Times Up

[Deepwater6]

http://humanknowledge.net/SocialScience/Futurology/Timeline.html

 

http://www.futuretimeline.net/beyond.htm

 

Assuming most of these predictions are correct, would time cease to exist during the time of the last entry? If there is nothing to measure the passing of time can it be called "time" or would it just continually pass by forever labeled something else?

[Deepwater6]

Forgot to mention, click on one of the blue timeline era rows in the second link and it will bring up more detail of their predictions for whichever one you selected.

[modest]

I think I heard Lawrence Krauss say that nothing is the next big thing... his clever response to those people who want to know where something came from. Roger Penrose had some interesting ideas on how low entropy big bang like events could begin from high entropy heat death universe... but musings aside,

 

If time is what a clock measures, and a clock relies on some measurable change in state, and there is no longer any measurable changes in state in the universe, then one could logically say that there is no longer any time.

 

Philosophically, that phrase "killing time" which is such a backward saying because it's always time that is killing us not the other way around would finally be satisfied. Matter and energy, for its insistence on doing nothing useful, would finally kill time.

 

~modest

[CraigD]

Thanks for the links, Deepwater! :thumbs_up

 

Nearly all of the “potentially contentious assertions” in programmer Brian Holtz’s 2003 opus Human Knowledge* or graphic artist Will Foxe’s Future Timeline are worthy of long discussion thread – more than a lifetimes worth, if explored deeply enough. :)

 

Unlike Holtz, Foxe doesn’t distinguish contentious from uncontentious assertions, though I imagine most readers of speculation like this have pretty accurate intuitions, back-able by fast research, to make this distinction for themselves. Holtz’s assertion (or meta-assertions, if you will) of which assertions are and aren’t potentially contentious are themselves potentially contentious: “10⁴⁰ – Proton decay has left the universe with only black holes and subatomic particles” is far from a scientific consensus, as despite some appealing theoretical predictions of it, despite good experiments, none of these predictions have been observed (see here for a summary and links)

 

I admire and envy Holtz and Foxe’s “future timeline” work. Holtz in particular is something of “a guy I would like to be”, being about my age (5 years younger) and having had a similar education and career (though more “glamorous” from a programmer’s perspective, the now dead software he worked on at least having its own wikipedia page, vs. mine having a horrible zombie existence requiring my occasional support effort), and a similar penchant for speculating about the future of ... well, everything. With Human Knowledge, though, Holtz puts my own efforts to organize and share to shame. :( Ah, shame can be a form of inspiration, I suppose. Perhaps all I and the obscure masses of like-minded people need are infusions of enthusiasm and improved time management skills. :)

 

* Either bolstering or countering his prediction “2020 - Most text, images, audio, and video is produced and consumed digitally. Unauthorized reproduction and distribution of such media is routine”, this free-form book/personal notebook is freely downloadable at Holtz’s website for it

 

I think I heard Lawrence Krauss say that nothing is the next big thing... his clever response to those people who want to know where something came from. Roger Penrose had some interesting ideas on how low entropy big bang like events could begin from high entropy heat death universe...

I like Ed Tryon’s succinct 1973 take on “nothing cosmogony” – pretty much a single short paper, and the marvelous quote “the universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.”

 

but musings aside,

 

If time is what a clock measures, and a clock relies on some measurable change in state, and there is no longer any measurable changes in state in the universe, then one could logically say that there is no longer any time.

We can’t logically conclude this positing Tryon et al’s speculations of a large scale quantum vacuum fluctuation being the origin of the big bang are correct, because the eventual occurrence of the “big fluctuation” is itself a kind of timer, albeit not a very precise or useful one.

 

Restating my point: if, per the meaning of Tryon’s quote, the uniform near vacuum at the end of the heat death of the universe has a calculable, very small probability [imath]p[/imath] of undergoing a big-bang-producing fluctuation over an short period of time [imath]t_0[/imath], giving an expectation of this occurring at future time [imath]t[/imath] such that [imath]1-(1-p)^{(t/t_0)} \ge 0.5[/imath]. Therefore, regardless of the lack of practically usable clocks in the universe, time must be continuing as usual for this equation, and “nothing cosmogony”, to have meaning.

[Rade]

I think one can only "kill time" by stopping all motion, for without motion time cannot exist.

[tommtomm]

Time, as can be concluded in the Relativity's Twin Paradox, is a property of matter that passes at rates inversely proportional to an object's speed. It can only accrue to objects having mass and energy,thus massless objects lack the time dimension and cannot age.

 

I agree time requires motion in order for it to pass, but as a property of objects, and since all objects are in motion, motion is not the only requirement, as there must also be an object involved.

[Deepwater6]

http://www.universetoday.com/96379/a-space-time-crystal-to-outlive-the-universe/

 

Would there be any validity to these crystals existing when no other energy or matter in the universe does?

[CraigD]

http://www.universetoday.com/96379/a-space-time-crystal-to-outlive-the-universe/

Cool article (you seem to have a penchant for finding such stuff, Deepwater, which I much appreciate :thumbs_up) with links to this cool MIT blog entry about this arxiv paper (Space-time Crystals of trapped ions, 21 Jun 2012, a bunch of folk), which is based on this one (Quantum Time Crystals, 12 Feb 2012 Frank Wilczek).

 

At an amateurish glance, this stuff is serious physics by physicists for physicists inspired by a brilliant idea by a famous physicist – big idea stuff, and challenging. I’m a bit vague on precisely what it’s saying, but have picked up enough to have some idea of what it’s not.

 

One thing they’re not, is ordinary crystals like the pretty chunk of alum shown at the top of the universetoday article. The “crystal” the bunch of folk are describing in their paper has its breaking of symmetry – that is, structure – in the dimension of time. Although it also has a spatial structure, it depends on an external magnetic field holding a ring of ions in place – not an crystal in the ordinary, mineralogical sense of the word.

 

Would there be any validity to these crystals existing when no other energy or matter in the universe does?

In short, sort of. ;)

 

First, the usual “heat-death of the universe” scenario doesn’t hypothesize that there will be no matter or energy, but that it will be uniformly disorganized (AKA maximum entropy), so not usable to produce organized work. Wilczek and Shapere’s “time crystals” don’t violate this, because, despite their organized motion, they’re in a lowest possible energy state.

 

To exist as described by the bunch of folk, though, they must have a very specific external magnetic field, which is not a feature of the head-death universe, so nobody’s seriously suggesting they really could exist then.

 

From what I gather, Wikczek, Shapere, and the bunch of folk are mostly interested in the concept of broken symmetry/structure in the time dimension, because most attention among theorists has focused on broken symmetry only in spatial dimensions. Thinking about this concept, they hope, will inspire new theories, the precise nature of which aren’t predictable (cause if they were, they wouldn’t be new). Though it’s fun and deep speculation, I don’t think this current work is seriously looking for design ideas for computers that’ll keep computing after the heat death of the universe.

[Deepwater6]

http://science.discovery.com/videos/through-the-wormhole-will-eternity-end/index.html

 

This recent episiode of "Through The Wormhole" with a (will the eternity end?) target was fascinating. Many of the segments of this show

touch on subjects around this thread. One segment touches on the far future era of everything in existence gone, but Dark Energy. This energy could theroretically bring about another BB if given enough time. There were also other interesting segments on holographic time, a theory that the future as well as the past come together to effect the present, and some other therioes about our inability to ever measure all the info in the universe. I'm sure Morgan can put all the segments together a little better than I. Great show though take a look.

[Pincho Paxton]

Most people believe that time has an arrow, and always moves forwards. However, the physics that I use for time has no arrow, and zig zags more like a DNA double helix. I believe that time is merely a scalar particle, and comes from a hole like a geyser, and drops back into the hole as it scales back the other way. The physics are central to particles, and therefore are skipped by X/Y/Z coordinates which always start outside of particles.

 

Like you can walk North/South/East/West/Up/Down. Time just scales from a standing position, and therefore is not moving anywhere, but is applying energy to a standing structure. The energy of inflation, but also the see-saw effect of contraction.

 

Man ages, inflates from child to man, deflates to old person with wrinkles, DNA folds back into holes, and is stored for evolution.

Edited August 7, 2012 by Pincho Paxton

[Aethelwulf]

Most people believe that time has an arrow, and always moves forwards. However, the physics that I use for time has no arrow, and zig zags more like a DNA double helix. I believe that time is merely a scalar particle, and comes from a hole like a geyser, and drops back into the hole as it scales back the other way. The physics are central to particles, and therefore are skipped by X/Y/Z coordinates which always start outside of particles.

 

Like you can walk North/South/East/West/Up/Down. Time just scales from a standing position, and therefore is not moving anywhere, but is applying energy to a standing structure. The energy of inflation, but also the see-saw effect of contraction.

 

Man ages, inflates from child to man, deflates to old person with wrinkles, DNA folds back into holes, and is stored for evolution.

 

 

There is no such arrow of time in my opinion. Arrows with a certain directionality imply a linearity of spacetime and spacetime is not linear.

[LaurieAG]

There is no such arrow of time in my opinion. Arrows with a certain directionality imply a linearity of spacetime and spacetime is not linear.

But you can never put a dead cat in Schrodingers box and expect to get a live one out as a result.

[Rade]

I would suggest that time can be thought of as an arrow with two points (< and >) such as:

 

A<---^---time interval---*--->B

 

In this example, the ^ = antimatter and the * = matter, and A & B are two moments that are outside of time the time interval A <---> B. Following the suggestion of Feynman, antimatter can the thought to move in the opposite direction of matter, call them backward B ---> A and forward A ---> B if you wish. Any phenomenon without mass is 100% within a moment, exists forever, and thus outside of any time interval, for example the photon.

 

Comments welcome.

[Moontanman]

I admire and envy Holtz and Foxe’s “future timeline” work. Holtz in particular is something of “a guy I would like to be”, being about my age (5 years younger) and having had a similar education and career (though more “glamorous” from a programmer’s perspective, the now dead software he worked on at least having its own wikipedia page, vs. mine having a horrible zombie existence requiring my occasional support effort), and a similar penchant for speculating about the future of ... well, everything. With Human Knowledge, though, Holtz puts my own efforts to organize and share to shame. :( Ah, shame can be a form of inspiration, I suppose. Perhaps all I and the obscure masses of like-minded people need are infusions of enthusiasm and improved time management skills.

 

 

While this appears to be a blatant attempt to curry favor you and people like you who have managed to actually create something that adds to the general knowledge of human existence are my heroes. People like me simply follow along and rarely ever really contribute .

 

My own thoughts on time are dysfunctional to some extent, i think that time is fundamental to existence, in effect nothing can exist without time. Time is the fundamental aspect of our universe in my own limited perception of reality.

[Aethelwulf]

But you can never put a dead cat in Schrodingers box and expect to get a live one out as a result.

 

 

This is causality of course - but thinking the arrow of time truly exists is wrong for quite a number of reasons, perhaps even fundamentally-speaking. First of all, fundamental time doesn't exist, it's emergent when geometry in the universe appears. An arrow of time implies some linear set of events - sure, an eggs falls off a table and hits the ground - there is no reassembling of the pieces of eggs perfectly. I don't dispute causality on the macroscopic level.

 

The arrow of time is like being able to draw a line from some distant past event in our universes history with an arrow pointing to the current present moment - there is no past in physics, there is certainly no future in physics and most important of all, time is not linear - time is not an arrow which you can draw from one past distant event and linearly connect it to another event. Time is a geometrical property of the spacetime manifold. Time cannot be drawn as an arrow for another reason - if big bang is your starting point in which you draw an arrow explaining the entropy of the universe, then you reach another problem. That problem being there is no ''defined'' point which we can call the big bang - The big bang happened everywhere. So if you want an arrow of time, you might as well draw an infinite amount of arrows on the spacetime map with each arrow being called the beginning of time. You simply don't have a single linear arrow of time where our usual idea of time is geometric property. There is no such thing as ''up'' or ''down'' or even ''left'' or ''right'' in our universe - there is no arrow where we can say it has a definite directionality - only events subject to causality on the macrosopic level seem to obey definite rules.

 

Causality, now fundamentally-speaking, may be violated by quantum mechanics at the subatomic level - indeed, the idea of causality is in fact inconsistent with the quantum field theory http://www.fredalanwolf.com/myarticles/causalityVC.pdf - things on our classical level, our macroscopic level only follow the logical entropy we mistake as some kind of arrow of time because our usual everyday world is free from the quantum effects which pervade the subatomic level. Schrodinger's cat will be dead, because it was not in a significant superposition in the first place.

Edited August 8, 2012 by Aethelwulf

[Aethelwulf]

While this appears to be a blatant attempt to curry favor you and people like you who have managed to actually create something that adds to the general knowledge of human existence are my heroes. People like me simply follow along and rarely ever really contribute .

 

My own thoughts on time are dysfunctional to some extent, i think that time is fundamental to existence, in effect nothing can exist without time. Time is the fundamental aspect of our universe in my own limited perception of reality.

 

 

The question is how time is even fundamental when we only understand time as a geometric property? The universe, when big bang happened (and is still happening) arose from a situation where there was no geometry to even comprehend. So how can time be a fundamental property of the vacuum?

Edited August 8, 2012 by Aethelwulf

[Aethelwulf]

I would suggest that time can be thought of as an arrow with two points (< and >) such as:

 

A<---^---time interval---*--->B

 

In this example, the ^ = antimatter and the * = matter, and A & B are two moments that are outside of time the time interval A <---> B. Following the suggestion of Feynman, antimatter can the thought to move in the opposite direction of matter, call them backward B ---> A and forward A ---> B if you wish. Any phenomenon without mass is 100% within a moment, exists forever, and thus outside of any time interval, for example the photon.

 

Comments welcome.

 

 

I don't know how you can justify a time interval existing between two points, but certainly no one takes the idea seriously that antimatter particles are truly particles backwards travelling in time.