MATTER-TIME: ARE MATTER AND TIME LINKED TOGETHER SIMILAR TO THE WAY THAT
SPACE AND TIME (SPACETIME)
ARE JOINED?
It was late one sunny afternoon when I was sitting in my car looking out at an inland waterway not far from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Lulled into a kind of daydream state, I was mesmerized by boats drifting, sailing, turning at anchor as clouds were rolling through, the tide was going out, and a gentle wind was blowing as the Sun was setting. I turned to look at the other horizon and a full moon was coming up.
Then it hit me -- it was one of those AHA moments: EVERYTHING IS IN MOTION. And I mean everything, from atoms that vibrate as electrons swirl around them, to blood cells and the breath in my body, to the turning and orbiting Earth, to the Sun that is moving within our galaxy, to the galaxy itself which is drifting toward our sister galaxy Andromeda, to the Universe which is expanding much faster than scientists previously thought. All of it is in motion. But that was just the start of my thoughts. This gave me an idea about time and physics.
The Earth [left] constantly rotates at 1000 miles per hour (1600 km). The Sun [2nd from left] moves around our galaxy at about 515,000 miles per hour (830,000 km) and our galaxy, the Milky Way, is moving at about 250,000 miles per hour (400,000 km) in the direction of our sister galaxy Andromeda [third from left], And at the furthest edges, the Universe is moving close to the speed of light (73.8 +/- 2.4 km/sec/mpc). Photo of two galaxies colliding [far right].
ARE WE MISSING SOMETHING?
Beyond Energy, Matter, Time and Space
But it is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time. There are skeptics who suspect we may be missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.
Jul 22, 2014, The New York Times
George Johnson RAW DATA
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/science/beyond-energy-matter-time-and-space.html
Many major advances in science have come about when a scientist connected two things that were not related before. In Einstein's famous equation E = mc2, matter is converted into energy -- thus connecting the two. And then there is also the well-known story about Isaac Newton when he saw an apple fall to the ground and suddenly realized that the gravity which caused the apple to fall was the same force that allowed the Earth to orbit the Sun.
Newton, as a young man, suddenly understood how the Universe was held together when he saw an apple fall. He made the leap of connecting the fall of a small apple on Earth to the force that governed the planets as they circled the Sun and the force that controlled the moon as it orbited the Earth.
Which takes us to the idea of gravity itself which has never really been completely explained even by Einstein. And furthermore is incompatible with quantum physics.
WHAT IS GRAVITY?
(Quoted from Cosmos Magazine)
As Newton himself even wondered, how could a force work instantaneously at a distance even through the vacuum of space?
... Einstein...showed that space and time are not separate entities but rather a single four-dimensional continuum...[and] imagined it stretching through the universe like a fabric. Any object with mass, Einstein reasoned, would interact with the fabric of spacetime and cause distortions...
Gravity may be one of the fundamental forces of the universe, but it currently seems fundamentally incompatible with the others. While quantum field theory (QFT) succeeds in bringing together electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces, it struggles with ... general relativity.
EXPLAINER: WHAT IS GRAVITY?
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/explainer-what-is-gravity
TAKING A LEAP
There comes a point where the mind takes a leap
— call it intuition or what you will —
and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge,
but can never prove how it got there.
All great discoveries have involved such a leap.
Albert Einstein
Einstein imagined riding or chasing a beam of light when he was a teenager. He thought about this for years. Then, one night in Bern, Switzerland, he heard the ancient clock [far right photo] chime the hour and it triggered a thought experiment with light and time that led to the Special Theory of Relativity.
SO WHAT IS THE LEAP I AM PROPOSING?
MATTER-TIME OR MATTERTIME
Well, it's really quite simple. As I said everything, and I mean everything from the tiniest to the biggest is in motion. So all matter involves movement but movement can only exist in time because movement means that there is a change over time. Therefore time is not just the arena in which matter operates, time is part of matter. It is an essential element that makes up matter.
And where does this go? Since all matter contains time, then everything from a subatomic particle to a galaxy contains time.
While the following is highly speculative and frankly I am way over my head, here are some thoughts. This might be the bridge between the very large and the very small that physicists have been looking for: the link between quantum physics and Einstein's cosmology. A large object with a gravitational pull that bends space-time, for example, may also have its own time component -- which comes from its own matter-time field that is a product of all the atoms that are part of it. This body then interacts with Einstein's space-time. And we see this interaction as gravity. An understanding of matter-time at the quantum level and then the way that matter-time interacts and links together in larger structures might lead to a complete understanding from small to large.
THE HISTORY OF TIME IN PHYSICS
When Galileo performed his inclined plane experiments to discover the nature of gravity, he thought originally that the critical element was distance. Yet it turned out to be time (time squared) or acceleration. His equations were perhaps the first in physics in which time was seen as a key part of the dynamics of objects.
Newton went one step further and developed calculus which could handle sophisticated situations with time such as an accelerating cannonball being fired high up into the air. "Calculus is the study of how things change...The fundamental idea of calculus is to study...changes over tiny intervals of time." And change requires time. (Quotes about calculus are from MIT).
(http://www-math.mit.edu/~djk/calculus_beginners/chapter01/section02.html)
Einstein took time two steps further. First, he made time the fourth dimension and also relative to the observer in the Special Theory of Relativity. And then he made time part of the fabric of the Universe with his concept of space-time as a field in the General Theory of Relativity.
In Einstein's General Relativity, space-time is a field that is bent by objects in the field which we perceive as gravity.
If we have missed part of the puzzle as Johnson said above, it might be because time is always with us and everywhere. It is so close and so much a part of us and everything we do, we don't notice it. However, everything exists in time, nothing exists outside of time.
A deep-sea fish has probably no means of apprehending
the existence of water; it is too uniformly immersed in it...
the existence of water; it is too uniformly immersed in it...
Sir Oliver Lodge, British scientist
What could a fish tell you about water? Probably not much. It lives in water, it is surrounded by water, it floats and moves in water; water is the world that it lives in -- so a fish is probably unaware of many of the properties of water. I doubt, for example, that it could understand the concept of being wet.
And so, like the fish, we live surrounded, but not by water but by time. There is no way out -- no way around it. While we work with it every day and every moment, we are so immersed in it, we have trouble grasping its complexities.
It has taken four hundred years, starting with Galileo to include a dynamic sense of time in our scientific view. Perhaps it is now time to take the next step.
ABOUT MY BACKGROUND
To be honest, I am only an advanced amateur in these matters. But I have been studying Einstein and the stars since I was 13 when I also got an A in algebra. Later I in college I got A's in Calculus and also in a course in Modern Physics at UNC-Chapel Hill. And I took four semesters of a laboratory physics course. And recently I just finished writing and researching two 10k word eBooks on Galileo and Einstein for a client. Yet I don't pretend to understand Quantum Field Theory.
However, much of my work has a scientific bent and the study of time has been at the heart of my efforts.
In my own work, I have made a PowerPoint presentation based on Eames' Powers of Ten in which I presented photographic images from the furthest galaxies to subatomic particles -- photographs that were not available when Eames first made his animated film. And I have been writing this blog, DeconstructingTime, about time for five years now. In this blog, I have covered a number of scientific topics and presented a number of scientific ideas. For example, I have proposed that it can be proven scientifically that the Neolithic culture at the Newgrange Passage Tomb in Ireland built an accurate and sophisticated device that magnified the Sun's rays so that the device could indicate the day of the winter solstice in real time, which the Greeks and Romans could not do 3000 years later.
SEE THESE BLOGS FOR TWO OF MY MOST READ SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES
Animal Senses Compared to the Human Sense of Time
Computing the Winter Solstice at Newgrange: Was Neolithic Science Equal To or Better Than Ancient Greek or Roman Science?
And I spent a summer reading and notating the wonderful, A History of Scientific Ideas by Charles Singer. So I might know more than the average bear, but probably not a lot more. Nevertheless, I will take a chance and put my ideas out there, because who knows...
Using equipment I modified, I tweaked an old color analog TV set so that it received the maximum amount of static from the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMBR created when the Big Bang exploded. Then using a photographic technique developed by me, I was able to take a clear photograph that exaggerated the static which I then enhanced with computer software. These pictures are enlargements of the static after I processed it. I was interviewed on NPR Radio about this as well.
It is also important to note that some major ideas have come from thinkers who, while not scientists per se, thought in scientific terms. A good example is the friar Giordano Bruno who was the first person to state around 1600 CE that the stars were other suns and much more distant than believed at the time. Plus he thought many of the stars might have planets around them -- an idea which has only been taken seriously in the last half-century. His ideas were totally radical at the time. And, come to think of it, Galileo was not an astronomer -- with none of the training or experience of his contemporaries such as Kepler or Tycho Brahe. Yet he was able to discover things they had not.
------ AFTERWORD ------
THE AHA EXPERIENCE
During a church service, Galileo saw a huge bronze lamp swinging above him in the Pisa Cathedral when he was a college student [second picture from left]. Being a medical student at the time, he timed the swings with his pulse and then suddenly understood that pendulums moved with a regular motion. This revelation would stay with him his entire life. Before he died, when he was blind, he worked with his son on a design for a pendulum clock. Just a few years later Christiaan Huygens made a pendulum clock based on Galileo's ideas which would be the most accurate design of a clock for the next 300 years [drawing of the mechanism and the actual clock, third and fourth from left].
FOR MORE ABOUT THE AHA OR EUREKA MOMENT
AND RELATED IDEAS:
Eureka
Einstein's Clocks and Thought Experiments
It's Not A Cookie-Cutter World
I WROTE ABOUT THIS MATTER-TIME IDEA 5 YEARS AGO,
BUT I KNEW MUCH LESS ABOUT IT THAN I DO KNOW
HERE IS A LINK TO THAT FIRST BLOG POST
September 19, 2013
Pure Speculation About the Physics of Time
AROUND 1970 I WROTE THE FOLLOWING SCIENCE/POEM
The Gentle Wind That Blows Through Atoms
THE GENTLE WIND THAT BLOWS THROUGH ATOMS
the gentle wind
that blows through atoms
that curls and lies quiet
waits for a mind
to focus it
like burning sunlight
and penetrate
the weave of space
