The Theory Of Time

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One thing that I never understood is the theory that everything in time is happening all at once, not in a linear fashion as we think. Many say that the idea of time depends on the observer. When Isaac Newton talked about time he said that mathematical time passed by with other universal forces disrupting it. He went on further to state that time was a dimension and events occurred in sequence. This is known as the realist view of time. This was not always what others thought about time previously and many thought that time could not progress without change taking place. Aristotle thought that time was the measure of motion. He believed that time was uniform and used the motion of the stars to reinforce his idea.

Remember how I said that some think that everything in time is happening at once? No lesser person than Albert Einstein stated in his later years that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously. Here is what he said, “Since there exists in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer any sections which represent 'now' objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.” If I understand this correctly he was saying that in his fourth dimensional universe, the concept of now really can't be explained. When he talked about the death of a friend he said, "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." He felt that death was really of no consequence and that we still existed.

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Here we have two of the world's smartest people, Newton and Einstein both believing in different theories about time. Stephen Hawking states that time if not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time. Space-Time is defined as the four-dimensional coordinate system (3 dimensions of space and 1 of time) in which physical events are located.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. There is a new theory on time and guess what? Give up? It goes back to before Einstein and states that space and time are not tied together. Physicists believe that this could lead to a theory of quantum gravity, something that has eluded us. When Einstein tied space and time together he created something that could be distorted by matter. That is time became malleable. This has been the thorn in the side of quantum physics working correctly in some areas. When time is separated from space the quantum theory of gravity works correctly and so do computer simulations. Many scientists now believe that the splitting of time and space will lead to a new theory on the movement of the planets that will be very accurate.

There have been a lot of theories about what we could do with time manipulation A scientist named Gregory Benford proposed that we build a Tachyonic anti-telephone. He believed that Tachyons could travel into the past and therefore we could send messages back in time to warn the past to make changes that would help the future. There are also many different theories about time travel which I have talked about in the past. There is the project by Dr. Ronald Mallett who was interviewed by me and was trying to send an atom or particle into the future. There has been talk for years that time travel has been accomplished, mainly because some scientists are actually working on it and most people realize if it ever becomes a reality it will be made so secret that we could never know that it existed.

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There is also a certain element that believes that time will someday be manipulated by some type of super computer that will help us discover how to either travel through time, or make different time periods visible to us so that we will be able to see different events. Can you imagine sitting back and watching the actual building of the pyramids? Some others also believe that we will be able to see these events, but not because we are actually traveling in time, but because we will be able to pickup the light that was created by these events and replay it like a movie. There would be no need for documentaries anymore, because we could watch images of the real thing. The difference between the two methods is that we could interact with the first, but only watch the second. In other words, if we saw the actual event we could communicate with the people from that time or even take part in the construction if they would let us. This would not be possible with images that were picked up.

One of my favorite shows was the original Star Trek. Many in the military watch it and I was one of them. Of course you had to be on a base that had a television and mine did. The writers of the show like to portray the ship going so fast that it broke the time barrier. This usually sent the ship into the past initially, but they could return to the present by repeating the action which included an instant stop. While many of the ideas from Star Trek became reality, this one was never taken seriously.

It seems that the more we discuss time, the more we realize that we don't really know that much about it. We will know even less if Einstein's theory about space time bites the dust. There are those that believe that there is no such thing as time and it is only something that was invented for convenience, as an attempt to explain what is happening around us. It succeeds in some of this. How else would we explain why someone ages, or why the universe is expanding? These things are happening in the framework of time.

Somehow it seems that time may never be fully explained, just as electricity never has. Sure we know that a current flows through a wire and supplies energy, but if we ask a scientist to define electricity, we can never truly know what it is. I for one find time an interesting subject and if it is ever conquered in the future, there will surely be time travelers because humans could not resist the opportunity to time travel. If it will exist, then we most likely have time travelers here now and that doesn't seem to be the case, but we can never be sure. Time, we are all in it for better or worse.