Tuesday, October 12
What About our Future?
Next Tuesday is off in the future. It hasn't happened yet, and you can't say what it's going to look like. Maybe it will be like today. No big deal. But maybe you'll get hit by a falling meteor on Monday and be in the intensive care ward. Bummer. Amsterdam's Central Station, however, exists now. It's just over the Atlantic Ocean, and even as you read these words people are there, scurrying to get their trains or milling about buying weird Dutch fast food (try the greasy fried rice balls ... yum!).
So Amsterdam Central Station already exists. It's just at a different point in space. But next Tuesday, which is at a different point in time, doesn't exist.
What is up with that?
For physicists like myself, this question of the difference between space and time is rock bottom, fundamental, super important. We can't really do physics without starting with some kind of theory of space and of time and of their relationship.
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Newton's giant leap forward, 400 years ago, was to think about space and time as two totally separate domains. Space was the unchanging stage on which the drama of the world played out. Time was a river that flowed at an unchanging rate through every point on that cosmic change.
The power of Newton's conception changed the world, opening the floodgate for the mechanical era and the Industrial Revolution. There was only one small problem with this idea of a separate, absolute space and time.
It was wrong.
Of Albert Einstein's many great achievements, his most profound might be the recognition that space (the location of Amsterdam Central Station) and time (the location of next Tuesday) cannot be so easily separated. And that is why next Tuesday may already exist in the same way as Amsterdam's Central Station does.
Let me tell you about your "world line."
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the drama of the world is "played" out not on the 3-D stage of space with time acting as an unchanging metronome. Instead, reality is composed of a four-dimensional space-time. There are three dimensions of space: left/right, forward/back, up/down. And there is one dimension of time: past/future. Just as every location on the surface of the Earth already exists in space, every event that has ever happened and ever will happen already exists in space-time.
To see how freaky this idea really gets, let's consider your life for a moment. TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS CONCEPT, CLICK HERE...
Saturday, May 15
Time's Mistress
Monday, November 9
TIME: Past - Present - Future
The breeze that blows by... comes and goes but as it touches our bodies is all we know of its existence other than what we may observe but where it came from has disappeared into our past never to be seen again so we do not know for sure if the conditions that brought the breeze to us still there... or perhaps the past goes into some kind of holding dimension.
Using telescopes we can see where space came from and where it is going but that ability stops as we observe the life we are living. There will always be cars behind us on the interstate but we are all moving forward at the same relative time and even though we see a landscape behind us as we drive by, the conditions of that landscape are different than when we were just there... just as every millisecond of our present is different so too is every millisecond of our past.
SO... again... where does our past go and that it goes so fast we cannot return?
A jet stream is a visual reminder and the actual past of a fast moving aircraft as it moves into its future pausing less than a nanosecond in its present; however, the physical aircraft's past is never seen as if it never been there in the first place yet we see its reminder as it floats behind eventually dissipating.
Grave Stones are a reminder of someone's past but that is not exactly what I am talking about... I want to know where our immediate past goes when we are still alive always moving into our future... this is the question that bothers me and to which there is no easy reply and only speculative proof and our existence in our future that it actually happened at all or why we can never return.
Thursday, October 22
Living in the PRESENT
However, in my case, I have no such memories...
- I remember not my early childhood or adolescence
- I have vague memories of my deceased parents
- I remember only bits and pieces of high school and college
- I remember almost nothing of my time in the military
- I remember fragments of my working career
Monday, October 19
A BIG Think
In the block universe, there is no "now" or present. All moments that exist are just relative to each other within the three spacial dimensions and one time dimension. Your sense of the present is just reflecting where in the block universe you are at that instance. The "past" is just a slice of the universe at an earlier location while the "future" is at a later location.
Block Universe diagram. Credit: ABC Science |