Thursday 5 February 2015

On Time as a Separately Observable Dimensional Body

Short note on Time as a Separately Observable Dimensional Body. Just another premature scientfic proposition, on the continual journey to the interesting Theory of Everything.

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I have never been an advocate of theoretical assumptions or isolated mathematics so I will go straight to my point.

The Hafele-Keating Experiment with flying atomic clocks has been performed to prove the concept of time dilation. This means that, at least for now, we can accept the idea that time ‘slows down’ as it approaches the speed of light, c.

If time dilation is true, then this means (scarily), that relative to a stationary observer, time comes to a standstill while approaching c. So we can assume that c is the threshold for absolute relativity when considering a classical reference frame.

But when considering relativity, would it make sense to quantify speed objectively? Why should c be a threshold?

If I were moving in a car at 5m/s relative to a stationary observer on earth, and threw a ball at 5m/s, the observer on earth would see it move at 10m/s. If I released a pulse of light with speed c in the same car, the stationary observer would see it travelling with speed c. This is the point of the famous breakdown of Newtonian mechanics.

The stationary observer in the above example sees the body as travelling at 10m/s. But the body itself also sees the observer as travelling at 10m/s also. For only in our preferred reference frame, the hypothetical aether, would the speed of light be c.

The idea of picking out a reference frame is good, for classical calculations, but philosophically, it is weak. From geo-positioning and aerospace, to satellite mapping and sonar engineering, our understanding of the universe depends on the idea of ‘reference frames’. Everything that has to work has to account for special relativity, perhaps that is why so much attention has been given to the speed of light, and less attention given to the philosophy of speed itself.

I believe speed itself, a measure of distance with time, is an isolated, fleeting property; a property which could have dimensional implications, and form. I believe speed should not be treated with absolutism, and just like the well-accepted impossibility of determining the exact position of a particle in xyz space at every instant in time, the result manifesting in the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, I believe it is ‘much more impossible’ to determine the speed of a particle because speed itself is a dimensional property.

If I am stationary and you are moving at 2m/s, you could also be said to be stationary with me moving at 2m/s if we rotate the reference frame. And with the Michelson-Morley experiment backing up this claim and disproving the idea of a classical reference frame, then what indeed is stationary?

I could say that ‘distance’ is the only sensible variable in Newton’s first equation. You could always say a body is here or there, to some certainty at least, but speed isn’t. The time it takes to get a body from point A to point B could also be the ‘time’ it takes to get the body from point B to point A, with both bodies cross-referencing each other in each event.

I am saying that speed, a passive property of time, could actually have dimensional properties. Time could have measureable form, and be an isolated dimensional body, like space.

Conventional knowledge has it that time is the forth dimension of classical xyz space. I am saying that time is another observable dimensional body with possibly its own mechanics. Time affects space, with interaction mechanics, giving rise to passive properties like speed. Also, it doesn’t take much to realise from this that space does not affect time, but the other way round.

To properly model this new line of thought, algorithms would have to be developed for ‘Time Mechanics’, the study of Time and its interaction with matter and energy. Attention given to the classical studies of space-time interaction would have to be reversed to the study of ‘time-space interaction’ because interactions in Time could be responsible for the fuzziness of matter and natural systems. Time could also be the answer to the wave-particle paradox.


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Ikenna Osi
University of Lagos

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