I don't get it. So....does this article mean that time is slowing down and EARTH is at the center of the Universe?

someone should call a doctor...

Manic_Repressive: of light is that the closer you get to the 'cosmic speed limit', the slower time goes

Correct. Also, the distance to the target destination shrinks in the direction of travel (from the frame of reference of the traveler). If you were traveling at .9c to a system 7 light years away, it would take you approximately 1 year to get there. It actually takes less time than you would expect to get somewhere, the faster you go.


, and once you reach it time stops and so does your means of propulsion.

Not quite. Mass increases as velocity increases, requiring more and more energy to accelerate the mass. Eventually, the energy required to accelerate would be infinite. Tough trick.

Americans ARE getting fatter....

ironic_followup: someone should call a doctor...

He looks as confused as I am about all this.

/still figuring out 'dark energy.'

Wasnt there another theory floated several years ago that the reason wasn't due to dark matter but due to the fact that the speed of light had slowed down since the time of the big bang? An odd idea to me but heck, why not?

shanrick: Kiefer Sutherland unavailable for comment.

Brilliant.

/WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME!

Why do I get the dreaded feeling that the big bang had some serious evil associated with it?

Does this mean it will take longer for me to be late for work?

I think this is why Jodie Foster got totally screwed over in that "Contact" movie.

I see that this has been said already, but time is merely a unit of measure. If we stop measuring it, it no longer exists, or at the very least, no longer remains exact or synced.

BKITU: Toshiro Mifune's Letter Opener: This is nothing that ONE POINT TWENTY-ONE GIGAWATTS can't fix.

What the hell is a gigawatt?!?

The world is moving on.

Time is slowing down.

I love theories like this. Makes for excellent reading!

KhamanV
ironic_followup: someone should call a doctor...

He looks as confused as I am about all this.

It's all part of The Master's latest fiendish plan.

"Now, Doctor, let us see how well a Time Lord can fight when Time itself is running out on you..."

Good. Because time is going so damn fast right now I could scream!!

These concepts need to be thought about with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKLpJtvzlEI&feature=related
in the background.

no gravitational time dilation ala bevets?

But srsly, this is old news.

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

I think the problem is people don't masturbate enough, or maybe too much.

Where's Abian (new window) when you need him?

/Get off my reference frame

moon-watcher Quote 2007-12-22 04:55:27 AM
So this big ball explodes and the matter expands, expands, expands, all the while losing velocity and slowing down to the point it stops and then contracts, contracts, contracts until it reaches the start point and forms the big ball again. Then it explodes and expands, expands, etc...

/problem solved, time for bed.

The problem is that at the rate it's expanding, and it doesn't appear like it's ever going to contract. It could just expand forever.

zhinz1

The problem is that at the rate it's expanding, and it doesn't appear like it's ever going to contract. It could just expand forever.

Like your mom.

Quantum Apostrophe: BKITU: Toshiro Mifune's Letter Opener: This is nothing that ONE POINT TWENTY-ONE GIGAWATTS can't fix.

What the hell is a gigawatt?!?

giga = billion, 10 ^ 9.

He's making a joke.. back in the delorean thread from a week ago or so, people were going ape-shait that ol' Doc Brown pronounces it jigawatt.

I'm a total foob at this shiat, having mostly learned about quantum math and physics by reading sci fi. That said, it seems to me that this is the sort of theory that will be the only "observation" we will ever have of the extradimensionality that string theory gets into. Rather than time slowing down - as the concept of 'seconds getting longer' would indicate - there's another force at work. Think about it this way: you have a bungee chord that's 1 rod long. If you jump off a bridge with the bungee tied around your neck and you drop 1.5 rods, did the "rod" unit just get longer? No, there was another force at play (i.e., your neck & gravity interacting with the elasticity of the bungee).

OK, bad analogy in the long run, but it works for demonstrating the cardinality of (arbitrarily defined) units of dimension. Perhaps then the observation of "time slowing down" indicates that rather than our units changing size over time, there's something else interacting with the elasticity of the dimension. A 'countertime' dimension that would run in the opposite 'direction' of our observable time, perhaps.

If this is the case then let's assume there is some force at play that causes the time and countertime to become stronger in certain states and weaker in others (probably in some sort of coeffected inverse relationship where time has consistently been more strongly observable in the states that have existed since the beginning of the universe). If so then the progression of the state of the universe has tended toward conditions where countertime has become progressively more influential and/or time less so. So then the question is what drives the state change? This leads to the postulation of a 6th dimension that contains time, countertime, and the 3 that we live in.

Well, this is where my 'getting it' stops. I can't conceptualize the quality of a 6th dimension, although leading sci fi writers assure me that the most cracked-out physicists out there can keep pushing this crap further and further until they ultimately get their brains around the 11 or more (30-40??) dimensions necessary for a plausible string theory (vectors that move inside multiple tightly curved microdimensions, and that define the subatomic particles that make up matter and energy in our 3-D universe).

/Core dump: time to reboot brain with 16 straight hours of WoW...

KhamanV: ironic_followup: someone should call a doctor...

He looks as confused as I am about all this.

/still figuring out 'dark energy.'

Dark energy is not mysterious... journalists just think it is. Dark energy, just like dark matter, is simply unaccounted for energy in the universe. It may, for instance, be polarized and traveling in a direction we are not able to observe... or in the case of dark matter, there may not be any energy emanating from it, light reflecting form it etc, to allow us to observe it.

One of the primary reasons astronomers think there is dark energy and dark matter is that they are arrogant. They think they know how to calculate how big the universe should be, and they make their calculations, and it comes up short. So rather than admit that the possibility that they don't fully understand the universe, they theorize that there must be alot of missing matter and energy.

They start of with the assumption that the universe is finite and expanding. That is the only way there can even be dark energy/matter. You would need at least a billion years to truly be able to observe the expanding part ( uniformly, I mean for you Astro types you are going to jump in and say Hubble Hubble Hubble )

In reality, we'll probably never really know. Cosmologically, it doesn't even matter. By the time we really figure it out, half of the suns and planets we discover in the universe will already have fizzled out.

Trucker: Seriously, this souds like the kind of shiat kids think up when stoned out of their farking minds.

"Dude, what if the universe is really just a piece of lint on some giant's table..."

That's because those stoned kids often grow up to be physicists, where they actually get paid to think about things besides American Idol and Fox News.

/they also grow up to become computer programmers and, strangely enough, car wash attendants

dj42: shanrick: Kiefer Sutherland unavailable for comment.

Brilliant.

/WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME!

You don't know what "brilliant" means, do you?

huntercr: KhamanV: ironic_followup: someone should call a doctor...

He looks as confused as I am about all this.

/still figuring out 'dark energy.'

Dark energy is not mysterious... journalists just think it is. Dark energy, just like dark matter, is simply unaccounted for energy in the universe. It may, for instance, be polarized and traveling in a direction we are not able to observe... or in the case of dark matter, there may not be any energy emanating from it, light reflecting form it etc, to allow us to observe it.
...snip...


Thank you. That made a hell of a lot more sense than the article on Wikipedia. Of course, Wiki is frequently the land of humorless, arrogant farks, so that probably didn't help matters.

we_hates: how they determine something's absolute speed (if there is any such thing)

There is no such thing, because there is no absolute time (or space for that matter). That's what Einstein meant when he said that everything is relative. There is no such thing as a "universal clock" that can measure time directly, ie without using a cyclic mechanical process. Hence, time can't "slow down" as a whole, only relative to a particular observer. That article made as much sense as Farnsworth's announcement that scientists had raised the speed of light so they could travel faster...

Gaspar unavailable for comment.

Because it was already there.

Why did the tachyon cross the road?

/not mine

Manic_Repressive: It kinda makes sense. Doesn't time slow down the further you get from a gravitational body?
If all the major groups of gravitational bodies are moving away from each other, wouldn't that slow down time as a whole?

/time's been stuck at 4:20 in my house since mid-afternoon

time is not real, the device measuring vibration, starts to vibrate different and thus it appears as though time is changing. Time is not real why don't even scientists understand this?

Wow, even the tag filter couldn't fix that one.

camaroash: // Knew a girl whose nickname was "poiple". She used a purple sharpie to color her nipples and flashed some guys I know.

Pics or the purple nurple didn't happen.

I blame this man:



It's the clock man. Flavor Flav's clock is sloooowwwwiiiiiing uuuusssssss ddddddddddooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!

Bow down and worship your newest Scientist/Priests Hypothesis all you God Haters!

Seems obligatory: DIDN'T I TELL YOU ABOUT THE CUBIC INTERVAL? (new window)

YOU"RE THAT BUBBLEGUM TATE?

EwoksSuck: Flavor Flav

Good god it looks like time's been moving faster in the local gravity of Flav's face than it does in the rest of the universe...

SquirrelHill: EwoksSuck: Flavor Flav

Good god it looks like time's been moving faster in the local gravity of Flav's face than it does in the rest of the universe...

That's just the illusion caused by the light bending slightly towards the gravitational pull of his gold teef.

/now I feel dirty for spelling teef

Time IS universally variable, which is why perceptive people experience a "slow day" together, regardless of boredom.

That stuff at the edge of the universe? You can't even begin to fathom the wonderful creation of God set in motion 10x10tothegazillion years ago. Good luck with that. Bet your wrong until year 10,567 on Earth.

12inpianist: camaroash: // Knew a girl whose nickname was "poiple". She used a purple sharpie to color her nipples and flashed some guys I know.

Pics or the purple nurple didn't happen.

Pics would be teh illegalz0r. She was 15.

Let's take time to be an instrument, an instrument of measure, or duration in this instance.
Let's assume this instrument (or its readings) will vary according to such situations as will have noticeable affect on it.
What was the question again?