What would you rather do?

[.pcbrainbuster]

- before that, I didn't mind the least about my own (conscious) in existence...

Of course you didn't! Because, actually I just give the points and not the details...

By the way I'm now gonna change the subject of this topic and talk about another view

I think that people think life is short because of the "videos/images" their your head. What I mean by this is that when you experience something, your brain usually stores memories but not exactly everything and then when you actually think about how long your life has been it SEEMS short because of all those missing "clips" from your experiences.

Who agrees about this other view?

[JVene]

I think non-existence is similar to your experience before your life began.

I don't recall that being unpleasant .

It must have lasted for billions of years, if you accept the scientific depiction of reality.

In my view, I think we consider linear and fixed rate of time as too much a part of consciousness. Thought plays out over time. Recent work by IBM gives a most interesting view of how the brain communicates among its various components. There is, as they put it, a spatial and temporal (and I suspect an amplitude) coding. A group of neurons communicating with another group send signals along specific paths, to excite targeted destinations. The pulses are not just single spikes, but a series of pulses over a span of time. Restated with poetic license, the spatial coding is like pitch (where on the keyboard), and the temporal coding is like rhythm. Even if the same neurons are excited, if the rhythm is different, the meaning is different. This makes thought play out over time, and our view of consciousness follows it.

However, from a physical viewpoint, time isn't so fixed. Gravity affects it, velocity affects it, and while we'll probably never experience time's flow any other way, it seems important that one of the basic properties of thought, sense and sentience is as much a property of time as of biology or any other factor.

Of the many theories on the universe, most follow the principle that there's nothing so peculiar about our current reality as to assume it's unique. Whatever caused the universe to exist doesn't evaporate even if the substance of the universe collapses in on itself (the reverse of the big bang), or if it fades into non-existence (expansion leads us to a point where one electron is the size of the known universe).

Either way, I think it reasonable to assume that the conditions which give rise to the universe continue, and at some point recur. The possibility that this universe can exist is obvious, since we are here. If there's another 'big bang' in the very distant future, that 'new' universe may be quite different. The particles that start out as indistinct 'soup' become something, not exactly what we became this occasion. Still, this one remains possible, if improbable. Time representing an infinity suggests that eventually, the highly improbable yet possible must eventually occur. If we waited long enough, this universe might recur. It seems there's nothing to prevent it. Locally (as in the present moment), it may seem hopelessly distant, but the infinity represented by eternity gives considerable hope. That non-existence may be very long, but would we have any recognition of it? Doubtful, because we have no anxiety or memory of that several billion year history that must have happened before we appeared. Actually, we marvel over it when we realize it. What if, in some uncountable number of repetitions, the improbable does appear, and this universe, exactly as we know it, recurs?

Eternity, stretching beyond that one repetition without end, would never cease to bring that possibility to fruition. It may have been before, too. We can't know; that distant knowledge is beyond us. It may be a matter of faith to assume a little more than physics could ever reveal, but it just might be that we're in eternity, and never really leave it. No matter how much time might pass, if we ever exist it is because it is possible to exist, and if that potential remains, no matter how rare, and that plays out though the infinity of time, we may as well have never ceased to exist. Non existence would be as temporary as existence, given the expanse of eternity.

[SuperKoko]

I think that people think life is short because of the "videos/images" their your head. What I mean by this is that when you experience something, your brain usually stores memories but not exactly everything and then when you actually think about how long your life has been it SEEMS short because of all those missing "clips" from your experiences.

In other words, if you spend your life in a dentist's waiting room, you'll locally feel that the time passes very slowly, but, at the end, you'll feel that your life was very short because you did nothing, thus, you memorized very few events.

Who agrees about this other view?

Me.

However, saying that the life that you didn't memorize is pointless is, in my opinion, self centric. Don't take that as an insult. It's just that I expect that my life wasn't pointless from the point of view of others.
There has been good discussions on codeguru that I partially contributed to animate, and that's not the only thing that my life brought.

Even if the only thing that counts is memory, if I lose the memory of me when dying, others won't lose it immediately.

[SuperKoko]

@JVene: I don't think .pcbrainbuster was refering to this type of non existence.
He was thinking about the infinite non-existence.

[Siddhartha]

Life is wonderful and great -- but, only if you are lucky.

There are many people on this planet who live lives I would not want to experience. There are many experiences that are best not experienced (at least for me).

In that context, even though I am not sure about the existence of Hell (actually I am pretty sure about the inexistence thereof... ), I would rather not exist than live an unlucky life that some people on this planet live - irrespective of whether I go to heaven or hell, after that...

On second thoughts... It's a bit ironic that the so-called unlucky people in unfortunate parts of the world (war-ravaged areas, etc) are often a lot more positive and internally happy than many of the (so-called) lucky people who live in developed countries who have everything at their fingertips.

[JVene]

SuperKoko,

I agree, and my point was to introduce the notion that it might just not be infinite in one state, as if there could be a third option.

It's a bit ironic that the so-called unlucky people in unfortunate parts of the world (war-ravaged areas, etc) are often a lot more positive and internally happy than many of the (so-called) lucky people who live in developed countries who have everything at their fingertips.

I think this leads to a rather wonderfully illuminating tributary of thought, though I think the concept of hell was designed to obviate the possibility, imaged as a place of no hope.

I know that .pcbrainbuster is quite young, and this line of philosophical inquiry is wonderful to witness, and rather natural for those of us questioning our mortality.

Anyone familiar with the film "What the bleep do we know"? The title literally uses the word "bleep", that's not my replacement of an explicative. It's a fascinating review of many tangentially related subjects, and there's a website you can find by that title. There's even some treatment of the material I posted above, though you'll find hints (skipping the deeper philosophy) of it in Hawkings book "A Brief History of Time".

[RaleTheBlade]

lol @ 17th post by Jvene

You just unravelled the mysteries of the universe! lol, Ive always been interested in Einsteins perception of time as something changeable. I mean, its weird. Because if you think about it his way, your not going through "time" itself, but the events that have occurred along the path in time. He basically stated that if you went the precise speed of light, "time" would become stagnant and events in history would stop. If you went twice the speed of light, time would move twice as fast.

But this is the mere perception of time, not actual time itself seeing as how you cannot make a minute more than a minute but your perception of that minute may have more (or less) events crammed into it based on how fast your moving. Its a fascinating topic indeed. But until we figure out how to go 2.99 X 10^6 m/s, we'll never know, lol.

[SuperKoko]

He basically stated that if you went the precise speed of light, "time" would become stagnant and events in history would stop

No, he said that you cannot reach this speed.
You can reach c/2, 0.9*c, but not c.

If you went twice the speed of light, time would move twice as fast.

Nope.

But until we figure out how to go 2.99 X 10^6 m/s, we'll never know, lol.

The relativity theory has to be applied at speeds far under this one, and is usually applied for all astronomical calculus. It gives very accurate results. With these calculus, the position of a probe can be given with an accuracy of 100 meters for 20 light hours.

lol, Ive always been interested in Einsteins perception of time as something changeable.

You don't need to laugh out loud when you're interested in something.

Anyway, at the scale of human body, the speed at which the time passes depends on the speed of neuro-transmission, which varies much, depending on the amount of coffee you drunk (and many other factors), so that, the percieved (and effective, for the brain) speed of the time, varies among individuals, hours of the day and day of the week.

[JVene]

I'm only a tourist and so I can't profess more than a mere book report on the subject, and I hope you'll not take offense as I respond with an adjustment to your response RaleTheBlade. I think essentially you're correct.

In the texts I've read on the subject they made careful use of terms like 'viewpoint' or 'frame of reference', avoiding the depiction of the effect as a perception. I think perception suggests something of an illusion, but the effect is no illusion.

In one of the classic illustrations, one 'traveler' takes a clock which is set to match a second clock's time exactly. The second clock 'stays behind', presumably in the frame of reference commonly found here on Earth. The clock that goes with the traveler boards a craft that reaches perhaps .9 C (90% the speed of light). The traveler's clock measures, for sake of illustration (and without reference to the precise calculations available) about 1 hour of time. Say the trip began at 1pm, and the traveler reached .9 C rather quickly, for convenience of the illustration. He traveled an hour at that speed (according to his clock), then returned. When he compares the two clocks he'll witness that while his own clock, which traveled with him, shows it to be just a couple of minutes past 2pm, the clock he left behind will show the time is well past 11pm.

From the traveler's viewpoint, the passage of events in the Earth's frame of reference happened faster than his own. From the Earthbound viewpoint, the traveler's clock moved much slower than the reference.

I got the impression, though, that the conclusions have been that time is altered for the viewpoints of the respective velocities. Real enough that if the traveler moved faster, and for a little longer on his clock (a few hours), when he returned several centuries will have passed, yet he'll only be a few hours older than when he left.


While we certainly can't make a craft that does this, we have, many times, done almost exactly the same experiment with particle accelerators. Some particles have short decay times, and we can, with present technology, observe particles that decay into 'something else' at specific time intervals. I don't have the chart with me, but let's say there's a particle that, once created, decays in exactly 10 minutes (there are particles that decay in seconds, minutes, hours, years, etc.).

In these experiments, conducted over many years, we create a collection of particles that we know will decay in 10 minutes - they're all created at the same moment (probably some accelerator collision producing a heavy element like Americium, but I don't know which particle decays in around 10 minutes).

Some of the particles are kept on the lab "bench", so to speak, while a few others are launched into a particle accelerator and moved at some .9 to .95 C. When the particles are slowed and collected, the examined in comparison to the "bench" sample, the bench sample will decay before the particles that ran at .9C - time dilation has been demonstrated in this general way many times.

I labor over this description, and hope you don't take offense as if I'm correcting an article, because I think it relevant to the understanding of time's elasticity. To a layman like myself, there is considerable mystery in this fact, and I take Hawking's point literally when he suggested that the time has come to reevaluate the philosophies in light of recent revelations like these.

I think your point applies this way. Even if the traveler has skipped a century or two, his own life experience has proceeded only by a few hours. He has not added to the duration of his life from his viewpoint of time. He has extended his life with respect to the viewpoint of time remaining behind, but without interacting with us. Even if we could have communicated, while we could have imparted decades of literature, art, music and world events, he wouldn't have much time to absorb the material, and his responses would amount to little more than a single word each year, relative to our point of view.

I don't recall reading that time stops, in either relative viewpoint, at the speed of light. I seem to vaguely recall that the 'double' time dilation occurs before particles reach the speed of light, and the faster the relative velocity the greater the dilation. I suppose that from the 'low velocity' viewpoint, a particle AT the speed of light might loose time distinctions, and for a short term observation it may appear to have stopped 'moving' - I'm not actually sure. The reverse viewpoint (that of the particle at lightspeed) would witness a near infinite speed of time, something similar to a particle near the surface of a black hole (as if falls in, about to hit it).

The summary point here is that in all of the material I've read, relativity requires that two viewpoints be considered (and compared). Since we are all in a common viewpoint (a common velocity) relative to lightspeed, we all share the same basic relative time view.

[Siddhartha]

I am a layman at this topic but I definitely hold the opinion that the post from JVene was a very good one. Lucid and interesting.

[RaleTheBlade]

JVene,
Killer topic, extremely interesting!

Ive always had a vested interest in this sort of subject, but never had anyone else to explain it with. But yes, you seemed to elaborate much better on what I was getting at. The main point I was attempting to get through was that we can never change time, but only our perception of time and the events that occur in it. Time itself stays a constant, a second will never be less than a second, a minute will always be a minute, but relativity does join the two sides together. Such as person A on planet earth and person B traveling at .9 C, a minute will be the same for both of them from their vantage points, but when you compare the two, a minute for person B would be equal to 2 hours (or some arbitrary number, not applying astrophysics here ) for person A. Its all in the concept of relativity and its a rather fascinating topic.

I had heard about this particle accelerator over in Europe that could accelerate particles almost to the speed of light. But what was Einsteins theory on why you could never go exactly or surpass the speed of light?

My theory lay in that your body as a mass would actually "push" light faster than you, so light will always be some number of seconds, minutes, hours ahead of you. Therefore you could never catch up to it.

As for singularities or black holes, theyre a perfect example of an area of physics we cannot yet fully comprehend. And for good reason, how can something with zero size have such a large mass? Its impossible to fathom... The gravitational pull it would take to absorb even light must be unbelievable. And it does this all even with a size thats lets than a neutron star which pushes physics to the brink.

[JVene]

But what was Einsteins theory on why you could never go exactly or surpass the speed of light?

It's an interesting point that's usually ignored in lay conversations like ours.

As velocity increases, mass increases.

It doesn't SOUND right, but it's correct. Said in reverse perspective, the amount of energy required to achieve further unit of acceleration increases as the velocity approaches the speed of light, reaching an infinite amount at the limit of lightspeed (we're brushing against an elementary calculus discussion there).

You can get close, but for that last, little bit of acceleration that would get you to lightspeed you would require an infinite amount of energy.

Of course, massless particles don't have that problem - only mass particles (like us - me especially).

Now, take care about the speed of light energy itself. Nothing accelerates the speed of light. One of the great revelations from relativity about light is that all observers, no matter what their velocity, observe that light is the same relative speed. It's quite a conundrum to puzzle over without diving into the math of it, and that really is beyond us here.

Velocity of an object does not add to the velocity of the light bouncing off of it. This was one of the great revelations, and if I recall correctly, one of the 'apple falling from the tree' illustrations that led to Einstein's theory.

Imagine what would happen if light's speed were additive. You approach an intersection and stop. Another car is coming from the crossing road, and it approaches the intersection - it doesn't intend to stop.

If you bounced a rubber ball off the hood of the car (rude, I know, but this is a thought experiment Einstein imagined with bicycles, so it would have been even ruder). If the ball was so 'bouncy' as to be 100% efficient in energy transfer, it would return toward you at the speed of your ability to through PLUS the speed of the car that it hit. The ball would enter the intersection before the car it bounced off of. That seems simple.

Why, then, do we not SEE the car enter the intersection before it actually does? If light speed were additive, the vision of the car (made up of the particles of light bouncing from it much the same as that ball did) should enter the intersection (visually) before the car actually gets there.

Could it be some tiny adjustment we simply don't witness? A little math revealed to Einstein that it would be measurable if true. If we didn't stop, and headed along a collision path, we WOULD end up hitting a car we perceived had already passed through the intersection.

The truth is that the speed of light is constant, and can't be accelerated. Constant, though, is a bit relative ( ) - because light does slow down within a medium, like air. It's speed is altered when it passes through glass, but it returns to it's previous speed when it leaves the glass. Recent experiments have slowed light down to a speed you could actually outpace yourself - very, very slow (38 MPH) - within an Einstein-Bose condensate.

However, we have no means of speeding light up beyond the 'constant' - which is, specifically, a speed in a vacuum.



Less we be accused of hijacking .pcbrainbuster's thread here, let me defend the tangents as part of the overall search for answers about time, mortality, the nature of the universe - all related subjects. Many will isolate .pcbrainbuster's original inquiry from physics through religious positions, and I wouldn't argue against that, even if I'm not a follower of their faith. I think physics can give answers that satisfy, to a point, the curiosity and anxiety associated with these questions for agnostics and religious followers alike, assuming the religious readers are willing to allow the discussion (many are not), and it would require some willingness to accept the possibility that the differences between a particular religion and the state of scientific findings may be a matter of interpretation quality.

The more I understand about physics, quantum mechanics and related topics, I sense there's an even larger reality than what most religions have described, which is paradoxically comforting and disturbing.