One of the
major constraints of Einstein’s relativity is the temporal dimension. According
to the general theory traveling faster than light allows one to go into the
past. Therefore most physicists will not
even consider the idea of traveling faster than light because they cannot
explain this phenomenon. The time
coordinate can move forwards or backwards, mathematically, without reason. However the aliens know this is not the case
in reality, and for good reason.
Say you
traveled faster than light and went fifty years into the past. There you killed your grandfather so you were
never born. How did you wind up in the
future to travel back into the past? This
is the paradox that physicists and sci-fi writers have played with for years,
but no one really knows the answer, except the aliens. Let us look at this from
a logical point of view.
If you
really traveled back into the past fifty years, when you are standing on Earth
and looking up into the night sky you would have to see the same constellations
the way they were fifty years ago. You
did not just send yourself back into the past, but you also reversed fifty
years of Entropy of the universe. That
takes a lot of power and energy. I know
of no one that can violate the second law of thermodynamics, except maybe God,
himself.
What is
Entropy? Entropy is the measure of chaos
of any system. In the universe each
moment is more chaotic than the last.
Simply, it is the expenditure of energy without reversal. I have seen it likened to a billiard table
where all the balls are racked in the triangular, orderly fashion, and then the
que ball hits them and scatters them all over the table. The scattering is entropy as the balls bounce
off the rails and one another chaotically until they come to rest, dissipating
the energy interjected by the que ball.
But let us take this just a little further and say that the balls are
racked sequentially from one to fifteen.
This takes more time and energy and intelligence than just racking the
balls. (My explanation of why I believe in God.
I digress however). In Einstein’s
concept of time travel into the past all the billiard balls must retrace their
exact chaotic path back to the triangular formation. This is possible in Einstein’s concept of
relativity, not in reality.
We see it
is impossible from a logical point of view to travel into the past, but the
theories of relativity allow this very thing.
This cannot happen not because relativity is wrong but because there is
not just one temporal dimension, but two temporal dimensions. The biggest surprise is we use them every day
without even knowing it or ever being disoriented. Nature compensates well.
I must
confess I was not the first to consider this.
Two great physicists of the past, Arthur Milne and P.A.M. Dirac, were
the first enlightened physicists to think of this. However, their efforts fell short, trying to
preserve relativity in its current form they considered one temporal dimension
to be the exponent of the other and experiments failed to prove this out. It doesn’t mean they were wrong. The temporal dimensions are simply added
together along with the other dimensions in the coordinate system.
You do not
believe me? You just have to look as far
as your GPS. The Ground Positioning
System (GPS) uses two temporal properties to locate anyone at any time on the
face of the Earth. One is called
motional or coordinate time (electromagnetic time according to the special
theory of relativity) and the other is called proper or gravitational time (as
according to the general theory of relativity).
There is the time dilation of the clock involved with coordinate or
motional time and the relative positional time dilation involved with the
position of the clock in the gravity well. The professional journal NATURE just recently
published an article that showed that cesium atoms, the atoms by which we set
up our atomic clocks, vibrate at different rates just one meter apart in a
gravity well. (A gravity well simply
meaning different depths and gravitational densities.) In other words, the cesium atoms on the
ground at the bottom of your meter stick will vibrate slightly slower than the
ones one meter off the ground on the top of your meter stick.
What is
time dilation? This simply means a
slowing down of time. It was introduced
in the special theory of relativity. A
clock in uniform linear translation will supposedly move slower than one which
is at rest. However, this is an
observational illusion. The reason for
this is because rest and uniform linear translation are two sides of the same
uniform motion, just observer dependent.
Rest can be defined as uniform
motion where the relative velocity of an object with respect to an observer is
equal to zero; uniform linear translation (a constant steady speed without
variation) can be defined as uniform motion where the relative velocity of an
object with respect to an observer is unequal to zero. And both forms of uniform motions are in a
state of equilibrium, meaning all forces acting on them add up to zero.
This is one
of the great mental paradoxes of the special theory of relativity. Physicists often use the concept of two rocket
ships passing each other going opposite directions. Observers on one ship notice the clock on the
other ship moving slower than their clock on their ship. The observers on the other ship also notice
the exact same time dilation on the other ship as they pass by. Whose clock is really going slower? The answer is that both clocks are moving at
the same rate. If you select a position
outside the ships that is exactly in between and equidistant at all times, say
the center of gravity between them, you will see that the clocks move at
exactly the same rate.
However, if
you bring the clocks together to compare you will find one is slower than the
other. That is because as one of the
clocks remains steady and the other clock is brought to it, this other clock
had to slow down and stop and reverse direction and then accelerate to get up
to the steady clock. Einstein proved in
his general theory that acceleration and deceleration is the same as passing through
gravity and gravity slows the time of the clock just as acceleration and
deceleration does.
This is why
I always found the twin paradox so interesting.
One twin leaves Earth at twenty years old on a rocket ship on a twenty-light-year
mission traveling at the speed of light.
He comes back, his brother is forty years older and he has only aged a
few years. This won’t happen, not unless
the rocket ship accelerates half way there and decelerates the other half, and
does the same thing on the return trip.
It’s the acceleration and deceleration that locks in the time dilation,
not the constant uniform speed of the rocket ship, even at the speed of light.
Of course
this being true then it means that our universe is five dimensional just as
Theodore Kaluza suggested in 1920. The
only difference is that Kaluza never thought of the extra dimension as a
temporal dimension. But a force divided
by a field is equal to a linear dimension, so that we would have s2
= x2 + y2 + z2 + [- c2(te2
+ tg2)]. It
does unite all the forces of nature.
Physicists
little understand or comprehend the dimension of time. Newton
The
unique thing about this equation is that it shows that no matter how many times
faster than the speed of light one goes, one cannot travel into the past. Time simply slows, infinitely, collapsing
behind critical radius after critical radius while the observer moves through
it. Because 2KM/c2 equals RS,
which is Schwarzschild’s critical radius, and if one lets v equal the speed of light, c,
then our equation becomes the following;
dt = R_s/ (2+n^2)c,
And therefore, time slows
infinitely with respect to the critical radius of the Universe but it never
reverses itself, no matter how fast we go.
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