train of thought
What is speed?
On a train from krakow to wroclaw, it is about 120kph. kilometres per hour. So it is distance travelled within a fixed amount of time. Easy.
But on this train I was trying desperately to tune-out the very very $#%$ing loud German woman to my right who managed to blather on annoyingly for the whole 4 and a half hour trip, so it got metaphysical. And the ipod was deployed. And I fantasized about delivering an elbow to her face to shut her up. That bad.
Bring on the metaphysical goo.
Time slows down when things travel very close to the speed of light. So says einstein anyway. The idea being that if you (and your watch, and your atomic clock) 'experienced' 1 hour of time as you chugged along from Wakefield to Leeds in the number 110 bus at close to light speed, by the time you got into Leeds everyone in Leeds would have experienced several years of time. Some people you were going to meet for a burger might have gone home by then in disgust at your tardiness.
Which means the speed at which we experience time can vary. Those people in Leeds were able to do 3 years worth of stuff in the period demarcated by 2 events, my bus setting off from Wakefield and arriving in Leeds. Conversely, whilst on the bus I was only able to do 1 hour of stuff between those events. This is kind of weird...
I like to think of time as the 4th dimension, with an axis just like x, y and z from maths class at school. call it 'e'. I was going to call it 't', but I think it works better as an 'event axis'. You can mark on the axis the event of the bus leaving Wakefield, and the bus arriving in Leeds. Who knows what the scale is on the axis; it doesn't matter: the fundamental thing is that both I and those people in Leeds agree that my arrival in Leeds comes after my departure from Wakefield. Linear event sequence is a axiomatic property of linear time. We can also agree on when they occur, because we can define those events in terms of a rendezvous. But I experienced less time between the events than my friends in Leeds. From their perspective, I have been able to traverse 3 years worth of event separation in 1 hour.
Acceleration
So maybe time is the speed at which we travel on the event axis between events. I travelled faster, in Leeds they travelled slower. Travelling at the speed of light allowed me to accelerate on the e-axis for a while?
Observer and Observed
Another way to look at it is as a property of me, the observer. If I can move between events faster, maybe I am just 'sampling' the world at a slower rate. Like a film, my perception of motion-through-event-space ('time') depends on how fast I am shown the individual frames. If something changes so I am shown the frames faster, or maybe shown fewer frames in total, then time would appear to speed up. On the other hand, if I am shown the frames slower (but there are still fewer frames in total) then time might appear (to me) to progress as normal. I would perceive it the same as if I was shown twice as many frames at twice the speed.
Interaction
So maybe the passage of time is a product of an interaction between entities. An actor entity with potential to 'do stuff' given the opportunity, and spacetime to provide the medium. The two interact and the actor perceives the passage of time. If the properties/circumstances of either party in the interaction change, then the interaction itself will probably change.
Stuff
This suggests that spacetime is stuff to be interacted with. This makes sense to me. The idea that gravity and electromagnetics are surreal 'forces' that just work in the absence of a medium has never made sense. It's just not stuff in the normal sense; we don't know how to touch it....
Capacity
If passage of time is an interaction, it changes spacetime and observer. An interaction which does not affect both parties is no interaction at all. Just as moving (in the traditional sense) is a similar interaction (empty space becomes filled, filled space becomes empty). Is there an upper limit on the rate at which interactions can occur? If so, maybe at the speed of light there are so many 'movement interactions' taking place, there is little capacity for 'time interactions'. So less time can 'happen' at that speed...?
The wheels turn backwards
The TV shows my journey. Through the train window you can just make me out, as it travels through the pine forest. The camera pulls back a little. The train forages on, wheels turning. But what's this? - they are turning slowly backwards. A child watching the show asks her mother why the wheels turn backwards. She learns it is because the film can only capture frames tens of times a second and the wheels' rotation have a similar frequency. The observer's limitations exposed.
p.s. if u think i need help, then check out the next link. I found this after I had finished writing - decided to google... found this!.
this one seems a bit more sensible
On a train from krakow to wroclaw, it is about 120kph. kilometres per hour. So it is distance travelled within a fixed amount of time. Easy.
But on this train I was trying desperately to tune-out the very very $#%$ing loud German woman to my right who managed to blather on annoyingly for the whole 4 and a half hour trip, so it got metaphysical. And the ipod was deployed. And I fantasized about delivering an elbow to her face to shut her up. That bad.
Bring on the metaphysical goo.
Time slows down when things travel very close to the speed of light. So says einstein anyway. The idea being that if you (and your watch, and your atomic clock) 'experienced' 1 hour of time as you chugged along from Wakefield to Leeds in the number 110 bus at close to light speed, by the time you got into Leeds everyone in Leeds would have experienced several years of time. Some people you were going to meet for a burger might have gone home by then in disgust at your tardiness.
Which means the speed at which we experience time can vary. Those people in Leeds were able to do 3 years worth of stuff in the period demarcated by 2 events, my bus setting off from Wakefield and arriving in Leeds. Conversely, whilst on the bus I was only able to do 1 hour of stuff between those events. This is kind of weird...
I like to think of time as the 4th dimension, with an axis just like x, y and z from maths class at school. call it 'e'. I was going to call it 't', but I think it works better as an 'event axis'. You can mark on the axis the event of the bus leaving Wakefield, and the bus arriving in Leeds. Who knows what the scale is on the axis; it doesn't matter: the fundamental thing is that both I and those people in Leeds agree that my arrival in Leeds comes after my departure from Wakefield. Linear event sequence is a axiomatic property of linear time. We can also agree on when they occur, because we can define those events in terms of a rendezvous. But I experienced less time between the events than my friends in Leeds. From their perspective, I have been able to traverse 3 years worth of event separation in 1 hour.
Acceleration
So maybe time is the speed at which we travel on the event axis between events. I travelled faster, in Leeds they travelled slower. Travelling at the speed of light allowed me to accelerate on the e-axis for a while?
Observer and Observed
Another way to look at it is as a property of me, the observer. If I can move between events faster, maybe I am just 'sampling' the world at a slower rate. Like a film, my perception of motion-through-event-space ('time') depends on how fast I am shown the individual frames. If something changes so I am shown the frames faster, or maybe shown fewer frames in total, then time would appear to speed up. On the other hand, if I am shown the frames slower (but there are still fewer frames in total) then time might appear (to me) to progress as normal. I would perceive it the same as if I was shown twice as many frames at twice the speed.
Interaction
So maybe the passage of time is a product of an interaction between entities. An actor entity with potential to 'do stuff' given the opportunity, and spacetime to provide the medium. The two interact and the actor perceives the passage of time. If the properties/circumstances of either party in the interaction change, then the interaction itself will probably change.
Stuff
This suggests that spacetime is stuff to be interacted with. This makes sense to me. The idea that gravity and electromagnetics are surreal 'forces' that just work in the absence of a medium has never made sense. It's just not stuff in the normal sense; we don't know how to touch it....
Capacity
If passage of time is an interaction, it changes spacetime and observer. An interaction which does not affect both parties is no interaction at all. Just as moving (in the traditional sense) is a similar interaction (empty space becomes filled, filled space becomes empty). Is there an upper limit on the rate at which interactions can occur? If so, maybe at the speed of light there are so many 'movement interactions' taking place, there is little capacity for 'time interactions'. So less time can 'happen' at that speed...?
The wheels turn backwards
The TV shows my journey. Through the train window you can just make me out, as it travels through the pine forest. The camera pulls back a little. The train forages on, wheels turning. But what's this? - they are turning slowly backwards. A child watching the show asks her mother why the wheels turn backwards. She learns it is because the film can only capture frames tens of times a second and the wheels' rotation have a similar frequency. The observer's limitations exposed.
p.s. if u think i need help, then check out the next link. I found this after I had finished writing - decided to google... found this!.
this one seems a bit more sensible
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