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Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts

Monday 30 November 2015

Months passing faster?

Someone said that time passes faster as you get older. It certainly seems this way. November came and went in no time at all. October was just as fast. It will soon be Christmas, January will soon go, February is a short month and before you know it there will be buds and daffodils everywhere. I am not wishing my time away, but time does seem to disappear.

Sunday 26 February 2012

The scale of time

A few days back I mentioned this link which demonstrated the physical scale of things in the universe from the very very tiny to the huge on a cosmological scale. Se http://images.4channel.org/f/src /589217_scale_of_universe_enhanced.swf .

Now this got me wondering about the real nature of time. We think of time as running at a constant rate, although relativity suggests this is not true. We happen to be human beings on a certain physical size scale and to us time goes, more or less, at the speed we are used to. What if time itself was somehow as strange as the physical scale of the universe and ran at rates so divergent that a second of our time was almost an infinity for some things in the multiverses? That our concept of time could be akin to the flat-earther's incomplete view of a multi-dimensional world?

What I'm saying is our concept of physical size and time flow is just how it is for us. One can imagine other universes where time runs incredibly fast or incredibly slowly. Is it really so odd to think that we are just a sub-atomic particle in another universe, or that other entire universes both in all space and time are contained within each sub-atomic particle that makes us and every other bit of star dust?

I'm finding it hard to put into words the sort of concepts going through my head, but in summary I think the whole nature of space and time is far more of a wonder and a mystery than we think or can ever imagine.

Thursday 5 January 2012

CERN, particles and cosmology

As you may know scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland are currently searching for some mysterious elemental particles.  At the same time cosmologists are struggling to make sense of the universe (or is it universes?) debating whether space is expanding, contracting, static or made of strings.  They debate how many dimensions they need to make the theories work. The search for a grand unified theory bringing together the subatomic and cosmological scales continues.

Now here's a thought: are we looking in completely the wrong places? Is it conceivable that within each atom there exists an entire universe? And within each atom within this universe there are yet more universes, and so on for ever? In the opposite direction (outwards) are we just part of the space dust that makes our universe a microscopic part of something yet larger, and so on for ever? And do these diverging scales somehow fold back into a unified whole?

I am neither a cosmologist nor a particle physicist and my knowledge of quantum mechanics was limited to some difficult lectures in my last year at university in 1970, but I do remember the sense of awe and wonder when told that everything could be viewed as a wave function existing in all space and all time: somehow we are already everywhere (statistically) and we exist in all time forwards into the future and backwards into the past (statistically). What I am speculating is that the macro and the micro world could be one and the same.