Time

[Little Bang]

Does an electric field effect time?

[CraigD]

Does an electric field effect time?

I assume you're asking if electric fields have a time dilation effect similar to gravitational time dilation.

 

I know of no credible theory predicting this, or any empirical evidence suggesting it.

 

So, no.

[Little Bang]

No, I'm asking if you move a clock into a strong electric field does it affect it's rate?

[coldcreation]

No, I'm asking if you move a clock into a strong electric field does it affect it's rate?

 

Hey Little Bang,

 

That would be an effect similar to gravitational time dilation, as CraigD pointed out.

 

Just out of curiosity, why do you ask?

 

Are you thinking there exists such an effect in strong electric fields, and if so, for what reason would you suspect the effect to exist?

 

 

CC

[Little Bang]

If there is an effect it suggests a possible reason as to why a gravity well dilates time. I have offered in other posts that gravity is an artifact of time dilation and not the other way around. If mass dilates time then the electron will dilate time so the real conundrum is why.

[Rade]

see this paper, perhaps it helps with your question:

 

http://ccdb4fs.kek.jp/cgi-bin/img/allpdf?199107099

 

===

 

Also, it appears the experiment has been conducted....see report below in red text.

 

 

 

"Advances in laser technology and the field of quantum information science have allowed researchers to demonstrate Einstein’s theories at much more ordinary scales.

 

The researchers used two optical atomic clocks sitting atop steel tables in neighboring labs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. Each clock has an electrically charged aluminum atom, or ion, that vibrates between two energy levels more than a million billion times per second. A 75-meter-long optical cable connects the clocks, which allows the team to compare the instruments’ timekeeping.

 

In the first experiment, physicist James Chin-wen Chou and his colleagues at NIST used a hydraulic jack to raise one of the tables 33 centimeters, or about a foot. Sure enough, the lower clock ran slower than the elevated one — at the rate of a 90-billionth of a second in 79 years. In a second experiment the team applied an electric field to one clock, sending the aluminum ion moving back and forth. As predicted, the moving clock ran slower than the clock that was at rest."

[Little Bang]

Rade that was very interesting. Can you provide a site that I might read about the second experiment?

[CraigD]

Rade that was very interesting. Can you provide a site that I might read about the second experiment?

The paper is C.W. Chou, D.B. Hume, T. Rosenband and D.J. Wineland , ‘Optical Clocks and Relativity’ Science 24 Sep 2010, page 1630-1633, available online here. You must have an AAAS account (personal, organization, library, etc) to read the full article.

 

It’s been mentioned in lots of free articles, such as This 23 Oct 2010ScienceNews article.

 

The paper doesn’t propose or support that an electric field effects time in and of itself. Instead, Chou et al show, using a pair of very precise atomic clocks, that by varying the electric fields used to contain the clocks’ aluminum ions so that one of the clocks ion has a greater back-and-forth movement, and thus a higher average speed, than the other, the time dilation predicted by special relativity is measured.

 

It’s reminiscent of the 1971 Hafele–Keating experiment, where four atomic clocks were flown eastward and westward around the world on commercial airliners, but the precision of the atomic clock Chou et all use is so much more precise than previously used ones, its possible to detect a tiny time dilation effect from smaller “tabletop experiment” speeds. Like the Hafele-Keating experiment, Chou’s is primarily a test of atomic clock technology, not of special relativity, which is confirmed to greater precision by other experiments.

 

Somehow I missed this cool experiment - ironically, because at the time, an AAAS account screw-up was causing me to get buried in print copies of Science magazine. :) Thanks, Rade for finding it, and LB, for bringing up the question that led to it. :thumbs_up

[Little Bang]

Yeah, your right. Wish NIST would perform the experiment to test if an electric field affects time.

[Little Bang]

Here are two sites that seem to confirm my hypothesis. http://www.riverrock.org/~howard/QuantumTime13.pdf

http://www.riverrock.org/~howard/QuantumTime13.pdf

[lawcat]

Gravity does not bend space, gravity is the the field of bent space itself. Mass is the space bending agent.

 

As a corollary, electric field would be a field of bent time itself. Charge would be the time bending agent under that hypothesis, so to connect Einstein to Newton and Coulomb:

 

Force of attraction in space = mass1 x mass 2 x G constant/distance^2

 

Force of electric attraction = charge 1 x charge 2 x constant (based on permittivity of space) / distance ^2.

 

The problem of experimental proof is the "nanoscale."

 

But I suppose, if you have a capacitor, two long charged plates, and you send light to travel through the electric field, you should observe inconsistency between expected and observed speed of travel that would indicate a longer or shorter distance based on the speed of light. In other words, as a corollary to gravity, bent space causes appearance of acceleration, bent time would cause appearance of dillation in distance.

[alexhensen987]

On 6/29/2011 at 3:28 PM, coldcreation said:

 

Hey Little Bang,

 

That would be an effect similar to gravitational time dilation, as CraigD pointed out.

 

Just out of curiosity, why do you ask?

 

Are you thinking there exists such an effect in strong electric fields, and if so, for what reason would you suspect the effect to exist?

 

 

CC

While reviewing basic calculus, I noticed that the curve (1+t^2,t^2,t^3), which clearly has a cusp at (1,0,0), has a derivative curve (2t,2t,3t^2) which is clearly smooth. This struck me as odd since differentiation usually seems to turn cusps into discontinuities, whereas integration smoothes out a curve, especially a curve described by polynomials. In fact, in general I have always taken a curve to be smooth iff it has a continuous derivative, which this curve has, and yet a cusp cannot be smooth in any sensible sense. I suspect the explanation is relatively simple - just something I'm missing.

[write4u]

Why does everyone assume that time is a field independent of space?

AFAIK time is an emergent result of the duration of a continuing chronological event in space. Time does not exist independent of the existence of space. So if there is a faster or slower expressinon of measurable time, it is the result of a continuing spatial (physical) condition. 

Gravity itself is also not a dimension, but a result of space warping. So it would be perfectly logical to propose that time and gravity are independently affected by spatial distortions, but will both become expressed in a distortion of space.

 

Edited October 19, 2022 by write4u

[write4u]

13 minutes ago, JeffreysTubes8 said:

Let's say the event is two gravitons collide, releasing a gravitational wave.

AFAIK time has no physical properties of any kind. It is an arbitrary abstract measurement of duration in space.  Time itself is immeasurable . Can't measure time with time. Even when we look back "in time" we actually look back in space and observe the universe as it was at a certain fixed space-time coordinate.

 

[write4u]

7 hours ago, JeffreysTubes8 said:

I would say any fundamental change in the stationary position on the most fundamental level could be an expression of time or duration. 

I agree, but time is not a causal function. It is a result of a chronological duration (unfolding) of something physical. Moreover, time is a variable, not a constant.

Time itself is immeasurable.  Time associated with specific objects or sets has names:

 

Note: time does not exist ahead of the present. The future is a timeless, dimensionless, permittive condition.

Time is an emergent result of duration of something. There is no time in the future. The future does not yet exist. 

Edited October 21, 2022 by write4u

[write4u]

13 hours ago, JeffreysTubes8 said:

That’s like saying the past doesn’t exist. As I explained; at the quantum level, the past might be replaced. Is the interpretation retrocausality or is it nonlocality? They both have the same outcome we have observed. However, the future is just the result of the next iteration in a mathematical set of fundamental exchanges of information. Just because we perceive the world like this, holding memories of how we were within a moment  that morphed into this moment, does not make it any more valid than if we didn’t know the past but had memories of the future. 

Recycling is not going back into the past. The arrow of time can only be directed into the future.  Even if time-travel into the past were possible the traveler's own time would be going forward as he traveled backward, which creates an impossible paradox.

The point is that you cannot undo what has been done before.  It is physically impossible for objects to reverse the duration of their existence even as they can reverse their physical interactive chronology, which also requires a steady state medium.

The dynamic nature of spacetime prohibits chronological reversal of change from quantum to galaxies. How do you undo a supernova?

Even the Bohm laminar reversal experiment does not reverse time, even as it reverses physical properties to their original state. But it takes time ahead to go back.

 

 

Perhaps we can theoretically fashion such a model, but I am willing to bet that time-travel is impossible. At best we might be able to use entanglement as some scientific daredevils proposed, but IMHO you never undo what has gone before.

Edited October 21, 2022 by write4u
correction