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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)
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!
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.
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
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?
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.
I always seem to read Large Hadron Collider as "Large Hardon Collider." Not sure how that's related to science.
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
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%.
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.