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Universe May Be Running Out of Time
RenHoek writes "With heat death, the big crunch and quite a few other nasty ways in which the universe could see its demise, we can now add "running out of time" to the list. A team of scientists came up with a new theory that would solve the problem of the elusive dark energy that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. They figure that the universe is not speeding up but we are, in relation to the outer regions of space, slowing down. Tests with the upcoming Large Hadron Collider will give more insight if we're going to end up frozen in time."
Ha, you only think this is offtopic!
... to book at Milliways !!!
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/09/1544200
Mr. Gore, have you been submitting stories to slashdot again?
Ms. Cartman: Doctor, did you find out what's wrong with him?
Doctor: I'm afraid he's running out of time.
Ms. Cartman: Why, what's wrong with him?
Doctor: It's his time. It's running out.
Ms. Cartman: What can we do?
Doctor: Well, I suppose we can try a time transplant. I'll have to call a specialist.
"We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect," he says.
Of course it could also flip us all upside down and turn everything a light salmon color!
Note to self: Patent method for garnering scientific celebrity. Come up with outlandish theory, then claim that LHC will move it to the mainstream.
I got a catholic block.
is this further evidence that we're approaching a black hole? The whole, unverse appears to be accelerating away from us in all directions thing?
kinda freakin' me out here people, if time slows down too much, it'll be 2:45 Friday afternoon forever!
If time turns out to be a non-constant, so goes everything we know about anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
"Although special relativity makes some quantities relative, such as time, that we would have imagined to be absolute based on everyday experience, it also makes absolute some others that were thought to be relative."
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I believe this announcement should be taken as a wake up call by the Duke Nukem Forever developers. I'm standing by to place my order while the cosmos collapses around me.
... "Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations"
Fear, long time (relative) slashdotter gets a girl, starts a family and then time stops!
Great! Just Great!
My daughter is due early May 2008... not sure what would be worse.. my wife stuck forever pregnant, baby (diapers), or her as a teenager!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I have some time-enlarging pills for sale if you're interested.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Assuming a Platonistic perspective (that there is this "thing" out there called time), then we would never be able to observe time slowing down. The slow down would never affect us in the least. All chemical reactions, all of your neural activity... everything... would slow down at the same rate. That may have been a badly worded statement, or I'm taking too literal an interpretation of it.
> get tea
No Tea: dropped.
The problem with TFA is that it makes little logical sense. In what possible sense can time be "slowing down?" "Slowing down" is a statement that something is changing less per unit time. If you like, that dx/dt is negative.
But how can you measure the "rate" at which time itself is changing? If "change in time" (dt) is going to go in the numerator, what will go in the denominator? Can't be dt, of course. So how do you define the "rate" at which time changes? I can't think of anything. It's like asking the price of money. "Price" means "how much you get per unit money." You can't ask how much money you get per unit money. (Note to nitpickers: the price of currency, e.g. the price of dollars in drachma, is not a valid counterexample.)
I'm sure the physics makes sense, but the language in this news article does not. If anyone knows what the actual science is, I at least would be grateful for a better explanation than this news article provides. Anyone?
Maybe this isn't a sign that time is collapsing or that it will collapse at some point in the far off future. Maybe Space and time are being stretched. There may be finite amount of space and it keeps getting spread thinner, which could effect gravitational forces and then effect time. Somewhat how a black hole can slow time around it, maybe the spreading of the universe is in effect increasing the speed in the spread thin areas. Of course what does that mean when Space and time get spread to thin, so we get tears or does it collapse? Seems devastating either way.
:P
Then again I only took one entry level university class on the whole thing so I don't think that qualifies me. I just like to think of apposing theories
Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This... is wrong tool. [rummaging] No, not good. Not good. No. No-- never use this!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
We can only hope.
Zathras: "Cannot run out of time. Time is infinite. You, are finite. Zathras if finite. This.... is wrong tool."
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Come on, really now. It came from the Flying Spagetti Monster. Heathen.
I always seem to read Large Hadron Collider as "Large Hardon Collider." Not sure how that's related to science.
Physics always has been the domain of sci-fi authors. How do you think we got most of our current theories? (:
Being "frozen in time" would require a privileged frame of reference from which to observe this. Relativity precludes such a thing.
If time slows down, we slow down with it, and we don't notice because everything looks normal. This is precisely the gedankenexperiment of the moving train. If you can't handle the relativity, read some science fiction that uses it, such as Tau Zero (the ship can't stop accelerating and ends up crossing the entire universe and watching the big crunch and next big bang) or the Heechee stories (where the guy leaves the rest of his crew trapped around a black hole, and they're recovered decades later, havening spent weeks waiting).
To have an absolutely 0 tau would require a completely flat universe. As long as any matter and/or energy (dark or light) exists, this is impossible. The rate may approach 0 but cannot achieve it. Thus, there will always be duration, and we will experience it just as we do now.
Time could be speeding up and slowing down right now, like a lead foot motorist stuck in a traffic jam. We'd never notice because we're stuck in it, no matter what its rate is, like a passenger in said vehicle that can't see outside (minus the inertial effects, because we're talking the universe here, not a locally observable phenomenon).
The same argument applies to "the universe is expanding". We couldn't detect that either, because we're embedded in space time. We'd expand too. All we can see is the supposed effects of previous expansion, that of Hubble red shift. Try the dots-on-the-balloon experiment. The dots get farther apart. But the distance between them as measured by the size of a dot remains constant.
It's the same argument because time and space are integrated as space-time. It's essentially the inability to get outside a frame of reference known as "universe".
Whenever I see one of these goofy assertion articles, I hope for a summary of the math. These goofy results must be arrived at due to an error in assumption. Such an error, if considered to be a valid point, may be just the error that prevents us from integrating gravity with the other forces, and so illuminating and fixing that error could be a major step in theoretical physics.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Hey! Someday he will save the world from immanent destruction and even you will say "Thank you Al Gore! You're super awesome!"
The game.
I came accross this information. Seems if light is slowing down why not time? Australian physicist Barry Setterfield and mathematician Trevor Norman examined all of the available experimental measurements to date and have announced a discovery: the speed of light appears to have been slowing down over the years. [Roemer, 1657 (Io eclipse): +/- 307,600 5400 km/sec; Harvard, 1875 (same method): +/- 299,921 13 km/sec; NBS, 1983 (laser method): +/- 299,792.4586 0.0003 km/sec.] They all are approximately 186,000 miles/second; or about one foot/nanosecond.)3 While the margin of error improved over the years, the mean value has noticeably decreased. In fact, the bands of uncertainty hardly overlap. As you would expect, these findings are highly controversial, especially to the more traditional physicists. However, many who scoffed at the idea initially have subsequently begun to take a closer look at the possibilities. Alan Montgomery, the Canadian mathematician, has also analyzed the data statistically and has concluded that the decay of c, the velocity of light, has followed a cosecant-squared curve with a correlation coefficient of better than 99%.
Let's all concentrate on making a big red cloud around the world, then we can remove ourselves from this universe all together!
Silly person, this is all a result of George Bush's efforts to accelerate global warming by increasing the profits of his Big Oil buddies, by pushing to reach Peak Oil and cause a global recession!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Clearly, this is a wake-up call for the Universe. Our dependency on time must not continue if we are to survive. Contact your President, your Prime Minister, all of your representatives and demand investigations into alternative time resources.
Perhaps something corn-based.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Their calculations are off because they are educated to be evil, and fail to appreciate that each day is actually four days long!.
When you account for this 1:4 ratio, the extra dark energy drops out of the equations, and the universe does not collapse into an academic singularity, but into four nodes, two major and two minor! The academic community will not teach this because it is brainwashing.
(Actually, I just really want this story to have the Time Cube metatag.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Please explain to me the moral superiority of your concern for our children now vs. everyone's children billions of years from now? I believe that is the voice of your genes I hear, not the voice of reason.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Just don't be so worried about all these universe or world-ending disasters that you absentmindedly step out into traffic and get hit by a bus. Like any vague fear of the future, the tricky part is to live long enough for it to matter :)
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
They figure that the universe is not speeding up but we are, in relation to the outer regions of space, slowing down. Tests ... will give more insight if we're going to end up frozen in time.
Come on now, that's utterly ridicuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Table-ized A.I.
Blasphemer! Cheese be upon him!!
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Hello:
I hate lousy accounting. The fundamental coin of the Universe are events in spacetime. Talk about time separate from space, and garbage results. One needs to add, subtract, multiply, or divide events. The usual thing to do is to add. This is how we go forward in spacetime (mostly time, with a little bit of wandering in space to go from home to work to the grocery store and back).
There is no need for super symmetry either, a way of making spin 1/2 particles play nicely with spin 2 particles. Anyone who has watch diving at the summer olympics knows that one object can go around one axis at a different rate from another. It is easy enough to make a classical system where along one axis, it takes 2 pi to get around, and another axis 4 pi. I have the animations to prove it: http://picasaweb.google.com/dougsweetser/AnalyticAnimationsSpin12Spin1
doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
Not exactly. There a a billion theories exactly like this one but different, but exactly the same. They are all waiting on the Hadron collider to provide proof of higher order dimensions and thus not disprove their theories that depend upon higher dimensions. It will not prove which one is correct.
If you don't believe me subscribe to new scientist for a while. Every issue a new multi dimensional theory that could help to explain some feature of the universe but can only be proved/disproved at energies that we can't reach.
This is in essence what I'm saying. We are too far removed from being able to test these theories, that they are not likely to be correct. String theory is over 30 years old and we still haven't been able to prove or disprove it. Think about that, people have spent their entire careers working on a theory that many not be proved or disproved in their lifetimes. I think we were spoiled by the rate of rapid advance in the 20th century.
I never said physics was not science, but more like science fiction where you don't really have to prove anything just suggest something is plausible.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The summary is massively confused, and invents the claim that it's about time here in comparison to time somewhere else at the edges of the universe.
Having actually read the linked article, it's funnier. What it seems to actually say is that the time of the whole universe runs slower now, than it ran some billion years ago. It's not "dt(here)/dt(there)", but "dt(now)/dt(back-then)". If that makes any sense.
Let's say we look at the light of a star, some 5 billion light years away. The important thing there isn't the distance. It's that light also took 5 billion years to get here. So if time went faster 5 billion years ago, we'd see it red-shifted.
So, yes, the question isn't as confused as you seem to assume.
If we at least have "here" and "there" in the equation, we'd also have space in it, essentially. So they would have essentially linked dt to distance, which is palatable. But here we have time flow changing with... time.
Well, wtf? In relation to which time? It's like saying that the metre standard is bigger 1000 miles from here, measured with itself.
If it makes any sense, it's not as simple as "dt(here)/dt(there)". It may still make some, but I'd need a smarter explanation than yours (no offense.)
I can't even think of a way to express it in terms of "cost of money", because even money you can compare to something else. E.g., even in a closed economy you could say that a yen in 1800 was more valuable or less valuable than a yen in 1600, based, say, on how much rice you could buy with one yen. So we already have a comparison to _something_ else (kilos of rice), and with a whole other variable as the X of the graph, so to speak. You plot, say, yen vs year, which is two variable.
Now think plotting time, from 2000 BC to 2000 AD. You have, uh, time vs time. I'm not sure how you _can_ plot that without ending up with X = Y all along.
Even briefer, what they say, translated to scales laymen can intuitively understand, is like saying that time goes faster this year than in 1997. How would you measure that? In relation to _what_? One second is one second, by definition, and it was a second by definition in 1997 too. It may make sense to say that "time goes slower" in a metaphorical way, or maybe in a "perceived time" way, but in maths or physics it makes no sense whatsoever.
You have to introduce some other variable there, to compare time to that. Let's call that variable R, from the rice we compared yen to.
Linking it to galaxies and their redshift doesn't change much. "They're not accelerating, time is slowing." Well, blimey, then what do you use under the fraction line there? Because if you use time, they _are_ accelerating. dX/dt is a speed, but dX/dR is something entirely different, and saying that the latter didn't accelerate isn't exactly saying the same thing.
And how does that affect more mundane Newtonian mechanics? If you say that measured in dX/dR, you no longer need energy to accelerate them, then in effect you've re-linked the whole mechanics to dR instead of dt. With all that implies.
How would that affect our galaxy or our solar system, then? The solar system alone is some 5 billion years old, so dt/dR changed a lot in that time. If the mechanics -- thus, for example the planet orbits -- were linked to dR instead of dt, and the ratio between the two changed, then you should see some funky orbit changes in time. Oops, now you need some energy from outside just to keep Earth in the beginning from not being somewhere past Pluto's current orbit.
How would it affect some other stuff? Even quantum mechanics effects, end up depending on time, one way or another. E.g., no matter how you write Heissenberg's uncertainty, you'd notice some pretty nasty changes there in 5 billion years.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't know why people come up with these ridiculous "dark energy" theories, when there is a perfectly simple explanation for the expansion of the universe: stars. Remember the traditional illustration of how matter curves space; place a heavy ball onto a sheet of fabric and a depression forms. If the sheet is finite and not fixed at the ends, the depression will "suck in" some of the sheet, reducing its area as seen from above. Likewise, a heavy star curves space around it and "sucks it in", making the universe a little smaller. As the star shines, matter is converted to energy in a fusion reaction. Because radiation is massless, it does not curve space. The star gets lighter, the curvature gets smaller, and the universe expands.
On the other side of the balance are the black holes, which suck in energy and condense it into a singularity, which has mass. More light falls into the hole, the more massive the hole gets, the more space it sucks in, the more it shrinks the universe. At our current point in the cycle there are more stars than there are black holes, so the universe expands at an accelerating rate. As stars burn out and become black holes the expansion will slow and eventually reverse as all the radiation eventually finds its way back into a black hole. Black holes coalesce and the larger ones can explode, creating material for star formation, thus continuing the cycle. See? No mysterious dark energy is needed; only basic physics.
A preprint of the paper is available from arxiv.org.
The general idea seems to be this. We observe that distant galaxies have an anomalously low redshift relative to the expectations of the linear Hubble relation, and we interpret this as evidence that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating. General relativity allows you to interpret a redshift as a difference in the rate of passage of time, so then an anomalously low redshift correponds to an anomalously low rate of passage of time, for us, compared to the distant galaxies, which were in the ancient universe where time was passing more quickly.
A couple of things leave me scratching my head:
Find free books.
An astronaut falling toward a black hole (assuming for the sake of argument that he does not get torn apart by tidal forces) perceives that it actually takes forever to fall into the black hole. Externally we would seem him slow down and then stop at the even horizon, but this "stop" is merely the curve receding into infinity, so that further increments are so small we cannot see them. But the astronaut's subjective time becomes infinite.
So if time is slowing down locally, I guess that means in a few billion years we'll all be living in a static (albeit smaller) universe that goes on forever.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I'm also slightly disturbed by the fact that you copied your post paragraph verbatim from http://www.khouse.org/articles/1995/58/, a web site that has as its mission statement, "To create, develop, and distribute materials to stimulate, encourage, and facilitate serious study of the Bible as the inerrant Word of God." Probably not the best source for a discussion of theoretical physics, methinks
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, Timey-Wimey... stuff"
Considering I just read a book about this, I'd like to point you to the variable speed of light theory (which is a cosmology theory that tries to explain the Big Bang problems that cosmic inflation couldn't).
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'