Originally posted by jjw004:
Hi JB:
I think I am still on topic to ask for your comparison of time passing. It seems to me we have time as an objective circumstance measured for dates and such by the rotation of the earth and then we time as an organic event. We get old independently of the earths rotation or the speed with which it orbits the earth. Possibly the drag of gravitation on our bodies provides some contribution as well.
When you quote an interpretation of Einstein and aging factors with acceleration by what means is our organic aging going to be restrained or accelerated as a result of moving through space? This has always been a curious suggestion to me.
This as an organic result needs something more than math to make it work. What can be shown to be going on in the body to age slower or faster?
jjw
Yes fascinating questions! According to special relativity (not considering gravitation), time is the fourth dimension. Thus it is an integral part of our four-dimensional universe and should thus manifest within every inertial reference frame at the same rate (the "proper rate"). In fact if this were not the case, estimations of the "age of the Universe" would have been futile. If time varied as a consquence of the speed you are moving at, the Universe would have different ages relative to different galaxies. Furthermore, the line widths of spectra will be different for materials moving relative to each other. The Universe would have been chaotic when being observed. Thus the contraction in time observed by an observer (considering himself to be stationary) within a reference frame moving relative to the observer is, as I have pointed out, a relativistic "illusion".
Thus a human being on another planet exactly like the earth but moving relative to earth with a high speed will still age at the same rate as he/she would have on earth.
From Einstein's general theory of relativity one finds that acceleration (which can be equated to gravity) causes actual time to slow down; for example at the event horizon of a black hole time supposedly stops completely. I sometimes speculate that the event horison is not a cloak of a singularity but rather the gateway to eternity. Thus if you can travel to end up near an event horison, you should actually age slower; i.e. all the time-related processes in you body should slow down. It might be a very boring and sad existence. Everything will be happenning in slow motion. On the other hand, if everything slows down , also you bodily functions and your thought rate, you might not notice the difference (except of course the massive gravitational force which you have to counteract not to fall "into" the black hole).
An interesting question: Can change occur (i.e. entropy change)within an Euclidean space-time. If it is truly Euclidean, the time axis will be perpendicular to the space axes so that any time-derivative will always be zero; nothing should then be able to change with time. I speculate that "our Universe" came into being when the fourth axis of an Euclidean (timeless; zero entropy) space-time became bent so that time and light started to manifest within three-dimensional space. Maybe our Universe is expanding because it is unbending to eventually again become a space-time with zero entropy.
