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Physicists Find That As Clocks Get More Precise, Time Gets More Fuzzy (sciencealert.com)
Physicists "have combined two grand theories of physics to conclude not only is time not universally consistent, any clock we use to measure it will blur the flow of time in its surrounding space." An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert:
A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have applied quantum mechanics and general relativity to argue that increasing the precision of measurements on clocks in the same space also increases their warping of time... [W]hile the theories are both supported by experiments, they usually don't play well together, forcing physicists to consider a new theory that will allow them both to be correct at the same time...
In this case, the physicists hypothesized the act of measuring time in greater detail requires the possibility of increasing amounts of energy, in turn making measurements in the immediate neighborhood of any time-keeping devices less precise. "Our findings suggest that we need to re-examine our ideas about the nature of time when both quantum mechanics and general relativity are taken into account," says researcher Esteban Castro.
The article opens with the statement that "time is weird," noting that despite our own human-centric expectations, "the Universe doesn't have a master clock to run by."
In this case, the physicists hypothesized the act of measuring time in greater detail requires the possibility of increasing amounts of energy, in turn making measurements in the immediate neighborhood of any time-keeping devices less precise. "Our findings suggest that we need to re-examine our ideas about the nature of time when both quantum mechanics and general relativity are taken into account," says researcher Esteban Castro.
The article opens with the statement that "time is weird," noting that despite our own human-centric expectations, "the Universe doesn't have a master clock to run by."
It's like they just found out that the definition of time is a planet circling a star, and doesn't apply to the whole universe! Wow!!!
The think about time is we have no idea how long it really takes to go one second in the simulation we all live inside of. It could be years on the wall clock in the simulators universe.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yet another example of how science can't prove anything. No, wait. This is another example of how the science lobby is trying to protect their jobs by, you know, doing experiments and shit, and trying to understand how stuff works.
We cannot "sample" time.
We cannot "stop" time.
We cannot evaluate the opposite of time, or "not-time".
We cannot directly "measure" time.
We cannot directly "see" time.
If we cannot evaluate these things, does time exist?
some sort of time based analog?
Didn't they know? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Is when I'll have time to give a shit about this.
So if their clock turns out not to be accurate. it's the universe's fault?
It's a poor scientist who blames the universe for their shortcomings.
Or is it Schrodinger's time? Oh, sweet entropy...
Sig ?
We're taking on clocks!
Terry Pratchett obviously understood time better than these physicists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.383...
Time is just the sequence of events. And events on the smallest scale are particle interactions.
What if there is an unknown quantum field which creates a barrier between particles? And particles have to "tunnel" through it in order to interact?
When this quantum field is more disturbed (warped, etc) this barrier will be greater and it would be harder to particles to interact with each other. The end result is "time" slows down since the number of interactions drops.
Note that an observer (in its own reference frame) will not notice anything (in the same way as in general relativity) since the observer just counts the number of interactions. To that observer the same number of interactions means the same amount of "time" passes.
And yes, this means this quantum field would be a distinguished reference frame.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
And vice versa.
only man's devices for measuring the concept of time, the past goes on for eternity and the future goes on to eternity, it is just that we humans have the audacity to think we are smart enough to count it or measure it, we can make devices that do this but they will never be absolutely accurate as these scientists found...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that time and space are the same thing (your perception of the two skews with your relative velocity, which causes all of relativity's time dilation effects). So I would expect there to be a time-corollary of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Just as extremely precise measurements of position lead to poor measurements of momentum, extremely precise measurements of time should result in poor measurements of... something else.
The article opens with the statement that "time is weird," noting that despite our own human-centric expectations, "the Universe doesn't have a master clock to run by."
What, so God doesn't own a wristwatch? No wonder he's always late to the party. Or the rape, or robbery, or molestation, or murder. If only he had a watch he could've gotten there in time to stop that shit. Fuckin' slacker.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I don't want to waste my time creating an account.
Because creating an account takes less time than that screed you just posted. Thanks for playing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Editor's @ PNAS must be getting desperate. The article starts off with "In general relativity, the picture of space–time assigns an ideal clock to each world line. Being ideal, gravitational effects due to these clocks are ignored and the flow of time according to one clock is not affected by the presence of clocks along nearby world lines." General relativity does not ignore gravitational effects. Full stop. A metric exists and its dynamics are determined by the Einstein field equations. These equations depend on the mass-energy distribution in spacetime. Continuing ... "However, if time is defined operationally, as a pointer position of a physical clock that obeys the principles of general relativity and quantum mechanics, such a picture is, at most, a convenient fiction." Wow, really? Ever heard of Hawking radiation? See this. "Specifically, we show that the general relativistic mass–energy equivalence implies gravitational interaction between the clocks" No shit. "whereas the quantum mechanical superposition of energy eigenstates leads to a nonfixed metric background" So, a coordinate measure exists that can be transformed to another and that is implied by requiring quantum mechanics. "Based only on the assumption that both principles hold in this situation" So, it's not a "convenient fiction"! "we show that the clocks necessarily get entangled through time dilation effect" Try reversing the statement. Entanglement gives rise to time. Time, mass and matter are emergent properties of the causal propagation of patterns of interactions between timeless and massless causal paths."which eventually leads to a loss of coherence of a single clock" Who would have thought decoherence could occur in entangled clocks? "Hence, the time as measured by a single clock is not well defined." Time is relative, absolute genius! "However, the general relativistic notion of time is recovered in the classical limit of clocks." The general relativistic notion of time is absolute? Please.
Perhaps the best thing to do when using this metric we call "time" is to constrain it within the boundaries of its inventors.
Hell, I'm surprised that the concept of time is universally accepted on the planet, when we can't even come to an agreement on the metric system.
"I am the one who clocks."
How do you know that if you were inside a simulation you would have no idea how long it really takes a second to go?
If some thing takes a second to do and you watch it do it, then one second has passed. If you're going to claim "when you put a breakpoint in the simulation, then longer than a second passes!" then you are incorrect, because the definition of a second is the length of time it takes for some thing to happen. And if time paused in the middle of it, then it's paused. As in it still takes precisely one second for the thing to do its thing.
Moreover, there's still operation going on in a computer program even when it's paused in its program at a breakpoint. At the very least so that it can resume from that breakpoint. And at that point, the complete system in which the simulation has run is no longer precisely what it was when it first entered the breakpoint, and the difference can be found and time has elapsed.
So it would STILL, if only theoretically, be possible to discern how long it "really took" for something to happen, even for things being simulated in a computer. Hell, this is how privilege escalation happens in computer programs: they access "outside the universe" and spot changes and change it themselves.
And if you're not going to accept "theoretically" then you need to show how this is a simulation NON THEORETICALLY. 'cos currently you only have the hypothetical claim it is. And if a similarly hypothetical out is going to be ruled invalid in this conversation, you have invalidated your claim right at the off.
That WMAP picture of the CMB is AFTER a sort of ying-yang red and blue shift pattern which is the result of our motion through space (the combination of our motion around the galaxy, our motion around our sun and our galaxy around the general mass of the universe) has been removed. And we're not moving relativistically.
It's just a very small difference.
Yet that is how even the CMB is, that you have to remove this effect of our proper motion to get a scale that will show up the detail difference in the CMB that caused the clustering of matter in galaxies we see today.
We already see that change in the CMB.
Then remove it so the remaining differences are inherent in the CMB and not our unsteady position in space.
I'm not here to collect useless Internet karma points.
Then what's the point?
and then only in the last 10,000 or so has time ever existed.
Yeah, that IS as dumb as it sounds.
One clock asks "What time is it?"
Second clock says "Who knows?"
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it one of the interesting things about the CMB is that it seems to be a uniform temperature in all directions.
However, assuming it was non-uniform, with a single directional bias, such as you would expect to see if there were originally a single more intense "hot-spot", and our local space had been positioned pretty much anywhere other than the immediate vicinity, would that not look exactly the same as if it were red/blue shifted along that axis?
How could we possibly distinguish between such a thermal gradient in the CMB, and frequency shifting due to our own motion relative to it?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"Another thing I read mentioned that the size of the estimated universe (they provided some math which I don't recall) would actually fit almost exactly into a 64 bit unsigned integer for X,Y,Z."
Well, how about when the universe was 1 microsecond old? It would fit in a 32-bit integer. And before inflation, an 8bit one.
And with expansion, our universe is about 90 billion light years across NOW, not the 26 billion your reading probably assumed. If it just fitted into a 64 bit number, it doesn't any more.
And in 10 billion years time, it could be many times bigger than that.
Given that these are completely equivalent assertions that they either fit DIFFERENT integer sizes or don't fit the one proposed, what makes you think that there's anything real and not mere mathturbation and numerology at work, in what you read but do not recall?
"Physicists Find That..."
Given that this wasn't a presentation of new research data, but rather an argument attempting to reconcile two theories - it is incorrect to claim that they "found" anything. Replacing that word with "argue" would fix that.
Although perhaps there's a Slashdot corollary to all this stating the more accurate a headline is, the more fuzzy the linked article will be...
#DeleteChrome
I can't say I understand it really, but I've always seen this as something that places limits on what we can measure. But can we use this phenomenon to force something to happen. That is, can we use precision clocks to force some weirdness to happen on a macro scale ? For example, can we make conservation of energy fail within a small volume if we measure time very accurately all around it ?
Nullius in verba
And was, despite being what you typed in the "Reply" option of this site, was not an actual reply or even connected with the post you hit "Reply" to, being completely without content or relevance.
Written by the excellent (and sadly deceased) Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time is a story about a clockmaker who makes the perfect clock to measure time exactly. At that time, time stops. Luckily in the books of Pratchett creatures can exist outside of time, so the day is saved - in the end... By the Small Gods, I love his books and dearly miss him... :-(
I'm the one who knocks.
M. White (Heisenberg)
Reminds me of the scientists that thought asking God "So who created you?" was okay and could survive after asking such a question! Science was invented by the mentally ill people!
Please don't build a glass clock.
The last time the time monks were trying to stitch history back together for years!
For example, if you aren't looking at something in a video game it doesn't get rendered, ergo schrodingers cat like phenomena. The moon in fact is not there if you don't look at it.
This is NOT AT ALL how quantum mechanics works. Schrodinger's Cat was a gedanken experiment developed by Schrodinger to show how absurd the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was when applied to everyday objects. Absolutely no physicist believes that this is how QM actually works: the cat is simply either alive or it is dead and is not in a superposition of two states. The point was to show that the prevailing interpretation at the time was wrong. The same goes for the world: QM does not say that things stop existing if they are not observed and nobody believes this. QM is strange and counter-intuitive, it is not crazy!
We do not have enough time.
Physicist and scientist in the esoteric fields produce little of value. Their goal is to find out neat theories that simplifies everything, just like Einstein. It smells more like philosophy than science, bordering on religion with mathematical proof.
Since it merely passes the problem off to under what evidence do you claim THAT to be the case? And adds the "and how does that make it the reason for the first assertion?".
If time is inconsistent according to location could we also say that physics is inconsistent according to location? That makes the entire observe and report method of study really shaky. If the laws of physics are indeed a variable we really know very little about what we observe in space. Try estimating the speed a star is traveling when you have no clue what time is doing in the area near that star.
Space exists, same as time. Without either one, there's nowhere and nowhen for anything TO exist. And it's definitely not static. For a start, a moron like you moves about on it.
the theories are both supported by experiments, they usually don't play well together, forcing physicists to consider a new theory that will allow them both to be correct at the same time...
In relativity, the entire notion of "at the same time" depends on the observer. So I guess for some scientists, GR and QM play well together, for others not so well.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I think a good simple explanation is that to get higher and higher precision time measurements it takes more and more energy. At some point you're using too much energy in that it's having an effect on time itself. So there's probably some sort of limit on how far you can go.