Is Time Absolute or Relative: Bob Enyart argues it's absolute...

[ThePhy]

Tks Taoist

Tks Taoist

In my overall response to Bob I may have sign errors, since my intent was just to establish that time is not the constant that Bob alludes to. It was not critical whether the mountaintop or valley floor clock was the leading one, either way the point of the variability of time would have been made.

On this issue, Taoist recently PM’d me asking if I am correct in my scenario about the person approaching a Black Hole. I did a little review, and found the answer is no – I blew that one. Now I need to decide if it is worthwhile tracing back to the source I relied on, and that is no easy task – my physics shelf is groaning under the weight of its tomes.

So, when I earlier said “trust me” - don’t. Instead, only trust me when I am right. How to know when I am right? Easy – just ask me.

 

[taoist]

Truer false words have never been spoken. I like the short version m'self, ThePhy.

"This statement is incorrect."

:chuckle:


But thanks for unboggling my head. All is once again right with the world. I found this one in General Relativity for Dummies:

"Squeezing space means stretching time."

Okay, so I just made it up. But if it's not there, it oughta be!

 

[ThePhy]

Round II

Round II

What’s A Week More or Less?​

From BE:

That’s false, of course, as my comment about a previous 360-day orbit directly indicates.

I see you have elected to let pass any comment on how long it took to go from the primal 360-day orbit to today’s 365.25 day orbit.

Reeling Through the Heavens​

I was NOT saying 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.”

The only understanding of the flow of time coming from the heavenly bodies I am aware of is the one we are all familiar with – the repetitive cycle of days and seasons and years. But until the advent of latter-day science (and I don’t mean Mormon) man had no way to perform very precise tests to quantify that regularity. Now we do. The heavenly bodies are a bunch of undependable derelicts when compared to clocks that are not influenced by all the factors that plague orbits.

Then you clarify by saying that it gives us “an additional frame of reference ‘for seasons, and for days and years.’” Additional frame? What frame of reference besides the heavenly bodies had been used as a measure of seasons and days and years?

Mountains Disappearing Into the Future​

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.

Here you bring forth an important point. How can the clock on the valley floor progress through time at a different rate than the one on the nearby mountaintop, yet each sits on soil that is part of the same earth? Wouldn’t that mean that the soil on which the valley clock rests would have to be moving through time at the same rate as the valley clock, and its companion (sitting on the same earth) be moving through time at the different rate experienced by the mountain clock? Answer – yes.

The River of Time​

Time, at least in the way we are considering it, is not something that locks onto an object. It is more like a river, rapidly flowing in some places, and flowing more slowly in others. You have sat in the shallows on the edge of a lazy river, with your feet extended towards the center where the current is much swifter. You felt the water on your feet rushing faster than on your thighs. In the same way, if I move a replica of the valley clock just a few feet up the mountain side, I will measure the flow of time to be just a little different than on the valley floor. If there were some point between the valley and the summit where time had to discretely jump from the valley floor rate to the summit rate, then at that interface we would be in big trouble. But smooth transitions are no problem.

Not only does the flow of time change gradually as we go up the hill, but obviously the strength of the gravity itself does as well, yet experience shows that having a gravity difference between two parts of the earth (mountaintop and valley floor) does not cause any logical issue. Nor does proximity to a flowing electric charge, or a fluctuating magnet field. Many fields exist which have gradients, and there is no reason time should be excluded from that list.

My Today is Your Tomorrow​

Does that really mean, after the eons-long test, that someone on the valley floor looking up at the peak is looking at something a day in the future? No, they are looking at something that has existed for one day longer, in a gravitational area where its total time is exactly equal to one day less of time down below. If I walk next to you in a big circle, I can travel farther than you and still be beside you. Time carries this same property. When you look up to the mountaintop you are not looking at something that is existing in your future. You are looking at something that has been there the whole time, just getting older slightly quicker than you were. It would be no more significant than a tomato in your garden that grew faster than the others.

And yes, that means your head (in its lower gravitational field) will live a different length of life than your feet (assuming you don’t lay down your whole life). And yet your whole body was born and will die as a unit.

As to the question you delineate in the earlier part of your paragraph above - it is absolutely true that after the eon’s-long experiment that the summit has existed for 24 hours longer than the valley floor, and so must be 24 hours farther along its orbital path around the sun than the valley clock. But the same gravity that distorts time also distorts space. This gravitational distortion of space is often characterized as a curvature introduced by the gravity, since the simplest analogue that we can visualize is one involving curvature. Anyway, if you compute the total distance the summit has traversed in the intervening eons, keeping in mind that distances are altered by exactly the same factor that time is, the mountain peak is found to be right where it should be, overlooking the valley floor. This interplay of distance and time is a necessary result of relativity. In the non-accelerated case (special relativity) the relationship between time and distance was derived first not by Einstein, but earlier by Lorentz, a Dutch Mathematician. For that reason the set of mathematical relationships relating relativistic time and distance are called the Lorentz Transformations.

The First Shall be Last​

That’s it. But Phy, I am not convinced that I will be able to disentangle your other objections to my illustration from this major misunderstanding. So, I’ve stopped reading your post,

I presume you mean you will limit your comments to the above so we can resolve this issue before going on. If indeed you stopped reading my post when you felt we had a logical disconnect, then you would block any chance that I might have clarified the issue in the latter portion of my post. Rather like a new Christian refusing to read Revelations until they were absolutely comfortable with Genesis. Some readers have made it clear that they read my post it in its entirety, whether or not they agreed with it.

Milk Before Meat​

I agree that your scenario is an interesting one. But since the core of your objection is the claim from physics that time is not a constant, let’s say that somehow you could absolutely stump the physics world on your gravitational question. What would that leave? It would leave literally thousands of cyclotrons, linear accelerators, and similar devices that depend fundamentally on the variability of time for their operation still proving you wrong. General Relativity is much harder than Special Relativity to examine in the laboratory, yet both depend absolutely on changing time. General Relativity has been verified experimentally to an accuracy that has satisfied almost all the scientific community. But Special Relativity, equally dependent on the variability of time, is indirectly tested millions of times every day. I say indirectly tested, meaning that it is used as a standard tool in an immense number of ongoing studies, and its falsity would quickly become apparent if the studies did not work. I claim hammers can pound nails. To prove it, I can take one into the laboratory and test it, or I can simply walk to any of a thousand construction sites where an equally convincing test is done every time the carpenter takes a swing. A la Special Relativity and changing time.

The Web of Deceit​

I’m asking you, now that we can get past this misunderstanding to edit your response. (I have edited my illustration, inserting my clarification here into my first post in square brackets). Thus, I will be very thankful if you would be so gracious as to edit your answer to disentangle it from the misunderstanding, and then repost it. If you have the time .

I am surprised you have the time for this exchange. Sam is getting ready to throw a “hail Mary” last-minute pass, and you better get back to that game.

Cloning the Pastor​

-Pastor Bob Enyart
Denver Bible Church

-ThePhy
(Zakath Clone)

 

[Bob Enyart]

Bob, you are comparing sunset/ rise counts to atomic clocks. the part I put in bold illustates where the diconnect is It doen't take one amount of time, cause it's relative to where your measuring. It could be said that there are as many times as there are molecules, since they all went a different speed.

Fool: you seemed to have missed this...

Bob Enyart: 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.

Sorry, but you can't fit 24 hours into that millesecond between the two clocks passing the same point in the earth's orbit .

-Bob

 

[Johnny]

Will you then be consistent with what you've said in the above post (which I concede as being accurate according to Einstien) and say that if the clock watcher at the top of the mountain came down to visit with the guy at the base of the mountain and asked him how many times the sun has set since they started their experiment that the guy at the base would report one fewer sunsets than the he had?

He won't report one fewer sunsets. They saw the same number. They'll simply disagree on how long each day was (because they are experiencing time differently from each other). Again, this does not mean that the sun should fall out of sync for us. One of us will have experienced less time in the same period.

Here's a more visual example. Imagine two frames of a movie (showing clocks) running side by side. (Note that I use the term "frame" not to refer to an actual snapshot of the film, but more like two panels of the same film running side by side). One is frame is slowed to half normal speed. So, while one clock ticks off 10 seconds, the other clock in the other frame ticks off five seconds (because the film is actually running slower). Now, imagine a person in each frame who can see out of the frame. Imagine a sun rusing over both frames of the film. They both watch the sun, outside of both frames, rise until midsky. Notice that both frames will always agree on the position of the sun, but they won't agree on how long it took there. One frame will say "it took 10 hours", but the other frame will say "it took 5 hours". But the sun is in the same position for both frames always. So if the frames could talk to each other, they would always agree on where the sun was, but they wouldn't agree on how much time has passed (and one person would be talking much slower!).

Which brings up a good way to measure this relativistic effect. If we could somehow put people in the situation we could measure how much slower and deeper their voice is to calculate how much time is dilated for that observer. But we can't, so we use light. Imagine you have a lightsource that emits at a known frequency (interval between waves). For example, say you have a lightbulb that emits at 200 Hz, that is 1/200 of a second between each crest of the EM wave. Now whirl that lightbulb around at near the speed of light and measure the frequency of the light from your stationary position. It won't be 200 Hz, because 1/200 of a second at near the speed of light is longer than 1/200 of a second in a relatively stationary frame. So you should measure a different frequency, after you've accounted for the doppler effect (physicists actually use transverse motion so you don't really need to cancel out the doppler effect). If relativity is correct, then the standard interval should lengthen according to an outside frame stationary relative to the particle. And indeed, the frequency does change (of course, they didn't use a lightbulb).

H.E. Ives and G.R. Stilwell, "An Experimental Study of the Rate of a Moving Atomic Clock", J. Opt. Soc. Am. 28 215-226 (1938); JOSA 31 369-374 (1941).

Yes, that was in 1938. Imagine what they're doing now.

Also notice that using the sun as a timepiece becomes utterly meaningless for communicating time intervals to each other. Because for one frame the sun took 5 hours to reach midsky, while the other frame it took 10 hours. So if we calibrated clocks to the sun, we'd be expressing different intervals depending on our frame. In other words, I couldn't share a recipe with you because my interval is completely different than yours. It's still better to use clocks inside our frames (i.e. our watches) even though they are out of sync. Because if a cake takes five minutes to bake in my frame, it will take five minutes to bake in your frame.

This is a good way to illustrate (though it is not without it's shortcomings) the principle here. Except instead of film frames, physicists use the term inertial frame.

I consider it progress that seemingly everyone is now in agreement on the premise of the hypothetical. Finally!

I have always said that they would see the same sunrise and sunset.

Could you explain how both parties could exist together in the same room at the same time and have a conversation about how one is a full day behind the other?

They are not a "day" behind. One has experienced 24 hours less than the other.

Time "itself" does not exist.

I know that there is no object in the universe we call time, just as there is no object in the universe that we call length. It is a definition. Time is not an object. It is a measurement we have assigned, just like length or height or width. So when we say "Time is relative", we are saying that so-called standard intervals are actually frame-dependent.

standardized set of events (ticks and tocks) by which to compare some other set of events

Truly. But there isn't really a standard interval. For example, say you define a standard interval as the duration it takes for a particle to decay. You realize that baking a cake takes about 10000 decays. Then you mail me your particles on the top of the mountain. You watch through your telescope and you realize that they're actually decaying a bit faster for me. If you tried to bake a cake by counting 10000 decays of my particles decaying at the top of a mountain, you'd undercook your cake. However, from my experience at the top of the mountain, they bake a perfect cake. This is another way of saying the same thing I said earlier: using a clock outside of your inertial frame is absurd under extreme relativistic conditions. So it's not accurate to say that using the sun as a clock is better than using an atomic clock.

I dont' think it's any real intrusion on theology either. We don't live under extreme relativistic conditions, and so the sun is, for the most part, fine. Especially for ancient people who don't really know the difference anyways.

But clocks are not actually measuring anything.

They're measuring an interval. We live and die by intervals. What meaning has time if you dissociate it from that which we have defined it as? It has no empirical meaning outside of measurement, as I have said before.

So when we same "time dilates" we mean that standard intervals become shorter or longer from an outside perspective (outside of the object's inertial frame).

 

[elohiym]

Bob,

What is the time lapse between a photon presently in your view and a photon 1,000,000 light years distance from it? If the answer was experimentally proven to be no lapse of time between those two photons, how would that effect the Open View position?

Please consider those questions, and please consider the experiments that have been done with photons. If a photon experiences no time lapse, I find it hard to believe that God is bound to a linear time experience.

You may also be interested in experiments done with antimatter. Does time flow backwards as well as forwards? If that were true, how would effect the Open View?

Peace

 

[Flipper]

Oh, yeah! There's nothing difficult at all if you're completely comfortable with direct contradictions!

The two men are either a day apart or they aren't. You cannot have it both ways. Further, your argument here ignores the fact that the sun sets at the same moment for both viewers in spite of the fact that one of the clocks (and according to Einstein, time itself) demands that such a sunset is several hours early.

But whose clock is wrong?

 

[elohiym]

Entangled in time...

Entangled in time...

From a BBC article from a little over a year ago...

"Researchers from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Science used an 800m-long optical fibre fed through a public sewer system tunnel to connect labs on opposite sides of the River Danube.

The link establishes a channel between the labs, dubbed Alice and Bob. This enables the properties, or "quantum states", of light particles to be transferred between the sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob)."

The quantum state of one photon is transferred to another, regardless of distance, instantaneously, as in no lapse of time.

:think:

 

[fool]

Fool: you seemed to have missed this...

Bob Enyart: 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.

Sorry, but you can't fit 24 hours into that millesecond between the two clocks passing the same point in the earth's orbit .

-Bob

Bob; you seem to miss my point,
You are comparing orbits to milliseconds.
Do you see that they are two different things?
they do after all have two different names.

 

[fool]

From a BBC article from a little over a year ago...

The quantum state of one photon is transferred to another, regardless of distance, instantaneously, as in no lapse of time.

:think:

It's as if they know what the other one is doing, :think:

 

[ThePhy]

From a BBC article from a little over a year ago...

The quantum state of one photon is transferred to another, regardless of distance, instantaneously, as in no lapse of time.

:think:

Sounds like an EPR experiment. DIfferent issue than the one being discussed in this thread.

 

[elohiym]

Sounds like an EPR experiment. DIfferent issue than the one being discussed in this thread.

From the title of this thread: Is Time Absolute or Relative: Bob Enyart argues it's absolute

Is time relative or absolute for a photon?

 

[missedmarks]

Isn't this argument sort of moot without the math to back it up? Annectdotes and illustrations are great for illuminating a complicated concept but they don't really serve to prove the concept. Not that I'm asking for proof, if you gave me the math I wouldn't understand it anyway.

 

[elohiym]

Isn't this argument sort of moot without the math to back it up?

Here is the math to back it up from Robert W. Brehme, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Wake Forest University ('59-'95), (Note: The equations did not copy properly so see the source below):

"In the thought experiment described above, we first imagine light to take on a corpuscular form, which we call the photon.. The proper speed of light u would be the ratio of the distance s to the lapse of time Dta on the photon as it travels from B to C over the distance s. In the thought experiment tb = 0 and tc = t. Thus we write Eq. (1) as (6) u = s/Dta

and Eq. (4) as (7) t2 = Dta2(1+(s2/Dta2)/c2).

Multiplying Eq. (7) by c2 and expanding the parenthesized terms, we see that Eq. (7) becomes (8) c2t2 = Dta2+s2.

However, because we have discovered that ct = s in the thought experiment described above, we see that Eq. (8) becomes (9) s2 = Dta2+s2.

That is, Dta must be zero! There can be no lapse of physical time on a photon. The proper speed of light is infinite! Light created in a distant galaxy millions of light years from us and striking the earth, travels those millions of light years instantly in its own time. To a photon, the universe and the photon exist, but only for a moment of no duration." (Emphasis mine) Source.

 

[Clete]

elohiym,

Your point, which I didn't understand before, is completely irrelivent. You're not even presenting anything that we didn't already know. Relativity states that the closer you get to the speed of light the more massive you become, the less volume you have and the slower you go through time. Thus you could also, with the same sort of math convert the energy in a photon to mass and then work your mathematical magic to discover that each photon is actually of infinite mass (which would translate back again into infinite energy). Does you math prove that you are right, no it doesn't. In fact, your math (or another aspect of it) would seem to suggest an impossibility, that a photon is both of finite measurable energy and of infinite energy as well all because of the speed at which is it travelling. Relativity is riddled with this sort of self-contradictory nonsense.

Resting in Him,
Clete

 

[ThePhy]

Abusing math

Abusing math

From Clete:

... you could also, with the same sort of math convert the energy in a photon to mass and then work your mathematical magic to discover that each photon is actually of infinite mass (which would translate back again into infinite energy).

I question this. Can you back it up with specifics?

 

[Clete]

From Clete: I question this. Can you back it up with specifics?

As I've said before, I am not an expert in this specific area, I'm simply conversant with the concepts. The math is definately beyond my abilities. Be that as it may, however, isn't it someone intuitive given just the very basic tenets of Relativity?
Mathematically speaking you can convert mass into energy and vise versa (this point is disputed by other theories but we'll ignore that for now). So one photon of light has a specifc amount of energy which if you convert to mass and then run the exact same sort of math in regards to the Relativistic effects on mass that elohiym has shown us in regards to time and whammo bammo you have an infinite amount of mass (with no volume in one dimention though so it doesn't really exist). Then you just do the reverse convertion from mass to energy and you've successfully converted the finite energy of a single photon of light into an infinite amount of energy. No wonder I get sunburned so easily these days!

Resting in Him,
Clete

 

[elohiym]

elohiym,

Your point, which I didn't understand before, is completely irrelivent. You're not even presenting anything that we didn't already know.

Really? Then please explain what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" and how that is not relevent to a discussion about relativity. That is what my point is based on.

 

[elohiym]

"In 1935, several years after quantum mechanics had been developed, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen published a paper which showed that under certain circumstances quantum mechanics predicted a breakdown of locality. Specifically they showed that according to the theory I could put a particle in a measuring device at one location and, simply by doing that, instantly influence another particle arbitrarily far away. They refused to believe that this effect, which Einstein later called "spooky action at a distance," could really happen, and thus viewed it as evidence that quantum mechanics was incomplete.

Almost thirty years later J.S. Bell proved that the results predicted by quantum mechanics could not be explained by any theory which preserved locality. In other words, if you set up an experiment like that described by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, and you get the results predicted by quantum mechanics, then there is no way that locality could be true. Years later the experiments were done, and the predictions of quantum mechanics proved to be accurate. In short, locality is dead." (Source)

If locality is dead, is time relative or absolute? :think:

 

[Clete]

Really? Then please explain what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" and how that is not relevent to a discussion about relativity. That is what my point is based on.

If so then why is this the first time you've brought it up? Most of us can't even spell your screen name, we sure as crap can't read you mind! By itself your post about the speed of light from the perspective of the photon is completely irrelevant. If you want to relate it somehow by way of some third issue then you have to do that in advance or at least at the same time that you bring up the other. The connection is somewhat less the intuitive, and even now, I do not see the connection. How are either of these issue related at all to the hypothetical that Bob presented in his opening post?

Resting in Him,
Clete