This won't be the last time.

It seems that my favorite topic so far has been to discuss time.  Time is so interesting and everyone has a certain view about time.  Therefore, my take on it is unique and I enjoy sharing my views.  Besides, I've got all the time in the world right now, and I might as well use it for something.  I certainly don't use it properly.  I waste more time than I care to admit.  But that's not what I'm here to discuss today.  I remember hearing about a phenomenon with time when I was in college.  I didn't think much of it at the time, as the only time I cared about at that time was Geologic time.  And those periods of time are so long, that it's hard to imagine the finitely small amounts of time that I'm going to be discussing right now, that it didn't really matter to me.  I'm not intimating that it matter to me now, but at least it interests me now.  The phenomenon that I heard about popped into my head when I started writing about time here.  So, I did a little digging, and found out some more info on it, that way I could competently expound upon the subject.

Whether you believe the story about
how Newton "discovered" gravity...

...he was the first one to describe the affect.
He did so in this book.  It's a fun read, you
should check it out. 

So what am I talking about.  I refer to the often overlooked and little know fact that time isn't constant.  I may have mentioned that before.  But I want to reiterate that fact. More specifically, I'm referring to the effect that gravity has on time.  Gravity, it turns out has a huge affect on time.  Well, huge if there's enough gravity.  To truly understand what I'm talking about, we have to understand gravity first.  We all know about Newton and the apple story, and his "discovery" of gravity.  I have a hard time calling it a discovery, since it's always been there.  I mean, people weren't flying off the Earth before Newton coined the term gravity.  He was just the first person to put a name to something that was always there.  Anyways, gravity is something that is inherent in all object.  Everything in the universe has gravity.  The sun, the moon, Earth, you me, this computer, the speck of dust floating by this computer, even protons, neutrons and electrons, some of the smallest known particles each have gravity.  The gravity that you, I, my computer and the atomic particles have is too small to make any difference.  But you put enough of it together, you get a force that we can feel.  That force pulls you towards the center of the object.  Not the surface, mind you, but the center.  That why when we dig a hole, we don't float back up to the surface of the Earth.  Now, how does gravity affect time?

Yup... he was smart.
I love this guy!

Time affects gravity in one specific and important way, the stronger the gravity, the slower time goes.  So let's think about this.  If you live at sea level, time goes slower for you than it would if you lived on top of Mount Everest.  We've known this since Einstein described the affect in his theory of relativity.  But those were just his theories.  Now we've proven it. Well, not me, the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  They used a pair of aluminum ion clocks to measure time so precisely, they were able to see the time dilation difference.   They found that if you moved one clock up a foot, the lower one goes 90 billionths of a second slower.  Just so you can see that, that would be 0.000000009 seconds slower.  So, if you lived at sea level instead of the top of Mt. Everest, which is 29,029 feet (plus about 2 inches every year) high, your life would go .00026 (26 ten thousandths of a second) seconds slower (you'd add that much time to your life).  And yes, that's over a 79 year lifespan, so you're really not gaining much here.  But facts are facts, so if you want to live longer, don't buy that penthouse suite with your millions.  Buy a bunker under the ground and live longer!  Oh, if the original article was too complex, here's where I first saw it. And NASA knows about this, they're pretty on the ball.  So they put this little blip up about time.  It's a fun little watch.

So what else does this apply to?  Well, for starters, if you lived on the moon, where gravity is 1/6th that of Earth's, your time would go faster.  Less gravity, faster time.  If you lived on Jupiter (not a great idea, by the way, the lack of a breathable atmosphere is troubling), you'd technically live a longer life because of the gravity is stronger, thus time goes slower (but again, you'd die instantly from any number of things that Jupiter throws out, including some serious radiation).  If you decided you wanted to go see a black hole (also not the best idea), time would slow to a crawl.  Now we're talking about some serious gravity (they're black because light can't escape their pull, and light is the fastest thing I know of).  And because of it, we're talking about some serious time slowage.  Now, I'm not mathematician and I'm certainly not an astrophysicist, but I know that the time you'd perceive as you approached the event horizon of the black hole would be slow enough that you might never actually realize you're entering the black hole.  In fact, it might go so slow, that time essentially stops and you never actually enter the black hole.  But that's just my musings and exaggerations of the idea, more than likely.

One other thing they were able to prove is what Einstein called the "twin paradox."  I've already talked about this before.  I just didn't know they gave such a cool name.  Basically, this paradox states that if you move faster, time goes slower.  So, if one twin is stationary and the other launches into space, when the astronaut twin comes back to Earth, he's younger than the stationary twin, ignoring the fact that time went faster for him because he was experiencing less gravity. Ok, let's take gravity out of the equation; if one twin is stationary on a completely flat plane and the other runs around for an hour, the one that ran around is younger than the stationary one.    So if you want to live longer, literally, live an active life and don't sit on the couch.

Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu is defined as the feeling that you're experiencing something you've previously experienced. I find that I often have déjà vu.  The feeling comes upon me once every other month or so, and I swear by whatever I feel like swearing upon at that moment, that I've done that before, even though I've clearly never done it before.  The feeling is fleeting though, and as quickly as it came, it goes and I'm left with this uncertain feeling that I just missed something.  But try as I might to figure it out, I'm not psychologically prepared to take on déjà vu.  I'll have to settle for a verbal argument.  But that feels like a Monty Python sketch.

I've read a bit about déjà vu.  There are many ideas out there about what it actually is.  The most interesting one that I've read is that déjà vu is a time lag disconnect in our brains between visually seeing something and the brain accessing the information telling us what we're seeing.  What this means is that we see it, and our brain instantly knows what we're seeing, but then lags when trying to get that information to the vital other areas of our brain for us to fully recognize what we're seeing.  So, by the time we are completely aware of what's in front of us, a few microseconds have passed and we've already perceived what's in front of us, so our brain interprets the information twice, thus the feeling of déjà vu.  Or something like that.  I'm not technical enough to really understand which parts of the brain are involved or which signal delays are involved and the speed at which this phenomenon occurs is mind boggling fast anyways, but yet slow enough to fool our eyes and our senses.

Of course, there's the Matrix explanation; the glitch resetting itself.  But then that's not a phenomenon of the brain, but an actual repetition of the same moment over again. But then, that repetition would mean that you're traveling through time, to be able to see the same moment again. But wait, didn't I talk about time travel in my post yesterday?  Déjà vu... I like the Matrix version of déjà vu, but can't believe that reality or perhaps that this isn't reality.  I guess I'm too plugged into the Matrix.  

But what about time travel? Could it be possible to actually travel back in time and experience a moment in time again (or for the first time if it is a time prior to your birth or a place you weren't at when the event happened).  First of all, why would we want to? Living in the past is a dangerous thing to do, and ACTUALLY living in the past could present all sorts of space-time quasality issues.  This is the old "if you went back in time and accidentally killed your dad before you were born..." argument.  I prefer the chicken or the egg paradox argument.  What I'm referring to is this:  If you build a time machine, travel into the past to interact with an event, then you change the event and therefore wouldn't have an event to build the time machine to interact with, so you wouldn't build the time machine and wouldn't change the event.  Ok, let me give it to you this way.  You build a time machine to go back and stop the JFK assassination.  You go back, jump Lee Harvey Oswald just outside of the book depository and stop him from killing JFK (this assumes non-conspiracy theorist version and that Oswald was in fact the only shooter that day), now fast forward to the future, you don't have an assassination to build a time machine in order to stop said assassination.  So you can't go back in time to change the event, thus the event in the past unfolds as it should and Oswald kills JFK.  So can you change the past, no.  The paradox won't let us.  If Oswald doesn't do it, someone else will, because JFK has to die in order for you to build the time machine to go back in time to change the event.  This is clearly displayed in H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine." 

But what about building a machine that allows you to just view the past, and not interact with it.  Sort of what Ebeneezer Scrooge experiences during his time with the Ghost of Christmas Past.  Why wouldn't this be possible, since there isn't a paradox prohibiting you from just looking at it, like a rerun on TV.  Think of all the things we could learn... like did Oswald REALLY act alone?  So many historical arguments we could put to rest with a time machine like that.  But that's just my desire to get history correct, and not politically changed by the victors who wrote the history. 

And what about traveling into the future.  Our present is the future's past, so we'd need to know how to travel to the past before we know how to travel to the future, or would it be the other way around, so we could get back to the present from the past.  What if we got the timing wrong.  Say we go into the past, then come back to the present, but time doesn't stop running in the present while we're in the past and we end up at a time that we shouldn't, but thought should be the right time. In this case, we end up coming back maybe just a few seconds later, or maybe the exact same length of time we were gone for into the future. But is it our future or our present.  And what if because we came back at the wrong time, we run into ourselves in a future that we already came back to.  Then there might be two of me at one time and place, and that'd certainly cause the world to end, unlike the Mayan calendar. Maybe we should just leave well enough alone and live in the present, it's safer that way. 

It's that time of the month

When I created this blog early last month, my intention was to create something witty and fun, with a tad bit of satire thrown in for laughs.  I promised myself that I would find some time every day, or at least every other day, but definitely once a week at a minimum to write something.  Well, almost a month later and I'm finally writing my second blog. At this pace, I'll only have to write 13 total blog posts this year; an even bakers dozen.  At least I won't have to think much at that pace.  But, alas, this is not what I want.  I want people to experience the wonders of my strange mind.  So, I am reaffirming my original goal of writing one blog post as often as time permits, which means you can probably expect my next blog post sometime in early 2014.

So, in continuing with today's theme of time, I often think about time.  What is time?  This is a question that science and society have both been grappling with for as long as we knew time existed.  And when did we first realize that there was this thing called "time?" Did neanderthals wake up in the morning an say "Ug need knew battery for sundial" only to not realize that batteries hadn't been invented yet?  Or sundials for that matter...  So what did neanderthals think about time?  Did the passage of that huge glowing ball of gas in the sky mean anything to them other than 1) it's up in the sky and therefore I should go hunt, eat and claim some female by dragging her back to my cave by her hair or 2) it's not up, therefore I need to hide in my cave with a fire to avoid being eaten tonight?  And when did we first start to use the passage of the sun to mark time?

Science tells us that we've been tracking time, perhaps as far back as 6,000 years ago (well, if you trust wikipedia).  And that's a good starting point.  Early humans realized that the moon went in cycles that they could predict.  That predicted cycle became the first tracking of time, although it was inaccurate. The Mayans made a very accurate calendar, although even they couldn't predict the end of time.  Later, sundials made time more accurate, and much later Pope Gregory III made the Gregorian calendar, which was very self centered if you ask me.  Today, that calendar is used almost everywhere on Earth.  It marks the passage of time from year to year, month to month and day to day.  For smaller intervals of time, we rely on watches.  Here we see seconds pass by, seconds of your life, ticking away, never to return.  But they weren't accurate enough, so we created atomic clocks that use radioactive elemental decay to determine the passage of time.  These clocks are incredibly accurate so we now know exactly what time it is all the time.

But what about before all this.  If we measure time by the rising and setting of our sun (on a basic level of day vs night), what about before our sun existed?  If time is just a human creation to help us understand past, present and future, what about before we existed.  Was there time?  Did dinosaurs measure time?  They had 250 million years to figure it out. Much longer than we've had, although we have bigger brains than they did, so maybe they were just figuring it out at the end.  You know, T-Rex is talking to a Triceratops,

   T-Rex: "Hey, Tritop, what time is it?"
   Triceratops: "I don't know Rexy, what time is it?"
   T-Rex: "It's dinner time!"

But, again, these are human constructions, dinner time, play time, time to make the donuts... So did time exist before humans?  Did the universe care what time it was?  Time for a new star to form, time for an old one to die, time for a black hole to swallow up some cosmic dust, time for two galaxies to collide. And what about before the universe existed. Was there time before the big bang? Was there anything before the big bang? Was there a big bang?  What about after humans are gone from the universe? Will time go on?

Star Trek did bring up one interesting point about time.  In space, time would be somewhat different without a sun to set our clocks by.  Would we be able to "create" a day with 35 hours in it, and get more done?  The saying, "there's only so much time in one day" becomes obsolete when you can create the length of your day.  We're apparently locked into a biological clock that runs akin to the 24 hours of our day, but if we get away from that sun, would our internal clocks adapt as easily as our wrist watches could?  Would other species track time differently based on their perceptions of time? And what if we had lived 2 billion years ago when the Earth had an 18 hour day?  Would we have less time to get things done?  Or would it be the same, as it would still take the same amount of time for the Earth to orbit around the sun.  So we'd have more days in one year, but the amount of time in one year wouldn't change.  I bet Pope Gregory wouldn't be ok with that.

And speaking of moving through space, Einstein and other really smart people began to wonder what would happen to time if you moved at the speed of light.  If we measure time based on the appearance of the sun every morning, then we're perceiving time based on light.  If you can see an object at a moment in time, that specific moment is occurring because the light from the sun reflected off that object and bounced into your eyes.  If you were moving at just short of the speed of light (moving AT the speed of light is a whole other discussion) then the amount of light entering your eye would be different than if you were moving as we normally would, so time would seem to change for you, because the information reaching your brain would be getting there slower, if you're moving away from the object, and faster if you're moving towards the object (or source of light as the case may be).  And for that matter, what about the light we see from the sun.  We don't see the sun as it currently is, but as it was 8 minutes ago.  That's the amount of time it takes for light to leave the sun and get to the Earth.  The same can be said for all celestial objects.  We're not seeing them as they are now, but as they were at some point in the past. So we're all time travelers when we look up into the sky.

But what about time travel, as in H.G. Wells type time travel?  If you're a believer of Einstein, then you can travel through time by traveling close to the speed of light.  Since, again, time and light are related.  You go somewhere at near the speed of light, when you get back to where you started, more time in the normal moving universe has passed than what you've experience, so this in essence is traveling into the future.  That whole traveling to the past thing will have to stay in our memories for now, or until I figure out how to do that.  But that, again, is a topic for another day.