Post
by dj357 » Wed Apr 07, 2010 8:00 pm
i can't really formulate it without figuring out if my approach is correct or not. if you glanced through Farsight's topic you may noticed a line that say you can't "unevent an event" and that's pretty much what I'm talking about. If you take a caesium clock, and I'm too jaded to figure out which runs faster or slower, but take a caesium clock on earth's surface and place an identical one in orbit directly above the other one. let's pretend that the one in orbit goes faster. let's go crazy and imagine it goes twice as fast. so, it takes one second for 9 billion or so periods to occur on the surface clock and it takes 0.5 seconds for the same number of periods to occur (let us imagine, it's the principle that matters here) in orbit. Now, the details are different but this phenomenon is a certified fact, we all agree on that. What I'm positing is that the reason for this is because the gravitational fields and whatever else that is acting upon these clocks causes the particles in the orbiting clock to interact with each other at a different rate than that of the particles in the clock on the earth's surface.
just disconnect your Relativity-drive for a second, and just imagine for a second that time is NOT a dimension. So, here we have a world around us where everything that we understand to exist is made up of infinitely large numbers of particles that interact with each other based upon rules we just about understand, for the most part. We have two identical caesium clocks. We understand that approx. 9 billion periods (and we understand this concept also) occur in what we call one second, for us here on planet earth. Now, it is true to say that everything that occurs in the universe is due to the interaction of matter and energy, yes? Ok, so now, we take our second caesium clock and place it in orbit above our first clock and we see that they run at slightly different rates. Now, we also understand the concept of gravitational fields and acceleration etc... and we imagine that a gravitational field works upon objects like an acceleration. With all these concepts and all these understandings, how do we explain the difference between the two clocks calculation of time?
Do we imagine ourselves as existing not only in the 3 dimensions of space that we can map out mathematically, through which we can move, not just in theory, but in practice, but also as existing in a fourth dimension called "time" which we imagine carries us from one state of the universe to the next, which describes, for example, the orbit of an electron around it's nucleus OR do we postulate that the gravitational fields and accelerations acting upon the clocks affect the rate at which the interactions of the particles that make up these clocks occur...?
Now, before you say "ok, that's a nice story, but the maths works for time as a dimension and it explains the way things work when we look at examples of relativity at work e.g. length contraction, time dilation etc..." stop for a second. Is it not possible, that the conceptualisation of time as a dimension works mathematically because we frame it in such a way that we can move through it just like space? Take the example given before of the two cars travelling to the same point at different angles. The explanation is that one is travelling additionally through an extra dimension which takes away from it's travel in the other dimension. However, when you examine the situation, both cars travelling at the same speed will arrive at different times because the distance they have to travel is different. Now I understand it was used as an example to help visualise time as a dimension but it can help to visualise the way we examine time.
Let's take the phenomenon of length contraction. There was a good example of it on the anti-telephone link with the train cars and the light source. This one is actually rather easy. The fact that moving near the speed of light, as far as these theoretical situations go, does not change the fact that the light reaches both the front of the train and rear of the train at the same time. The fact that the observer watching the train goes by experiences a phenomenon whereby he sees the light reach one end before the other is irrelevant to our discussion of travel near the speed of light and our concept of time. In this area of science we seem to get all muddled up by observers and what they appear to see. What is actually happening when we see this length contraction phenomenon? The light that travels from the train, which is the only way we have to observe the train, reaches us in sufficient time for us to see a contraction of the length of an object moving past us, when in actual fact the length of the object has NOT changed. The way we observe events influences the way we perceive them and I put it to you, that time is NOT a dimension, but we have crowned it as such and made workable mathematics out of it because we have made an assumption that phenomenon that occur due to the method by which we observe the events in question influence the way the system works.
the image which has the graph being skewed one way and then the other highlights my point. Regardless of the order in which we see events based on relativistic motion, it doesn't change the fact that the events occurred in the order A->B->C. We see C happening before B and B before A in a certain situation because the method we to observe the event is not immune to misinterpretation.
We see a man a mile away hammer a post into the ground. A short time later we hear the sound. Do we thereby assume that both events occurred in the order we observed them? No. We examine the situation again on the level of atoms and particles and we see the man strikes the post which in turn imparts kinetic energy to the post which results in compression of the air around the striking point and the particles within the post resulting in the vibration of the air molecules in a radial direction outwards from the post. The light which reflects off the man travels faster than the speed at which the sound wave does and as such we experience the events in that order. But that does not imply that the order in which they occurred and the relative delay between the events is indicative of the way things played out on the particle level. If you are travelling near or at the speed of light, the fact that it does take a quantifiable amount of time for light to travel from the front of the train in it's current position to you so you can observe it is important because the light that makes it to your eye from the millimetre in front of where the train will be in the next instant could potentially fool you into thinking that the train is a millimetre shorter than it actually is.
sigh... now I need a frickin nap....
