FayeKane

> I don't know what this expanding mass is. Well never mind, then.

The fact remains that this is false: > acceleration breaks the symmetry and we can thus tell which wristwatch is correct. Because there is no "correct". Every object in the universe has it's own rate of passage of time, and if two of them happen to be the same for a while, it's only because neither one of them has moved since you last looked. As soon as one of them does move, even if it is nudged once by just a nanometer, then time is out of sync. They have different definitions of "now". The minute hand of each clock has a different "now" than the hour hand. The arrow at the tip of the minute hand experiences time slower than the part of the minute hand near the hub. This is even true of any two molecules within a single clock. They will never be at EXACTLY the same temperature; one will be at a slightly higher temperature and therefore vibrating more. The point I was making was that not only is there is no "master clock" that others may be wrong with respect to, but that the very concept of "two clocks in sync" is a platonic ideal which cannot physically exist. I posted the thread item because I thought anyone who didn't know this might go "hey wow, that's cool!", not to argue about whether it's true or not. But I guess I'm willing to discuss that too, if someone wants to.

> Faye, when you say gravitation is like refraction... I wonder... what is being bent? Is it a particle's position in 3D space or actually... the particles movement through time itself? > Could the physical acceleration force effect we perceive as 'g' be a side-effect of the time 'pressure waves' an object moves through? Mmm... possibly, but I don't think so. It wouldn't be like running into water which slows you down through the mechanical effect of pushing water molecules out of the way (even though that effect is ultimately due to the electrical bonds between atoms). It would be from whatever causes light to slow in glass, which is a completely different mechanism involving wave interference, so I *guess* that the slowdown is due to the quantum waves of mass interacting with and interfering with each other. You may be right, though. > Could it be possible that A going through the expanding time waves of other matter could affect A's own speed in in time? Again, I would imagine that's gravitational time dilation. --flk > Classical gravity is already well understood in general relativity. Why not start there as we have nearly 100 years of experience with it. We already HAVE started there. I'm just observing something I though was curious and which doesn't involve believing anything new. If you don't find it a strange coincidence that the expanding mass is coincident with the gravity wave in both position, intensity, and rate of dispersion, that's okay with me. I just wanted to point it out in case other people think it's interesting. I'm not trying to change what people believe; I'm just trying to figure out what's going on. What I personally believe is that ultimately, "bending spacetime", "space is denser near mass", and "interference with expanding mass waves" are three ways of saying the same thing. --flk

Well, that does make sense, but my understanding of the twin paradox is that the symmetry still exists, despite acceleration. I've been meaning to read more on the twin paradox exactly for that reason. I wish we had some real relativity physicists here! I sometimes read alt.sci.relativity, but it's like the wild west there, with people shooting each other, and I don't want to post there because some of the replies people get are from the certifiably crazy. -flk

The following has been known to physicists for (lemme see...) about 80 years. Einstein not only came up with this, but most importantly, he proved it mathematically. NONE of it is either thought up by me, or is my interpretation of anything. But if you didn't already know it, it's really mind-blowing, and that's why I'm writing about it. You can read all about it in this book. It's a textbook for physics grad students, but really, anyone can understand it. Yeah, a page full of nothing but equations looks intimidating, until you look closely and say "Hey, this is nothing but high school algebra, and it's all just the same simple equation written in different ways." See, when you know what's REALLY going on, you realize that there IS no such thing as "now", other than the independent "now" which is different for every single point in the universe. Even your right hand and your left hand live in different "now"s. Every one of your blood cells has a different "right now" -- you just don't notice it. But when you get the big "OMG", you see the special-relativity way of looking at things as the only reality (which it IS), and the concepts we have of everyday motion and time are really illusion, much like thinking that an elephant is a snake because all we can feel is his trunk. If all you EVER see of the elephant is his trunk then, okay, you can get away with pretending that that's what an elephant is. But it is WRONG. And so is the idea of some objective "now". If you sync a REALLY ACCURATE watch on your left wrist to a watch on your right wrist, then whichever arm you move first will show an earlier time than the other watch, no matter how slowly or how far you move it. Neither watch is "correct", because there is no such thing as "the correct time"... or even "right now", for anything other than a single mathematical point in spacetime. You don't notice it unless you're going really, really fast (like a billion miles an hour), or if you have a clock that's really, really accurate. We can't go that fast, but we have clocks that are so accurate, that if you put one in a truck (they're kind of big) and drive it across town, it will read a different time than it would have if you had left it alone. And it's not just motion. Gravity slows down time too. These same clocks will run at different rates and immediately get out of sync if you put one of them on the 3rd floor and one on the fourth floor, because gravity is SLIGHTLY stronger on the 3rd floor (it's closer to the earth). Also, there is no such thing as "over there, right now", EVER, ANYWHERE. There is only a set of points in 4D spacetime. The points are separated by a special kind of distance called an "interval". You can look at this separation as space, or you can look at things as being separated in time, or as a combination of the two. But none of these is exclusively "correct", because they all force you to see everything as sitting still in space and floating together down a river of "time". But that just isn't so. ...I mean, in case you were, like, curious about it or something.

> Gravity isn't really a tug by objects themselves in space well yes, everyone believes that. Specifically, that it's not the objects "tugging", but a distortion in spacetime. I suspect that's just another way of looking at what's going on, but not really understanding GR, I can't say very much about it. I only made it to page 26 of "The Feynman Lectures in Gravitation", when he started doing calculus on 4D tensors. > but a tug caused by their movement through time away from us. not a tug really, but the same thing that makes light bend when it goes through water or glass (or anything denser than air). It's called "refraction", and why it happens is so bizarre that for sure you'd think I was making up a crackpot theory. Feynman explains it much more eloquently than I could in his "six not so easy pieces" and in QED. But the bottom line is that waves in "free fall" (i.e. following a geodesic) behave very strangely when they interact with matter before they continue on their merry way. In particular, light is bent when it goes through a lens. All I suggested was that matter (which, at the quantum level, is really a lot of little waves, like light) does this too., and pointed out that things we already know that everyone agrees with would explain why. It's not a big deal, really, it's just that if this is NOT the case I desperately want to know that fact. Not because I care about looking foolish for proposing it, as I couldn't care less about that. But because I really, REALLY have this fear that I'll believe something that turns out not to be true. And all I really want to do before I die is understand what the hell is going on around me, because I don't. And "what's going on around me" is the universe. --flk

> My first reaction is that objects are not events. In SR they are called that, for the same reason that distances are called "intervals", that is, there is really no fundamental distinction between space and time other than their sign in the metric. > A point object does not become a sphere; I believe the interval equation says does, because the spacetime distance between the sphere and the original "point" object is zero. It looks like a point or it looks like a sphere, depending on where in spacetime you observe it from. Furthermore, it slows light passing through it, indicating it's presence. I don't think the pseudometric is "pseudo"; I think it's a legitimate metric. "An event occurring at two places at the same time?" It's just something people have chosen to ignore because it's embarrassing, like so many other things. But it clearly shows mass as being a wave (in spacetime), as opposed to something of a completely different type: an "object" which just sits there. > what would be spherical is the region of potential causality Yes, of course. But the physical object also exists as a sphere, though a "defocused" one. You might as well say that if your wife saw you through the window at your girlfriend's house, it only means you COULD have touched her, it doesn't mean you were actually there. I think the interval equation clearly implies that the energy of every mass point physically exists at it's null cone. Of course, one could object: "where is it then?" That would be problematical, were it not for gravitation. The gravity waves emitted from an object in the past are like a smoking gun in all of this. --flk

> My apologies. I did not mean to sound derogatory God, what is it with you non-autistics? You inject personal ego-battles into EVERYTHING! It's like watching a little-kids' slap fight. And your governments are even worse! > No offence intended to anyone. It seems at every turn, you people are either offended, or apologizing for "making" someone else feel offended. > None of this make any sense to me. That's perfectly okay!! The reason I posted it was specifically to find out if it made sense. > 1. Reads more like a poem than an explanation. Well unless that's an insult (I can't usually tell), thank you. That's beautiful. 2. I feel somehow degraded just reading it. WTF? Unless that was a joke (and again, I usually can't tell), why would not understanding something make you feel that someone who does understand it is degrading you? Wait, it's injection of the normal-people ego-pecking-order thing again. Never mind. 3. I think FayeKane may be headed for a low What do you mean "a low"? My guesses, in descending order of reliability: 1) a "low" in my online reputation because I posted something either subsequently proved incorrect, or that you deem silly 2) depressed because you believe I want people to tell me how smart I am and that didn't happen, or 3) sad because not everyone agrees with what I wrote, or 4) you insulted me, I didn't perceive that, and you think it makes make me feel "low" which, presumably, would have been your intention. Evaluations rejected for being too improbable: 5) It's a clever pun involving the extremely low (air) pressure of the hurricane which is about to hit where I live. In any case, I don't feel "low". I hope that is a good thing to you. What I feel is "curious". > and feel sorry. Why should I feel sorry? Did I do something wrong? I often do, you know, without knowing it. If so, I apologize. It seems I have to do that a lot. But would you tell me what it was so I don't make the same "politeness mistake" again? I'll never understand normal people!! You'd think I'd be used to that by now. Oh well. --flk PS Can we return this thread to a discussion of spacetime? It's a subject I feel much more comfortable with than the evaluation of other people's "feelings".

Yeah, I figured. Oh well.

Educate me. Here's what I think I know about SR. Please tear my understanding of it to pieces if it's wrong. I want to be humiliated now rather than someday. Thanx, --flk Okay, consider an "event". In particular, consider an (almost) point mass, stationary in space. Call it event A. The same point mass still sitting in the same place, but one nanosecond later, we will call "event B". Now consider the nexus (set of points in spacetime) which have a four-dimensional distance (a spacetime interval) from event A which equals zero. The point mass called "event A" is in that set by definition. But because the interval is a pseudometric (specifically, a Lorentzian metric), two events in different places, if they also exist at different times, can have zero distance between them. This happens when the time displacement expressed as space (the "ct" term in the interval equation) exactly equals the spatial displacement. This is because the time displacement is SUBTRACTED from the metric when the spatial displacement is ADDED. Thus a stationary pointlike mass at time 0 has a zero interval (4-D distance) from many other points. In particular, it has zero distance from all points on a sphere 12 inches in radius but existing one nanosecond later. The critical thing to note is that this sphere is NOT identical to "event B". Why? Because it has a nonzero interval from event B. Event B is a pointlike mass sitting in the same spatial location as event A, but one nanosecond later. The pointlike mass which sits there immobile, has persistance in time. It is not moving through space. It is, however moving through TIME. And what is the rate of its motion through time? Well, after a time of 1 nanosecond, the spatial distance between event A and event B is 12 inches. Because we ourselves are moving through time too, we really have no choice but to see the pointlike mass as stationary. "It was sitting there, and it's still sitting there. It hasn't moved", a situation similar to looking at an object on a table when you're in a moving train. But the mass/energy which moved from event A to event B IS moving: through time. We just don't notice that because we're moving through time at the same rate. And what is that rate? 12 inches per nanosecond, or "c". Another interesting curiosity which I believe is hugely important in understanding what's going on but which has recieved little attention is: Event A is NOT the same event as B because they are separated by a nonzero interval. You can chose to interpret it as we always do, as no spatial displacement over an interval of one nanosecond, BUT it is equally valid to view the situation "from the ground, outside the moving train". That is, it is equally correct to think of A and B as existing at the same time, but spatially displaced by 12 inches (spherically). Either reference frame is equally valid. The peculiar nature of pseudometrics makes this arbitrary choice necessary. I won't go into the utility of viewing the spacetime metric in this way (it really helps understand gravitation), but it is important to note that nothing I have said is "news". It's all just simple, direct, and probably even obvious consequences of the fact that 4-dimensional distances are Lorentzian, that is, that "time distance" is the same thing as spatial distance, but with the sign inverted. When you read what others have written about it, this last point is usually phrased as "time is imaginary space", in the sense of "multiplied by the square root of minus one." While all of the above is just a restatement of things that every physicist knows, the following is just my opinion about the implications of the above. > Okay, fine. But what does all this have to do with gravity? Well, if you see a coin sitting on a table, the above discussion states that you can view the situation in two ways: View One: the coin is sitting in space, motionless. This is what an observer thinks when she fails to notice that she is moving through time at the same rate as the coin. It's as if the coin, the table, and the observer were both on a moving train. View Two, which is more general (from the ground outside the train): The coin is observed to be moving. A moment ago it was one foot away from it's present location; a minute ago it was a mile away, and yesterday it was in Philadelphia. What this means for us is that at any given moment, event A exists both as a point source, AND as a sphere centered on that point. So why can we only detect (see) the point as a point, and not as a spherically expanding shell? I believe we do, and that the gravitational attraction we feel from the mass at event A is the expanding shell that existed as a point (event A) in the past. Think about it. From the above discussion, we already know, as a FACT, that at any particular moment, a coin on a table exists both as the coin we see, AND as an expanding sphere surrounding the coin. Whatever a "gravity wave" is, it is spatially identical to the mass of an object in the past. Also note that the denser the object (like a coin) is, the denser the expanding shell will be when it hits you. And since the surface of a sphere expands as the square of it's radius, when the expanding sphere hits you, it does so with an impact that is proportional to the inverse of the square of your spatial distance from it when it was a point mass. That's exactly the same way a gravitational field propagates. It's called the "inverse square law". Not all fields propagate this way; magnetic field strength varies with the CUBE of the distance. So it seems that if a gravity wave emitted from an object is NOT, literally, the physical object from the past, then it is, by coincidence, something else which: 1) spatially overlays in three dimensions the mass of an object in the past 2) propagates through space at the same speed as an object in the past 3) propagates through space in the same direction as an object in the past (spherically outward) 4) The strength of the gravitational field just happens to vary with distance exactly the same as the density of expanding mass from the past does. If the object in question were two stars rotating around each other, the density of their combined mass reaching out from the past just happens to vary exactly in the same complex way that gravity waves emitted from the system do. The moon is a quarter-million miles away, which is one light-second. If it were to suddenly disappear from existence, then on Earth, the moons' gravity would stop one second after the moon disappeared. Coincidentally exactly the same time that the mass sphere expanding from the past stops. When you feel the tug of the earth's gravity, I believe it is literally the earth -- the whole thing, even the melted iron ball at the center -- reaching up from the past and dragging you down. But again, that's just my opinion. It could just be a coincidence that the gravity emitted from an object is in the same physical locations at the same densities as the object in the past is. In the unlikely case that anyone understands that, I'm waiting for them to say "well, the distance (interval) to an object in the future is also zero if you're the correct distance from it, so why don't we feel gravitation from objects in the future?" Feynman and Wheeler answered that about 50 years ago when they asked the same question about EM radiation. They observed that Maxwell's equations SEEM to say that we should be able to see light from the future as well as light emitted by an object in the past, and they explained very elegantly why we can't. Details HERE. Note that if the above is correct, it doesn't imply anything new or even important. It's just interesting to know what gravity really is. In the last chapter of Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, And Space-Time, Feynman pointed out that while distortion of the geometry of spacetime is a good way to look at gravitation, an equally valid way is to think of empty space somehow being "denser" near a massive object. In another book, called QED (for "quantum electrodynamics"), he explained that refraction occurs because glass is denser than air, and light moves more slowly through matter than it does through air (or a vacuum). I suspect that space is "denser" near massive objects because anything on a free-fall path (a geodesic) that gets close to the massive object must pass through this continual, spherical wave of mass from the object's past which is described above. That would imply that gravitation is actually the same phenomenon as refraction. We actually have a way to check this conjecture. If it were true, then one would expect the deflection of light by glass to vary with the glass density in exactly the same way that a geodesic is deflected by when passing near mass. We could test this by making a lens (actually just a chunk of glass or other transparent material) which varies in density as the square of the distance to some point inside it. If light bends when passing through such a material in the same way that the path of a spacecraft bends when it passes a planet, then I believe that would be strong evidence that refraction and gravitational deflection are the same phenomenon. My personal opinion is that since this conclusion can be reached by just thinking about it while lying on the sofa drinking beer and smoking cigarettes in one's underpants, then if is true, it has probably been known for a century, and I'm merely the ten-thousandth person to stumble upon it. Unfortunately, while I can calculate the trajectory of an object near a planet, I am too stupid to calculate the path light takes when it passes through a material of a continually-changing refractive index. Oh well. If someone smarter than me knows how to do this, and the trajectories turn out to be identical, and that fact turns out to be important, please "steal" this whole idea and publish it as part of your Master's thesis. It isn't necessary to give me "credit" for it; I just want understanding to increase. We already have a model of gravitation: curved spacetime. I suppose that thinking about another model of gravitation just uses time and attention that people could spend thinking about the first one. The thing is, if this way of looking at it is valid, then maybe it's a description of what's actually happening, and that "curved spacetime" turns out to just be an analogy that returns the same mathematical predictions. It would certainly be easier, at least for ME, to not have to think about empty space curving in three dimensions if the much simpler and more factually accurate model of refraction were available.

FastTrack was correct. It is meaningless to talk about "speed of time" for the same reason that it's meaningless to talk about "the length of up". We don't notice the "direction" of time as being like the other three because the lengths of all lines in that direction are negative numbers (see the interval metric). Also, our perception of what's going on is distorted because we are not stationary. We are moving through time. All mass is. It's that momentum in the time direction that gives mass it's mass-energy. Light, on the other hand, moves only through space but does not experience the passage of time. Light has momentum in space, not time. You may have meant to ask "at what speed do we move through time?" The answer is "at c". -- faye kane, homeless brain http://blog.myspace.com/fayekane

Klaynos was correct, as were a couple of others. Here's what's going on, in a nutshell: Time is a "direction", like any of the other three. But because of the signature of the four-dimensional metric equation (the interval), all lengths in that direction are negative numbers when described in inches or meters, etc.. Photons are moving through space at c. Mass is energy moving through time at c. The two directions are orthogonal. Antimatter is energy moving through time at c in the other direction. Acceleration in three dimensions is rotation in four dimensions. If you accelerate a mass to to c, you have rotated 90 degrees in 4D. You then have extent in space, but not in time, that is, you have converted your mass to energy. No, photons do not experience time. They can't. Their momentum vector is rotated 90 degrees away from the "direction" of time. -- faye kane, homeless brain http:/blog.myspace.com/fayekane

I was always curious: I read on the blue cheese package that the blue mold is penicillin. Would eating a lot of it have cured people during the black plague? thanx --flk