Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Saturday, February 04, 2012

Thoughts on Time: Greatly-Compressed Version

The "-time" component of spacetime is just the prosaic speedup or* slowdown effects on physical processes that are under the influence of strong gravity, velocity, or acceleration. These effects are extremely straightforward and can be calculated quite easily, with reliability and precision. Nothing mysterious about it: you push a mass to half the speed of light, every process in that mass slows down, to a known degree, right down to the subatomic level.

Time slows down? Fuck no. There's no such thing. "Time." Sheesh.

You took a clock, and you slowed it down.

Every atom in the universe is a clock.

*slowdown, really, but it could look like a speedup to you depending on your coordinate system.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Is this what we perceive (perhaps on a very basic level) on the interstate or some other roadway when someone's travelling so fast, it nearly appears as those he's passing seem to be sitting still, or at least much slower than they really are? Or am I observing some other property at work?

dogimo said...

I was trying to cut it down from previous longer-winded versions.

What your talking about sounds like all motion being relative to one's own "coordinate system"? - the idea that there's no "fixed" (privileged) point of reference against which motion can be measured - that whether an object is in motion depends wholly on the point of view of the observer?

Which I buy 100%! And it's true I can't pretend to fully understand how the truth of relative motion can be reconciled with physicist's claims that the speed of light is absolute. But it seems clear that the closer an object's velocity approaches the speed of light, the more that mass's physical processes slow down.

Basically what I'm talking about is that all the effects that physicists call time are just measurements of extreme velocity's (or gravity's or acceleration's) slowdown effect on physical properties such as electrons and stuff pinging around.