I’ve been thinking about relativity where the passage of time depends on your velocity, but I don’t really understand what this means physically. I understand that the clocks of two different people traveling at different relative speeds will be different, but what does this really mean? Does this imply that time is a physical quantity, like energy, and that depending on your speed you have less of it? To make this more complicated, my understanding is that it’s not just clocks that will be different, it’s the actual “age” of physical things; ex: if I’m traveling at the speed of light I can go infinite distance and to me it would be like waking from a coma, I would have no memory of traveling at all, so as far as I was concerned it didn’t happen. I guess I just don’t really understand what this means about the physical nature of time; is it a tangible quantity like matter or is it more like a byproduct of something else and what we call “the passage of time” is just how we measure it (ex: if I heat up a gas and the atoms get more disordered then it’s entropy has increased, but I can measure temperature and use that as a proxy for entropy).
In: 11
I think what your asking in what time is “physically”. You actually mean how to conceptualize time from an outside of time perspective.
When you think of something physical, you have to have an outside perspective, like you can see the whole of a rock, weigh it, touch it, etc.
You can imagine this for space-time as well. Imagine your like god or something, and you can see from a singular point, the big bang, time and space expands out like an infinite expanding cone. This would be the perspective of an being that exsist on a dimension in which space-time is nestled it. Just like how people are nestled in space-time.
You would see the past and the future in freeze frame without motion, and the 3 dimensional space is expanding out on the 4th dimension of time.
If you want to know what time -is-, well its a field in which particles, and their force counterparts, is affected and carried by. Kinda of like a elctro magnetic field with magents and electric motors. Then electromagnetism has an carrier particles, and the force of space time use to affect other stuff, which is the Higgs-Boson. Funny enoguh that’s where the name god particle comes from.
Latest Answers