Veil of Fire

I was just reading a book with a cursory explanation of Special Relativity, much of which has soared way over my head for some time now.

Well, I was reading about time-space, time as a 4th dimension, etc, and I put the book down and started thinking.

If time is a dimension, we should be able to move through it at will, right? Point A to point B in location AND time?

Well, no.. we can't move up and down at will. We need special equipment to do more than go up for a fraction of a second, and then we come back down.

But we can go down as much as we want... because of gravity.

Could our relatively constant progression through the time dimension in one direction be caused by some sort of Time Gravity? Could Time be "down"? Could it be the same as normal gravity? I remember reading somewhere that gravity and time end up screwing with each other. Does time go slower/faster on high-gravity worlds? Does time go faster/slower when falling, or jumping, or flying? If we ever invented an anti-gravity device, would we actually end up inventing an anti-time device?

Yikes. That's a whole 'nother eyeball-bleeding ramble right there.

If time is relative, everything around me has to be moving through it at the same speed (or my keyboard wouldn't be here for me to type on; it'd be a few seconds behind me or ahead of me). So Time Gravity would have to be pretty constant under normal circumstances. Sorta like if my computer and I were dropped out of a plane at the same time, we'd all be falling at the same rate (discounting friction).

Hm. Friction. There's friction when moving through any OTHER direction... is there some kind of Time Friction? Some Time Terminal Velocity?

So... if there IS a Time Gravity, and some kind of Time Friction... theoretically... couldn't we people falling through it obtain a limited control over our momentum without special equipment? Like a skydiver before he releases his parachute can minutely increase or decrease his velocity using air friction, could we do the same postulating an existant Time Friction?

And if we DID manage to make a time parachute, or time rocket, or something, and go back in time, what would be there? As linear critters, we've all passed through that time, right? Would it be an empty void? Would it be like "The Langoliers"? Or would we actually observe people and events that were going on back there as they were happening?

...whew.

There. I'm done. I couldn't get to sleep without getting all that off my chest.

So. How crazy am I?

Christopher Lord

Some of what you say is consistant with the way time and space relate. But its better to picture it as 'energy transfer' between the dimensions.

For instance, if you relative-speed up, time slows down. if you sit still, time goes at full speed. When you hit full light speed through 3d space, all the 'energy' for movement through time is transfered to your movement over 3d space, and so you can not move through time anymore.

And of course, since time itself is changing with 3d relative-speed, from your point of view time does not seem affected at all, except that everything flying by you seems to be moving faster through time (everyone else would see you in slow motion). This is why your 'time rocket' would not be possible. You need to have your total 'speed' through 4d spacetime equal to the speed of light at all times.

Veil of Fire

*blink*

*blink blink*

I think I just submerged back into "this is way over my head"-land again.

I'll give that another shot after a full night's sleep, and maybe my ears won't bleed.

Christopher Lord

if 'time gravity' was accurate, it would be as if we lived on a planet where the universe's speed limit (C, light speed) was lower than the escape velocity of said planet.

Kinda like a black hole............

DieToDeath

VoF... that hurt to read. I think I'll wait 'til I take like.. quantum physics or somethin' before I even think about that.

NeilUnreal

Somebody, I think it was Lewis Carroll Epstein, said: "You can't go faster than the speed of light because you can't go slower. Everything is always travelling at the speed of light."

A simplified analogy is: At rest, you're using all that speed to travel through time, and none to travel through space. If you use any of it to travel through space, you have to give up some speed through time. Since gravity is equivalent to acceleration, you have to use some of your speed just to stay in place, so time slows down.

-Neil

Skydancer

Umm... it's quite a bit more complex than that. Remember that time is based on relative speed - you can always assume you are at rest, so you observe other people as having slow clocks, regardless of who is actually in the near-lightspeed spaceship. You do observe other times as faster than yours if you are deep in a gravity well.

Christopher Lord

yes, but if you're going at 99.9% of light speed, the light escaping in front of you looks to be going 100% of C. But for everyone else, that beam is barely getting away from you.

The reason is that time is also bending for you. You are in a 'normal frame' at 99.9% light speed, just like at any other frame. Even though all your speed is being used to move through space and almost none through time, you still feel like your moving at full speed through time!

This is the crux of the misunderstanding. Because time is slower for you, people watching you (and the beam escaping you) would say the beam appears to barely move faster than you. But since time for others is faster for you, the beam goes at full speed away from you.


At least, thats how I understand it... I could be wrong.

Tharmas

In other words, if I understand you correctly, there's no such thing as TIME, it's just that the future really sucks...?

NeilUnreal

Mea culpa; when I said "at rest," I meant relative to another observer. My analogy was meant to be informal. I was using speed through time vs. speed through space as colloqial descriptions of how a spacetime vector in the frame of a "moving observed object" would appear when projected onto the axes of the observer's frame. "Time slows down for moving objects" is just our subjective name for this relative rotation of frames.

-Neil

[ June 06, 2002: Message edited by: NeilUnreal ]</p>