Time and Technicalities (Timewalkers Book 1)
Page 30
How many people have lived in history with no evidence of their life left behind?
We all know the famous people with significant accomplishments throughout history, but what about all of the other people with no memorable accomplishments? Even those with direct descendants may be wiped from history due to their lack of notoriety.
If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a noise?
Science and logic say that it must – no event can occur without the associated aspects also happening – and anyone stumbling over a fallen tree can imagine the sound without much effort.
However, without an observer, that tree could fall and also rot and disappear without any notice. Did that tree ever actually exist at all? What is the proof of its existence?
How many planets and solar systems have been born and destroyed before humans started observing the stars, and how many were completely beyond earth’s view for their entire existence?
Unless there is an observer, nothing can be known. And when the first conscious observation happens, that is when the events begin.
This is very similar to dreaming. There is never a beginning to the dream. Dreams begin in the middle with the action already in progress.
Human memory solidifies between the ages of 2 to 5. the world does not exist to anyone before these memories.
Observation creates. And defines. Very much like Schroedinger’s Cat, the cat exists in both states (alive and dead) until positively observed.
How does this apply to time?
Scientists tell us the universe is 14 billion years old, and humans have just popped into existence in the last 10,000 years with recorded history. That is the middle of the dream. We don’t know what happened before that.
We can all speculate and find evidence of things that might have happened, or that lived before, but we will never KNOW about it without an observer, or more accurately, without observing for ourselves.
This is the conundrum of time.
The first problem with ‘science’ time is that it has to always exist. Time has to exist without an observer. Everything has to fit into nice little time compartments. The sun was born 4 billion years ago, etc.
With change, nothing needs to happen before the observer arrives.
Much like a hotel room with a check in time of 3pm. When the hotel guest steps in the room, it is organized and ready, but the room could have been in any state up to that point. The hotel guest doesn’t know what happened in the room before the door opened at 3pm. There could be speculation and some evidence, but the guest will never KNOW exactly what happened.
Another good example is how people change personalities based on who is around. The observation by others changes how most people behave.
In church, a person behaves to a certain standard. At a football game, there is another standard. When that person is alone, there is another behavior.
A good example for how people behave without observation is when a crowd gathers in masks or disguises to hide their identities. The group may get violent or hateful, or attack a person or business. People in a crowd don’t feel there is any observation going on, so they act accordingly.
If every person in this crowd knew they were personally being observed, it would follow that they would behave differently in most cases. Thus, observation can cause change, but change is inherent in everything.
A computer needs a clock generator to work. Without the clock the computer wouldn’t be able to work. The computer doesn’t know what happened before the clock started. There might be evidence – files and other stored records on the disks, etc – but it doesn’t KNOW what happened before the clock started.
Those computer files could be from a different computer, or downloaded over the internet. The computer knows they are there, and can work with them, but can’t prove that the computer created those files in any form.
The second argument against time is that it cannot be stored.
There are 7 fundamental units in physics:
Length
Mass
Time
Electric Current
Temperature
Intensity
Quantity
Suppose you had to make a box containing each of these units for an alien world to understand. How would you package these?
Length and mass are easy – just include a ruler and a standard mass – a meter stick and a kilogram weight perhaps.
Temperature could be done with a thermometer, but the markings may be difficult for the aliens to correlate. But because temperature has an absolute zero, there is a universal start to it.
Quantity would be hard to understand in a way, because it could be confused with mass, but showing some way of counting is sufficient, such as one, two, and three marbles, and then larger sets, up to 100 for example.
Intensity and current are more difficult, not because the ideas are hard to grasp, but because the methods of generating these ideas are not reliable over centuries, or comparable to earth standards from a different viewpoint. A circuit with a battery could be made, and the current could be a set amount – but the battery may run out, etc, because of the reality of the system.
Imagining perfectly ideal situations, a circuit of a known current could be created and stored in the package, as well as an intensity system for either a star or just a light.
All 6 of these unit bases have ways of creating or showing what they are. Also, all 6 have definite zero values.
But now, how would time be captured? Does time have a zero?
There are a number of ways to show CHANGE but no way to capture ‘time’.
Just having a clock that counts 1 second over and over would be a way to show change. But that doesn’t count as time. How would a human calendar be made understandable to an alien race? In fact, even in recorded human history there have been many different calendars, making it hard to understand for humans sometimes. Some calendars start counting when a king or emperor began their reign. Calendars can also be based off of historical events – comets and such, or most recently, following the standardization based on the birth of Christ. None of these actually satisfy a zero moment for time, these are actually just zero moments for some change in human events.
Absolute zero is not achievable, but can be extrapolated in many ways, even with home experiments. Many practical tests have achieved temps less than 0.1 degree Kelvin.
Is there an absolute ‘zero’ with time? Some theorize that it might be the “big bang” around 14 billion years ago, but how is that tested? Is there a home experiment that can be done to predict the “time zero?” How does an average person determine when time itself started?
Change also has the problem of no zero, until the realization hits that change requires an observer, so change always has a zero based on observation or the observer.
Chapter 2: What is ‘time’
The previous chapter addresses the two main problems with time: storage and no zero point, and this chapter will address the keeping of time.
The first principle of the Fundamental Theory of Change is that the rate of change is constant everywhere. This should come as no surprise to most people, being as time is considered constant everywhere.
The first objection is going to be “but what about relativity?”
Remember that change requires an observer, so change happens constantly everywhere to every observer, but only when that observer comes back and references another system does the sum total of the change look different in the ‘relativity’ sense. Each ‘twin’ sees the same rate of change, and only when comparing themselves to each other does the extent of the differences appear.
During any motion, change is constant for every observer. Comparative change can be different, as explained by relativity.
The system of time adopted for humans is actually based on observe
d change. One day is based on the rising and setting sun, the four seasons based on position of the sun and changes in temperature and foliage, a year based on the recurring pattern of seasons, etc.
All of these units of time were based some observable change. We also watch people change as they age, but there is no repeatable change pattern during the aging process, so people just get older.
Time, as we know it, is just a way to categorize change into some bracket. Years are bracketed into different historical eras based on events or people. The biggest time event was the birth of Jesus Christ, which sets the stage from B.C. [before Christ] to A.D. [Anno Domini, year of our Lord] and current history uses this date as the starting point. Side note, the calendar goes from 1BC to 1AD, there is not a ‘Year Zero’ defined in the current system.
Before the birth of Jesus Christ and the subsequent calendaring systems based on it, time was usually quantified by the year of the current emperor or ruler, or from some major event, like the founding of the city of Rome, for example. All of these were significant changes from a cultural perspective and allowed for keeping track of the position in time. There wasn’t a universal system of comparative times, and in early Greek culture, for example, when years were based off of the era of each ruler, there was no easy way to account for or ‘schedule’ for future events. If the calendars reset, any event scheduled for “year 25 of Caesar’s reign” then gets reset when the emperor changes.
The current calendaring method is universally synchronized on a singular event, while allowing forwards and backwards tracking of events – but still based on observable changes.
In simplistic terms, the rate of change of the Universal Change Constant is the same as the time system developed and in use by every observer. One second of ‘time’ is can be defined as being exactly equal to one second of ‘Change’ in the Fundamental Theory of Change.
Time, as constructed, describes a continuous series of change events and labels them such that each event aligns with others to give order and remembrance, but doesn’t create these events – Change does.
Why doesn’t time exist then?
Because time from change requires an observer, and as such that makes every observer experience a different ‘time’ relative to each other. There is no absolute ‘time’ as we know it, only absolute ‘change.’
Starting with a single person is one way to examine the difference between time and change. For this one person, their life can be represented by a continuous curve – and a convenient one to use is the Spiral of Archimedes, as shown below.
Mathematically, the Spiral of Archimedes represents the equation r = {theta} or, for simplicity, with some constant of proportionality, r = k [theta], in the polar coordinate system. It may be that k is some other function of other unknown variables.
Change, in The Fundamental Theory of Change, causes the value of theta to increase at a uniform rate, and this produces the rotation along the axes at a constant speed. The life of a single person can be represented as a car driving forward along the red curve, and drives one lap every year. The first year the car moves a distance, and the second year that distance is longer, and the third year even longer, etc. This could also help explain the feelings of how fast time moves. A young child feels like it takes forever for Christmas to arrive, whereas an older person has the years just fly by due to the speed needed to complete one lap on the curve.
The relative effect is that “time” varies as the “speed” of the car varies.
The position of the person can be calculated by using the age as defined in ‘years’ by counting which lap the person is driving on, much like the rings of a tree. The time since birth corresponds to an exact point on the Spiral, and also determines the speed of ‘life’ as well.
Events and memories are sign posts or markers along the way.
Every person ever born has their own spiral. Imagine this one person’s life spiral as being on a sheet of paper. All of the people ever alive would be a pile of papers, each with a spiral on it.
Recorded history can then be represented as a stack of these sheets of paper, one person on top of each other, in historical order based on the moment of birth. All of the papers are glued together and there is a rod going through the origin to allow for the stack of papers to turn. This stack of papers, or lives, is constantly rotating at the speed of change – one rotation, or lap, per year.
The observable earth history, therefore, could be represented by a tube containing all of the rotating Spirals containing every person’s life. The direction of time is constructed by observing the layering of the Spirals, new births on top of old lives, and the direction of the turning of the papers inside.
One fascinating aspect of the Fundamental Theory of Change is that it creates many interesting possibilities with regards to how to address time – the first being that time is also an observational construct.
One of the first questions for this theory is ‘what happens when two people experience/observe things together?’
This very good question allows the power of the Fundamental Theory of Change to be explored.
The stacks of paper in the tube are not single dimensional elements. While the papers are flat in the ‘time’ dimension (birth order), the lives of the people on the paper, in fact, connect on many other dimensions. Temporal and Physical dimensions overlap people in life, and thus Time and Space would be two of the dimensions. People cross paths and arrive at the same location at the same time, so there must be a way for this to be represented and explained by the Change Theory. And shared experiences create memories as well, whether people are in the same location or far apart, so there must be a way (or “place”) to connect and store memory and sensory data.
With the calendaring system, the event is considered universally fixed, for example, the date of some event, such as 9/11. In the Fundamental Theory of Change, every event is just ordered sequentially to the observer. For example, “last week I was there.” “yesterday I did that.” etc. Without some method of a universal calendaring system, time would be relative and hard to keep track of. But to each of the observers, days consist of the details of their lives, and change marches on.
The invention of the universal calendaring system truly was a pivotal moment in human endeavor.
Returning to the question of ‘what happens when people experience the same thing together’ produces a great thought experiment within the Fundamental Theory of Change.
Consider an event, say someone’s birthday with 20 attendees. The calendar is set to a specific date and hour, and ‘time’ says that everyone is there at the exact same moment.
In the Fundamental Theory of Change, each person has their own Spiral, and live their lives in their own observable time. This means that the event happens and they all interconnect for those moments, but the people don’t all need to be existing together for their observations.
That statement takes a bit more explaining with an example. The event is Cousin Lois’ birthday. Let’s focus on 3 people at the party. Joe is 22, Jane is 24, and Rob is 30. They all attend the party and interact throughout.
Each one is driving their ‘car’ along their curves in their observational life.
‘Time’ says that each one should be driving side by side for those moments, and at the same speed, for each of those interactive events.
In the Fundamental Theory of Change, they could all be at different points in their lives, and most likely are. What this means is that at the exact “time” on the calendar for the birthday:
Joe could actually be 80 years old in his own observational change life, and looking back at the birthday event when he was 22, just as a memory.
Jane could be 24 and observing the moments as they happen in real time,
and Rob could be only 11 and will experience that event in his future, 19 years from now.
All three will ex
perience the same event, and observe it on their Spiral, but it doesn’t have to happen that all three are observing at the same point in their own observational spirals.
The Fundamental Theory of Change focuses on each person’s observable changes, and develops ‘time’ from there, such as making calendar markers, rather than being calendar driven. Events still happen at the prescribed dates and in order, but the calendar date isn’t the same for everybody.
Another aspect of having an observational based system of time is that it allows everybody to be alive – right now - but in their own era.
For example, George Washington is still alive, but living in the 1700s, which people in the 2000s can’t interact with. To George Washington, people alive in the 2000s don’t exist, because he has no way to observe them, and to the people living in the 2000s, these people only know of Washington from the history books because there is no way to have an observational interaction within the system/cylinder before being born.
One aspect of the Fundamental Theory of Change is that everybody ever born is current alive in their own observable lifetimes.
Chapter 3: Contradictions
How can everyone ever born be currently alive?
In the calendaring system, the driving ‘force’ is the chronological time of the universe – it is now Jan 1, 2000, for example. And everybody must obey that date – many people haven’t been born, and many have died.
In the Fundamental Theory of Change, the time is relative to each observer, so everyone can be alive at the same time, just not interact across lifetimes.
Everybody alive just observes changes in their own life, with change driving everything at the same rate. Only recorded history is able to carry over from past to present. That recorded history travels at the speed of information along the stack of papers, so as someone creates a record of history, that recorded history passes along to the future generations.