Is the concept of spacetime logical?

[makaveli121212]

yeah i think i do have it backwards, whatever, its not important for the conversation anyway...and no physics people made all these things up, and made their constants, and their limits and their units, everything...lets not get off topic, is spacetime logical

[Omeganitros]

Spagettified....Dude, that's my new word now.

[makaveli121212]

you wouldnt feel anything, youd be sucked in faster than you can blink

*EDIT* in response to the insults thrown at me...why do you feel the equation has anything to do with whether space time is logical or not...

[AlbinoLime]

The equation explains WHY it is logical, people have to make up equations to explain things, things dont come out of thin air, people have to discover them. By the way, where do you get your research makaveli121212? I looked at cnn.com (was a while ago), and they cited some pretty crditable sources about the pain of going into a black hole.

[makaveli121212]

yes because everyone knows what going through a blackhole is like...i mnot gonna get off subject, but a black hole basically would atomize you...of course before that actually happened your limbs would be ripped off you, and your head too...

that equation alone does not prove that it is logical...if the equation makes it so logical, care to explain why it makes it so...if we were debating whether or not force existed, F = m*a would hardly be relevant

'people have to make up equations to explain things'...didnt you just say that physicians didnt make things up to explain things and that i had it backwards

[Specforces]

Most of you are quoting classic textbook scientific theory, I am viewing this from a philosophical perspective. Ok here's a scenario that will further explain and expound on my point.

I am imagining 2 houses. I live in one of them. My neighbour in the other. I spend the morning measuring my lounge. I write down the measurements. Then something magical happens. My house suddenly grows bigger. But not only does my house grow bigger, so does everything in it, including me and my ruler. I measure my lounge again and write down the meausrements of the bigger lounge. Then my house and everything in it suddenly shrinks back to normal size again. Then I suddenly notice that the two lots of measurements of the lounge are recorded as being exactly the same on my piece of paper. How could this possibly be so when the lounge was so much bigger the second time round?

The answer is of course because I was using a different sized ruler (ie. a different measurement system - although I wrongly 'perceived it as being the same measurement system). It was the measurement systems that changed, not 'length' itself. Length did not get longer.
If my neighbour was to sneak into my lounge and measure it after the growing had taken place, with his normal sized (small) ruler and measured my lounge, his measurement results would be completely different to my second lot.

A parallel analogy could be made of time. And as with 'length' 'time' cannot cannot speed up. We might percieve it as speeding up if we compare experiences in the changes of physical laws (other than time) like me and my house getting bigger. But neither length nor time themselces can change. Only our perceptions change. Just because our perceptions are 'tricked' doesn't mean want they percieved was correct.

Time cannot speed up. Maybe other laws of nature can change in relation to each other - but not time itself.

This raises a further fascinating question. Does time then really exist at all? Or is it just a figment of our perception? Certainly if time doesn't really exist then it can't be said to be able to speed it. If something doesn't actually exist it can't actually be said to 'do' anything.

[alainbryden]

Time isn't a dimention of it's own. It can be expressed at a function of the 3 actual dimentions. When you consider that time has just always been an expression oif the possition of the earth relative to the sun, time can be expressed as a conceptual three-dimentional vector.

for example, let the center of the sun represent vercto (0,0,0), or the origin.
the time, therefore, is defined as being (x,y,z) depending on it's position relative to the sun.
Depending on the rotational axis to the sun relative to the axis position of the earth, we can get the time of day, as well as year, all expressed through vectors.

Yeah, it's more complicated than V=d/t, but it renders the concept of time travel obsolete because it eliminates all the assumptions created by making time an intangeable dimention of it's own.

[jazzmosis]

Messing around with time is novel, but for real travel a concept of wormholes or "bending space" would be far more efficent to travel around.. that way you don't bugger with time/space continuium. (interesting spelling...)

We'd literally have to freeze time/aging/molecules to travel some distances in space...

[AlbinoLime]

yes because everyone knows what going through a blackhole is like...i mnot gonna get off subject, but a black hole basically would atomize you...of course before that actually happened your limbs would be ripped off you, and your head too...

that equation alone does not prove that it is logical...if the equation makes it so logical, care to explain why it makes it so...if we were debating whether or not force existed, F = m*a would hardly be relevant

'people have to make up equations to explain things'...didnt you just say that physicians didnt make things up to explain things and that i had it backwards

Seriously dude. You would be spagettified, not really ripped apart. This is mostly because when you are being sucked into a black hole you will be experiencing different amounts of gravity; the closer you get to the hole, the faster you will move toward it. Since your whole body can't be in one point at a time you will be pulled at different speeds, so you will be turned into human spagetti, only you would be 1 long noodle. Nobody knows what going into black holes will be like, but people have ideas. Ad the idea of you being able to feel the pain if you went head first came up because people compared the speed of the nervous system to the speed you might be entering a black hole. And almost anybody can think of how painful it would be to be rolled out like play-doh.

[VxDx]

Most of you are quoting classic textbook scientific theory, I am viewing this from a philosophical perspective. Ok here's a scenario that will further explain and expound on my point.....*edited out to save space. You know what you said*

Well, if you want to go philosophical, how can you know what you percieve as time exists? Futhermore, how can you know that what you consider reality is as you believe it is?

I posted the equation for the exact reason that the equations exists. It symbolically identifies what effect different variables have on time, and also gives limits as to what the values of those variables can be.

What does it have to do with the discussion at hand? Well it happens to be an experimentally verified equation, and one that is used in countless other higher level equations in physics. It would indicate, then, that the theories proposed by the physicists has some merit, particularly when they have been verified to the best ability of science.

for more of an explanation of special relativity, without offending makaveli by stating something relevant, go here. http://science.howstuffworks.com/relativity.htm

[makaveli121212]

still, as this has been avoided, if i were cloned and one of me lives on a satellite traveling 50000 miles per hour and the other me lives on a satellite going 0 mph and we lived the exact same lives, you would say the me traveling faster would live longer right

[VxDx]

Well, if one of you were traveling 50000 miles per hour and the other weren't, you wouldn't be leading the same lives now would you. Plus, to yourselves, assuming you both live the same amount of time, you would think that you are living the same amount of time, but relative to a body at rest, the person at rest would die earlier in the at rest frame of reference, according to special relativity.

[Specforces]

This raises a further fascinating question. Does time then really exist at all? Or is it just a figment of our perception? Certainly if time doesn't really exist then it can't be said to be able to speed it. If something doesn't actually exist it can't actually be said to 'do' anything.

That's what I was trying to get at here VxDx, thanks for adding merit to your arguements, I have a newfound respect for you.

[Master_of_PARANOiA]

This raises a further fascinating question. Does time then really exist at all? Or is it just a figment of our perception? Certainly if time doesn't really exist then it can't be said to be able to speed it. If something doesn't actually exist it can't actually be said to 'do' anything.

That's what I was trying to get at here VxDx, thanks for adding merit to your arguements, I have a newfound respect for you.

I do too.

I don't believe that time can speed up, however it is a measurement that was created by humans (the system of time: minutes, hours, seconds, year, millenia, etc) so technically we could change it to be faster. For example: one second is 1000 milliseconds, we could change one second to reflect 500 milliseconds and thus make our concept of time "faster".

Just my 3.1415926[insert last _____________ digits of pi] cents

[makaveli121212]

exactly...everything that we know of as physics was basically made up...and not to say made up like it was imaginary, so i dont offend you physics queers, but taking educated statements and aplpying them to explain the world and how and why it works the way it does...the theory makes some sense, but is it logical? i say no, not because i believe it isnt fact...it is fact, but to any human mind it should be illogical or your brain isnt functioning correctly...its really hard to put my thoughts into words, and im sure this postis going to sound pretty poorly, but you can probably see where im coming from