You should read a few good vulgarization books, you'd be hooked.
If I may recommend Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe", "The Fabric of the Cosmos" and "The Hidden Reality".
Printable View
You should read a few good vulgarization books, you'd be hooked.
If I may recommend Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe", "The Fabric of the Cosmos" and "The Hidden Reality".
Is advanced-amateur science for dummies? That's what I need.
I'm "totes" into theoretical Quantum Physics! I just severely lack a PHD in String Theory.
Then Brian Greene is for you!
Start with The Elegant Universe, you shall not regret it.
let's say you travel through space with nearly the speed of light, you would age alot slower than the people who are left behind on earth. a theoretical physician said: fifteen years travelling with nearly the speed of light, would be enough to cross the whole universe!! what does this mean? well, it is possible to travel forward in time, theoretically ;) a few seconds with the speed of light, would let you age a few seconds, but all others who aren't moving at that speed, would age lots of years.
I have no idea how to feel right now
I watched a concept trailer for MOMENTUM the other day and it's quite interesting. It's probably more about the main character than the whole AG racing thing, but still...
https://vimeo.com/133314030
Think about it like this (this is a great post by a guy called corpuscle):
tl:drQuote:
Everything, by nature of simply existing, is "moving" at the speed of light (which really has nothing to do with light: more on that later). Yes, that does include you.
Our understanding of the universe is that the way that we perceive space and time as separate things is, to be frank, wrong. They aren't separate: the universe is made of "spacetime," all one word. A year and a lightyear describe different things in our day to day lives, but from a physicist's point of view, they're actually the exact same thing (depending on what kind of physics you're doing).
In our day to day lives, we define motion as a distance traveled over some amount of time. However, if distances and intervals of time are the exact same thing, that suddenly becomes completely meaningless. "I traveled one foot for every foot that I traveled" is an absolutely absurd statement!
The way it works is that everything in the universe travels through spacetime at some speed which I'll call "c" for the sake of brevity. Remember, motion in spacetime is meaningless, so it makes sense that nothing could be "faster" or "slower" through spacetime than anything else. Everybody and everything travels at one foot per foot, that's just... how it works.
Obviously, though, things do seem to have different speeds. The reason that happens is that time and space are orthogonal, which is sort of a fancy term for "at right angles to each other." North and east, for example, are orthogonal: you can travel as far as you want directly to the north, but it's not going to affect where you are in terms of east/west at all.
Just like how you can travel north without traveling east, you can travel through time without it affecting where you are in space. Conversely, you can travel through space without it affecting where you are in time.
You're (presumably) sitting in your chair right now, which means you're not traveling through space at all. Since you have to travel through spacetime at c (speed of light), though, that means all of your motion is through time.
By the way, this is why time dilation happens: something that's moving very fast relative to you is moving through space, but since they can only travel through spacetime at c, they have to be moving more slowly through time to compensate (from your point of view).
Light, on the other hand, doesn't travel through time at all. The reason it doesn't is somewhat complicated, but it has to do with the fact that it has no mass.
Something that isn't moving that has mass can have energy: that's what E = mc2 means. Light has no mass, but it does have energy. If we plug the mass of light into E=mc2, we get 0, which makes no sense because light has energy. Hence, light can never be stationary.
Not only that, but light can never be stationary from anybody's perspective. Since, like everything else, it travels at c through spacetime, that means all of its "spacetime speed" must be through space, and none of it is through time.
So, light travels at c. Not at all by coincidence, you'll often hear c referred to as the "speed of light in a vacuum." Really, though, it's the speed that everything travels at, and it happens to be the speed that light travels through space at because it has no mass.
Photons are not born and don't die, they don't experience time, because they travel at the greatest speed ever possible in our universe. If you had the eyes of a photon, you wouldn't see a thing, because you'd appear and disappear in a moment from your perspective.
The faster you travel in space, the slower you travel in time, because you spend more energy travelling in space than in time.
Conversely, if you spend more energy travelling in time than you do in space (like you're doing right now you big fat... :p), well, you age faster.
Ergo, motion is life :)
^ That would sort of support the theory of wormholes, because the theoretical science behind them is that a wormhole is a super dense region of space time where light either does not "exist" shall we say, or cannot be seen. People have photographed the region around the wormhole, because there is a light source there. BUT, it is impossible to peer inside a wormhole because light can not be seen (or does not exist as we perceive it). I don't really quite understand it, but it sets up a theory I have. We can take a picture of the space around a wormhole, not the wormhole itself.
Since space itself is expanding constantly, we can make a few loose assumptions:
1. The rate of space expansion is essentially at the speed of light, considering that nothing travels faster than light. In short, the universe is not only expanding, but if you were surfing on the wave of the universe expanding, you would be traveling at a theoretical "maximum speed" or at least as we might perceive it.
2. Since time is merely a way to judge speed, which is relative, any planet that already exists by definition is not traveling as "fast" as the universal expansion rate. This is why sonic booms occur, an object is traveling faster than the speed of sound.
3. Applying the same theory to movement, if it was possible to "see" someone on the edge of the universe from our back yard here on Earth, we would see their past (actually we wouldn't see them at all, but to make it easier to discuss let's assume we can see them). The perception of the faster moving object would not be delayed.
4. Assuming the universe expands in a 360 axis (X, Y, Z), any point in space time has a relative "speed" based on their X, Y, Z distance proportionally related to how close they are to the cusp of the universe expanding. This would technically mean that "time travel" isn't actually moving through time rather your perception would be altered base on distance. You aren't going to the future, rather you are going faster than objects located at 0, 0, 0. Based on this, going back in time is theoretically impossible.
5. If the Earth is the center of the universe (and it likely isn't), then we are essentially stopped in time as it relates to universal expansion. For someone at the edge of the universe however, we are all dinosaurs.
6. If a wormhole is essentially a point in space time (X, Y, Z) the theory is that time bends or distorts at the specific coordinate and leads to another coordinate. The fastest way to travel to the opposite coordinate on the Earth is to go straight through the center of it, strictly speaking (because I can't obviously travel through molten Earth). So the same is possible when considering traveling through the solar system. My theory is that a wormhole is essentially just that: a point where one can directly travel in a linear path through space/time as opposed to traveling around the long way (or by using a tangent curve along a circular axis). If the universe is a true 360 degree expansion, if there is a wormhole that is say at coordinate 1, 1, 1 (and this is made up of course) it could end up closer to a point where the universe is expanding. Since no current faster than light travel exists, the wormhole would compress time (at least our perception of it) and thus create a short cut.
7. Lastly, if there was some sort of engine capable of traveling at the speed of light, it wouldn't actually go that fast in pure linear motion, rather the drive would open up a super compressed point (essentially create a small wormhole) and zip through the "short way." It wouldn't travel "faster than light" rather it would instead compress the time space around it.
8. Confused yet? I am.
It hurts, it hurts so much.
My best friend...tortues me like this...
I gave her all I was able to give...
For a moment she gave me a lot of hope, all felt so save and wonderful.
It came like my worst nightmare.
Maybe she used to love me, she appreciated the way I cared about her.
And then...she coldly shoots me down.
Please let someone end this suffer.
Look away. If it's meant to be, one day it will.
In the meantime, you gotta take care of yourself :)