Time
The existence of time is something that has puzzled man for millenia,
yet for the average man in his daily doings time is thought of only as the one
thing that constantly gets away from him. The average Joe knows time has been
around since the beginning of time and it will be around till the end of time,
so why would you want to know what existed before time, or what is going to exist
after time. The scientific mind knows that to manipulate something you first have
to know if it is possible to manipulate it. To know if it is manipulable one
must first understand the basic properties of it. Then once you have a theory
that says this is how the thing works, one must come up with a means to control
it.
As far as time is concerned, even today we are just coming
to grips with some of its properties after studying it since man had his first
thought. Some of the questions a scientist might be trying to answer are ‘Can
it travel faster or slower? Can it reverse, can it stop?’ In modern times these
are the types of questions scientist have been trying to answer and a big part
of their studies rest on Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Of course for
the guy holding a conversation in a bar, mentioning Special theory of
relativity will only serve to clear your friends from your table, but for the
scientist everything Einstein had to say on the matter of space and time, and
space-time has been the most interesting thing to happen in cosmology and
particle physics for some time.
Thanks to Einstein and his genius we are marginally closer
to understanding how time works and have come up with some interesting theories
about how one might manipulate it, but we are no closer to understanding the
reason for its existence as we are to understanding our own existence. Einstein’s
theory of relativity does not come close to explaining either of those things.
It's relative, or is it?
Relativity
is a word that needs to be constantly added when one talks about time, because
a human’s perspective to time and the existence of it is slightly different to
that of a fly. A fly might live only a month, but during that time in relative
terms the fly has lived a whole life. Of course the fly might celebrate its
birthday on a daily basis because it only has thirty of them, but for the fly,
this all appears quite normal, and who are we to think that the fly does not think
about such subjects as time. Perhaps the fly sees us big slow moving giant
objects and wonders if we are capable of conceiving time since we move so
slowly, and perhaps the fly might wonder how we manage to live for thousands of
fly years and not be all knowing on all matters. Its all relative to who, what and where you are.
Most people would think that we have
better things to be studying than sitting around thinking about the creation,
existence and the future of time. A lot of Greek and Romans would have thought
the same thing when philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were discussing
what made up the components of air; the nothing that surrounds us, the same as
physicists today are investigating the nothing that makes up space.
Time is the
ultimate study, for if we can understand it maybe we can manipulate it. If it
is possible to manipulate it maybe it is possible to traverse around it like a
wormhole might cut through the universe by folding space to eliminate the
distance between two points, maybe the same applies for time. We already travel
through time, the same as we travel through space. But like crawling through a
smoke filled room we are oblivious to the fact that on every part of the
planet, time moves at different rates. We know that gravity affects time. We know that in the acreccion disk time slows and the math also suggest that it might even stop in the singularity. We know a lot about time but we can't sense its movement when it moves slowly or fast.
Einstein opened our eyes to time and
space and how the two are interwoven like fine silk threads in a sheet. Through
his simple mathematical equation E=MC2 he opened the eyes of many
smart minds and gave them a platform to investigate time. Einstein’s first
thought on time came to him after a spell in his paying job as a patents office clerk. All the patents coming his way were for keeping time in remote locations; there were many. It is interesting to wonder what the world would be like today if we even used one of the more bizarre ones and thought of it as normal today.
The measure of it.
The universe is our clock, the
earth revolves around the sun and spins on its axis, and this is our concept of
time; a single day and night is one of 365 that make the four seasons a year.
The sun has a
fairly big gravitational field that causes the earth to spin around it. If a human were to spend some time closer to
the surface of the sun, assuming he was not burnt to a crisp, then the human
would actually live longer. Now to confuse matters even a little more, the
special theory of relativity also says that speed has something to do with the
speed of time. So as we revolve around the sun we are traveling at the speed of
the earth traveling through space (217km/s), but if the earth were traveling at twice the
speed we would be in fact traveling through space faster so in fact living
faster lives. This is where perspective comes into it.
Our lives get faster yes
but we would not know it, from our perspective, and from the perspective of
everything we see, time would not change, we still would be traveling around
the sun, with everything around us once a year, and we would still wake up to the
sun rising every morning, even our watches would spin faster, guided by the
same fundamental aspects of space-time. Every minute in the ticking clock would
still be broken down into sixty parts. Every second would still feel like a
second; you could still say “One Mississippi” in the second, so the question is, has anything changed?
The answer is 'No'. Nothing has changed from our perspective. If the sun is moving twice as fast around the sun then it is still travelling at 217 kilometers per second. Since the second is no longer the same unit of measure the speed as measured by the second is still the same.
We need to find another way to measure time. Astrophysics uses the quasar to measure time. The quasar is a neutron star that is spinning very fast and with a wobble As the energy shoots out of its poles and that energy passes us, like a lighthouse light, we can measure the time between wobbles. The problem they find is that the quasars in the universe are actually slowing down. So this could mean that what we all think we sense (time is speeding up) might actually be happening.
We need to find another way to measure time. Astrophysics uses the quasar to measure time. The quasar is a neutron star that is spinning very fast and with a wobble As the energy shoots out of its poles and that energy passes us, like a lighthouse light, we can measure the time between wobbles. The problem they find is that the quasars in the universe are actually slowing down. So this could mean that what we all think we sense (time is speeding up) might actually be happening.
