Soldato
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Is time not linked to atoms/electrons or something crazy like that?
Concept of time
- Thread starter Craterloads
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We call it a 'singularity'. Everything collapses down to a single point, and nothing exists outwith that point. It's like if you imagine the room you're in now shrinking like the trash compactor in Star Wars, the walls all closing in on you. Everything in the room is crushed and compacted down (and sadly so are you) until even the individual atoms are being crushed together so tightly that the room shrinks into nothingness.
Yes, it sounds crazy, but when you remember that atoms are overwhelmingly empty space (we're talking around 99.9999...% kind of 'overwhelming', though the exact figure escapes me) then it starts to seem more plausible. Not intuitive or reasonable, perhaps, but plausible.
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Doesnt the big crunch imply its returning to its original for which is something and not nothing. So there was something before the big bang and time didnt begin then.
Soldato
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That is melting my mind
Not necessarily. Just because things are moving in the opposite direction doesn't mean they'll do the exact reverse procedure compared with the start of the universe.
Not as far as I'm aware. Things on that kind of scale are a whole different kind of crazy, but I've never heard of an identification of time with fundamental particle properties.
Unless of course you're thinking of antiparticles which can be thought of as travelling back in time, but then again we head into mad-as-a-box-of-frogs territory that's not really relevant to what we're discussing here.
I assumed he was getting at time being linked to mass etc?
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We call it a 'singularity'. Everything collapses down to a single point, and nothing exists outwith that point. It's like if you imagine the room you're in now shrinking like the trash compactor in Star Wars, the walls all closing in on you. Everything in the room is crushed and compacted down (and sadly so are you) until even the individual atoms are being crushed together so tightly that the room shrinks into nothingness.
Yes, it sounds crazy, but when you remember that atoms are overwhelmingly empty space (we're talking around 99.9999...% kind of 'overwhelming', though the exact figure escapes me) then it starts to seem more plausible. Not intuitive or reasonable, perhaps, but plausible.
I dont think ill ever get it.
Thats just impossible, there will always be somthing, even if its just atoms.
Far from impossible! It's just not something that is easily to visualise in your mind.
The original state IS nothing, as far as most theories say. Squash everything down to the tiniest point you can comprehend and then squash it further - nothing exists outside that point, and eventually the point gets so small it disappears. All the spatial dimensions vanish, and the time dimension vanishes along with them. Time as we know it ceases to exist, and similarly it didn't exist until it was created by the big bang in the first place.
Soldato
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What about movement of atoms etc, can time not be based around that?
I'm sinking
I'm sinking
Atoms are HUGE on the kind of scales we're talking about!
Besides, as I said, atoms are almost entirely empty space. Hugely so - look up neutron stars to see what happens in nature when atoms are themselves compressed into smaller things. You can get tiny stars containing the mass of a star in a space the size of a city, and that's not the end of the story. Compress further, and you start getting into black holes and the real unknown.
And again, there's nowhere for the atoms to exist! All of space shrinks to a point - nothing can exist outside of it, because 'outside' has no meaning. Re-read my post about the 2D balloon surface again; all the atoms live on the surface of that balloon, and when the balloon shrinks to a point, there's nowhere else for the atoms to be, they can be on surface of the balloon and absolutely nowhere else.
So you mean something like if you imagine an electron orbiting a nucleus like a planet orbiting a star, say one orbit is one second and then our atom acts like a clock? I'm not aware of that being used as a proper definition since the movement of atoms and their constituents are subject to weird rules that no one quite agrees on well enough to use in that kind of way.
Unless of course you mean atomic clocks, which are a slightly different kind of thing. They don't so much define our concept of time, they just help us measure it.
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When people say that i tend to think they dont have a clue themselves, thats refering to scientists, not you.
Then what makes it expand and what is there to expand if there is nothing? aka bing bang. I basically expanded nothing going by that logic?
Isnt mavity something?
Time is the Fire in which we all burn.........
But seriously, Time is both a philosophical concept and an extent dimension, the problems always derive from questions relating to definition. For example it is clear that time exists insofar that human perception has an ordered linear directional path, basically not everything is happening all at once....it is also conceptual insofar that we cannot objectively percieve the universe in any other way therefore time is not fundamentally real, but an intellectual construct which enables us to define and compare percieved events. (although the Piraña People have a slightly different perception of time if anyone wishes to google it, I don't have the time (pun) to explain it right now)
This is one of those questions that has prompted debate amongst the greatest minds the Mankind has and had to offer...as yet without consensus or definitive definition. (beyond the obvious)
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Soldato
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Yeh, I thought that was a way of calculating time.
Maybe I was thinking of atomic clocks.
Do electrons slow as temperature decreases?
Maybe I was thinking of atomic clocks.
Do electrons slow as temperature decreases?
Honestly, without a pretty decent understanding of the whole process from quantum through to galactic, then it really won't make much sense, at all. (Also, who said I'm not a scientist?!)
A lot of the physics of it at that level breaks down to maths and probabilities, so trying to understand it without understanding the processes is nigh on impossible. It's not that the scientists don't have a clue; they can back up everything with the models and maths (or they'd be laughed out of any journal they tried to publish in), it's just that it's not something the layman can ever understand. That's why you get analogies that only half explain something, or are difficult to understand, because the truth would be impossible to convey in that manner.
When people say "It's just not something that is easily to visualise", they tend to mean that the mathematics tells them that, they haven't just pulled it out of thin air. Maths is a powerful tool for extending our reach into realms where our intuition fails us.
As to what makes it expand, that is certainly something that no one knows yet, and that's where we start hitting quantum mavity and string theory, which is a little too mystical for my tastes. Let's just say quantum weirdness and leave it at that.