Entangled Time

[ysabetwordsmith]

Physicists are often frustrated by quantum entanglements, here focusing on time.

Meanwhile, mystics have known for ages that time is nonlinear.  It's still amusing to watch the physicists try to figure it out, though -- sometimes they find cool things along the way.

Comments

[technoshaman]

Okay, what's your model for it? Mine at the moment is quasi-linear, as if Lachesis let a litter of kittens at her thread... quite tangly... but it kind of makes sense, if Merlin's thread were laid into the weft bass-ackwards from everybody else... and I know damn well I'm throwing the pantheon in a blender and hitting "frappe" but this is the Crystal, we can *do* shit like that here... and if we're good (if in no other way than we make the gods laugh) we might just get away with it, too. ;)

[technoshaman]

I'm just a little bit boggled with how *comfortable* ^^ that is...

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Time is a lot like gravity. When you are at the bottom of a gravity well, then gravity seems to stick you to the surface of a planet; it's flattened. But when you're out in space, you can perceive that gravity flows and moves and swings things around each other. It's how planets hold hands; it's globular.

When you're at the bottom of a temporal gravity well, in a body, then time seems linear. But when when you're outside of that, you can perceive it as flow, as mass.

Re: Well ...

[zeeth_kyrah]

From my perception... let's talk about density and phase.

I've been taught a lot about dimensionality the past few years, from my spiritual tutors. The progression (from "usually affecting the smallest objects to the largest, unless magic happens") goes:
Strong and weak (quantum/atomic forces primarily)
Electric and magnetic (molecular/functional forces for most objects in standard physics)
Gravitic and heat (heat meaning not temperature, but inherent motion -- realm forces for objects large and small and their environments)
Density and phase (forces that define solidity and passage)
Space and time (environment and motion therein)

The lower-density regions are over-realm, the higher-density are under-realm, and phase traverses them. So we have Physical/underworld (material objects and signals only but it's traversable by spirits), Material/Conscious realm (waking incarnation), Spirit/ethereal (where bodies are mutable and minds flow quickly), Astral (where thought becomes material), and Vaporous (so low-density that even a whim is solid). And phasing abilities allow one to pass form and substance across them, though intervening matter may have an effect; this is the way most teleport actually works, happening in a pulse of translocation rather than a slide of flow between materials. (Mind realms are simply pockets of "selfness" within these environments, thus leading me to believe that the internet is an underworld mind-realm, since it's not conscious on its own but is sustained by our own minds.)

Time is perceptible as more-linear in higher densities, due to the field-motion effects of gravity (drawing things toward mass across time) and strong/weak forces (aligning the spin of particles so they function as material things). At lower density, time seems more like a field than a flow, mostly due to a lack of mass-effect forces pulling one's focus toward visible progression. Thus, observing time as a breadth is not necessarily something you'd perceive while floating between stars on a slow-ship, but definitely while on an astral journey. This is the source of the old idea that time slows to seven times or seventy-seven times its normal rate while on the "ethereal" and astral planes.

Thus I think of Star Trek warp drive as actually passing a bubble of normal space up the phase field temporarily, allowing one to adjust temporal flow rate during motion. However, disrupting the warp field drops the bubble's shell, throwing its contents back out to "normal" material space.

[zeeth_kyrah]

(see my comment below)

[mdlbear]

The article hints at the relativistic explanation, but doesn't come out and say it, instead turning to metaphysics and handwaving.

The reality is that for a photon, everything is simultaneous. As far as the photons, moving at c, are concerned, all these events are happening at the same time. Of course, that's just a slightly different handwave -- I don't understand it either. Photons live in the eternal Now.

If you were to travel along with the photons in your NAFAL spacecraft, the time between the various events would get shorter. You can't actually catch up, but you can get an idea of what things would "look" like if you could.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Thank you.

[johnpalmer]

Well, I don't know if this will help, but: if I snap my fingers .01 light seconds away from you, I *didn't* for .01 seconds. Only then did the event actually reach your frame of reference. A photon is eternally trapped within a singular frame of reference, moving away from any event precisely as fast as the event is happening.

I believe part of this is because time is really the chance for "light" to "move" and "space" is what it "moves" through. The photon, in a sense, is carrying its own packet of time and space along the way.

(Those scare quotes are because it doesn't have to be "light" and it doesn't have to be "moving". Oh, and by space, I don't mean the final frontier to which one goes to boldly split infinitives never split before.

(Yes, I know, nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive in English. But I did find an interesting comment from a professional editor who never let a writer do that *unless they could defend it*, because the splitting word - like, "to truly understand" - was usually weaker in that place; or extraneous.)