from y/t:
It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time. How long it can survive depends on whether Stephen Hawking's theory checks out. Special thanks to Ivan Bridgewater for use of footage.
Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet... as life changes and evolves from second to second.
And yet the arc of human lifespan is getting longer: 65 years is the global average ... way up from just 20 in the Stone Age.
Modern science, however, provides a humbling perspective. Our lives... indeed the life span of the human species... is just a blip compared to the age of the universe, at 13.7 billion years and counting.
It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time...
And that even it may be just a blip within the grand sweep of deep time.
Scholars debate whether time is a property of the universe... or a human invention.
What's certain is that we use the ticking of all kinds of clocks... from the decay of radioactive elements to the oscillation of light beams... to chart and measure a changing universe... to understand how it works and what drives it.
Our own major reference for the passage of time is the 24-hour day... the time it takes the Earth to rotate once. Well, it's actually 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds... approximately... if you're judging by the stars, not the sun.
Earth acquired its spin during its birth, from the bombardment of rocks and dust that formed it.
But it's gradually losing that rotation to drag from the moon's gravity.
That's why, in the time of the dinosaurs, a year was 370 days... and why we have to add a leap second to our clocks about every 18 months.
In a few hundred million years, we'll gain a whole hour.
The day-night cycle is so reliable that it has come to regulate our internal chemistry.
The fading rays of the sun, picked up by the retinas in our eyes, set our so-called "circadian rhythms" in motion.
That's when our brains begin to secrete melatonin, a hormone that tells our bodies to get ready for sleep. Long ago, this may have been an adaptation to keep us quiet and clear of night-time predators.
Finally, in the light of morning, the flow of melatonin stops. Our blood pressure spikes... body temperature and heart rate rise as we move out into the world.
Over the days ... and years... we march to the beat of our biology.
But with our minds, we have learned to follow time's trail out to longer and longer intervals.
Philosophers have wondered... does time move like an arrow... with all the phenomena in nature pushing toward an inevitable end?
Or perhaps, it moves in cycles that endlessly repeat... and even perhaps restore what is there?
We know from precise measurements that the Earth goes around the sun once every 365.256366 days.
As the Earth orbits, with each hemisphere tilting toward and away from its parent star, the seasons bring on cycles of life... birth and reproduction... decay and death.
Only about one billionth of the Sun's energy actually hits the Earth. And much of that gets absorbed by dust and water vapor in the upper atmosphere.
What does make it down to the surface sets many planetary processes in motion.
You can see it in the annual melting and refreezing of ice at the poles... the ebb and flow of heat in the tropical oceans...
The seasonal cycles of chlorophyll production in plants on land and at sea... and in the biosphere at large.
These cycles are embedded in still longer Earth cycles.
Ocean currents, for example, are thought to make complete cycles ranging from four to around sixteen centuries.
Moving out in time, as the Earth rotates on its axis, it completes a series of interlocking wobbles called Milankovic cycles every 23 to 41,000 years.
They have been blamed for the onset of ice ages about every one hundred thousand years.
Then there's the carbon cycle. It begins with rainfall over the oceans and coastal waves that pull carbon dioxide into the sea.
9 Comments
shagen454And as I opened up my trousers and looked down into the dark matter two balls of light emitted some goo across the unfathomable infinity only to come splash me about the eye one google later.
kceaton1Oh that question has been answered for a long time!
As soon as you can tell me what the half-life of a proton is!
/subtle for non-nerds, I'll be here all night!
kceaton1BTW, baryons aside... The fact that superposition and duality are a common theme in underlying physics really screams at me that the theories we have now are wrong purely because of how we see it.
If the Universe doesn't have an aspect of "time" as we know it (two measurements with an interval), then that solves a lot of problems. We create the mystifying part and need to somehow shift our perspective.
Don't ask me how. I have no idea how to figure out a puzzle without looking at it, unless we can get an "outside" or non-entangled view of the physics. Only problem is that as soon as you mess with something you're now entangled...
GeeSussFreeKActually, there has to be a smallest unit of time logically speaking. You can also understand time in a "tickless" way; as a proceeding chain of events or states. Much akin to a program in a computer. A computer has code adjacency that exist in a timeless state, there is no objective amount of time it would take for one line to execute to the next. However, you could describe the progress from one line to the next time; a progression of events in a "tickless" state would still approximate our current understanding of time. So, you can see the entire universe in state "A", then state "B" even without knowing how "long" each was. Metaphysically speaking, though, you need an actual smallest unit of time for things to happen. It is similar to Xenos paradox. A smallest unit of space joins space so that you can actually move. Without a smallest unit matter would just be moving around through space boundlessly. Interestingly, when you combine both ideas of smallest unit of time, and smallest unit of space you get a bit of magic. If an something has to move from point a to c, and has to hit all points in-between, it can only do so in t=1 units which builds in a speed limit to the universe. As fate would have it, we observe just such a phenomena! The speed of light gives credence to the Xenos paradox solution of smallest units of time and space! Indeed, even particle physicists are now clamoring about a smallest unit of space via recent measurement experiments.
Ya, I share your problem of entanglement. It is why I have come to the notion that science will never get us "Truth" with a capital T. It will always be humans current understanding of how "WE!" experience the universe, a very subtle but distinct difference than truth and understanding. I love science, it is my field and one of the few things I have a natural nack for! But when it comes to truth and certainty, you have to check it at the door and pick up philosophy and metaphysics. There isn't much money there, so bring some food with ya if you come!
kceaton1Hahaha, I wanted to do theoretical physics as I was growing out of high school. Then I realized even if I did find a place to do research I would have to move away from everyone I knew. (Alas, I sit at the sidelines and watch pro vs. joe.
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I guess I could rephrase that the smallest amount of time is basically energy+some entropy. What I meant above was that from our state we experience time; I was alluding more to the idea that it is purely an error on our part and that maybe outside of the measurable Universe there is no time attributed to us. More like quantum leaping, we change energy states so we perceive change, but outside we look more like another layer in a cake. This would be very much akin to sequences you see in a computer as you said above.
If they ever find time travel it will have to conclude that reality is already set or free form for each independent piece of quanta ever made.
Hopefully I got that across.
GeeSussFreeKWhat your describing is pretty neat, and also known as occasionalism. It is a REAL problem for scientists because it eliminates causation. It eliminates the universe from explaining itself because causes for things aren't related to any other state. There is the mind experiment where you set up a bunch of clocks to all go off one second after each other. To those around, when the clocks go off they seem to cause a chain reaction that causes the others to go off, but nothing is further from the truth. What is really happening is one state is leading into another completely unrelated state setup by some unrelated source. You don't even need the positive side of the argument (that someone set it up), but the negative of the argument; that causation is destroyed and causal links are mearly creations of minds and not the true metaphysics is maintained. It is on the same level of destruction to empirical knowledge that Hume caused until Kant quazi restoration (but Kant destroyed sciences ability to talk about the universe we live in, and relegate it only to the universe we experience. So he let us use reason, but science reasons in a box that is the human mind).
If you ever have some reading time to spare, I think George Berkeley is one of the more interesting metaphysisits of his day. He gets a lot of flack because his religious background, but his mind...his mind is awesome!
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kceaton1>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
What your describing is pretty neat, and also known as occasionalism.
Hah, then I could get it the rough treatment of an atheist. I knew of the particulars to which you referred, but didn't know of Hume's relation. I'll give it a read. The only problem about the human brain aspect is that it's entangled to the physics it wishes to describe. That destroys the ability to view it from a conceived outside perspective (if that's what you meant, otherwise disagreed it.).
As soon as you become entangled you destroy the old process/object and create a new hybrid. Like two soap bubbles running into each other.
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