Armchair physics - What's the point of questioning the reality of Time?

Science and Technology
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(Okay my bad, let me try that again)

 

It’s ironic, there seem to be lots of people who like speculating about time being something that people created, etc, etc.

It occurred to me this morning that if we think about what makes us different from other highly evolved animals, is our sense of time. In animals we have found aspects of every human impulse, the entire spectrum of emotions that humans feel makes them special - all have been found, in degrees, in other animals.

Sure we have the greatest concentration and use of emotions, but that aside, it’s all part of life, the existential background of mammals and other branches of life.

What humans have is Deep Memory, which depends of a sense of time, along with memory. Animals have utilitarian memory imprints, where the human memory and emotional spectrum takes our memory and sense of time passing took hominids way beyond utilitarian memory.

So now we’ve come full circle and some people want to deny time.

 

Though there isn’t a single aspects of anything we know, that isn’t rushing forward in time. That is what I call disconnected from physical reality. But so many love it. Playing within their mindscapes, rather than thinking of the reality we exist within - that would be our life sustaining Earth. Do mathematicians ever spend any time out in the real world?

Why are people so into ignoring reality and feeling all uppity by spending endless hours on speculation, that will never have a utility, but make them feel smart?

 

What does one get from questioning the most fundamental constraints of our physical reality.

 

That’s why I think it’s so important for people to stop and recognize physical reality and evolution on Earth for what it is, and the amazing achievements of science these past few centuries. When are we going to devote some time into absorbing all we’ve been taught?

To actually learn enough not to be bowled over by every smooth talking taker.

So many intellectual predators and parasites out there. I never really thought about it that way, but this Hoffman book and related reading has been quite the mind bender for a simple Earth Centrist, like me, who sees everything through the eyes of evolution itself, rather than fancy formulas that a private club of too smart for their own good intellects can conjure. But what a racket, if you got the brains to keep up. {It’s been bizarre how parts of CAR triggers 80s hitchhiking memories. All the stories people told me, from inside seemed solid as fish bowl; but step outside, think about it a little and more like a spaghetti strainer. Even some scientists and physicists who loved talking to someone who was actually interested and seemed capable of following their story. Ah, the beauty of youth, I was that kind of clean all-American looking kid, got lots of breaks. The old man I am now, would be left to freeze. I hear it’s not the worst way to go. :slight_smile: }

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To forestall any misunderstanding.

 

“stories people told me …”

were different from,

“stories scientists, etc, would talk about …”

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What does one get from questioning the most fundamental constraints of our physical reality. -- CC
I don't think there is a lot of money it. It seems you are suggesting it's some sort of threat to our psyche though, which I'm not seeing.

Questioning time is mainly useful when considering beginnings and endings of our physical reality and the boundaries of it. It’s pretty much all speculation, and can be kept separate from any discussion about the evolution of psychology.

 

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Questioning ‘time’ serves no practical purpose. It is required in a small part of academia, but until someone uses that knowledge to invent something useful, it’s nothing more than an esoteric topic that is the source of angst, entertainment and derision amongst us commoners.

It’s interesting on it’s surface but getting deep into it is way way too hard for a guy like me. So I might read a book or watch a video that mentions it, but I don’t ever think about it on my own time.

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I question time, but I think what I’m doing is very different than what you’re talking about. I do it for a better understanding of the universe. If I am correct in my questioning of time it doesn’t break reality or make us all just brains in a jar hooked up to a computer somewhere. It simply makes time travel impossible.

To be clear, when I say I “question time” I am not questioning the validity of any observation. I’m simply questioning the conclusion on what the explanation tells us. So far as I know my ideas on time and the universe don’t change any of the math (except the theoretical stuff which hasn’t been proved), they simply provide an alternative explanation for the observation and eliminate some of the crazier stuff in physics, like time travel, wormholes, white holes, etc. All the really fun sci-fi stuff which, as far as we can tell, doesn’t really happen in the universe. I also seek to answer some unanswered questions about the universe, such as what is fueling the expansion of the universe, why that expansion seems to be increasing, what is the nature of gravity and why an object entering orbit with the rotation of a body will be traveling at a slightly lower final speed than an object entering orbit against the rotation of that body on an identical trajectory.

So I don’t think that’s anything like what you’re talking about. I’m not denying reality or saying I know more about physics than physicists or anything. I just have a simpler explanation for some of the observations than are currently accepted in physics. The science, except the really wacky stuff which, so far as we can tell, only exists in the results of mathematical quagmires which result from the current explanations, all remains exactly the same.

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"...an object entering orbit with the rotation of a body will be traveling at a slightly lower final speed than an object entering orbit against the rotation of that body on an identical trajectory."
Really? That's cool.

 

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Just thinking of that orbit/trajectory/speed thing:

Is it because the closer to a body something orbits the faster it has to move, so something entering an orbit “against the grain” will fall closer before settling into an orbit and therefore be moving faster in the end?

[I freely admit that my thoughts might be a zillion miles away from being intelligent, so please don’t be too harsh when critiquing them.]

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Last I knew we had no idea. That’s one of the things my ideas on time and space sought to answer. But actually, now that I think about it, even current understanding of physics probably actually has an answer for that, just nobody thought about it before. So here is my explanation, which may be further from reality than yours.

Current gravity theory posits the graviton, some particle which is the cause for gravity, but which has not yet been detected. My idea does away with the graviton, but we’ll stick with tried-and-true physics for now. I don’t know a whole lot about the graviton, but it’s something along the lines that when it collides with matter rather than exerting a push as most particles do, it exerts the opposite force. DO NOT take that as fact. I’m half guessing here. As I said, I don’t know a lot about the graviton.

But, with that in mind there is an easy possibly explanation for this. Gravitons don’t just emanate out in straight lines from a body, they are “thrown off” in the direction of spin. So if you enter with the rotation, fewer graviton impacts, less speed. Enter against the rotation, more graviton impacts, more speed.

That seems simplistic enough, but do keep in mind science did not have an explanation for this phenomena the last I knew. The likelihood of me coming up with a very simple explanation for this which all physicists everywhere missed are very, very slim. This is pure speculation.

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Do you have a website that explains the problem? I did a search for one and didn’t find anything like what you are talking about (it’s mostly websites about our moon and other more basic stuff.)

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I don’t even remember where I heard about it, though I click on just about every article I ever see about science and watch space documentaries whenever I find something interesting. I only heard about it once years ago. The closest I could find is the Flyby Anomaly, in which unexpected speed increases have been detected in gravity assist speed increases. It looks like that is currently believed to have something to do with the rotation of the Earth, which fits in nicely with what I was saying, so long as the anomalous speed increase is only detected when the flyby is on the “against the rotation” side of the planet.

Though I can’t remember exactly where I heard this and cannot find this, precisely, now, this was one of the problems I was trying to resolve by offering a different explanation to account for observations. When I came up with my current idea, which I’m not going to bore you with, I thought of a “test” for it which, if it failed, would mean I was completely wrong. I postulated that if I was correct in my thinking then gravitational lensing around massive single bodies would be more pronounced on the side rotating away from the viewer, less pronounced on the side rotating toward the viewer and somewhere in between in equal amounts near the rotational poles. When I did a search to see if that was correct I did find that was true. So my idea (I’m not a scientist, so it’s not a “theory” or even an “hypothesis” because I am not qualified to theorize or hypothesize) did pass the one test I thought of which I could actually check for. Although what I found did only mention that it was more pronounced on the side rotating away from us. It did not mention being less pronounced on the opposite side and somewhere in between the two at the poles, which should have equal lensing effects.

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I don’t think there is a lot of money it. It seems you are suggesting it’s some sort of threat to our psyche though, which I’m not seeing.
It's more like I see it as a threat to our national psyche.

Now where would I get that idea from?

Anyone else around here notice the general disconnect from reality that’s effecting most of this country, right wing worst, but the left wing is home to some pretty insanely disconnected stuff also.

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Well that took an interesting turn. There is hope for a discussion forum, it can actually happen. :- )

 

Freak’n fascinating I’d never hear that about entering orbits and rotational speed. I like W’s mind experiment too.

All this reminded me of something fascinating I’d heard recently, quite different, but in a weird way sort of similar.

Why hot water might freeze faster than cold water.

A new experiment hints at how hot water can freeze faster than cold

By Emily Conover

AUGUST 7, 2020

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/physics-new-experiment-hot-water-freeze-faster-cold-mpemba-effect

…

It might seem sensible to assume that a lower starting temperature would provide an insurmountable head start. In a straightforward race down the thermometer, the hot object would first have to reach the original temperature of the warm object, suggesting that a higher temperature could only add to the cooling time.

But in certain cases, that simple logic is wrong — specifically, for systems that are not in a state of thermal equilibrium, in which all parts have reached an even temperature. For such a system, “its behavior is no longer characterized just by a temperature,” Bechhoefer says. The material’s behavior is too complicated for a single number to describe it. As the beads cooled, they weren’t in thermal equilibrium, meaning their locations in the potential energy landscape weren’t distributed in a manner that would allow a single temperature to describe them.

For such systems, rather than a direct path from hot to cold, there can be multiple paths to chilliness allowing for potential shortcuts. For the beads, depending on the shape of the landscape, starting at a higher temperature meant they could more easily rearrange themselves into a configuration that matched a lower temperature. It’s like how a hiker might arrive at a destination more quickly by starting farther away, if that starting point allows the hiker to avoid an arduous climb over a mountain.

Lu and physicist Oren Raz had previously predicted that such cooling shortcuts were possible. “It’s really nice to see that it actually works,” says Raz, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. But, he notes, “we don’t know whether this is the effect in water or not.” …

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Widdershins: "Although what I found did only mention that it was more pronounced on the side rotating away from us. It did not mention being less pronounced on the opposite side"
I'll forgive you if you take the fact it's more pronounced on one side to mean it's less pronounced on the other side. Wouldn't it almost have to be?

Do we know enough about the difference in final speed between the two objects for someone to create a computer model of it? Or is it all based on measurements, meaning we can’t model because we don’t know enough about it to create formulas that describe it?

I wonder if the difference in speeds is more than a tiny fraction of a percent and how it is influenced by the mass/velocity/rotation/etc. of the objects involved.

Don’t worry Widdershins, no answers are required. These are all rhetorical questions and thinking out loud. If you find something online, you can link to it, but I don’t expect a detailed response.

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I’ll forgive you if you take the fact it’s more pronounced on one side to mean it’s less pronounced on the other side. Wouldn’t it almost have to be?
Of course. But there's more to it than that. Gravitational lensing caused by a body not rotating has an equal magnification factor on each side. We'll call that factor "1". So what I surmised, and I'm making up the numbers here, is that the magnification on the side rotating away from us would be, say, 1.1, the magnification factor on the side rotating toward us would be .9 and the magnification factor on the scales would be the expected 1. So yeah, if the one side is increased at 1.1 then the opposite side would obviously be less than 1.1, but my idea says it should be less than 1. It should actually be a gradient magnification based on the rotational speed of the rotation of the surface of the body (assuming equal mass distribution) at a given longitude. The magnification difference would be most pronounced at the equator, begin to "normalize" slowly and then normalize much more quickly as you approach the poles, where it would be the same magnification it would be if the body were not rotating, which should be the same magnification you would see on all sides if you were directly facing one of the poles.
Do we know enough about the difference in final speed between the two objects for someone to create a computer model of it? Or is it all based on measurements, meaning we can’t model because we don’t know enough about it to create formulas that describe it?
Given that there is no theory yet as to what's causing it there would be no way to model it. I suppose it could be modeled based on my thoughts to see if my ideas pan out, but that's beyond my abilities. Then the model could be compared to actual values to see if the model matches observation.

And I will throw this out there just because I like this conversation. It is absolutely possible that time does not exist, but none of our observations, including that time slows at faster speeds, are wrong.

Imagine this. We have a mass moving through space at a given speed, let’s say a human body holding a wind-up watch in one hand and an atomic clock in the other. This mass is made up of molecules. These molecules interact with each other countless times in the blink of an eye, doing a little dance, as it were. Chemical reactions in the brain allow us to observe our two clocks and interpret what we are seeing. The movement of molecules allows the spring on our wind-up clock to unwind and tick away the seconds. Molecules, being matter, may move at any speed except the speed of light.

Now, those molecules are made up of atoms. Those atoms have their own interactions with each other and do their own little dance, allowing molecules to form. Here, too, they can interact with each other to produce chemical reactions. And these atoms decay at a given rate (within the same time frame) which allows us to measure time much more precisely.

Further down the line, these atoms are made up of subatomic particles. You have electrons, protons and neutrons, each doing their own little dance. They interact with each other allowing atoms to form. And it is this interaction which dictates the decay rate of nuclear material. And at this same level we have a whole bunch of other particles, such as bosons and photons. These get a little weird and I’m not entirely familiar with the structure here, but an electron can absorb a photon, becoming a higher energy electron, or emit a photon, becoming a lower energy electron. And some of these, such as the photon, move at the speed of light. The point is that these other particles also do their own little dance.

Further down from that you have quarks, which all these other particles are made of each doing their own little dance with each other to form subatomic particles. I know less about them.

And finally (for now) we have the 12 known fields in the universe (not counting gravity) which these quarks are made of, doing their own little dance to make up quarks.

Now, after all of that we can look at how time may be an illusion, but still look like a reality. We know that matter moves at any speed except the speed of light and we know that energy moves at the speed of light. Because we can only really “do physics” from a perspective of relativity we fail to realize that there is an actual change in speed. All of these little dances that all of this “stuff” of the universe does, combined with its movement through space, cannot exceed the speed of light. That means the faster you propel your mass through the universe, the slower these little dances have to go to keep from going faster than the speed of light. When the dances go slower, the interactions between these things is slower. Chemical reactions slow down, springs unwind slower, radioactive elements decay slower because it is these interactions between the stuff of the universe at every level which sets the rate at which these things happen. Increase the speed the overall mass is traveling through space and the dances decrease in speed to match.

This suggests a “universal speed”, a speed at which all things in the universe are traveling at all times on the basest level (the fields that make up everything). The fields are always moving at this universal speed and they can move at no other speed. That speed is slightly faster than the speed of light (if it were not then a photon, moving at the speed of light, could not exist because the dance the fields ultimately do to form the photon would cease and the photon would collapse). At the basest level of the universe these fields always move at this universal speed. These fields make up everything which makes up everything which makes up everything which makes up you. So what you increase your speed in a single direction through space you are really changing the directional momentum of these fields. The sum total of the speed of the fields must be the universal speed. So if you go faster, they seem to slow down, causing what we experience as time dilation.

I don’t think I explained that well, so if you’re not getting it let me know and I’ll try to come up with a decent analogy when I have more time.

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Widdershins: "I don’t think I explained that well, so if you’re not getting it let me know and I’ll try to come up with a decent analogy when I have more time."
You explained it very well. [You're writing is the easiest to understand in these forums. Some other people's posts are a chore to wade through.] Basically there's a Universal Speed that's faster than the speed of light at which everything moves and the motions of particles automatically adjust to keep that speed constant.

This brings up another question:

Temperature affects the vibrational speed of molecules and therefore the speed of the fundamental particles they are made out of. How does your theory explain the conservation of this Universal Speed if two objects of different temperatures approach the speed of light? Would objects at absolute zero make it past the speed of light to reach the Universal Speed before going ‘poof’ while hotter objects go ‘poof’ at slower and slower speeds the hotter they are?

(As I wrote that question I was thinking that I am missing something basic and should know the answer. But it’s early and my brain is still waking up so I can’t think what it is.)

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more coffee!

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Apparently I did much better that I thought. Except it’s not a theory. It’s an idea. I’m not qualified to create a theory. I don’t even know enough about the subject to be able to check if there are any flaws in it, such as the potential flaw you brought up. I only know enough about the subject to imagine some test for it, and the one I imagined is not actually for the “time” portion of my idea.

But I have imagined a possible solution to this which essentially doesn’t change anything. Two objects at different temperatures would “poof” at the same time. This is because the orbital momentum of the various dances, the direction of travel of the subatomic and smaller movement, would experience an adjustment in alignment as speed increased. We’ll look at it in a much more simplistic way than is realistic just to explain the point.

Imagine the orbit of an electron at a 45 degree angle to the direction of movement. As the orbit rounded the curve and started going with the direction of travel it would slow down. As it rounded the other curve to go away from the direction of travel it would speed up. This could potentially have the effect of exerting a force on the orbit of the electron, pushing it toward equilibrium, which would be an orbit exactly 90 degrees (at very high speeds) from the direction of travel at which point it would be rotating at a constant speed.

But besides that faster vibration is not the same as faster speed. Vibration is a net zero speed, regardless of direction. As much as it moves one direction it moves back the other direction. Imagine playing with a paddle ball in a car. Yes, sometimes the ball is going faster than the car, but sometimes it is going slower than the car. The net speed difference is zero, meaning the ball is essentially traveling the same speed as the car. If the trip is an hour long it doesn’t matter how fast you can get the ball going or if it sits still in the seat beside you, the ball will still get to the destination in the same amount of time. Like that, only with the ball moving forward much more slowly than normal and moving backward much more quickly than normal.

Interestingly enough this should actually give us a method of determining our exact speed and direction through space. Time dilation in general, I mean, not my idea. Firing 3 laser beams operating on a given wavelength in 3 different directions at 90 degree angles to each other and measuring the red shift of each should give us a kind of “universal speedometer”, telling us our non-relative speed and direction of travel through space at any given moment. Assuming we can be precise enough with the intended wavelength and our measurements. This would also allow us to easily calculate our current “time frame”. If this would actually work it wouldn’t matter whether relativity is the reality or my idea is. As I said, every “normal” thing we observe is completely unchanged by my idea. All the math is the same. It’s not actually any new science at all. It’s just a different way of interpreting the observations.

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Gravitational lensing caused by a body not rotating has an equal magnification factor on each side.
Yeah but, does such an object exist?
It is absolutely possible that time does not exist, but none of our observations, including that time slows at faster speeds, are wrong. ...

 

… And finally (for now) we have the 12 known fields in the universe (not counting gravity) which these quarks are made of, doing their own little dance to make up quarks.

Now, after all of that we can look at how time may be an illusion, but still look like a reality. We know that matter moves at any speed except the speed of light and we know that energy moves at the speed of light. …


 

... Chemical reactions slow down, springs unwind slower, radioactive elements decay slower because it is these interactions between the stuff of the universe at every level which sets the rate at which these things happen. Increase the speed the overall mass is traveling through space and the dances decrease in speed to match.

This suggests a “universal speed”, a speed at which all things in the universe are traveling at all times on the basest level (the fields that make up everything). …


I confused as to how you get from differences in speeds to “absolutely possible that time does not exist” -

As for the two clock mind experiment, I’m thinking heck you could look at every atom, perhaps even every subatomic units, as a clock in itself, . . . or? And all of them are ticking.

Guess we could go back to the original supposition about a planet that doesn’t rotate. Does such a thing even exist? In either realm for that matter, excepting an idealized absolute zero.

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“Vibration is a net zero speed, regardless of direction.”

But only over exact multiples of the frequency. The ball bouncing off of the paddle is moving a net zero distance in relation to a part of the car only if you measure the distance when the ball is at exactly the same point in it’s path. Same as if you drive the car around the block over and over at the same speed and measure the distance at time intervals that match it’s ‘frequency’.

There is motion so there is speed… no?

Analogies are great but are tough when talking about subatomic things. Intuition goes out the window so I don’t know how accurate these comparisons are. Unfortunately we only have experience at our scale, so there’s no alternative.

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@citizenschallengev3

more coffee!

There’s coffee in that nebula!