Our understanding of time is from past to future

[fasika]

Interesting; Here is an excerpt from a piece I wrote five years ago. I seem to have a arrived at a similar notion from a different point of view (e.g. why speed of light remains the same regardless of what angle one is measuring it from...), it actually occured to me a number of years before I wrote the piece itself. You can jump to the last two paragraphs if you don't want the details of how I got there.

 

"4. Our understanding of time is from past to future.

 

 

We usually think time 'goes by', 'flows', 'flies' in a certain direction. But here is a little problem; why don't we notice/feel the other spatial dimensions X, Y, Z 'pass by' from one direction to the other just like that of time? Should the rules that apply for the fourth dimension (time) be any different? If so, why?

 

 

Well, my hypothesis is; time should be no different from the other dimensions. We're not floating with time, it's akin to - 'Time is no river - the water is still and we're the ones swimming in it'. X dimension doesn't move, the virtual 'number line' has always been there, and same should go for Y, Z and time itself. Had all of us been born and raised in a shuttle going 1000mph in space - let say a along conventional x axis, we would have thought the shuttle was at rest and the whole cosmos was moving back (giving the impression that X is 'flowing', not us, while the reality is otherwise).

 

 

Subsequently, everything that will happen in the future has happened (all instantly, in parallel scenario or not) and is already there, we're just not there yet. The way life works and how we feel alive is by experiencing some point in time after the other, past to future, while every moment to be experienced was already there. That doesn't necessarily mean freewill is impossible (as we'll see later), But still If we were not a being that takes snapshots of the universe one at a time, the actual/ultimate face of the universe is one big smudge. We thought the earth was revolving around the sun, but merging all those snapshots, what we'd witness is one bizarre giant donut shaped body with a sphere in it … And nothing is ever 'moving' in it in the absolute sense!

 

 

This brings some interesting modification to how we appreciate nature. The very first thing is that time will not further be addressed as we know it. 'A second' is some relative measurement of how far we feel we have traversed through time for a while, not how much time has 'gone by', thus 'second' would no longer be a reliable standard unit of measurement of time (who's to say we're cruising at a constant pace in time anyways, the recent hour might have been shorter than the previous one). Another fascinating edge to this point is that Time is going to have to be 'rotatable' to any of those other dimensions, just like any given width in X can be scaled 90 degrees to show the same distance in Y… How would '3 meters' of time sound like? Better yet, in that ultimate reality set, there wouldn't be such a thing as speed, acceleration, force or anything whose very fundamental definition involves the classical variable time't'.

 

 

It was also very exciting to arrive at a very similar understanding of time sometime ago from a totally different approach.

 

 

Why is the speed of light © so significant to humans understanding of nature? why does it possesses the fastest observable speed around, what does it mean when light seems to travel at the same speed regardless of any angle one is measuring it? and why does the mass and size of matter change when it travels at a speed approaching c. As far I dug for a cause and effect relationship, there is no real explanation out there as to why this is the case, all we have is relationships between mass and energy (the infamous E=MC²), or how much will the observable 'time' be 'bent', and so on. But what I wanted to know was why the glass breaks beyond the notion of its being brittle, well of course it is brittle - that's what why we came up with the the notion in the first place right?

 

 

I remember the very first moments when I thought … "how on earth do those photons travel at that speed © and yet it doesn't matter from which direction we're measuring their speed, may be that's just their apparent speed, may be they are stationary and we're the ones travelling at that pace in time! This may explain why it doesn't matter from which angle we measure c because it never occurred to us to measure it in an angle from the time dimension itself. (It really doesn't matter measuring your apparent speed from some stationary object unless that angle is with respect to the direction/dimension you're moving away from the stationary object). It would also explain why c seems to be the maximum observable speed - could it probably be because photons are as stationary as anything could be in reference to us - so at the end of the day, all that's fast from our own existence was how fast we were traversing through time dimension itself; c!"

 

 

[questionposter]

If your traveling at the speed of light, how do you perceive distance equaling 0 when it takes time to reach a destination and a photon doesn't poses infinite speed? If you see everything standing still, then you should never run into anything, even though to an outside observer you would crash into something. Would you be alive or dead if you traveled at the speed of light and ran into the Earth? Everyone else would see you crashing into it, but you would see time stopped, therefore you can't travel distance over time...

[michel123456]

Alright, so I am not a theoretical physicist, but one of my physics buddies and I had this idea today and I wanted to run it by experts to see what out error in thinking is. Heres the concept...

 

What if light was stationary in the universe, and we were moving through it? This would imply that light was somewhat of a 4th dimension, and our observable world was traveling through it at the "speed of light". This would also imply, I suppose, that time would not be the 4th dimension, but a characteristic of matter like gravity? which would say that time does not exist in the absense of matter. The concept of stationary light/moving universe would also explain the constant-ness of the speed of light. it proposes the interesting thought of light being a manifestation of a 4th dimensional object in a 3 dimensional world, which may explain our difficulty of understanding exactly what light is. so where is the error in my thinking here? what other things would this concept imply?

 

Good. Go for it.

 

But that does not explain why C is always the same. We know that velocity is relative. So velocity should be relative to everything. Even if we are the ones moving and light is at rest, why do we observe that we are moving at this SOL speed, no matter our state of motion ? the question does not differ much from the traditional POV where light is moving. It is mathematically equivalent.

 

(...)

Well, my hypothesis is; time should be no different from the other dimensions.

 

(...) Time is going to have to be 'rotatable' to any of those other dimensions, just like any given width in X can be scaled 90 degrees to show the same distance in Y… (...)

 

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Edited March 18, 2012 by michel123456

[michel123456]

Oops, after splitting the original "stationary light' thread is gone from my list. Completely lost, where is it? Help please.

[Spyman]

Oops, after splitting the original "stationary light' thread is gone from my list. Completely lost, where is it? Help please.

This one? -> Stationary light Interesting thought experiment / new view on space time

[michel123456]

Thanks, I didn't notice it was an old thread.

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back to the subject: if under some observation time can transform in space, doesn't that mean that time is "rotatable" under accepted science?

[michel123456]

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