These gravity waves are extremely important and may have led to the birth of our Universe. It seems black holes have a rush of material in the vortex that gravitationally develops a kind of wave that opens a mouth, with results that leads to the opening of another universe as a white hole. I believe this is how our Universe was born and these types of universes may be common. It may be likely the Big Bang was only the beginning of our Universe and not others, and others were born through their own big bangs from other universe' black holes. Some black hole in another universe gave birth to ours. We're finding out the cosmos is vastly larger than the human mind can imagine.
"We're finding out the cosmos is vastly larger than the human mind can imagine."
Wait - is it possible to imagine a thing larger than we can imagine? Something isn't right about that phrase.
Just kidding. This is a great topic.
I want to add a couple of references - frame-dragging, which suggests that on comparing gravity to the electric field, there is a corresponding gravito-magnetic field, and the LIGO experiment, which is trying to detect gravitational waves.
I met Ray Weiss of the LIGO project when I was in college, and asked him some dumb freshman question about gravity, and he laughed and said he gets the same question several times a year, but he was really nice about it.
I think there's much less to time than we think. Time is nothing more than the rate at which energy exchanges between fields - electric/magnetic, as in LC oscillators, or gravitational/gravi-magnetic, as in a pendulum, or the potential energy of an excited electron in an atom vs. the kinetic energy of the released photon, as in atomic clocks.
The rate of time is just another property at every point in space, sort of like temperature. The past and future are fiction; just figments of our imagination; nothing really exists but "now".
But why is it that both gravity-related fields seem to affect the rate of time but not both electromagnetic fields?
Wait - is it possible to imagine a thing larger than we can imagine?
We can imagine that things exist in which our minds are not sufficient to imagine all the details. So those things, even if our imagination is aware, it cannot fathom the consequences with such imagination. Take for example, time. At one time, it was said that time could only flow in the forward direction like water in a stream. Then that was proved to have exceptions based on time variances by gravity. We can imagine time going forward and backwards and we can imagine the time paradox but we are not aware of the details of the third condition of time altercations when time is neither flowing forward or backwards. You can compress, expand and slingshot time but in each of the cases where does it come from and where will it go?
We're finding out the cosmos is vastly larger than the human mind can imagine.
I though we always imagined that. Err...now I've got headache:)
David B,
I don't follow. A "rate" is usually a measure of something per unit time. Like Speed = distance / time.
So your statement " Time is nothing more than the rate at which energy exchanges ...." read to me as "time = energy / time". Using time to define time does not help us and mixing up the units like that is not allowed anyway.
Then again your phrase "The rate of time is just another property ..." causes me issues. "rate of time" reads as time / time to me. What's that?
Of course then we have to introduce the idea that there are many different "times" depending on your speed /acceleration / gravitational situation. As laid out by Einstein and co. So we could talk about the rate at which yourTime passes compared to myTime say.
But that is getting mind bending complex already so "I think there's much less to time than we think" is unlikely.
I think we could stick with the formula for time which was invented by Albert Einstein. The time factor is equal to one over the square root of one minus v squared over c squared, so we'll need to equate velocity, the speed of light, and time, at least with this formula. Yet Hawking has created a multi faceted time equation specifying black hole proximity so now we can use gravity as well. Indeed there are likely multiple dimensions of time, one for each universe, and one for each time zone in existing universes. Yet, there are some places where time has not begun and there is no time. If we look to the edge of our Universe, we see the zone of extinction where all time ceases to exist. Yet, beyond this zone, a bubble boundary is thought to exist, that encapsulates the time within our own Universe from that of other bubble universes. Can we see beyond this extinction zone? How can we see zones where no time exists? How is the curvature of the universe warped onto the boundary of time to no time? We are trying to use larger and larger telescopes to help answer some of these questions.
Another even more startling aspect of time is the human equation. Some people are strapped for time while others definitely have too much time on their hands.
When we are one year old, half our life time is six months and one minute seems like an incredibly long time. By the time we are age 80, one year has less meaning in terms of time length and the rate of time passing by has physiologically accelerated to alarming speed, and days can be like hours. We could say the body slows down as clocks speed up.
Yet when we ponder the human life span, we live less than a fraction of a second in the grand scheme of the Cosmos. Our existence is everything, and yet our existence is microscopic. So time can enter into physics of gravitational waves and light, enter into the physiological aspect of a human's life span, and come into the cosmological scale of eternity.
I'm zooming along in my rocketship which is traveling at roughly 1/5 the speed of light. A beam of light from behind passes me at 186,282.397 miles/hour. A second beam from the front passes my window at 186,282.397 miles/hour. An observer from a distant planet looks through a telescope and watches both light beams which from the observer's perspective, both take a long time to reach their destinations.
As far as the person in the rocketship is concerned I see it as "Access Denied". I won't defend this notion. It is my philosophical view.
As far as traveling into the future all one would have to do is sustain in a higher gravity field relative to the one in which the "future" is in. Then when the "time" comes, equalize the the two fields for a sort of space-time sync. Of course this is assuming you are only looking to travel an adequate amount of time into the future and have taken into account the physical limitations on the human body and the surrounding environment in your endeavor.
Lots of good analogies and thinking in this thread.
What is interesting and fascinating about gravity waves
is their ability to change time. As we know, the Earth
is a serious contender of gravity. Breaking the bonds
of Earth's gravity during a rocket launch requires
millions of tons of force. But what happens when we
examine a clock undergoing the effects Earth's gravity?
Not surprising, two clocks, one at the lowest point
and one at the highest point, with the greatest
gravity differential, will read different times.
That's because the clock experiencing more
gravity is experiencing time travel. So you only
need to generate an intense gravitational field to
experience a change in time.
Gravity waves could be generated artificially or
collected from space time. The best contender of
manipulating gravity is a black hole because they
come in different package sizes and theoretically
could be man made. Stand in front of one, and like
the different and separated clocks at the two points
on Earth, the gravity waves will change your
time, accelerating you into the future.
This is a way to time travel, without using
a space ship traveling at high speeds. So if we're
sort of lazy and don't want to build a "light speed"
star ship, we could position ourselves in front of a
huge gravity wave generator, like a black hole.
But how would you use the ability to travel into the
future? Time is fluid and like water flows in one
direction. As we know it, we can't go back in time,
though we can see back in time under special
conditions.
Using black holes again, we can see
ourselves existing moments in the past. How will
a super civilization use the technology of harnessing
gravity waves and bending, shaping the nuances
of space and time? Will they choose to live longer
and accelerate into the future? Will they observe the
past in different places of space time, i.e. at the front
of a modulating worm hole, through time portals?
How will the technology of harnessing gravity waves
shape our future lives?
As far as traveling into the future all one would have to do is sustain in a higher gravity field relative to the one in which the "future" is in. Then when the "time" comes, equalize the the two fields for a sort of space-time sync. Of course this is assuming you are only looking to travel an adequate amount of time into the future and have taken into account the physical limitations on the human body and the surrounding environment in your endeavor.
I like the idea of syncing with a time traveling reference space time frame and there is great merit in adjusting the gravitational field. I designed a harmonic gravitational time machine. It had only one minor bug. The intensity of the harmonics would tear apart the human riding it. So I was looking for a gravitometric shielding for the human. Unfortunately Star Trek was canceled and I don't know how they solved the shielding problem. I think it has 2 solutions, one is fitting through the gravity wave crests and peaks and two is related to antimatter and antigravity. If anyone solves this I would be interested.
I'm zooming along in my rocketship which is traveling at roughly 1/5 the speed of light. A beam of light from behind passes me at 186,282.397 miles/hour. A second beam from the front passes my window at 186,282.397 miles/hour. An observer from a distant planet looks through a telescope and watches both light beams which from the observer's perspective, both take a long time to reach their destinations. As far as the person in the rocketship is concerned I see it as "Access Denied". I won't defend this notion. It is my philosophical view.
Depending on the inertial reference frame of the observer, the light could take a theoretical 13.7 billion years to reach destination (a long time). One could perform an experiment on Earth, using observations from Superluminal motion objects.
In astronomy, superluminal motion is the apparently faster-than-light motion seen in some radio galaxies, quasars and recently also in some galactic sources called microquasars. All of these sources are thought to contain a black hole, responsible for the ejection of mass at high velocities.
Comments
Wait - is it possible to imagine a thing larger than we can imagine? Something isn't right about that phrase.
Just kidding. This is a great topic.
I want to add a couple of references - frame-dragging, which suggests that on comparing gravity to the electric field, there is a corresponding gravito-magnetic field, and the LIGO experiment, which is trying to detect gravitational waves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame-dragging
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligo
I met Ray Weiss of the LIGO project when I was in college, and asked him some dumb freshman question about gravity, and he laughed and said he gets the same question several times a year, but he was really nice about it.
I think there's much less to time than we think. Time is nothing more than the rate at which energy exchanges between fields - electric/magnetic, as in LC oscillators, or gravitational/gravi-magnetic, as in a pendulum, or the potential energy of an excited electron in an atom vs. the kinetic energy of the released photon, as in atomic clocks.
The rate of time is just another property at every point in space, sort of like temperature. The past and future are fiction; just figments of our imagination; nothing really exists but "now".
But why is it that both gravity-related fields seem to affect the rate of time but not both electromagnetic fields?
I though we always imagined that. Err...now I've got headache:)
David B,
I don't follow. A "rate" is usually a measure of something per unit time. Like Speed = distance / time.
So your statement " Time is nothing more than the rate at which energy exchanges ...." read to me as "time = energy / time". Using time to define time does not help us and mixing up the units like that is not allowed anyway.
Then again your phrase "The rate of time is just another property ..." causes me issues. "rate of time" reads as time / time to me. What's that?
Of course then we have to introduce the idea that there are many different "times" depending on your speed /acceleration / gravitational situation. As laid out by Einstein and co. So we could talk about the rate at which yourTime passes compared to myTime say.
But that is getting mind bending complex already so "I think there's much less to time than we think" is unlikely.
When we are one year old, half our life time is six months and one minute seems like an incredibly long time. By the time we are age 80, one year has less meaning in terms of time length and the rate of time passing by has physiologically accelerated to alarming speed, and days can be like hours. We could say the body slows down as clocks speed up.
Yet when we ponder the human life span, we live less than a fraction of a second in the grand scheme of the Cosmos. Our existence is everything, and yet our existence is microscopic. So time can enter into physics of gravitational waves and light, enter into the physiological aspect of a human's life span, and come into the cosmological scale of eternity.
As far as the person in the rocketship is concerned I see it as "Access Denied". I won't defend this notion. It is my philosophical view.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_motion
In astronomy, superluminal motion is the apparently faster-than-light motion seen in some radio galaxies, quasars and recently also in some galactic sources called microquasars. All of these sources are thought to contain a black hole, responsible for the ejection of mass at high velocities.