auto-da-fe

I know I am going to get my ass kicked about this, but I want to flesh it out anyway.

There is an abstract idea that has been floating around my head for some years now. I'm not sure if it is correct, and I am pretty sure it is not, but I want some other opinions.

I have no idea if you can travel into the future or the past. I have opinions on both, but, I want to discuss stopping time. Bringing time to a halt, for all molecules, everywhere. All over the universe and beyond. The idea is, you can't do this, because to do so, there would have to be no light.

If light exists, you can (potentially) measure how long it took for the light to travel from its source, to you. This would mean that you could run a continuos experiment, constantly measuring from this light source, and keep track of time. So, therefore time did not stop.

If time were to stop, and light therefore was to stop, would that not mean that it would never be able to start again? What mechanism was used to stop time, and once time was stopped, would that mechanism still exist, if it did not eminate light of any kind?

I realize this may be a little pedestrian, but as I said, I don't expect it to produce any earth shattering epiphanies.

Arken

Okay... now why can't we stop gravity?

auto-da-fe

Becuse gravity is bassed on mass, so to stop gravity, you would have to destroy mass. I don't think this would be possible either, because you would have to destroy the entire universe.

Jesse

I don't think there's any theory of physics that would justify the idea that you could stop time for all the objects around you but still move around among them yourself, like in the movie "Clockstoppers". The closest thing I can think of is that, because of time dilation in relativity, from the point of view of a photon traveling in a straight line, time in the world around it would appear to be stopped--the photon would see an infinite amount of time between successive ticks of a clock moving slower than the speed of light. Also, in general relativity someone outside the event horizon of a black hole will see time running slower and slower for objects approaching the horizon, although they'll never be completely frozen. And in discussions of time travel one concept sometimes discussed is an idealized infinitely long, extremely dense and rapidly rotating cylinder known as a Tipler cylinder, which according to the laws of general relativity would allow an object approaching it closely enough to travel back in time; I remember reading somewhere that there would also be a "null zone" around such a cylinder in which an object could remain indefinitely while no time passed in the external universe. But the properties of a Tipler cylinder were very idealized (infinite length, infinitely old) and it's not known whether either the backwards time travel zone or the null zone would exist for a more realistic cylinder of finite length and age.