Time - how can it not be constant?
Discussion
I don't think I'll ever understand this. For me there is the past, the present and the future. Time happens and there's no way to slow it or change it, time is always passing at the same rate. If it didn't parts of space/the universe etc could die out/die of old age whilst others did not. It's like me outliving my children because I am somewhere that has time moving more slowly. So would I be able to live 1 day and they live 1 year, for example all within the same time? Surely everything in one time zone would move faster or slower?
Frimley111R said:
I don't think I'll ever understand this. For me there is the past, the present and the future. Time happens and there's no way to slow it or change it, time is always passing at the same rate. If it didn't parts of space/the universe etc could die out/die of old age whilst others did not. It's like me outliving my children because I am somewhere that has time moving more slowly. So would I be able to live 1 day and they live 1 year, for example all within the same time? Surely everything in one time zone would move faster or slower?
To answer your query you can look at what happens with spacetime around a black hole.The underlying principle is that due to the curvature of the spacetime around said black hole, the distance a beam of light has to cover is greater the near it gets. Yet you as the observer in the same gravitational field would always see it as 300k km/sec, time would need to down for yourself compared to someone further away from the same gravitational field as one would expect due to the time/distance relationship of speed.
Frimley111R said:
I don't think I'll ever understand this. For me there is the past, the present and the future. Time happens and there's no way to slow it or change it, time is always passing at the same rate. If it didn't parts of space/the universe etc could die out/die of old age whilst others did not. It's like me outliving my children because I am somewhere that has time moving more slowly. So would I be able to live 1 day and they live 1 year, for example all within the same time? Surely everything in one time zone would move faster or slower?
I'm afraid so. Orbit the earth fast enough for what seems like 10 years to you and everyone on earth will be dead. Google "light clock on a train". That explains it well.Frimley111R said:
For me there is the past, the present and the future.
This is what makes it's so hard to comprehend. Actually, there isn't any difference between the past present and future. All are moments that coexist and it is the conscious experience of sequencing one moment to the next which we perceive as the passage of time. Hence time is relative to the observer and can appear to speed up or slow down depending on their speed of motion or the magnitude of gravitational force experienced. Time is essentially an illusionThis documentary on youtube tries to explain it in laymen terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTTCqnEnz6g
Edited by DE1975 on Tuesday 3rd April 16:26
According to Carlo Rovelli, in his recent book Reality Is Not What It Seems, Time doesn't exist.
"But even this notion of a localised time no longer works when we take the quantum nature of the gravitational field into account. Quantum events are no longer ordered by the passage of time at the Planck scale. Time, in a sense, ceases to exist.
What does it mean to say that time does not exist? First, the absence of the variable time from the fundamental equations does not imply that everything is immobile and that change does not happen. On the contrary, it means that change is ubiquitous. Only: elementary processes cannot be ordered along a common succession of instants".
Extract from here:
http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/carlo-rovelli-time...
I can honestly say this book had more of an effect on my way of thinking than A Brief of History of Time did when I was a kid. It really is brilliant. If it was written in English first (rather than translated from Italian), it would have been a huge bestseller. In fact if he was English speaking, he would be a household name, like he is in Italy!
"But even this notion of a localised time no longer works when we take the quantum nature of the gravitational field into account. Quantum events are no longer ordered by the passage of time at the Planck scale. Time, in a sense, ceases to exist.
What does it mean to say that time does not exist? First, the absence of the variable time from the fundamental equations does not imply that everything is immobile and that change does not happen. On the contrary, it means that change is ubiquitous. Only: elementary processes cannot be ordered along a common succession of instants".
Extract from here:
http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/carlo-rovelli-time...
I can honestly say this book had more of an effect on my way of thinking than A Brief of History of Time did when I was a kid. It really is brilliant. If it was written in English first (rather than translated from Italian), it would have been a huge bestseller. In fact if he was English speaking, he would be a household name, like he is in Italy!
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