Is there a physicist in the house?
TOL’s resident physicist, ThePhy, would be a great candidate for reading and poking holes in this post. ThePhy (or anyone else), if you would, please give me your opinion on the following. This was just a stream of consciousness thing, so if you’d rather not waste the time reading it, I don’t blame you. But I’m wondering if you can poke holes in it. Thanks, -Bob
A Layman Questions Gravitational Time Dilation
● Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is presented as indicating that gravity influences time, in that time flows relatively more slowly in a stronger gravitational field as compared to time in a weaker field.
● Actual experiments and observations provide evidence for GR time dilation. For example, clocks at different Earth altitudes run at different rates, thus the mile high atomic clock in Colorado runs a few ticks faster per year than the one close to sea level in Greenwich, England.
● Most physicists and cosmologists accept GR time dilation, and thus, that time is relative to a particular frame of reference.
Googling “Gravitational Time Dilation” I get Google 7: “Gravitational time dilation is the slowing down of the passage of time anywhere in the gravitational field.” Google :11 “The short and sloppy versions say: "… ‘Time runs slower as you descend into the potential well of a uniform pseudo-force field.’” From Google 9: “The idea of relativity is to throw out the concept of us travelling through time inescapably, and accept time as just another dimension”
Consider this exaggerated scenario to illustrate my question, and then I’ll suggest a practical experiment that could test my conclusion.
Two atomic clocks have been running for billions of years, one at the base of a mountain, and the other at the summit, sitting inside of a well-maintained Chinook cargo helicopter. The clock on the peak has been running faster by a few nanoseconds per year, but over the eons, it has advanced to twenty-four hours ahead of the clock far below, and it’s readout, in year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and nanosecond, is just now turning over to indicate exactly twenty-four hours ahead of the other clock, on a Friday at exactly high noon. This illustrates Einstein’s prediction that time would run relatively slower at a stronger gravitational field, as exists at the bottom of the mountain. Thus, the clock at the mountaintop is now one-day ahead of the clock below. The operator of the clock below, who was hired because of his PhD in physics, has just begun reading today’s newspaper. The operator can read today’s paper, because they both exist at the same time. He is alive, and wanting and able to read, and today’s paper has been printed, and just delivered to his facility, and since they are both there, the operator and the paper, at the same time, he can read that paper. However, if he wanted to read tomorrow’s paper, he could not do it immediately, because tomorrow’s paper is twenty-four hours behind him in time. (Behind him. That’s correct. No? He’s ahead of tomorrow paper! He’s here now, a full 24 hours before it hits the newsstands. Remember after all, the river of time flows backward, not forward, from the future through the present into the past. No? Imagine something floating in that current, like next Christmas Day, which is in the future, drifting toward the present, but eventually will be remembered only in fading prints in family photo albums. But I digress…) Assuming that the newspaper’s production schedule remains constant with past performance, the operator will have to wait for twenty-four hours to pass before he can actually come into contact with tomorrow’s paper, or for that matter, with anything that is twenty-four hours into the future. Now, back to the clock on the peak. The operator has kept an eye on that clock all along (he’s now near retirement age), and with a telescope, he’s been able to watch the nanoseconds ticking more quickly than those of his clock. So, being a reader of popular science magazines, he believes that time has been flowing faster for the clock above, and so that clock is twenty-four hours ahead of him and his clock. Now, it seems to me that he is confused, and that physicists must actually be referring to some other effect when they say or imply that gravity affects time. The seventh site found by a web search on the topic, (Google 7), states: “Gravitational time dilation is the slowing down of the passage of time.” Seemingly implying that time flows at different rates for the two clocks. If that were literally true, then it seems the two clocks would exist in two different time frames, now separated by twenty-four hours, and the operator at the base shouldn’t even be able to see the clock at the summit, since it is 24 hours ahead of him in time, and it is impossible to see into the future!
Now THE PLOT thickens! The helicopter (which has been maintained all these years at great taxpayer expense) suddenly transported the summit clock to the base clock, and the two clocks were set next to each other so that they actually touched! And the contact between the two clocks happened exactly ten minutes after noon on Friday according to the summit clock (rounding to the nearest whole second).
So, here is my question. What time would the base clock show at the moment that they made contact?
Calvinists, physicists and evolutionary cosmologists would all answer that at the moment of contact, the base clock would read Thursday at 12:10 p.m. Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day. And for what I know of Relativity (not much) they all happen to be correct! So whenever physicists claim that GR proves that gravitational gradients affect time, they are wrong. They don’t. Gravity does not affect time: it affects clocks. And that is not the same thing. If gravity affected actual time, then like tomorrow’s paper, the summit clock should be one day into the actual future as compared to the base clock; and if it were quickly transported down the mountain (where it would begin experiencing the same rate of time as the other clock), then the summit clock would continue to give readouts of twenty-four hours in the future, as compared to the base clock. (The brief trip down the mountain had a relatively negligible impact on its timekeeping!) So the two clocks would then stay offset with the base clock always reading one day behind the other. However, if different gravitational gradients truly affected time, and the summit clock were truly one day ahead in time of the other, then the helicopter should not be able to bring them into contact after a mere ten minute trip! The duration of the flight was measured at 10 minutes by both clocks within less than a billionth of a second. (Having worked on the AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter, I know a bit of inside information about these machines, and while it was classified, I think enough time has passed to allow me to say this, as least quietly: helicopters are not time machines. They do not offer time-travel service.) If the summit clock truly experienced time faster than the base clock, then once the helicopter brought the clock to the base of the mountain, at that point, then another twenty-four hours would have to pass by before the operator at the base could see the summit clock sitting there (after returning from lunch, behold, the helicopter cometh!). So the operator would have waited until Friday, at ten minutes after noon, before he could see the clock suddenly appear on the ground next to his base clock. But, that is not what happened, is it? What happened was, having packed a sack lunch that day, he happened to see the clock at the same moment that it was being delivered. The summit clock and the base clock had been ticking at different rates for billions of years. And both had traveled around the Sun the same number of times. But what’s more, both clocks saw the exact same number of sunrises and sunsets! However the summit clock’s readout suggested that it had seen one additional sunrise and sunset than had the base clock, which of course it had not. The peak clock and the base clock both revolve around the earth’s axis in the same solar day, so to interpret their readouts as measuring different length days is to be confused. Genesis says that God gave us the Sun (and other astronomic bodies) for “seasons, and for days and years.” It turns out that God gave mankind great timekeepers (and less misleading ones than our atomic clocks as interpreted by theorists)! The movements within our solar system give us a more correct understanding of the absolute nature of time than do the ticks of atomic clocks. So, whatever cosmologists are actually trying to say when they speak of time dilation, here is the truth. Gravity does not affect time. Gravity affects clocks.
[Clarification: By the way, I am NOT saying that the earth's orbit is an exact timekeeper, I am saying that by taking into account other wider frames of reference, we can correct our misinterpretations of atomic clock data. Another clarification appears below.]
In this scenario, as with the real world atomic clocks in Greenwich and Boulder (one across the Atlantic, and the other a few miles up Highway 93), both clocks exist in the exact same ultimate time reference, and always will, as long as they both shall tick. The false theory of epicycles did a better job of predicting the positions of the planets in the sky as compared to early Copernican calculations, yet epicycles were incorrect. Relativity’s time dilation does a great job of predicting the read out of an atomic clock at various altitudes and accelerations (experimentally, what, to within less than 1% of theoretical performance?) But that does not prove that time is relative. Rather, it proves that gravity affects clocks. Imagine if ancient Eskimos used a seal bladder to keep time, filling it up with water, and counting sixty drips for each minute. (Why sixty? Well, since the earth originally orbited the Sun in exactly 360 days, the ancients divided circles into 360 degrees, and a hexagonal system of time developed, with the day and night divided anciently into 12 hour segments, and measurements of time divided into convenient hexagonal units.) Anyway, occasionally a drunkard would wander by and squeeze the bladder, bringing a native physicist to suggest his theory of time dilation, for after all, even a drunk can speed up time! So, both the Eskimo clock and the atomic clock prove the same thing. When exposed to different gravitational gradients, it is the various measuring instruments of time, like atomic clocks, seal bladders, GPS satellites, metabolism, etc., that are affected. So once again, a simple experiment, is worth a thousand theories. What does it prove? That the amateurs are wrong. And also, that the amateurs include a lot of professionals. And Calvinists too. For my interest in all this is theological. For biblically, I have been convinced that time is an eternal attribute of God’s existence, seen most easily in that He is relational. And many Calvinists and others teach that God is outside of time existing in an eternal now, and that He created time. So Calvinists commonly quote popular understandings of General Relativity’s time dilation as evidence for their claim that time is not absolute. So, I have a vested interested in refuting that. So, I argue that when folks say that time speeds up or slows down in different frames of reference, what they really mean is that stuff affects clocks.
[Clarification: Again, I am not saying (as initial reviewers misinterpreted) that the earth rotates at an eternally exact rate. Even if I had said that, that would not prove that time is absolute, but only that, from the earth’s reference frame, it’s period of rotation is constant. What I was saying (apparently not clearly enough) was that, the movement of the heavenly bodies “gives us a more correct understanding,” that is, it gives us an additional frame of reference “for seasons, and for days and years.” What can this additional reference frame inform us of? Consider these Mountain Clocks. Even if some local experiment might make us think that time is not absolute, measuring it differently with different instruments at different altitudes, by not ignoring this additional reference frame, we can “correct” our “understanding” by taking into account the earth's movement around the sun. Here’s how. At the end of the experiment, when the Summit and Base Clocks meet, the earth is not in its position, and also in another position 24 hours lagging or further around its solar orbit; from this perspective, the earth is only in one position. Likewise, when the clocks were first installed, one above and one below, the earth was not in its orbital position, and also 24 hours ahead or behind itself. This tells us that the exact times of sunrises and sunsets seen by the two clocks throughout the eons means nothing to our understanding of what the clocks are telling us, since the entire experiment including both clocks are being carried on the earth, which at the beginning was in one place in it’s orbit, and at the end is in one place in its orbit. Let's also assume, reasonably, that at the start of the Experiment both clocks passed a Starting Point on the earth's orbit within one millisecond of each other, and at the end of the Experiment, both clocks passed the Ending Point on the earth's orbit, again also within one millisecond of each other. Now, earth only took one length of time to get from it’s starting point to its ending point, not two. And coincidentally, the clocks started their experiment in synch with the earth’s temporal reference point, and ended there also. Thus, the entire point of the Mountain Clocks illustration is that by not ignoring the movements of the solar system, we bring our heads up out of the details, and look at the bigger picture, and remember that nothing has fallen behind the present, nor sped up into the future, nor ever can, as known from God’s revelation of Himself, and corroborated to date by all our scientific effort and even Einstein’s relativity as experimentally demonstrated.]
And here is my practical experiment: let’s hike to the top of 14,110-foot Pike’s Peak and enter the snack bar at the summit, and grab the old round wall clock, the one that’s been up there so long that when removed, it will leave a clean white circle on the wall. And then ride the train down to the base of the mountain in Manitou Springs, and then rush the old ticking clock a few miles to the Clock Tower at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. And when we get there, we will touch the two together, and see if the space-time continuum ruptures, or anything like that.
-Pastor Bob Enyart.com
DenverBibleChurch.com & KGOV.com
Note: Physicist Smolin earned his physics Ph.D. at Harvard and taught at Yale and Penn State before writing his 2014 book Time Reborn of which The Telegraph says, "Einstein’s theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can’t see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."
TOL’s resident physicist, ThePhy, would be a great candidate for reading and poking holes in this post. ThePhy (or anyone else), if you would, please give me your opinion on the following. This was just a stream of consciousness thing, so if you’d rather not waste the time reading it, I don’t blame you. But I’m wondering if you can poke holes in it. Thanks, -Bob
A Layman Questions Gravitational Time Dilation
● Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is presented as indicating that gravity influences time, in that time flows relatively more slowly in a stronger gravitational field as compared to time in a weaker field.
● Actual experiments and observations provide evidence for GR time dilation. For example, clocks at different Earth altitudes run at different rates, thus the mile high atomic clock in Colorado runs a few ticks faster per year than the one close to sea level in Greenwich, England.
● Most physicists and cosmologists accept GR time dilation, and thus, that time is relative to a particular frame of reference.
Googling “Gravitational Time Dilation” I get Google 7: “Gravitational time dilation is the slowing down of the passage of time anywhere in the gravitational field.” Google :11 “The short and sloppy versions say: "… ‘Time runs slower as you descend into the potential well of a uniform pseudo-force field.’” From Google 9: “The idea of relativity is to throw out the concept of us travelling through time inescapably, and accept time as just another dimension”
Consider this exaggerated scenario to illustrate my question, and then I’ll suggest a practical experiment that could test my conclusion.
Two atomic clocks have been running for billions of years, one at the base of a mountain, and the other at the summit, sitting inside of a well-maintained Chinook cargo helicopter. The clock on the peak has been running faster by a few nanoseconds per year, but over the eons, it has advanced to twenty-four hours ahead of the clock far below, and it’s readout, in year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and nanosecond, is just now turning over to indicate exactly twenty-four hours ahead of the other clock, on a Friday at exactly high noon. This illustrates Einstein’s prediction that time would run relatively slower at a stronger gravitational field, as exists at the bottom of the mountain. Thus, the clock at the mountaintop is now one-day ahead of the clock below. The operator of the clock below, who was hired because of his PhD in physics, has just begun reading today’s newspaper. The operator can read today’s paper, because they both exist at the same time. He is alive, and wanting and able to read, and today’s paper has been printed, and just delivered to his facility, and since they are both there, the operator and the paper, at the same time, he can read that paper. However, if he wanted to read tomorrow’s paper, he could not do it immediately, because tomorrow’s paper is twenty-four hours behind him in time. (Behind him. That’s correct. No? He’s ahead of tomorrow paper! He’s here now, a full 24 hours before it hits the newsstands. Remember after all, the river of time flows backward, not forward, from the future through the present into the past. No? Imagine something floating in that current, like next Christmas Day, which is in the future, drifting toward the present, but eventually will be remembered only in fading prints in family photo albums. But I digress…) Assuming that the newspaper’s production schedule remains constant with past performance, the operator will have to wait for twenty-four hours to pass before he can actually come into contact with tomorrow’s paper, or for that matter, with anything that is twenty-four hours into the future. Now, back to the clock on the peak. The operator has kept an eye on that clock all along (he’s now near retirement age), and with a telescope, he’s been able to watch the nanoseconds ticking more quickly than those of his clock. So, being a reader of popular science magazines, he believes that time has been flowing faster for the clock above, and so that clock is twenty-four hours ahead of him and his clock. Now, it seems to me that he is confused, and that physicists must actually be referring to some other effect when they say or imply that gravity affects time. The seventh site found by a web search on the topic, (Google 7), states: “Gravitational time dilation is the slowing down of the passage of time.” Seemingly implying that time flows at different rates for the two clocks. If that were literally true, then it seems the two clocks would exist in two different time frames, now separated by twenty-four hours, and the operator at the base shouldn’t even be able to see the clock at the summit, since it is 24 hours ahead of him in time, and it is impossible to see into the future!
Now THE PLOT thickens! The helicopter (which has been maintained all these years at great taxpayer expense) suddenly transported the summit clock to the base clock, and the two clocks were set next to each other so that they actually touched! And the contact between the two clocks happened exactly ten minutes after noon on Friday according to the summit clock (rounding to the nearest whole second).
So, here is my question. What time would the base clock show at the moment that they made contact?
Calvinists, physicists and evolutionary cosmologists would all answer that at the moment of contact, the base clock would read Thursday at 12:10 p.m. Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day. And for what I know of Relativity (not much) they all happen to be correct! So whenever physicists claim that GR proves that gravitational gradients affect time, they are wrong. They don’t. Gravity does not affect time: it affects clocks. And that is not the same thing. If gravity affected actual time, then like tomorrow’s paper, the summit clock should be one day into the actual future as compared to the base clock; and if it were quickly transported down the mountain (where it would begin experiencing the same rate of time as the other clock), then the summit clock would continue to give readouts of twenty-four hours in the future, as compared to the base clock. (The brief trip down the mountain had a relatively negligible impact on its timekeeping!) So the two clocks would then stay offset with the base clock always reading one day behind the other. However, if different gravitational gradients truly affected time, and the summit clock were truly one day ahead in time of the other, then the helicopter should not be able to bring them into contact after a mere ten minute trip! The duration of the flight was measured at 10 minutes by both clocks within less than a billionth of a second. (Having worked on the AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter, I know a bit of inside information about these machines, and while it was classified, I think enough time has passed to allow me to say this, as least quietly: helicopters are not time machines. They do not offer time-travel service.) If the summit clock truly experienced time faster than the base clock, then once the helicopter brought the clock to the base of the mountain, at that point, then another twenty-four hours would have to pass by before the operator at the base could see the summit clock sitting there (after returning from lunch, behold, the helicopter cometh!). So the operator would have waited until Friday, at ten minutes after noon, before he could see the clock suddenly appear on the ground next to his base clock. But, that is not what happened, is it? What happened was, having packed a sack lunch that day, he happened to see the clock at the same moment that it was being delivered. The summit clock and the base clock had been ticking at different rates for billions of years. And both had traveled around the Sun the same number of times. But what’s more, both clocks saw the exact same number of sunrises and sunsets! However the summit clock’s readout suggested that it had seen one additional sunrise and sunset than had the base clock, which of course it had not. The peak clock and the base clock both revolve around the earth’s axis in the same solar day, so to interpret their readouts as measuring different length days is to be confused. Genesis says that God gave us the Sun (and other astronomic bodies) for “seasons, and for days and years.” It turns out that God gave mankind great timekeepers (and less misleading ones than our atomic clocks as interpreted by theorists)! The movements within our solar system give us a more correct understanding of the absolute nature of time than do the ticks of atomic clocks. So, whatever cosmologists are actually trying to say when they speak of time dilation, here is the truth. Gravity does not affect time. Gravity affects clocks.
[Clarification: By the way, I am NOT saying that the earth's orbit is an exact timekeeper, I am saying that by taking into account other wider frames of reference, we can correct our misinterpretations of atomic clock data. Another clarification appears below.]
In this scenario, as with the real world atomic clocks in Greenwich and Boulder (one across the Atlantic, and the other a few miles up Highway 93), both clocks exist in the exact same ultimate time reference, and always will, as long as they both shall tick. The false theory of epicycles did a better job of predicting the positions of the planets in the sky as compared to early Copernican calculations, yet epicycles were incorrect. Relativity’s time dilation does a great job of predicting the read out of an atomic clock at various altitudes and accelerations (experimentally, what, to within less than 1% of theoretical performance?) But that does not prove that time is relative. Rather, it proves that gravity affects clocks. Imagine if ancient Eskimos used a seal bladder to keep time, filling it up with water, and counting sixty drips for each minute. (Why sixty? Well, since the earth originally orbited the Sun in exactly 360 days, the ancients divided circles into 360 degrees, and a hexagonal system of time developed, with the day and night divided anciently into 12 hour segments, and measurements of time divided into convenient hexagonal units.) Anyway, occasionally a drunkard would wander by and squeeze the bladder, bringing a native physicist to suggest his theory of time dilation, for after all, even a drunk can speed up time! So, both the Eskimo clock and the atomic clock prove the same thing. When exposed to different gravitational gradients, it is the various measuring instruments of time, like atomic clocks, seal bladders, GPS satellites, metabolism, etc., that are affected. So once again, a simple experiment, is worth a thousand theories. What does it prove? That the amateurs are wrong. And also, that the amateurs include a lot of professionals. And Calvinists too. For my interest in all this is theological. For biblically, I have been convinced that time is an eternal attribute of God’s existence, seen most easily in that He is relational. And many Calvinists and others teach that God is outside of time existing in an eternal now, and that He created time. So Calvinists commonly quote popular understandings of General Relativity’s time dilation as evidence for their claim that time is not absolute. So, I have a vested interested in refuting that. So, I argue that when folks say that time speeds up or slows down in different frames of reference, what they really mean is that stuff affects clocks.
[Clarification: Again, I am not saying (as initial reviewers misinterpreted) that the earth rotates at an eternally exact rate. Even if I had said that, that would not prove that time is absolute, but only that, from the earth’s reference frame, it’s period of rotation is constant. What I was saying (apparently not clearly enough) was that, the movement of the heavenly bodies “gives us a more correct understanding,” that is, it gives us an additional frame of reference “for seasons, and for days and years.” What can this additional reference frame inform us of? Consider these Mountain Clocks. Even if some local experiment might make us think that time is not absolute, measuring it differently with different instruments at different altitudes, by not ignoring this additional reference frame, we can “correct” our “understanding” by taking into account the earth's movement around the sun. Here’s how. At the end of the experiment, when the Summit and Base Clocks meet, the earth is not in its position, and also in another position 24 hours lagging or further around its solar orbit; from this perspective, the earth is only in one position. Likewise, when the clocks were first installed, one above and one below, the earth was not in its orbital position, and also 24 hours ahead or behind itself. This tells us that the exact times of sunrises and sunsets seen by the two clocks throughout the eons means nothing to our understanding of what the clocks are telling us, since the entire experiment including both clocks are being carried on the earth, which at the beginning was in one place in it’s orbit, and at the end is in one place in its orbit. Let's also assume, reasonably, that at the start of the Experiment both clocks passed a Starting Point on the earth's orbit within one millisecond of each other, and at the end of the Experiment, both clocks passed the Ending Point on the earth's orbit, again also within one millisecond of each other. Now, earth only took one length of time to get from it’s starting point to its ending point, not two. And coincidentally, the clocks started their experiment in synch with the earth’s temporal reference point, and ended there also. Thus, the entire point of the Mountain Clocks illustration is that by not ignoring the movements of the solar system, we bring our heads up out of the details, and look at the bigger picture, and remember that nothing has fallen behind the present, nor sped up into the future, nor ever can, as known from God’s revelation of Himself, and corroborated to date by all our scientific effort and even Einstein’s relativity as experimentally demonstrated.]
And here is my practical experiment: let’s hike to the top of 14,110-foot Pike’s Peak and enter the snack bar at the summit, and grab the old round wall clock, the one that’s been up there so long that when removed, it will leave a clean white circle on the wall. And then ride the train down to the base of the mountain in Manitou Springs, and then rush the old ticking clock a few miles to the Clock Tower at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. And when we get there, we will touch the two together, and see if the space-time continuum ruptures, or anything like that.
-Pastor Bob Enyart.com
DenverBibleChurch.com & KGOV.com
Note: Physicist Smolin earned his physics Ph.D. at Harvard and taught at Yale and Penn State before writing his 2014 book Time Reborn of which The Telegraph says, "Einstein’s theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can’t see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."
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but that's how I see it, and I think it is what Johnny was saying.
