Time Dimension To Become Space-like

KentuckyFC writes "The Universe is about to flip from having three dimensions of space and one of time to having four dimensions of space. That's the conclusion of a group of Spanish astrophysicists who have calculated that observers inside such a Universe would see it expanding and accelerating away from them just before the flip (abstract, full paper pdf on the physics arXiv). 'We show that regular changes of signature on brane-worlds in AdS bulks may account for some types of the recently fashionable sudden singularities. Therefore, the fact that the Universe seems to approach a future sudden singularity at an accelerated rate of expansion might simply be an indication that our braneworld is about to change from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature. Both the brane and the bulk remain fully regular everywhere.'" Update: 10/09 16:06 GMT by Z : A few readers have written in to point out that the article is not peer-reviewed; your mileage may vary.

Comments

Mayan Calender

[andyh3930]

So that's whats going to happen when the Mayan calender rolls over in 2012.

Re:Mayan Calender

[dark404]

There will be a patch to update the calendar software to granite instead of sand stone, this will push the calendar into 4096.

Re:Mayan Calender

[xanadu113]

No, that's just the Mayan Y2.012K bug...

Re:Mayan Calender

[mentaldingo]

Disclaimer: IANAP.

Seriously, I think this is ridiculous for two main reasons, I think.

How can the Universe suddenly change like that? Change requires time. It's a logical paradox. You say that in the future, that time will become a fourth spacial dimension, but try writing up a timeline of the events:

1. Time 0: Universe has time and is normal.
2. Time 1: Universe suddenly flips and now has 0 time, 4 space.
3. Time ??: No time, but now where did the past go?

OK, I'm no good at explaining this, but it clearly doesn't mix at all well with general/special relativity's block time. Not only for that timeline problem above, but also because the difference between space and time is made up by humans: Special relativity can be derived from the starting assumption that there are four dimensions (3 with real displacements, 1 with imaginary displacements) and a whole bunch of spaghetti (particles and stuff moving around). When you rotate the spaghetti through the fourth, imaginary dimension, you get a velocity, and it just so happens, that the rotation becomes hyperbolic, and you get the speed of light as a limit.

Re:Mayan Calender

[DeepZenPill]

No no no, you have it all wrong. It goes like this:

Time 0: Universe has time and is normal.
Time 1: Universe suddenly flips and now has 0 time, 4 space.
Time ??: ????
Time 42: Profit!

Re:Mayan Calender

[MarsDefenseMinister]

That particular problem can be solved by defining time as a big rubber band that *doesn't* break. Simple.

Re:Mayan Calender

[tm2b]

How can the Universe suddenly change like that? Change requires time. No... this change requires time before it, not after it. It's a phase transition.

What was time like before the (4-space) big bang?

That said, this is probably a junk paper, but what you identify isn't a problem.

Re:Mayan Calender

[eclipz]

I am also not a professional. However...

The paper describes the time dimension heading toward a singularity. So, we'll get the universe rapidly expanding outward faster and faster. However, there will be a point at which there is a "big freeze", where time will stop. However, there is no 'experience' of time stopping. Instead, we would experience time as normal as we are attached to it, and would have no clue that we can go no further. There is a very interesting description of this in "Einstein's Dreams".

So, putting it into your explaination, all that spaghetti rotating in the forth dimension would keep doing so. Only an observer *outside* of time could ever see the change in the brane-space and only they would ever see the stuck versions of ourselves at the point of the signature change.

Re:Mayan Calender

[mhall119]

Look at it this way. We live in a 4 dimensional space, x, y, z and t are our 4 dimensions. x, y and z are space-like, while t is (currently) time-like. You steps go like this:

1. t=0: Universe has time and is normal
2. t=1: Universe suddenly flips, dimension t is now space-like
3. t=2: You now life in a 4d universe with 4 space-like dimensions, and you are at point 2 on the 't' dimension, which you can freely travel on in the positive or negative directions (time travel becomes possible)

Does that help?

Re:Mayan Calender

[fractoid]

Soggy? His Noodly Appendage Shall Not be Overcooked!

Ode to the new way

[fyngyrz]

Oh, I'm living in a tesseract,
a four dimensional box.
It's bigger on the inside,
what why my four-space rocks!
When you get on the inside,
the outside becomes the in,
Dimensionally speaking,
it's all about the spin.

E=MC^2

[jshriverWVU]

If only Einstein was around to see it :)

Re:E=MC^2

[mikael]

He's spinning in his grave - in a quantum mechanical way of course.

Re:E=MC^2

[bar-agent]

He's spinning in his grave - in a quantum mechanical way of course.

Would that be spin-up or spin-down?

Re:E=MC^2

[HTH NE1]

Would that be spin-up or spin-down? Both, obviously. I find that strangely charming.

My advice

[Weaselmancer]

Avoid poetry, coastal cities, and the Catskill mountains. Seriously.

I wasn't expecting that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody Expects the Spanish Astrophysicists! In fact, our two main weapons are theory and telescopes, theory and telescopes, and an insane amount of genius, wait that's three, our three main weapons are...

But what does that mean?

[downix]

If time becomes space-like, what would that mean for us? Would we be able to transverse time as easily as space? Would time itself become irrelevent as we could look "forwards"? Will the cubs win the world series? These important questions have to be answered!

Re:But what does that mean?

[caramelcarrot]

Physics as we experience it will go to shit, since much of the base derivations are a consequence of a non-spacelike time.

Re:But what does that mean?

[inviolet]

> Would we be able to transverse time as easily as space?
Yes!

> Would time itself become irrelevent as we could look "forwards"?
Yes!

In "Slaughterhouse Five", Vonnegut wrote about creatures who perceived time as a geometric dimension. They could perceive their entire lives as a wide landscape, stretching from past to present to future... and they could move freely within it, to relive the better moments and fast-forward over the unpleasant ones.

One of the implications that these creatures could see, but which we could not, is that the universe can only play out one way. Whatever happens, has always happened, and always will happen, it is unavoidable. The creatures could see their future with absolute certainty, and so they knew that choice is an illusion (or, in my understanding, a mis-connotated word that belongs in the realm of epistemology rather than of metaphysics).

In any case, if the universe experiences this sort of "signature change", then we'll never know it. Consciousness will abruptly cease, like a paused DVD player or a saved Diablo game, waiting forever for time to resume. But, a new sort of consciousness could arise, to which physical movement is the equivalent of temporal progression. Somehow, if it could gather information and then ruminate upon it, by means of movement rather than time, it could become self-aware.

Re:But what does that mean?

[planckscale]

Well lets hope that when I abruptly stop that I am frozen in front of my laptop reading Slashdot. That way I can ruminate on the comment "I really hope I'm not in the DMV when time ends." for eons.

Re:But what does that mean?

[king-manic]

The "problem", philosophically, with a purely Newtonian universe, derives from the niggling little detail that free will cannot exist. Every possible action you could ever take will have already happened, just not yet.

Free will is just an idea. It isn't some essential observed bit of the universe. From all scientific evidence we are complicated finite state machines. We are entirely physical, deterministic machines.

Re:But what does that mean?

[kalirion]

This allows from freedom of choice because you can move all over the realm of time.

But you'd have no control over where in the realm of time you choose to move any more than you have control where in space you choose to move. You can will what to do, but you can't will what to will.

Re:But what does that mean?

[jeffasselin]

The existence of 3 dimensions of time is one of the suggestions of quantum gravity.

Also, why does time seem to flow into a single direction? Most of the equations of physics work fine both ways, but time only appears to flow in a single direction, only its "pace" changes. The best explanation is that there's a breaking of symmetry, a process which for some reason only occurs in one direction of the time dimension(s). The only such process we can observe at this time is entropy. In a closed system, it always increases, it can never decrease. So entropy seems to be linked to time in some intricate way, or maybe it's actually an extra time dimension linked to the first in some way. So what happens if time changes into a space dimension? What does that even MEAN? The only significant difference between time and space is that single direction in which time flows, so does it mean the second law of thermodynamics will stop applying? The flow of entropy will reverse or break its link to the time dimension? This would not necessarily be so "bad" but it would completely break down most of the laws of physics that depend on this phenomenon, thus destroying the universe, no?

Re:But what does that mean?

[Ashtead]

"Look" at all? Won't electromagnetism fail at this point too when the photons stop dead, so there won't be anyone left to look for or at anything? Not that there would be any way to see anything either. After all, it is electromagnetism that really holds atoms, molecules, and thus people, planets, and stars together ...

Will it look like the langoliers finishing off the reality starting at one edge, or will it be like the encounter with the Boojum "softly and suddenly vanish away"?

Or maybe it just will be a party lasting indefinitely at a restaurant at the end of the universe.

Re:But what does that mean?

[kalirion]

In "Slaughterhouse Five", Vonnegut wrote about creatures who perceived time as a geometric dimension. They could perceive their entire lives as a wide landscape, stretching from past to present to future... and they could move freely within it, to relive the better moments and fast-forward over the unpleasant ones.

Movement is change, and change requires time. To move from one time to another, you need some kind of "metatime". To move through that, you'd need "metametatime" and so forth. Without change, you can't decide to "relive" the better moments because you've already lived them, are currently living them, and will always live them. You'd either exist everytime through your life "simultaneously" or just in the same moment. With metatime your existence would still be linear, no matter how many jumps and zigzags you make through ordinary time. Say you time travel 1985 -> 1955 -> 1985 -> 2015 -> 1985 -> 1955 -> 1885. That would be your linear metatime progression, and that's the one your memories will follow.

Anyway, that's the only way it would make sense to me :)

Re:But what does that mean?

[kalirion]

You're absolutely right. There is an underlying assumption that right now we are moving linearly through time. However you have to consider that if we were bouncing around, it wouldn't make any difference to us. I mean, what's doing the bouncing? At each point, as you've said, we have our memories of the past and not the future. As far as I'm concerned, that is me, the memories, the remembered experiences, whatever the current state is. Past bounces and future bounces would have zero affect on the present. It's always the current bounce that would matter and nothing else.

To take it further, The memories present in each bounce could be completely unrelated to any events at any time. There might be no cause and effect at all, rendering "past" and "future" meaningless terms.

Hell, instead of bouncing around, we could be stuck within the same moment and not know the difference. That's what might happen when time is gone, and it "already" might be. Might "always" have been in fact.

Re:But what does that mean?

[ultranova]

The only such process we can observe at this time is entropy. In a closed system, it always increases, it can never decrease.

In a closed system entropy can and does decrease from time to time. It is simply much more likely to increase, due to there being more possible states with high entropy than there are states with low entropy in known physical systems, and the likelihood of it decreasing in a given period decreases sharply as the complexity of the system grows. It never goes to zero, thought.

A classical example is a box with two separate gasses, initially separated by a dividing wall. If the wall is removed, the gasses will mix, eventually spreading equally to every part of the box. However, suppose that the box only contains a single molecule of both gasses. It is certainly possible, and even likely, that both molecules happen to be at their initial side of the box, and both gassed therefore separated back to their own sides, at some future point. Add another molecule to both gassed, and you'll have to wait a bit longer for all four to be at their initial sides, but still not too long. A third molecule, and it takes longer still, then fourth, fifth and so on.

The more molecules you add, the longer you'll have to wait. However, no matter how many molecules there are in the box, given a long enough time, the gasses will separate, simply due to random motion of the molecules happenign to take all the molecules of one gas to one side of the box at the same time, and all the molecules of the other gas to the other side at the same time.

It will take almost, but not quite, forever, but that's a far cry from "never".

Plagarism!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I first read this theory in Oolong Caloophid's seminal work: "Where God Went Wrong."

More of this is elaborated in his development of these themes: "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes," and "Who Is This God Person Anyway?".

So how does this affect us?

[icebrain]

So what does this mean for us, exactly? Would we still perceive things as we do now (only with some relativistic stuff changing), or does everything suddenly go nuts? FTL travel, maybe?

And mostly-OT but seemed related: I remember a couple of SF short stories about something like this... one was "Mimsy were the Bogroves" or something like that, where two kids discover 4-dimensional toys from the future, then read "Jabberwocky" and figure out how to move in time.

The other one was about a kid who befriends a neighbor working in 4-D stuff. The kid (because he's young and has an open mind or something) learns to move about in that dimension as well, and communicate with creatures living in other dimensions. Don't remember the title of that one, thoguh.

Re:So how does this affect us?

[Qzukk]

The other one was about a kid who befriends a neighbor working in 4-D stuff. The kid (because he's young and has an open mind or something) learns to move about in that dimension as well, and communicate with creatures living in other dimensions. Don't remember the title of that one, thoguh.

I believe that's The Boy Who Reversed Himself. I remember having read that when I was in highschool.

This can mean but one thing

[Arthur B.]

Jeebus will return ! Clean your browsing history and cache.

Re:Another dimension?

[weirdcrashingnoises]

No, but your slashdot ID# should cease to matter.

and there was much rejoicing.

(holy crap we have close #'s too)

Re:So. . . .

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

the intersection of mathematics and cosmology

[circletimessquare]

where the theories and calculations of the brightest brains in the room become indistinguishable from the random brainfarts of two stoners sitting on a smelly couch in a dorm room at 4:20 AM

Re:Not just what, but when?

[Basehart]

I'm guessing some time in the future.

great

[nomadic]

I really hope I'm not in the DMV when time ends.

Re:Not just what, but when?

[timster]

Silly... obviously the question is NOT "When will this happen?" Without time there is no "when", and no "happen", and no "will". Only "this".

Should this research be correct, the only question left will be: "This?" Now and always and forever, this?

Peer review

[MillionthMonkey]

The peers are going to review this a few centimeters from now; give them time.

Re:Peer review

[eclectro]

You don't need peer review if you have enough branes.

"... about to ..."

[dpilot]

So dpilot was talking with God, and God said, "To Me, a minute is like a million years, and a million years are like a minute." So dpilot said, "In a that vein, is a penny like a billion dollars, and a dollars like a penny?" God replied, "You've got it." Which led dpilot to ask of God, "Can you spare a penny?" "Sure," said God, "in just a minute..."

When you say "about to" in sports, something generally happens pretty fast.
When you say "about to" in geology, something generally happens pretty slow.
Generally speaking, saying "about to" in cosmology is to geology as geology is to sports.

But not always. At some points in time, the volcano under Yellowstone does go off. Likewise, supernovas happen, and perhaps brane changes too. But to say "about to" or "soon" is just meaningless to human scales of time.

Re:Not just what, but when?

[ArieKremen]

The real question is not "when is this expected to happen?", but where? I think it already happened on the NJ turnpike a long time ago

Re:Not just what, but when?

[Anonymous Monkey]

No, not at some time in the future. At some POINT in the future. If time is becomes a detention of physical space then future and past will be like left and right. I could never tell my left from my right as a kid.

Define "about to"?

[WibbleOnMars]

I'd like to know how they define "about to flip".

Are we talking about something they see as imminent -- could happen at any moment?
Or are we talking about geological time scales -- it'll happen in a few hundred thousand years, give or take?
Or do they mean cosmological scales -- where 'about to happen' means somewhere in the next ten or twenty million years?

Or is the whole question of when a silly thing to ask, given that they're talking about the end of time as sequential/chronological?

Re:Not just what, but when?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I'm guessing some time in the future.

You missed the whole point. Some place in the future.

Re:So... Should I buy canned goods and water?

[pclminion]

Isn't "time" only subtlety different from a physical dimension?

This phrasing suggests that time is not a physical thing. Given that the variable "t" occurs in practically all dynamic equations of physics, I'd have to disagree with the assertion that time isn't physical.

Old, old old news

[bradgoodman]

This is nothing new at all.

Relativity talks of space and time as a single 4-dimensional 'spacetime'.

M-Theory, Superstrings, p-Branes, and a billion other theories all say there are 10 (or 11) dimensions, including things like two-dimensional "time" and "imaginary-time" dimensions, smaller "curled-up" spacial dimensions, etc.

All you D & D players

[Ilan Volow]

Get that last game in before your game stops working with your newly created 144-sided dice.

Lorentzian to Euclidian transformations...

[jnaujok]

All this talk about time becoming a spatial dimension and realities collapsing is making my brane hurt.

Yeah, I said it.

Re:Explanation?

[xPsi]

Lets say I told you we had two spatial dimensions. You would imagine a plane with perpendicular x-y axes everyone knows and loves. If I asked you to draw the set of points that were equidistant from the origin, you would probably assume the geometry was Euclidian and would probably instinctively draw a circle (a good guess!). It is commonplace to hear "time is the fourth dimension." As first pass to visualize this, you might try to draw a two dimensional space-time plot: an x axis and a perpendicular time axis in a plane. If I then asked you to draw all the points equidistant from the origin, you would probably again draw a circle in this x-t plane. It seems to make sense, but is only true of time is a "space-like" dimension like "y" in the x-y plane. This is way Newton thought of things and it seems to be what the authors of the paper are advocating. But, unbeknownst to some people who cite "time as the fourth dimension," according to the theory of relativity, the set of equidistant points from the origin on a x-t graph would actually be hyperbole, not circles. This is because in relativity space-time is a Minkowski geometry, not Euclidian. All the weird stuff in special relativity like time dilation and length contraction come about because of this weird geometry. In fancier language, time has an opposite sign than space in the metric. The metric determines how distances are calculated in a given geometry. If time has the same sign as space in the metric, then space-time becomes Euclidian and one would say that time was a space-like. The article is probably extra confusing to non-physics people because most probably didn't know time wasn't space-like to begin with.

Mileage?

[TheRaven64]

Update: 10/09 16:06 GMT by Z : A few readers have written in to point out that the article is not peer-reviewed; your mileage may vary. So may your yearage, presumably.

Hope not.

[mattr]

I knew 3 answers to the Fermi Paradox. Either intelligence quickly builds into quiet-looking shells like in Charlie Stross' Accelerando, or by virtue of being conscious we humans have somehow carved out a light cone or domain excluding other intelligences, some wierd cocoon: it is impossible physically to communicate because other domains have other physics. There's a neat scifi story about that too. The third is a land mine in physics, waiting for young civilizations to liberate enough power to fry them. Heinlein did that one, it's a nasty one. Now a fourth: the universe really is out to get us. Not just out to get aggressive monkeys that want to learn high-energy physics, but even to the point of making a state flip ever so often. I think this last one (today's news) is pretty unlikely to happen any time soon but nevertheless it is a future killer, something harder to understand than the burning out of the stars in the far future. None of these are very nice ideas but I hope some physicists will step up to answering what the latest theory says about when it might happen and whether it could operate on a patchwork basis, killing other civilizations while our planet was still cooling.

Re:Hope not.

[Ristol]

All wrong. See, in the future, we're gonna create robots whose only goals are the well-being of humanity. They'll eventually realize that it would benefit us if we were the only intelligent race in the galaxy. So when they eventually become omnipotent, they'll travel back in time and 'choose' a universe for us in which Earth hosts the only life-forms.
Seriously, I read it in a book!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It is almost physically painful to see

[Nephrite]

slashdotters comment on science topics. Top comments are always "Funny" because no one really understands what it's all about and so everybody just makes stupid jokes instead.

My crude guess

[khallow]

It appears to me that this is a purely mathematical result. They are basically saying that an anti-de sitter bulk, the interior of anti de Sitter (AdS) space which is a constant negatively curved (or constant positive cosmological constant) with one time-like dimension (Lorentzian space) can be glued to a euclidean space smoothly along the boundary of the two spaces. Classically, this is of little relevance since time-based trajectories would stop at the boundary (either take infinite time to arrive or the system would "rip" itself apart at the boundary). Instead there could be (though not addressed in the paper) observable quantum effects from having something past the boundary even if it is purely spatial. Space-time states might extend over the boudary into this other space. So you might end up with the strange situation where parts of the universe are interacting beyond the end of time.

This paper doesn't tell you whether that occurs or not. But it does indicate that it is possible for quantum systems to have both Lorentzian and Euclidean space components seamlessly connected.

Nothing but quaternions

[sweetser]

Silly Spaniards playing bogus number games. Quaternions are numbers, like the reals, but with 4 parts, a scalar one for time, and a 3-vector for 3D space. A scalar ain't never gonna be a vector. Ever. There is no finger pointing for scalars. This is why there is no arrow for time, never will be, but there is an arrow for spacetime, due to the space part of spacetime. If you look up "Standard Model" on YouTube, not arXiv, you can see they symmetries of EM, the weak force, the strong force, and gravity, U(1), SU(2), SU(3), and Diff(M) respectively. Those 4 symmetries are involved in the norm of two quaternions, where q* q' = 1. Play with the quaternion 4D wave equation, and you get competition for GR.

doug
barking up a real 4D tree by himself
instead of making dumb 11D claims

Re:Not just what, but when?

[prat393]

It's not the future anymore. It's just "that way". *Points*

Re:Not just what, but when?

[Dr. Eggman]

In the future, time will become very confusing...

Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
Sandurz: Now, you're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now is happening now.
Dark Helmet: What happend to then?
Sandurz: We passed then.
Dark Helmet: When?
Sandurz: Just now. Were at now, now.
Dark Helmet: Go back to then!
Sandurz: When?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Sandurz: Now?
Dark Helmet: Now!
Sandurz: I can't.
Dark Helmet: Why?
Sandurz: We missed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Sandurz: Just now.
Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Sandurz: Soon.
Dark Helmet: How soon?

ow ow my brane hurts!

[Anonymous Coward]

..maybe if I wait a few feet it'll feel better

Consequences

[xPsi]

Ok, as others have pointed out, this "paper" is not peer reviewed. I want to make it clear that I don't personally feel slashdot is the place to debate random physics papers on the arXiv. But, being slashdot, I will ignore my own pleas for sanity. What would be the physical consequences of time suddenly becoming space-like? First, on most mesoscopic scales in our everyday life, time already appears like a spatial dimension. Newton certainly thought so and our (incorrect) intuition tells us this is the case. The degree to which special and general relativity play a role in your everyday life is a measure of how "time-like" time feels. Probably not much. Nevertheless, if time suddenly physically became space-like, physicists all over the world would know it right away. All the weird stuff in relativity like time dilation and space contraction and so on, comes from time having an opposite metric sign as space. These effects all go away if time is space-like. For example, in a typical advanced undergraduate physics lab, you might measure the lifetime of a muon that is sitting in the lab as opposed to one that is crashing down from the sky. The one coming from above (at a large fraction the speed of light) lives longer in the frame of the ground because of time dilation. Easily verified in an afternoon. But I guess no more (at least after next Thursday or whenever this is supposed to happen). Similarly, all the special relativity equations required to perform basic momentum, energy, and lifetime calculations at colliders like Fermilab, CERN, and Brookhaven would suddenly stop working. That would be a big deal and it wouldn't be a subtle thing. IMHO, it makes for great science fiction, but I'm not sure where these guys are going with it.

Assumptions

[camperdave]

Change requires time. It's a logical paradox.

You're assuming that there is only one time dimension. But actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.

Re:Assumptions

[flyingsquid]

All I know is, my boss has now declared that our fifteen-minute breaks are to be replaced by 15-centimeter breaks. Asshole.

Re:Assumptions

[dpiven]

Easy. Time is what keeps everything from happening at once, and space is what keeps everything from happening to you.

Re:Assumptions

[genner]

I knew you where going to say that......so it begins.

Time speeding up

[Skevin]

When I first heard that the rate of the universe's expansion was actually accelerating, I came up with a weird hypothesis after a few days...

Time in our frame of reference is slowing down.

The only way that seemed possible was if we were traveling at speeds close to c, but that didn't sound feasible since we were observing objects that were moving away from us, in all directions. Then another weird thought occurred to me...

Our observed universe is self-contained within the event horizon of a giant black hole.

We're closer to the singularity, and accelerating towards it faster than objects closer to the edge of the event horizon. Time will move slower for us, and far away objects will appear to speed up. An outside observer (if such a thing could possibly exist) would perceive our universe as shrinking, but in our current frame of reference, we still think of it as expanding.

One other observation that lends to this possibility is the fact that we have not seen evidence of other "Big Bangs" or other "Universes". If the Big Bang happened once, shouldn't it be a repeatable occurrence in the limitless void of space?

Okay, that's my rant. You can slap the straitjacket on me now and ship me off to the funny farm.

Solomon Chang

Re:Time speeding up

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Okay, that's my rant. You can slap the straitjacket on me now and ship me off to the funny farm.

Or give you a Phd in theoretical physics. It's all good.

Re:Time speeding up

[phoenixwade]

Okay, that's my rant. You can slap the straitjacket on me now and ship me off to the funny farm.

Or give you a Phd in theoretical physics. It's all good. IS there a difference?

Re:Time speeding up

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

IS there a difference?

It's possible to actually get certified as sane if you're sent to the funny farm.

Re:Time speeding up

[dissy]

The big-bang didn't happen sometime in the limitless void of space, the big-bang was the creation of the space-time continuum itself. Not according to current brane and bulk theories. In them, time and space existed forever, and still do. The big bang is just a massive release of energy, that reorders the energy and matter within our brane in a way that appears everything is moving away from that 4d point.

One suggestion was that two branes within the bulk colided, and all that energy that has to go somewhere goes into a big bang in a 4d brane (the bulk is either 10 or lately 11 dinentions while we are just in 4)

If those theories are correct, both time and space existed before the big bang, and also at some point in the future our brane will collide with another again and cause another big bang. This happens through out all the branes at different times and repeats forever.

Note that I word my post as if "this is", when it should be pointed out that my wording is this way "if these theories are right", so please take it as such.

Re:Time speeding up

[russ1337]

Our observed universe is self-contained within the event horizon of a giant black hole.

dude, you just totally changed the way I see the universe. I swear I almost blacked out for a second...

Re:Time speeding up

[addbo]

Interesting when I took astronomy in University I had the same hypothesis that the Universe itself is a black hole.

One of the unintuitive properties of a black hole is that as mass increases the average density inside the Schwarschild radius decreases... even though the radius itself increases. Anyways as Mass goes to infinity, Density inside the Schwarschild radius goes to Zero and of course the Radius goes to infinity.

The radius of the known Universe along with the mass that is hypothesized almost satisfy the Schwarschild radius equation and is only off by a factor of 2 or 3.(Which isn't much in Astronomy)

Re:Time speeding up

[blahlemon]

You read that article http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/white_hole_030917.html too eh?

Re:Time speeding up

[PRMan]

Actually, strangely enough, this exact sort of logic is used by Creationists to explain how starlight could be billions of years old on a 3 day old earth. One theory is that the universe was created out of a white hole, and the earth was in a 4 space dimension 0 time dimension position while billions of years of star formation and travel were happening (by the earth's reference clock).

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/405.asp

I have the book. It's very interesting. The most interesting thing of all is that the math supports his premise and has gone unchallenged, meaning that it is physically possible that starlight could be billions of years old when the earth was only 3 days old, as long as earth was near the center of the white hole and exited toward the end.

Re:M-Theory is bad science

[fyngyrz]

M-Theory was the brain child of a bunch of mathematicians

M-Theory was the brane child of a bunch of mathematicians

[tips hat]

Well, I for one welcomed our five dimentional

[crovira]

overlords.

Breaking "time's arrow" will really fuck with our verb tenses.

But I worried about that tomorrow...

Y 2 K been berry good to me..

[bdwoolman]

I called it Y 2 K Y Jelly.

And more on topic, Can I say that the arrow of time is an illusion?

Be here now.

Re:Y 2 K been berry good to me..

[blahlemon]

The arrow of lunch time, doubly so.

Re:Eternal Life

[ConceptJunkie]

That means no movement and no thought.

Don't look now, but it's already happened in Washington, D.C.

Thank you, Doctor

[Prototerm]

Don't blink, don't turn away, don't close your eyes, and whatever you do, don't blink!

(for those of you who didn't recognize the Doctor Who quote in the parent, turn in your geek badge!)

Quack alert!

[Fujisawa Sensei]

You still haven't produced the code for COSA, its been more than a month. Do you have it?

A time dimension is crackpottery.

I suggest you read Relativity by Albert Einstein. He explains Special Relativity in simple mathematics that even somebody who has taken Algebra in US public school system can understand.

Read Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics and get the facts.

I will refer you to the following questionnaire: Are you a quack?