A Brief Space of Time - Small Journey Through the Timeless!

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Edited by @yaziris | Stock image from Pixabay.


Human perception of time as a concept is well known to all of us. We take time for granted, and we use it to reference much of our daily life. We quantify it, we sequence events with it, and we waste it deliberately or unintentionally.

From the moment we are born, we start growing older and older, "time" flows in one direction for us. Though we might feel it accelerating if we're having a good time, or decelerating when bored, it never halts, not for a brief moment, and never goes the other way around.

We never get any younger, that's for sure!

⏰ 🕑 🕙 🕚 🕖 🕘 ⏰

Milk gets spilled, eggs scrambled, things get broken or mixed up. We never see them unspilled, unscrambled, unbroken, or unmixed in our normal daily life. They always go from an orderly state to disorder. And that's a process we call Entropy.

Does it explain time, however? Or is it simply just another tool of our creation for useful calculations and a poor attempt to describe what time does when it moves forward without really explaining any reason.[1]

The apparent permanent increase of entropy is how we deceive ourselves in explaining time direction in the macroscopic world. Order and disorder are mere fabrications of our imagination! The universe doesn't care what we call a certain state, nor does it "think" an unscrambled egg, for example, is in an "ordered" state to start with.

Contrary to what entropy is defined to be, I'd even argue that the -one way- arrow of time, if anything, is going from the disordered, forcefully into an order of physical laws. Despite what pleases us as "ordered".



Created by @yaziris | Pixabay
Time, in its essence, is not as rigid as we think.
It appears to be emerging from something entirely different, completely detached from how we intuitively perceive it. No physical laws specifically prohibit an incident from happening in one direction or another, as long as no other laws affect or prevent it from doing so.[2]

In short, it is an emergent property. Meaning, it's a built-up effect of multiple factors acting altogether to form a property for a whole (the macroscopic), that is just not there for its constituents (the microscopic).

Explained in layman's terms:

The pile-up of effects from the various interacting sources and forces as we go up the hierarchy of structures, is what causes the emergence of this "time" effect, and it's what might prevent something from happening the other way around at the macroscopic scale.

Take our spilled milk for example, let's ignore for a moment that someone or something did the spilling, for the sake of simplicity, and just focus on its current state and what forces can prevent it from going back. Well, we got gravity of course, air pressure, surface tention, and of course the dissipated kinetic energy, to name a few. The point is, not a single reason you can find that itself isn't emergent. And that "pile-up" of various effects is the root cause of the apparent one way arrow of time.

The smaller the things are, however, the freer and the less inclined to be affected by such pile-up.[3]


Edited by @yaziris | Image from Pixabay.

Physically speaking, time as we know it, disintegrates entirely as we dive deeper into the super tiny world of particles.
Those building blocks of everything, do not experience "time" per say. They are like jiggly dots, oozing with energy, just trying to be at rest. With our memory and consciousness when we look at them, interacting and doing their thing in a sequence, we think "time" is passing. But it's just passing for us.

Antimatter, which is a form of matter particles, behaves exactly as if it's moving backward in time, as Dr.Feynman puts it.

Say an Electron, for example, has its unique and distinctive properties, behaves in a very specific way, always goes in a specific direction when interacted with the same field, which makes us know this is an electron and nothing else.

Its Anti-Electron, the Positron, has all its same characteristics, except it moves in the opposite direction.[4]


I'm trying to keep things simple for all readers, so I'll use this (not-so-accurate but gives an idea) analogy: By opposite, I don't mean opposite in your normal sense. It's as if a known rock is falling upwards, away from Earth due to its gravity instead of falling downwards. If we see that on Youtube, we'd know the video is edited to play in reverse, right?

Time, even seizes to exist the smaller we go, until it completely vanishes when we start talking about the particles of light, the photons, the smallest thing that can ever be. Zero mass!

Those pure forms of energy particles are massless, they only have momentum which gives them their energy, and time in their world is zero![5]



Even our -not so trusty- perception of time changes relative to speed, after all, time and speed go hand in hand. Clocks tick differently when moving at different speeds, becoming hugely more noticeable as we approach the speed of light. The famous "twins" thought experiment by Albert Einstein, shows how you wouldn't experience time the same if you are to sit in bed here on boring Earth vs whizzing around on a rocket in outer space near the speed of light. (You'd have an exhilarating time doing the latter for sure if nothing else)
The twin that stays on Earth would become much older than the one riding the rocket. 🚀 [6]

Ps. Don't try to tell the police you were speeding to prevent aging, it doesn't work...


Edited by @yaziris | from Pixabay.

E² = p²c² + m²c⁴

In physics, mass and energy are interchangeably one and the same, nuclear bombs made sure to practically prove -with a bang- how mass can be converted into energy, and the Large Hadron particle accelerator in Geneva constantly creates mass from energy 24/7.
Energy and Mass, have always been manifestations of the same thing, nothing new, we were just blind before.

Similarly, space and time are interwoven. We call it "spacetime". (Spime?! 🤔)
You cannot talk about space without time, it wouldn't "exist", and vise versa.

Moreover, "mass/energy" and "space/time" are both tightly interrelated. There would be no spacetime without energy/mass and no energy/mass without spacetime.[8]

For calculations and mathematical purposes that holds true. But we can simplify the understanding further for the purposes of this post.

We can reduce the complexity by saying time isn't necessary. You wouldn't need time to describe positions in one still shot.
It only becomes viable as a variable if you need to describe sequences. Completely meaningless if no memory or consciousness is there to follow sequences, and try to predict what WILL happen.

And mass/energy, on the other hand, IS in other words the space.
Because even where you think it's lacking, aka "empty space", it's not empty at all. It's full of energy![7]

Energy seems to be the likely most fundamental thing, but so far, it's not really completely clear for sure which property emerged from what, and which aspect is the more fundamental one, if not even all have emerged from something more fundamental. 🤷‍♂️



Conclusion:


No matter how you look at it, you'd arrive at the conclusion that time is a concept of our imagination. An illusion!
Sure, it's affecting us from our point of view, but it's emergent. The underlying forces of nature are what creates that illusion. Time, along with what is called "entropy", are merely tools of our creation, useful for measurement. Nothing more.

To even talk about one thing happening and then another in a sequence, requires consciousness or at least a memory of some sort. Both of which to us, are a blessing but yet a curse. Both of which aren't there at what we consider the fundamental level of the universe, as far as we currently know.
Without memory, time would be meaningless!

♾ = 0 ?

It's funny and mind-boggling how the extreme opposites meet.
Being timeless means zero time but yet infinite.
Being massless, you have zero mass, but now unbound to travel at the fastest speed existence allows, practically becoming present at any particular point in no time.

Contrary to what they say, I do believe the microscopic "weird" world of particle physics is not really the weird one at all, nor is it as complicated. OUR world at these macroscopic scales is the weird one and surely is complex and deceiving.



Thank you for taking the time to read this space. And as always,

Until next time. 🙋‍♂️





Note: The purpose of this post is to explore the concept of time in simple terms without getting into the technicalities, making it accessible to anyone without a prior background in physics.




Banner by @theterminal

All content in this post is courtesy of me, unless stated otherwise.
© 2021 @yaziris.


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Time. Hmm
The concept of time is deep.
I see time as an asset that constantly reduce which it’s value vary with respect to the owner

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From our point of view regarding our lives, it sure seem to be in short supply with an ever groing demand as we get older.

Thanks for stopping by!

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Yay! 🤗
Your content has been boosted with Ecency Points, by @b0s.
Use Ecency daily to boost your growth on platform!

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Oooh, thank you @b0s !!!
That was very nice of you man. Much appreciated! 💛

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You're welcome. I read it and thought it was very informative content. Unfortunately I had nothing to say on the topic. Keep up the good work.

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That is cool post. I have a question about this:

No physical laws specifically prohibit an incident from happening in one direction or another, as long as no other laws affect or prevent it from doing so

So certain equations are not reversible, like the heat equation. How do you reconcile that with the above?

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Heat (temprature) itself too, is an emergent property. It doesn't exist when you go down to the individual atoms. It's a property that happens on the macroscopic when there are lots of atoms bouncing around, a measurement of their average kinetic energies.

I slightly mentioned that when talking about the "spilled milk" example and I quote:

...what forces can prevent it from going back. Well, we got gravity of course, air pressure, surface tention, and of course the dissipated kinetic energy, to name a few. The point is, not a single reason you can find that itself isn't emergent.

So, for sure. Temprature as an emergent property does interfere with the reversal for the macroscopic. It's part of the "pile-up" I talked about, but it's not fundamental. 🙂

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Thanks for your contribution to the STEMsocial community. Feel free to join us on discord to get to know the rest of us!

Please consider delegating to the @stemsocial account (80% of the curation rewards are returned).

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(Edited)

This was my first post in this community, I'm generally new to HIVE.

I will delegate as soon as I'm able to! (I'm currently delegated some HP to help with the RC issue by the lovely people from @theterminal and their @rc-assist). But I will include the beneficiary in my future posts, for sure.

Thank you for creating this community, and thanks for the discord invitation. 😊

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(Edited)

I hope you will excuse me for whizzing by, I'll take my time but that will be never. So, I guess I'll see you in the future, hahahahaha, excellent postulation @yaziris!
I believe that time is created by man, in his mind and imagination, so I agree 1000% with you, but you can't ask just anyone, as their particle field may just be empty.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this!!! It was this or food, and that just makes my hungry, and I don't have time for that now, maybe yesterday. Or never. hahahahaha!!!

I forgot to add that I believe we still have a mile long particle accelerator up the road here at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. I believe they changed the name though, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

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(Edited)

You're most welcome to whizz by this space any time you like! @jamerussell

So glad you enjoyed reading this, knowing this, made my yesterday. 😁

I forgot to add that I believe we still have a mile long particle accelerator up the road here at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. I believe they changed the name though, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Yes, that's true. 2 miles long. Generally speaking though, I think the US has been "SLAC"ing in their support to particle physics and the build of higher energy accelerators. Lol
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(Edited)

I wrote that it was a mile, we were all told that growing up, and I believe you are correct, it's 2 miles long. I remember this growing up as well; it's up off of Sand Hill Road by Palo Alto, and I remember there is a lake up there called Diamond Lake that is north of there. That facility has been there since the early 60s I believe, and operated since 1966. And I also believe you're probably correct about being lax about the support of a whole lot of things, but as a side-note, not lax about support in the wrong things in this time period.

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Oh, you'd know better than me about that for sure.
I go by what I read online about it, so I'm not sure, it says this on their Wikipedia page:

located in Menlo Park, California. It is the site of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer (2-mile) linear accelerator constructed in 1966 and shut down in the 2000s, which could accelerate electrons to energies of 50 GeV.
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I did not know that they had shut down in the 2000s, wow, well, now I know hahahahahahaha!
Learn something new everyday!
Couldn't have come at a better time!!! hahahahahahaha!!!

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That wiki page is a bit messy regarding timelines. LOL
I think the name change was in the 2000s (2008) so they considered it as a "shutdown" of the previously named one. The facility itself seems still operational till this day, but they consider it as a new lab or something.

I told you, you'd know better than me or even that wiki page, it might even be 1 mile as you first mentioned, just expanded with the universe over the years. 😋

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Hahahahaha, yeah, that's it! It grew exponentially!
Well, I know this, that it started out to be a mile long, but the particles are accelerated so fast that it pushed it out another mile, and yes, it is 2 miles long hahahahaha; you were correct!
I'll do a little research on it, and let you know just for general information.

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that time is a concept of our imagination. An illusion!
Sure, it's affecting us from our point of view, but it's emergent.

I always have to little time for everything

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You're just a busy bee who does 50 things at once! 😁

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Interesting reading. Thanks a lot for sharing it with us. I have a few comments about it, if I may.

First, about the following sentence:

Its Anti-Electron, the Positron, has all its same characteristics, except it moves in the opposite direction.[4]

Whilst it is good to refer to this analogy, I would also insist that in reality, an antiparticle is of course moving forward in time as anything else. This is not clear from the text.

Time, even seizes to exist the smaller we go, until it completely vanishes when we start talking about the particles of light, the photons, the smallest thing that can ever be. Zero mass!

This is my main comment/question. I actually don’t understand this sentence. One can emit a photon in one place and absorb it elsewhere in the universe after a certain time. As a matter of fact, photons travelling at the speed of light obey to
c2 t2 - ||x||2 = 0
This is different from t = 0. Do you mind elaborating a bit? Thanks in advance.

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My pleasure! @ Thank you for reading it, hope others have enjoyed the read as I enjoyed writing it.

My apologies if some points weren't clear, I was jumping back and forth in perspectives. Which was mostly the point I wanted to make. I tried to explain how the fundamental things in the universe are from their point of view. And how the time WE experience, may not even be there on the fundamental level to begin with.

Whilst it is good to refer to this analogy, I would also insist that in reality, an antiparticle is of course moving forward in OUR time as anything else. This is not clear from the text.
Fixed. 🙂 Again, sorry that it wasn't clear throughout my post which perspective I was talking about. It would have been bad to read if I re-mentioned it every sentence, though it was necessary to re-emphasise the perspective, which I probably failed to do.
I did mention this, however, in the opening paragraph leading to the talk about antiparticles:
as we dive deeper into the super tiny world of particles. Those building blocks of everything, do not experience "time" per say.

As for your second question:

One can emit a photon in one place and absorb it elsewhere in the universe after a certain time.
Again, I'm really sorry for the confusion. I should've made it clear when I jump from a perspective to another.

What I meant is, time for the photon is 0.
If one would be a photon, or if one to move at the speed of light, his time would be 0. The whole notion of the "speed of light" being the number we agreed on disappears. To a photon, it never left home, so to speak.

After all, the speed of light is the meters per second or whatever DISTANCE per TIME unit we measure in our reference frame.

Is there a specific universal value for c really, all we know is that light travels at "c" and can solve equations useful to us with it being "299,792,458 metres per second" A distance we agreed on, and a time frame we specified.

I'm sorry for all the confusion but it is hard to avoid sometimes when talking about such tricky subject as Time.


Thank you again, for reading, for your questions, and for this community! And sorry about the long answer.
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Thanks for coming back to me. I still do not get it.

And how the time WE experience, may not even be there on the fundamental level to begin with.

This does not sound correct to me. The particle's proper frame is related to our frame through Lorentz transformations. If the proper frame is not what you are talking about, then I must admit I am lost and some definitions of the context are in order. Please provide these. The time is always defined in a given reference frame and probably providing the exact definitions of the frames you consider will help.

as we dive deeper into the super tiny world of particles. Those building blocks of everything, do not experience "time" per say.

Ok, now I got it and this is actually what I disagree with. In special relativity, there definitely exists an arrow of time: we go from the past to the future, regardless of the reference frame. In other words, the cause always precedes the effects. Therefore, I do not understand what it means when you write that particles do not experience time?

And to come back to the photon question, everything I have written above applies to it. It is correct that time in the particle's proper rest frame is not the same as time in the laboratory (or our reference frame). But both times are not constant to 0. Hence I still do not understand why you say that time for photons is stuck to 0. Do you mind defining exactly the reference frame in which this happens? I think the bulk of the confusion is coming from the fact that I don't follow in which frame we lie.

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Oh, this is spiralling into more confusion. haha

The first quote you referenced in your latest post, wasn't in relation to what I was saying about the particles. I was just explaining in general what was my intention in the article. 😅 and to clarify, my whole point was that "Time is an emergent property"

The whole antimatter and behaving as if moving backwards in time, was in reference to Richard Feynman's theory of antimatter. Of course it's not a mainstream idea! And I only brought it up cautiously, hence the "behaves exactly as if it's moving backward".

the cause always precedes the effects
💯 Causality is there for sure. And it's what I'm arguing that there's ONLY causality down there. How we look at it across "time" though, may differ.
A -> B -> C in that direction or A <- B <- C Causality isn't broken in either direction.

As for the photon. If we are to accelerate to the speed of light, time approaches 0 and even the distance shrinks as WE approach the speed of light. We never reach it of course, but light itself does. Photons would experience "if they can experience >.<" 0 distance in 0 time in their reference frame. I'm not even sure how to define a reference frame for 0 mass particle/wave that's never at rest (from our reference frame)?

I hope that clarifies a bit what I was trying to say.

Here's an interesting talk by Jim Al-khalili from Arvin Ash's youtube channel if you're interested. They talk casually about the same topic of time emergence if you're interested.
(Starts at 5:37)

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(Edited)

I disagree with several points in this previous reply:

A -> B -> C in that direction or A <- B <- C Causality isn't broken in either direction.

If A, B and C are different events in space time, then causality is broken, by definition. In any given frame, the time of A, B and C are different so that they are ordered.

As for the photon. If we are to accelerate to the speed of light, time approaches 0 and even the distance shrinks as WE approach the speed of light. We never reach it of course, but light itself does. Photons would experience "if they can experience >.<" 0 distance in 0 time in their reference frame. I'm not even sure how to define a reference frame for 0 mass particle/wave that's never at rest (from our reference frame)?

The above statement is incorrect. We can accelerate as much as we can (let's assume we have infinite energy), time will continue passing and will never approach zero. Time in our proper rest frame will of course be different from time in the laboratory frame, but this dos not mean any of those time will be constantly zero. Time is actually zero only at the origins of time (which we fix conventionally). For any other moment, time is non zero.

PS: I don't look at anything on YouTube in general, regardless of the author. I would be happy to read anything, but not to watch. I am a bit unfamiliar with the emergence of time as I don't work on this topic. I know there is however a small community of people doing this (and haye seem to have not reached any definite consensus). I would however be surprised that their conclusions would violate special relativity in any means (this would be largely known).

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If A, B and C are different events in space time, then causality is broken, by definition. In any given frame, the time of A, B and C are different so that they are ordered.
I'm honestly unaware how would time reversal break causality in the microscopic world.
The above statement is incorrect. We can accelerate as much as we can (let's assume we have infinite energy), time will continue passing and will never approach zero.
I understand that the whole argument is probably counterfactual to begin with, and more philosophical than it being actual practical physics. But if time is not 0 from light's point of view (or when something moving at c), then faster than light would've been a possibility. No? For Lorentz Transformations to make any sense too, the value of v has to be smaller than c.

Last but not least, I should probably clarify that I don't have any degree in physics. Though I never claimed to have, but I feel this is an important point to clarify. I love physics, I suck at math, I read/watch what is accessible for me and try to navigate to the best of my ability and critical thinking through the 95% of BS that is floating around on the internet. As for youtube, I stopped watching long ago too. I get what you mean.
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Ok I now got one thing. You were not talking about protons but photons. In my last message, I thought about protons (whereas you were mentioning photons; this is my fault), and wrote the word photons. Anyways, I have erased the statement that was making no sense. Sorry about bringing more confusion.

Of course, for a photon, its proper time is always zero and there is no rest frame. It cannot be at rest as it travels at the speed of light. So when you wrote that the time was zero, you were in fact wanted to write that the photon proper time is always zero (which is a correct statement). I guess this sorts that part out. At the end, it is probably a matter of vocabulary.

For the "A>B>C" thing, I also didn't understand that you were talking about time reversal. Time reversal is known not to be a symmetry of the microscopic world. For this point, I guess you will need to elaborate a bit more as I don't see where you are heading to.

PS: I am happy to chat about this; don't worry. I am also happy t see that at the end things get clearer.

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All good, man! It happens. It's nice having this discussion with you, I honestly didn't expect much technical questions about it (New to Hive and first time posting in @stemsocial ), otherwise I would've put more effort in making the original post more precise and clear.
I wanted it to be interesting for the casual readers, and thought provocative.

At the end, it is probably a matter of vocabulary.

Largely, yes. I believe so!

Time reversal is known not to be a symmetry of the microscopic world.

I believe this is one of the issues the group of physicists you mentioned might be working on.

I'll refer you to the T-Symmetry Wikipedia page, "Microscopic phenomena" section.


But I'll quote here the last bit:

Strong measurements (both classical and quantum) are certainly disturbing, causing asymmetry due to the second law of thermodynamics. However, noninvasive measurements should not disturb the evolution, so they are expected to be time-symmetric. Surprisingly, it is true only in classical physics but not in quantum physics, even in a thermodynamically invariant equilibrium state.[1] This type of asymmetry is independent of CPT symmetry but has not yet been confirmed experimentally due to extreme conditions of the checking proposal.

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I was indeed meaning the T symmetry and the fact t hat only the CPT symmetry is expected to be a good symmetry of nature. As CP is violated, T must be violated.

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A very interesting piece I must say👍 First time being introduced to the concept of "entropy". Thank you for this💌

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My pleasure, glad it was somewhat useful.

Thank you for stopping by!

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