Sunday, May 29, 2011

Time Flies

One of the most fascinating things I've ever learned is the notion that the faster you are moving the slower time moves for you relatively to those "motionless" and the difference gets exponentially greater as you approach the speed of light.  E=MC squared?  Is that what that is about?  Anywho the story goes that if you were in a spaceship traveling around the Earth at the speed of light, years would be going by on Earth to what would only seem like hours or minutes to use in the ship.  It also works on much smaller scales.  They tested this theory a couple of times with an atomic clock and a jet, where the clock on the jet was like microsecond different than the one maintained as control after a flight of several hours. 

Why this notion of the universe hasn't gotten much further examination blows my mind.  If there were going to be an omnipotent being controlling the universe, this is one major piece of the puzzle that would bring us toward that ultimate truth.  But the thing is, aren't we always moving or in motion?  The Earth is spinning, the earth is revolving around the sun, the sun is revolving around the center of the galaxy, I'm pretty sure, that galaxy is revolving around something bigger and so on and so forth.  Not to mention our matter is still flying out from the big bang.  How does this all effect our perception of time.  With everything being relative to the univers maybe none since everything seems to be in constant motion.  Can anything smaller than the universe experience complete motionless?  The sun is probably moving thousands of miles a second, which in turn means we are relative to other positions in the galaxy, which if we were to do that on Earth would increase the difference with that experiment with the fighter jet 1000 fold.   If the sun stopped, would we age a lifetime in a split second.  Can we even call it a second then?  Or is it as humans the days will just keep adding up, time seems somewhat constant to us, and if the universe stopped we would just age regular in our own minds, but to observer outside the universe we would be gone like that (snaps fingers). 

Now recently, I think time has gone ridiculously fast.  Many say it is a factor of just getting older, you've lived more days so your collective memories of days becomes more and more, a day feels like it goes faster than it did when you were say 5 years old.  However now, something feels a little off otherwise, it feels like it is more of a collective group of people thinking this.  What if the matter from the big bang is finally slowing down and is causing our perception of time?  How would that effect our concept of time?  There should be a way to calculate when the matter from the big bang starts to slow down from its initial acceleration.  Maybe that is the key to our existence.  That the universe slowed down at just the right time to give humans a notion of time for them to exist. 

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