time is nothing... its all in how we perceive it... if the earth was faster or slower revolving around the sun, time would be different. there's no atoms that make up time, you can't bend it or shape it, you cant touch it or see it. time is basically something that changes for person to person, a perspective that everyone has.

i think Einstein was wrong ..if someone flew at the speed of light to our closest neighbor star, alpha centauri if would take about 4.5 years at the speed of light. Einstein says that he would age normally, while everyone one one earth would age about 75 years. I'm not a mathematician, but that makes no sense to me. we would all age the same, because time and space do not exist. space is called so because of the emptiness between things. time and space is just a perception that we have, and we think of them a an object, when they are not.

if two people travel from houston to chicago, one traveling at 50 mph, and the other traveling at 150 mph, would the person traveling at 150 mph be any younger than he was (than the other person) when they started?

Yes, with a 100 mph difference, the ratio is 1.000000000000011. So the amount one person ages is 0.000000000000011 more than the amount the other person ages.

If both people travel this way for a year (365 * 24 * 60 * 60 = 31536000 seconds) then one ages (0.000000000000011 * 31536000) 0.000000346896 seconds more than the other.

Two people could travel thus for 100 years and still one would only age 0.0000346896 seconds more than the other.

This is why we can completely disregard relativistic effects under everyday circumstances (special everyday tech devices not withstanding).

The currently accepted theories of relativity (partially incorrectly credited to Einstein) may or may not be wrong (the evidence is on their side), but your statements do not reflect Einstein's equations. Moving at close to the speed of light, the people on earth would only age about 4.5 years while the spacecraft traveled 4.5 light years. The people on the craft would experience less than 4.5 years of time.

I may repeating another, but we all move forward in time; some things just move forward through time slower than others.

that makes even less sense to me

Exactly. It does not make sense to us, yet it is true. Our everyday intuition is wrong.

we can measure time in light years, by how long it takes light to reach us from distant stars, but those are only estimates, althought good ones no doubt, because time is infinite and a continous rather than a dicrete variable...a moment in time? Perhaps, but we have no idea of how much smaller a moment time can become - limited by our perception maybe? Hence it remains a continuous rather than a discrete measure. I like the "wave" people

Time is all about the movement of objects in space in relation to other objects in space.

The earth travels around the sun, the sun moves around the galaxy, etc.

So time, being "relative" is an understatement. Once could ask "relative to what???"

The answer depends on the observer. The observer (us) picks something and calls that "the spot" that everything else is relative to.

But thats not necessarily the truth, its just a point of reference.

The truth is that everything is relative to the observer.

That would be you and me. Each of us who observe and measure time.

Inside of a spaceship which is moving at nearly the speed of light everything seems perfectly normal to the passengers. Their time is relative to them in that environment. Just because some planet (it does not have to be earth) out there in the vast universe is measuring time relative to how many times it rotates in space or travels around its sun... well that has no bearing on the people in the spaceship. They have taken their space-time with them.

Each and ever observer manifests their own time and space or space-time universe.

Now the reason a fast moving spaceship can get "out of sync" with the time on the earth or any other planet, is because of speed. While the spaceship is moving nearly the "speed of light," the planet it came from is still creeping along like a turtle, trying to get around its central sun.

When the spaceship decides to return and come to a stop returning to its planet, many years have passed. And they are only a few weeks older, while the people they once new are old or dead.

Did they go into the future? Not really. Here is why:

The future does not exist. Only Now exists.

In relation to the people on the earth, they appeared to be going fast, but in actuality when you approach the "speed of light" you are approaching a place where there is no time at all, therefore you are actually slowing down to a stop.

Light has no speed, it is just light. It appears to have speed when it is in our space-time which is warped.

If the people on the earth could see the people in the spaceship, to them, it would look like they were frozen in their tracks. They might look like statues, or be hardly moving at all.

Its as if they were put in a tank and frozen and then thawed out many years later. They appear to be in suspended animation.

Space is a three dimensional canvas in which the creators bring their thought forms and create life.

We are the creators.

the way i see it, all 3 exist, but we can only be in the "now" part. the future exists because everything we do now creates the future. i look at like a fishnet. where ever the stings connect, that is a decision in our lives that we make a choice. whatever choice we make, leads to more decisions and more choices we make. it's never ending and will always affect the future. the past is over and all we can do is learn from it.

I have not read through all the replies, here are my thoughts on the original topic.

If movement is indeed a series of still-worlds that are played to us at a speed; then what happens between "frames" of this moving world? I mean, if a new frame is presented at each Planck time, what happens BETWEEN the frames? This presupposes that the frames are played momentarily.

On the other hand, if indeed all instances of all frames exist at the same time in the world, the "bubbles", then how do we fit all these worlds in one space? I assume that each "frame" or "instantaneous" bubble is the entire world. Any particular "frame" or "snapshot" taken of the universe does not change, yet it is infinitely large. Time is infinite, both directions, arguably. So where do we stick the infinitely large spaces, occurring in infinite number of times, one for each Planck time?

How do you freeze-frame a "bubble"? How do you "speed through" or "slow down" the travel of one's perception of these worlds? If you alter the speed at which an individual can perceive the worlds, which appear in rapid succession, then you have two times to contend with: One time is the universe time, which is pre-determined, according to one occurrence of the universe for each planck-time. And you also have to have another time, the individuals time, which passes at a different speed from the universe's time, in order for the individual perceive "slowing" or "speeding up" of the universe's progress of sequential images through time. An easy example of this is to observe a snapshot of the universe. One would have to stop the universe's time from progressing, while keeping his "personal" time go and progress like business as usual. But the man is part of the universe!! So to do this is impossible.

I think the theory you proposed is valid if you believe that the instantaneous snapshots do not all exist in the same time, and you can't visit them at will, but they CHANGE from one manifestation to the other, and once a manifestation is not in time, it disappears. Similarly, there are no future manifestations in existence, but the universe changes, and new manifestations get created by change, while the old manifestations disappear.

This is the basic idea of "change", and not the "appearance" of change. For instance, you can see a bullet moving on a screen in a movie, but you cannot kill someone with this bullet at will. This is so because any real life bullet has momentum and kinetic energy, which make it possible for it to penetrate solid matter. The bullet in the movie on the screen LOOKS real, but it lacks the elements of momentum and kinetic energy. And the momentum and kinetic energy of the moving bullet in real life not only give the impression of change of reality, but their presence proves that there is actual change.

If the universe was a series of snapshots, then the universe could exist with no apparent causality, since physical laws don't carry from one snapshot to another in the appearance of change. A movie can show a man walk on the ceiling or become a turnip. These events are not possible in reality, but only in an appearance of reality. So if the world only appeared to be changing, then there would be no necessity for causality in the world. But there IS causality in the world. Therefore the theory of many instances concurrently existing of the universe, is false.

I think a lightyear is a unit of distance, not a unit of time.

When an object accelerates, according to relativity theory its time slows down, obeying a function defined very specifically and accurately by some formulas.

What most people don't see is that when an object decelerates, time speeds up.

For some unknown reason to me, because I am not a math or physics guy, and I can't comprehend Einstein's friend's equations, (Einstein co-authored his paper, and another guy also got the prize with him, but his name has been forgotten. Einstein was not good enough in math to describe his theory in equations. He was a great conceptualist, a grand natural philosopher of the finest kind, and the brilliance of his thoughts can't and must not be downplayed, but the fact is he lacked the skills in math to describe his on brilliant ideas.) a man who is travelling near the speed of light will live slower, and age slower, but when he decelerates, he loses all his advantage of slow aging, and when he stops in front of a man who never left Earth, they will have both aged the exact same amount since the traveller's fast-moving space ship started off first.

This works this way, no matter how many times the space craft goes up to near the speed of life and slows back down.

It's also counter-intuitive, since you'd think if he travelled for ten years, and aged during that at half the speed of his friend standing on Earth, then the acceleration/decelartion parts would cancel each other out, but the ten-years' worth of travel would still be preserved in his advantage.

I am now all of a sudden not sure about this. Maybe I am mixing up things I've heard. Maybe I heard that if a human being gets accelerated for half his life, and decelerated for the other half, he would still reach only a fraction of the speed of light. So in this case there is no time that the man would "steadily" cruise at a slower aging-speed.

Yeah, if you think how a man cannot survive in an environment in which his weight is double than his normal, due to acceleration, then you know that the rate of acceleration for 40 years is 20 m/s/s, which acceleration would take a very long time (I am too lazy to calculate) to take him to 300,000 km/s, which would take fifteen million seconds, however long that works out to be in years. 15,000,000 seconds / 60 /60 / 24 /365 is equal to the number of years the guy theoretically ought to reach the speed of light at a steady 2g acceleration. But that does not take into consideration that his mass increases with his speed, so... the accelation becomes deadly even at low rates even at relatively slow speed, a fraction of the value of the speed of light.

So the upshot is, that space travel even at best won't give people the effect of travelling into the future, and a very large part this is so is that man's life expectancy and physical tolerance does not allow him to ever speed up to be near the speed of light.

This doesn't change your argument, but there has been finite time since the beginning of the universe, and if it ends with contraction, there will be finite time from now to the end. If time plays out in discrete steps, then there have been (will be) a finite number of discrete steps.




Not according to han solo.

True, but still peaks out at the 'normal' pace of time - the pace of the unaccelerated reference frame.

The object still experience 'less passage of time', even though it went through a phase in which time was sped up.

By analogy, say I'm eating 10 eggs per minute. You are eating 10 eggs per minute, then you slow down and eat 5 eggs per minute, then you speed up and eat 10 eggs per minute.

Even though you went through a period of increasing rate of egg consumption (and i didn't), you still ate fewer eggs overall.


I just saw 'cool hand luke' the other week.



I don't believe the first part of the quote above is based on relativity. You might also be confusing this with the issue of 'how do you determine which frame is really the accelerated frame'.

Muons.


Relativity explains the observed behavior of Muons: Experimentally verifiable.
Relativity explains the constant speed of light: Experimentally verifiable.
Relativity explains gravitational lensing: Observed.
Satellites moving around the world at high speed with atomic clocks are direct evidence of dilation: Experimentally verifiable.


Explain these things with another theory and perhaps relativity will start to not make sense of the data.

If you are just unaware of the data, then perhaps that explains why it makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense to me and many others. This is not to say I would have ever thought of it, Einstein was a genius. However he does not get all the credit, many many physicists (even astronomers and mathematicians) paved the way, and verified these things.

it's how far light will travel in a year... at 186,000 miles a sec.

I think the universe is an infinite energy field, and what we define as time is just a description of the changing fluctuations in the fabric of energy that exists. Energy/mass is neither created nor destroyed; it just changes form.

E=mc2 . If we solve for time, then t2= (mass x distance2)/energy. (forgive me if I am mathematically wrong, it has been awhile :) ) So, basically, time is just a description that we use to describe mass (which is synonymous with energy) moving over a distance. I think time just describes how energy fluctuates from one state to another.

You can look at a tree that starts from a seed and see how this works. A tiny seed becomes a 100 foot tree. How? Energy imput in the form of soil nutrients, water and light. And, when the tree "dies", it falls to the ground, and it's energy is "given" to termites, fungi, and the soil. The energy has fluctated and changed it's form, and we call this progression from seed to tree to rotting "time". Our eyes tell us that we are seeing a tree grow and die, but I think in reality, we are just "seeing" different states of energy...and we are a part of this fabric of energy...we are connected to every "thing"...the tree is observing us and we are observing it...we are all looking at ourselves change within the fabric we are all a part of...kind of amusing.

That is the way I see it anyways.