I bet you didnt know that

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VandC wrote: »

I've never really understood this. How is time measured? I always thought it to be a "made up" concept, but with basis, i.e. 1 day is 1 rotation, but some one somewhere decided that a day would be broken down in to the hours and minutes that we know now. But there was nothing stopping them making it a 10 hour day with 100 minutes in each hour. Anyways, whatever way it came about, how is it that a second as we know it here is longer when gravity can warp it? How does gravity "stretch" my one second in to two? If I physically stood beside this gravity source would I age twice as quick? Could I go somewhere and never age? Or is a second always a second to me because that's how long I know it to be?

Probably not being very clear but my brain melts a little trying to think of this stuff sometimes.

Time is as real as mass, weight, volume etc.

Your years hours minutes etc. are just measures like kilometres or miles, pounds or grams.

Fourier

VandC wrote: »

Anyways, whatever way it came about, how is it that a second as we know it here is longer when gravity can warp it? How does gravity "stretch" my one second in to two? If I physically stood beside this gravity source would I age twice as quick? Could I go somewhere and never age? Or is a second always a second to me because that's how long I know it to be?

Anders Shy Aircraft explains the most crucial point well, kilograms might be man-made, but mass isn't. Similarly seconds are man-made, but time isn't.

You'll always age.

Think of the universe like a flat plain, with different objects timelines like paths running north to south. In places with high gravity time is distorted, this is like tall hills being made in the plain.

If your road has to go up a hill and come down to reach the same point as somebody on the flat, it's going to feel longer. Just like there are more meters on the hill road, there are more seconds on the distorted temporal path.

VandC

Anders Shy Aircraft wrote: »

VandC wrote: »

I've never really understood this. How is time measured? I always thought it to be a "made up" concept, but with basis, i.e. 1 day is 1 rotation, but some one somewhere decided that a day would be broken down in to the hours and minutes that we know now. But there was nothing stopping them making it a 10 hour day with 100 minutes in each hour. Anyways, whatever way it came about, how is it that a second as we know it here is longer when gravity can warp it? How does gravity "stretch" my one second in to two? If I physically stood beside this gravity source would I age twice as quick? Could I go somewhere and never age? Or is a second always a second to me because that's how long I know it to be?

Probably not being very clear but my brain melts a little trying to think of this stuff sometimes.

Time is as real as mass, weight, volume etc.

Your years hours minutes etc. are just measures like kilometres or miles, pounds or grams.

I think I'm over thinking it. When I think of time I can't measure it, like mass or distance. A kilometer here will be a kilometer on any planet. But if I take "earth time" and go to another planet then my units change somewhat. So, for example, if it takes the other planet 2 earth days to rotate then I either have 48 hours in a day there or I start measuring in "earth time", but I'm then just forcing the time that I know to work on the new planet, and it isn't consistent. I'm babbling, so don't mind me, it's one of those things I don't think I'll ever wrap my head around.

VandC

Fourier wrote: »

VandC wrote: »

Anyways, whatever way it came about, how is it that a second as we know it here is longer when gravity can warp it? How does gravity "stretch" my one second in to two? If I physically stood beside this gravity source would I age twice as quick? Could I go somewhere and never age? Or is a second always a second to me because that's how long I know it to be?

Anders Shy Aircraft explains the most crucial point well, kilograms might be man-made, but mass isn't. Similarly seconds are man-made, but time isn't.

You'll always age.

Think of the universe like a flat plain, with different objects timelines like paths running north to south. In places with high gravity time is distorted, this is like tall hills being made in the plain.

If your road has to go up a hill and come down to reach the same point as somebody on the flat, it's going to feel longer. Just like there are more meters on the hill road, there are more seconds on the distorted temporal path.

I posted my last post before i read this. Think I'm gonna ponder this one and see if I can wrap my head around it. I feel to achieve this I will need to reset my head of all my thoughts regarding time and hopefully it'll be clear(er) to me .

Capt'n Midnight

Sharks prefer jazz.

Fourier

VandC wrote: »

I think I'm over thinking it. When I think of time I can't measure it, like mass or distance. A kilometer here will be a kilometer on any planet. But if I take "earth time" and go to another planet then my units change somewhat. So, for example, if it takes the other planet 2 earth days to rotate then I either have 48 hours in a day there or I start measuring in "earth time", but I'm then just forcing the time that I know to work on the new planet, and it isn't consistent. I'm babbling, so don't mind me, it's one of those things I don't think I'll ever wrap my head around.

That's just different groupings of time.

You call a day 24 hours, on another planet it might be 48 hours. This is just like how the Chinese use a lǐ, which is 576m, rather than a kilometer, which is a thousand meters. However everybody would agree on the meter.

Similarly days might be different, but seconds would be universal.

Ineedaname

VandC wrote: »

I've never really understood this. How is time measured? I always thought it to be a "made up" concept, but with basis, i.e. 1 day is 1 rotation, but some one somewhere decided that a day would be broken down in to the hours and minutes that we know now. But there was nothing stopping them making it a 10 hour day with 100 minutes in each hour. Anyways, whatever way it came about, how is it that a second as we know it here is longer when gravity can warp it? How does gravity "stretch" my one second in to two? If I physically stood beside this gravity source would I age twice as quick? Could I go somewhere and never age? Or is a second always a second to me because that's how long I know it to be?

Probably not being very clear but my brain melts a little trying to think of this stuff sometimes.

Einstein coined the idea of space and time being two halves of the same thing. So when gravity warps space it also warps time. The larger the source of gravity the more time is dilated.

You'll always perceive a second as a second. It is only when you involve an outside observer will your timelines disagree. If you fell into a black hole time would flow for you normally. For someone watching in the distance they'd see you slow down and stop before you fell in.

It's hard to really explain in a single post and I'm oversimplifying it a bit but it's not as complex as you might think, just a bit counter-intuitive. There are some great videos on YouTube about it. Minute Physics are actually doing a series on Relativity at the minute. It's worth a look.

Are Am Eye

Because the Speed of Light is constant you can use the amount of time it takes to travel one fermi or one planck lenght as being one unit of time.

The base unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) is the second, defined as about 9 billion oscillations of the caesium atom.

Capt'n Midnight

Ineedaname wrote: »

Einstein coined the idea of space and time being two halves of the same thing. So when gravity warps space it also warps time. The larger the source of gravity the more time is dilated.

GPS satellites have to take both their speed and the Earth's gravity well into account.

Their 10.23 MHz clocks run at 10.22999999543 MHz

Ipso

Doesn't relativity effect auto pilot systems?

mookishboy

On the subject of time.
A jiffy was/is the amount of time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum.
So being back in a jiffy is pretty damn quick

Fourier

Not to keep the thread on physics for too long, but I've something that is easy to grasp (easy to grasp because there is nothing to grasp), while also explaining nothing and undermining things you might have learnt. :pac:

Quantum Mechanics often appears to be counter-intuitive, bizarre, hard to understand. If you've read science articles about it I'm sure you've read of half dead cats, spooky action at a distance, particles doing crazy stuff. The truth is, none of this stuff is really true.

All Quantum Mechanics (QM for short) does is tell you the chance of seeing one thing, if you do something else.

For example

"If you turn a silver oven to 200 degrees, put a magnet near it and some photosensitive paper near the magnet, you've a 50% chance of seeing a mark on the paper five seconds later"

or

"If you turn a magnet up to 1000 tesla in strength, there's a 72% chance a nearby Geiger counter will click a minute later"

QM doesn't tell you why any of this stuff happens, neither why the chances are what they are, or what is causing any of these things. For instance most books will explain the first example as the oven is making electrons, that can be randomly spin up or down. However this is just a convenient mental picture, QM doesn't say anything of the sort, just that your devices will click or develop marks, or something like that. It's really only about what devices see when they probe the very small, not about what is actually going on down there.

For this reason, things like quarks, electrons, etc are just convenient fictions, you aren't made of protons and electrons (you are made of molecules, but it stops there), because they're just "stories" to narrate these results. I'm guilty of this as well, giving facts about protons.

For a century people have been trying to guess what is really going on in the microworld. We know little, only the following facts:

Either:
1. Stuff "down there" can affect each other faster than light. At least 10,000 times faster (established in 2013).
2. The stuff isn't particles, or anything like them.
3. At least some of the concepts we consider real, like energy, momentum, are alien to the world down there and simply generated on demand when we perform experiments. Like how you might know a brief phrase in Spanish that you just utter on holidays, the microworld just concocts momentum to "report" back to the world above
4. It's contextual. The stuff in my lab interacts with the stuff on Saturn and they effect each others evolution. The results of my lab experiments depend on what is going on on Saturn
5. It's not something that can simulated with an algorithm, it's fundamentally not computable.

Or:
There is nothing going on down there, we just get random results back from nothing.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Either that piece ran away from Fourier or “easy to grasp” is physicist code for very difficult concepts.

Fourier

Well my aim was to say QM doesn't really tell you anything except lab results, it offers no picture of the world. And that's the last of physics weirdness for a while I promise! Just some might be interested to know.

EDIT: And also that the idea of particles, though useful, is on shaky grounds.

Chancer3001

Bill Bryson has a piece on how the whole world is built on chance.

The percentage chance that stuff happens is why stuff happens.

It's why you have a selection.
It's why you can see a bit of a reflection in a window whilst also looking out the window. Cos some of the light just happens to bounce back in.

There's nothing controlling these things only chance themselves.

I agree with the earlier poster that time doesn't exist. The scientific world doesn't agree with me at the moment, but I think it will

Franz Von Peppercorn

Chancer3001 wrote: »

Bill Bryson has a piece on how the whole world is built on chance.

The percentage chance that stuff happens is why stuff happens.

It's why you have a selection.
It's why you can see a bit of a reflection in a window whilst also looking out the window. Cos some of the light just happens to bounce back in.

There's nothing controlling these things only chance themselves.

I agree with the earlier poster that time doesn't exist. The scientific world doesn't agree with me at the moment, but I think it will

Plenty of physicists say time is an illusion. Personally I don’t think it’s an explanation that describes the world all that accurately.

Chancer3001

I agree it's a constructed illusion

I think everything happens in a constant

Realt Dearg Sec

Chancer3001 wrote: »

I agree it's a constructed illusion

I think everything happens in a constant

I'm absolutely not on firm ground discussing science so this shouldn't be taken as me trying to set you straight or anything, more just trying to see if Fourier can clarify something. But my understanding is that time is very much real, it is relative, but that you are correct about things happening in a constant in the sense that the past doesn't "exist" somewhere "right now". I know that's a contradiction in terms but I think the sense is clear: there isn't"really a Michael j Fox going about his life in 1985 right now that we can visit.

But I've yet to be right about physics yet, and I'm not about to start now.

Realt Dearg Sec

Oh the other thing I know about physics I only know because I'm a Joycean: the man who postulated the existence of quarks gave them that name having seen the word in Finnegans Wake by Joyce. "Three quarks for Muster Mark"

Fourier

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

But my understanding is that time is very much real, it is relative

That is the current understanding in physics

but that you are correct about things happening in a constant in the sense that the past doesn't "exist" somewhere "right now". I know that's a contradiction in terms but I think the sense is clear: there isn't"really a Michael j Fox going about his life in 1985 right now that we can visit.

According to General Relativity, the current theory of gravity, the past continues to exist, i.e. 1985 still exists as part of the universe's structure, we just can't access it.

There have been minor tests of this, where one object has been able to view what another considers the past, but it's milliseconds, not direct confirmation of this and it's short enough that other explanations are possible. However since General Relativity has been right in most things thus far, who knows?

Gloomtastic!

To lighten the load a little......

People comment on how the year is flying by - we’re in May already!

My explanation.

When you’re five, a year is 20% of your life. When you’re 50, a year is 2% of your lifetime. So while time is constant, it ‘feels’ shorter the older you get.

Realt Dearg Sec

Gloomtastic! wrote: »

To lighten the load a little......

People comment on how the year is flying by - we’re in May already!

My explanation.

When you’re five, a year is 20% of your life. When you’re 50, a year is 2% of your lifetime. So while time is constant, it ‘feels’ shorter the older you get.

I can't remember who it was that was asked in an interview how it feels to be in your eighties, and he responded "it's remarkable, it feels like I eat breakfast every twenty minutes"

pleas advice

the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time

we are all moving at the speed of light, through space-time...

quickbeam

Anders Shy Aircraft wrote: »

Only about half of people have the archaea (bacteria) in their bodies that are necessary to produce methane. The greatest component of human farts is Nitrogen.

Archaea aren't bacteria. They are both prokaryotes though, distinguished from plants, animals and fungi which are eukaryotes.

Don't know if it's actually archaea or bacteria that do the methane production though.

lmimmfn

pleas advice wrote: »

we are all moving at the speed of light, through space-time...

..on space ship Earth.

Buford T. Justice XIX

Today is the 68th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, a proposal by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, to create a common authority over steel and coal production in Europe and bring European countries closer by creating common interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuman_Declaration

This proposal was eventually to lead to the EU we have today.

lmimmfn

Buford T. Justice V wrote: »

Today is the 68th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, a proposal by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, to create a common authority over steel and coal production in Europe and bring European countries closer by creating common interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuman_Declaration

This proposal was eventually to lead to the EU we have today.

Happy Europe Day!

Franz Von Peppercorn

Fourier wrote: »

Well my aim was to say QM doesn't really tell you anything except lab results, it offers no picture of the world. And that's the last of physics weirdness for a while I promise! Just some might be interested to know.

EDIT: And also that the idea of particles, though useful, is on shaky grounds.

Please keep posting. Add links if you think were up to it. :-)

LarryGraham

There are two surviving Heads of State from WW2.

One is Simeon II, Tsar of Bulgaria, exiled as a minor surely shortly after the war. As Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, he became Prime Minister of Bulgaria after returning from exile.

The other is Tenzin Gyatso. Otherwise known as the 14th Dalai Lama.

Ipso

LarryGraham wrote: »

There are two surviving Heads of State from WW2.

One is Simeon II, Tsar of Bulgaria, exiled as a minor surely shortly after the war. As Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, he became Prime Minister of Bulgaria after returning from exile.

The other is Tenzin Gyatso. Otherwise known as the 14th Dalai Lama.

Any relation to Lizzie?