What is it, in this model, that we're really falling through?
What's a "click"?
(Often in math, a parameter doesn't represent anything real...)
So we're falling through space/time at the "speed of light..."
What goes through space at the speed of light?
Photons.
So, the whole of creation is like photons, but in 4 dimensions.
And, why do photons move through space at the speed of light?
Or, another way of looking at it, why can't photons move through time?
We can use forces to propel matter away from other matter, to change our velocity in space. Or, maybe we're just redirecting momentum from momentum in time to move some of the momentum into spacial dimensions. So maybe the "why" of why we're falling at the speed of light is just momentum?
When a particle splits, mass is thrown off at some velocity. A few things, like photons, are thrown off at the speed of light. Photons are traveling through space- not moving through time at all. But other stuff, stuff that we say has mass to it, is thrown also in the direction of time.
Think of it like momentum (mass x velocity). Momentum is conserved, but different things have different momentum.
In space-time, everything has the same space-time momentum- let's call it stomentum (Please tell me if there's a word for this...). Every particle is moving through space-time at the same speed. Things that aren't moving in space, are moving at the speed of light through time. Things that move through space have used some of that stomentum, so less of it is moving through time.
Gravity accelerates things through space, and thereby slows things through time. Well, except when somethings moving away from the gravitational center. These things gravity pulls at, slowing them down in space, speeding them in time.
So it would be almost equivalent to say that gravity accelerates or decelerates things in time. I say "almost", because slowing something in time doesn't specify in which direction the thing will be accelerated.
But it does seem accurate to say everything is moving through space-time at the same speed.
One strange part, to me, is that time isn't quite like a spatial dimension, partly that we don't have freedom to move through it, except at a constant pace forward, but partly that two people can have different clocks. In Einstein's thought experiment, one traveller gets in his rocket ship and travels quickly, say at half the speed of light, and then returns. When he gets back, less time has passed on his clock.
So when he gets back, is he together with us at the same point in time?
But space also seems to compress for him. So maybe we've gone through the same amount of "time", but it has compressed, too.
Recall the idea above of "clicks", a way of parameterizing space and time. Perhaps the compression of space and time is due to time/click getting larger. Similarly, space/click gets larger and this is what we're interpreting as space compressing...
Everything has a velocity vector with 4 components- the speed in each dimension.
Forces can accelerate things in space, but the above conservation rule
says the faster or slower speed must be compensated for by time.
In the beginning, the big bang, everything was created out of nothing into
space, and had very little time component. Then things started pushing and
pulling on each other in space and slowing things down in time.
Inside a star, particles are moving very fast, interacting with each other
and exploding. So they're not moving through time very much. Perhaps this
contributes to them lasting so long? In a way, this is true, but it's hard
for me to think this. On one hand, stars last a long time because they're
so heavy- they have so much stuff that most of the light/energy whizzing
around is reabsorbed and shot back out again. Only a tiny bit escapes
the outer layer to shine into the universe.
On the other hand, imagine exploding cubes of dynomite, 100 wide by 100 high
by 100 tall. It'd be over in a moment- exploding outwards. And those are
molecules, heavy things that don't travel anywhere near the speed of light.
It seems like a star should explode in an instant. Of course, it has its
mass pulling it together...
This idea intrigues me that when you move fast, space compresses.
Maybe this is a function of forces travelling at the speed of light.
Say you have a couple of molecules. If we push from one side, it's
a moment before the push gets to the next particle. So the space
between them compresses. If you're push something to go at the speed of light,
it's traveling as fast as forces, so things move before forces can
react. And since time isn't going by, there's no time for the forces
to react anyway. So everything gets squished down- space compresses.
16 May 2017
If we're falling through time at (well, near) the speed of light,
then so are the protons and neutrons in us, and in all near-stationary
matter. But not the photons and neutrinos. They move through space,
but not through time.
What about the speed of light through water? That's about 3/4 of c
(the speed of light in a vaccuum). It's even slower through glass.
But if it's moving slower, it's then moving through time.
I've always thought of Somehow, the denseness of water allows light to
move through time. As if the glass or water created some friction.
But it makes much more sense to think of the glass or water as putting
other particles very close to the light, forcing the light to move
through time in order to avoid them.
We think of photons as "particles", even though they often act like
"waves". Actually, both of those are human notions. Neither objects
nor waves actually exist in nature. Those are the way massive collections
of particles seem to us. A rock seems to be "an object", but it's not, its
a collection of particles.
In string theory, an electron and a neutrino are themselves quarks
and strings. So maybe all strings are shooting through the space at the
speed of light.
Protons and neutrinos are not "things", they're collections of strings,
of quarks. So maybe strings are shooting throughout space and not time,
but when they collide and form particles, they suddenly move through time.
Perhaps they don't really collide and form particles, perhaps they just
are close to each other, so suddenly slow down, in space, and begin moving
through time. Similarly, when photons move through glass or water, it's
so dense that their proximity acts on it, forcing it, too, to move through
time so its movement through space slows.
I think about this stuff a few hours a year. I've put much more time
into a plan to transform politics and government into
Please join me. Register and vote on issues on
PeopleCount.org.
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xs is the distance it covers in the x dimension in one click.