23 thoughts on “Something on time”

  1. klhwriting says:
    June 14, 2017 at 14:39

    Thanks for this. I found it quite a great read.

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  2. renudepride says:
    June 14, 2017 at 17:50

    Good choice, my Kenyan brother, but far too deep for my brain on a summer morning. He lost me somewhere between H.G. Wells and Dr. Who. Perhaps I’m just time-travel weary? Naked hugs!

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  3. inspiredbythedivine1 says:
    June 14, 2017 at 19:30

    Excellent read, my friend. Time and time travel are fascinating topics. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to hop through a worm hole and see me some dinosaurs!

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  4. Robert A. Vella says:
    June 15, 2017 at 00:14

    Fascinating topic. Years ago in college, a three-dimensional analogue to four-dimensional spacetime (i.e. special and general relativity) was presented. It was an illustration of a skyscraper frame having an infinite number of floors. Each floor represented the same physical space as all the other floors, but at a different position in time. In one corner of the building, there was a flight of stairs which people could walk up to the next floor, but not down to the lower floor. In the opposite corner, there was an elevator which people could take to any floor they chose; however, if they went to a lower floor, they would arrive at their chosen floor in an identical but duplicate skyscraper with different occupants, furniture, and activities than that which had existed in the original.

    From the perspective of an outsider observer, a person walking from one side of a floor to the other side would appear simultaneously on multiple floors but at different positions on each. From this perspective, the multiple iterations of the observed person would transect a diagonal line through the skyscraper. This represents the four-dimensionality of spacetime.

    The flight of stairs represents forward travel through time detailed in Einstein’s special relativity.

    The elevator represents travel through time using a wormhole as theorized in Einstein’s general relativity; and, taking the elevator down to a lower level represents backwards time travel – which accommodates the perplexities of the Grandfather Paradox since the traveler would arrive in a parallel universe.

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  5. Swarn Gill says:
    June 15, 2017 at 16:08

    It’s interesting stuff indeed. The fact that theory right now says we should be able to go in the opposite direction, probably just means our theory is incomplete and that we will find a reason why this isn’t possible sometime in the future. I do agree with the article in that it just seems if it were possible to visit the past this would just cause giant chaotic messes in the universe.

    I watched an interested video about time hosted by physicist Brian Greene and he did a pretty good job of explaining spacetime and that all points in time, just like all points in space already exist. And that seems sensible. If our universe is existence and it’s expanding then all of space has always existed…it’s just stretching…and if space and time are intimately connected then it makes sense that all of time has also always existed. It’s a bit of a mind fuck sure…but just like you can’t be everywhere at once, it makes sense that you just can’t visit every time. In fact in many ways there is no place you can go in the universe that is exactly the same as it is at this moment. By the time you get to that spot in space it is fundamentally different. Objects with gravitation are a bit further away, energy emissions to that spot have changed, regardless of how infinitesimally small those changes may be. The nature of space is constantly changing, so in some ways it seems that there are points in space that cannot be visited as far as they exist in this moment. Coordinate systems are also an invention for our navigation, but if we were to extend a coordinate system to the whole universe, assuming we could even know it’s shape…that grid would constantly be expanding, and no point could be visited and it be the same point when you left for the journey. It just seems that the way we think about space and time is so narrow given our evolutionary needs to really understand space and time over very short time spans and over very short distances, that wrapping our heads around it…even for very intelligent people is no easy task. The fact that we have gotten as far as we have is actually really impressive.

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  6. Swarn Gill says:
    June 15, 2017 at 16:20

    By the way, this is a subject I am very fascinated by. I teach a course at our university on time. It is more of a scientific history course looking at both the history in our ability to measure time, and also a history in our understanding of the vastness of time. I find the journey to actually be a remarkable one. In school it seems we spend a lot of time learning about explorers and how they discovered different parts of the Earth, and in astronomy we will learn about, once again, the exploration of space through the telescope…but we never learn about the exploration of time. Not surprisingly both those journey are connected. The exploration of the earth required good time keeping. Our system for measuring time is actually derived from the coordinate system used by Babylonians on their maps as they used a hexigesimal numbering system. Minutes and seconds were defined by them spatially and because those maps were the basis for Greek maps and sadly Greek maps were used by European explorers (Ptolemy was as I’m sure you know wrong about the size of the Earth), minutes and seconds become part of the way we measure time as well.

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    • makagutu says:
      June 16, 2017 at 10:43

      That must be an interesting course and your students must be a lucky lot. You display a lot of passion in whatever you put yourself into

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      • Swarn Gill says:
        June 16, 2017 at 14:18

        Thanks mak. 🙂 I am not sure how lucky they feel. I still make them do work. lol But I’d like to think it’s fun work. One of the things I do is to have them devise a new clock that perhaps matches how humans perceive or experience time. There have been some creative answers. Also some less than creative ones. lol

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