2007-10-25 06:30:40 · 8 answers · asked by mortimer 2 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Physics
Wow, awful answers.
Time is part of the fabric of space. 4 dimensional spacetime. That was one of Albert Einstein's contributions.
That much is often understood though the implication is pretty amazing to contemplate.
You're always travelling through spacetime. If you're at rest, still, your entire momentum is through time. The faster you move, the less you're moving through time. Time exists everywhere but our perception of it can alter - approaching the speed of light all your momentum would be through space and there would be none left to travel through time so your perception would be very slow - in fact, this is one way to travel far in to the future, get in a rocket and fly at relativistic speeds.
2007-10-25 06:59:00 · answer #1 · answered by Leviathan 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋
According to theory that's been accepted for the last 100 years or so, the passage of time is not experienced at all by anything that travels at the speed of light.
Einstein came up with an equation that describes the exact amount by which time ought to slow down as things go faster and faster. We can (and have) directly measured this slow-down for various fast moving objects; and the measurement exactly matches the equation.
The same equation says that time should completely stop when the speed of "c" is reached. As far as we can tell, this is the case. For example, if a photon were to undergo some change (e.g. decay into some different type of particle) during its trip from "A" to "B", then that would definitely mean that the photon experiences time. (The reasoning is: if you "change," then events are happening in your reference frame, and therefore time is passing.) But in fact, photons are never observed to undergo any changes between "A" and "B".
2007-10-25 13:57:28 · answer #2 · answered by RickB 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Sort of. At the speed of light the light cone collapses to a single line where all of the future and all of the past are happening at the same time. They are being represented by the equivalent of a spatial coordinate. In other words, for a photon time does not exist (everything happens at the same time) and the world, for some photons is just "longer" (as in ruler or measuring tape longer) than for others, depending on how long they live i.e. how many wave vectors are between their emission and absorption processes. The "longest" photons are those which were left over by the big bang as cosmic microwave background. They have a length of roughly 13.5billion years*c.
A human observer will never be able to approximate that state because the faster one goes, the more the future hits one in the face. And by hit I mean really hit as in punch as in collisions with matter and radiation, as in being evaporated into oblivion. That's not any different from a photon, really.
:-)
2007-10-25 14:06:59 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
RickB gives a very good answer. May I add to it? Einstein said that time dilates as matter moves through space, and since time and space are inseparable, space must also dilate. Dilate means, to stretch. Could you look at the phenomena this way? Imagine that matter nearing light speed is travelling through time and space that is so far stretched that motion and passage of time becomes more difficult to detect because the fabric of space time is stretched so severely that travelling through it is getting you nowhere. I also have difficulty with the shrinking of matter, in the direction of motion. Could it be because an outside observer can only determine the length of the moving matter with an instument that remains unchanged because it is outside the frame of reference and the moving matter only appears to be shorher because of the dilation of space?
2007-10-25 18:39:32 · answer #4 · answered by johnandeileen2000 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
There are theories that time slows as it approaches the speed of light, but until we could actually go that fast, who knows?
2007-10-25 13:34:37 · answer #5 · answered by ryan c 5 · 0⤊ 4⤋
the speed of light is related to time...ie...how long after calling time, can the landlord turn off the lights before the police catch you out..lol.
2007-10-25 13:37:40 · answer #6 · answered by mickeyfish 3 · 1⤊ 4⤋
the fabric of time does not exist , if the fabric of time existed we would be able to mess with it or manuver it how ever we wanted , time is only a series of numbers we use for relavence of placement for the sun =]
2007-10-25 13:34:55 · answer #7 · answered by sig-MTD 2 · 1⤊ 4⤋
Time doesn't exist, it is a man made construct to make our lives easier.
2007-10-25 13:34:05 · answer #8 · answered by scorch_22 6 · 0⤊ 4⤋