“Has it, indeed?” Elohim asked. “Please describe the experiment for Reese.”
“Simple, actually. Einstein calculated the amount of time variance as it relates to c, velocity. Put an atomic clock on an jetliner that travels in excess of mach 2 and leave one on the ground. The clocks start out in sync. After the trip, the clocks are out of sync by the value calculated by Einstein…proof.”
Addressing himself again to Reese, Elohim said, “You’ve read enough flawed studies, Reese, to know that a given result does not necessarily provide proof because the actual cause may be something other than that which the experimenter thought.”
Reese responded, “There’s always the issue of a hidden or unknown variable.”
“Yes. In the experiment Walt described, there was, in fact, a slight difference in the time measured by the two atomic clocks – a difference so slight it was only measurable by clocks of that precision. Unfortunately, that only indicates the time variation; it does not indicate the cause.”
Penfield asked, “Well…what else could it be?”
“What it could be,” Elohim answered, “is the actual mechanism that I have employed to accelerate time for the Earth. Walt, imagine a process, if you will, originating near the center of the Earth. That process generates a force which speeds up time. It is proximity-sensitive, so the closer you are to the source, the faster time moves for you – the farther, the slower. If you measure the passage of time on the ground and at thirty thousand feet, would you not get a slightly asynchronous reading?”
Penfield stared at Elohim with disbelief. “A process at the core of the Earth which manipulates time?”
“Yes. And you haven’t answered my question.”
“Well, I suppose if I buy into this theory, yes, the farther from the source the clock is, the slower time would be moving. How would this so-called device work?”
“Walt, I can no more explain the mechanism to you than you could explain the operation of a cell phone to Plato. You do not have the foundation of knowledge needed to discuss it or understand it. However, you already have the knowledge and technology necessary to prove it. In fact, much of the proof exists. It has simply never been applied to the correct hypothesis. If I may suggest an avenue?”
“Please do.”
“But first, theoretically, if time moved faster for you here on Earth, and the rate of time acceleration decreased with distance from the Earth, would a probe launched from Earth be nearer or farther than your calculations predict?”
“Nearer, of course. More time has passed for us than for the probe…good God, you’re talking about the Pioneer probes, aren’t you?”
“I’ve read about that,” said Reese. “But I don’t remember the details.”
Penfield explained, “John Anderson at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, in the 1980s, discovered that the probes heading out of the solar system in opposite directions were not as far away as they should be.”
“By how far?”
“About equal to the distance from the Earth to the moon.”
“Could that be explained by some onboard malfunction?”
“They’ve looked at heat loss, gas venting, everything they could think of…nothing penciled out. And whatever the malfunction was, it would have had to occur on both of the probes simultaneously and to the same degree.”
“Perhaps you could have someone determine the factor of the discrepancy and apply it to the atomic clock experiment….”
“Yes,” Penfield interrupted. “That should be simple enough, as long as the decline rate of the time influence is steady.”
“It is,” Elohim stated.
Penfield rose from his chair, pulling his cell phone out and making a call, turning his back on Reese and Elohim. As he spoke into the phone, Reese said, “I presume they’ll match.”
Chuckling softly, Elohim answered, “They will. And once he is armed with the factor, there are some other conundrums that have been puzzling him which will also be answered.”
Overhearing Elohim’s comment, Penfield whirled to face him. “Other things?” he asked, covering the phone with his hand.
Elohim motioned for him to finish his phone call, which Penfield hurriedly did as they waited. Finally, snapping the phone shut, he returned to the table. “What other things?”
“Once a new paradigm is accepted, it opens new vistas. If the Earth is the epicenter of a calculable local time disturbance, a multitude of unsolved questions can be resolved. For example, underground caves have been filled with water and sensors, looking for evidence of neutrinos. They have been detected, but not in nearly the quantity anticipated in your calculations. If time on Earth is substantially faster than the rest of the universe, then….”
“Then the calculations are correct, or could be, depending on the time variance. Our time is just going so much faster that hours, or even days, pass between the detection of each neutrino, when it should be minutes.”
“Or seconds,” Elohim added.
“Seconds? Instead of hours?”
“No. Instead of days.”
Walt Penfield was taken aback. Reese and Elohim watched his face as his mind raced.
Reese asked, “What is the ratio?”
“At present, it is 36,580/1. Early in the process, for a brief period, it was several orders of magnitude greater.”
“WHAT?” barked Penfield. “One of your days is equal to one hundred years on Earth?”
“Approximately, yes. But it is not one of my days…it is a day for the rest of the universe. Remember, you have come to all of your conclusions about the formation, expansion, size, and eventual demise of the universe based upon a time scale that is skewed by an unknown factor. How many of your beliefs about the universe are time-bound?”
“Many of them, hell, most of them. We’ve run into brick wall after brick wall trying to reconcile our observations to our theories; this could explain why. Our observations have been skewed by this time shift.”
Penfield’s cell phone rang. Pulling it out, he glanced at the caller ID, then activated the speaker phone function. Holding it at arm’s length, near the center of the table, for all three to hear, he answered, “This is Walt.”
“Walt, Jason. I finished the first pass on the Voyager comparison. I took the distance of the anomaly and extrapolated the….”
“Jason, bottom line. Did the numbers tie?”
“Yes! Yes, they did. As I said, it’s a rough first number, but it’s dead nuts on. How did you ever think to relate the dilation variation with the Pioneer anomaly?”
“I’ll get back to you on that one, Jason. Thanks for the quick work.”
“No problem. Uh, Walt, is this a paper?”
“Don’t worry, Jason. You’ll get your name on it. Gotta go.”
“Thanks. See you.”
Penfield flipped the phone closed and slowly let out his breath.
“Uhhh…assuming for a moment that this is really happening…that our time is sped up by that factor…how long has this been going on?”
“Since the beginning.”
“For the last four and a half billion of our years?”
“Yes.”
“You mentioned a period when the rate was much greater?”
“Yes, during the creation of the Earth and prior to the creation of mankind, the process was substantially accelerated. I was, after all, anxious to get on with the existence of man.”
“That explains the Creation-in-seven-days timetable?” asked Reese.
“During each of my past visits I explained these things to the best and brightest of the time, as I am explaining now to you. Just as I now cannot literally describe the actual mechanism of the time acceleration because of your dearth of knowledge in certain areas, my explanations in the past, of necessity, utilized available concepts for illustrative purposes. The concept of a day is somewhat subjective yet easily understood. If you consider that we are referring to a ‘day’ in Heaven, rather than on Earth, the descr
iption makes more sense. But what was intended as a description of the acceleration of time, unfortunately, became literally interpreted as the timetable for Creation.”
Penfield asked, “Since then, has the rate been constant?”
“Yes.”
Penfield vigorously ran his hands through his hair, disheveling it badly. “I have so many questions…I don’t know which to ask first.”
“I suggest that you start with gravity; it’s difficult to grasp the time concept without addressing it.”
“Gravity is affected?”
“Of course it is. The link between time and gravity is fundamental to the nature of both. If I were to stop the process that is accelerating time, you would not suddenly perceive your ‘day’ to be one hundred years long; it would be indistinguishable from the ‘day’ you experienced before the process stopped.
“To illustrate the impact of this, let’s do a mind experiment. Let’s say there is a location…an island within the solar system that is immune to the effects of the time acceleration. That island is between Earth and Mars, so it is close enough to Earth to view it with the naked eye. With the acceleration turned off, the Earth would appear to orbit the Sun at the velocity you currently perceive. But turn the process on and, from the island’s perspective, the Earth would now be spinning around the Sun at 36,580 times faster than before. If gravity and time were not linked….”
“The Earth would be flung out of the solar system like a slingshot.”
“Correct. Not exactly the ‘weak force,’ is it?”
Reese asked, “I know that I’m the non-physicist here, but hasn’t gravity been the big mystery for your community?”
Penfield responded, “Yes. We’ve never really had any idea how it worked or even what it was.” Addressing Elohim, Penfield asked, “So gravity is linked to time?”
“It would be misleading to answer ‘yes’ to that without more information. Gravity is linked to time; time is linked to gravity. You could almost say that gravity is the physical manifestation of time. The connection between the two is not the end of it. Time and gravity are also connected to the velocity of a body and the speed of light.”
Reese again jumped in. “The speed-of-light paradox. No matter how fast I move away from a source of light, I can never catch up to the light itself.”
“Right,” said Penfield. “In fact, no matter how fast you go away from the source of the light, the light will always close the distance toward you at the same speed, the speed of light.”
Elohim explained, “That’s true, in a sense. In reality, what’s happening is this: If you are traveling in the same direction as light – as you accelerate, time slows down proportionally. So if you are traveling at half the speed of light, time has slowed to half its previous rate. Since you measure the speed of light against your time reference, it appears to be unchanged.”
Penfield interrupted, “But that’s time dilation. I thought you said it didn’t exist?”
Smiling patiently, Elohim explained, “Walter, I did not say it didn’t exist. I merely pointed out that you have not measured it. The jetliner experiment could not work because the orientation was flawed.”
“The orientation?”
“Time dilation occurs in relation to the speed of light. In my example, I choose to move the body away from the source at half the speed of light, which slows time. If the body moves toward the source at half the speed of light, time speeds up for the body by a factor of two.”
“What if this hypothetical spaceship, traveling at half the speed of light, is between two opposing light sources, moving away from one and toward the other?” asked Reese. “Wouldn’t time be speeding up and slowing down simultaneously?”
“Yes,” answered Elohim.
“Yes?” barked Penfield. “What do you mean, ‘yes’?”
Laughing, Elohim answered, “This gets a little difficult to explain, as the three of us do not share a common knowledge of physics. Taking a cue from my Son when He spoke to His followers here on Earth, I will attempt an explanation.”
“Parables,” Reese commented.
“Yes. There were many concepts that He wanted to convey that were quite foreign to the people of the time. As a result, He found it necessary to convert complex thoughts into analogies. Unfortunately, since He left, some of the faithful have believed that His analogies were to be taken literally.
“That being said, I will answer your question. It is necessary, Walt, to imagine each star, each source of light, as a time island – or perhaps a time zone. As you travel from close proximity of one star toward another, the time effect projects out from each.”
“Like two radio beacons,” offered Reese.
“Very good. Yes, like two radio beacons on the same frequency. When you are close to the first star, its effect on your ‘real’ time is more powerful than the effect the distant star has upon you. At the midpoint, the effect on your ‘real’ time would be null. As you approach the other, you regain what was lost from your ‘real’ time during the first half of the trip.”
“But if you observe and measure the light speed from either source, at any point in the trip, would the result always be the same?”
“Yes.”
“How can that be, or is this just another paradox?”
“Walt, whether it is a paradox depends upon your point of view. The reason the light from opposing directions would both be measured at the same speed, regardless of your relative speed, is that you measure it against time…and time is linked to velocity. If you were to represent the linkage – the relationship between them – as an equation, that equation would look like this.”
Elohim once again took pen to paper and wrote:
T (time) = s (speed of light) - v (velocity of observer)
“It is the very ratio between the speed of light and the observer’s velocity that determines the rate of time. The three are locked together. Therefore, the ‘relative’ speed of light, in relation to the viewer, will always be the same.”
“So, it’s an illusion,” said Penfield.
Elohim answered, “If you are referring to time, the answer is, yes, it is an illusion, but only an illusion in the sense that it can be manipulated. All of the various velocities are not illusions; they are, in a sense, real. The reason you are grappling with so many paradoxes is that you have used time as your method of measurement…and time is, shall we say, flexible.”
It was obvious that Penfield was struggling to assimilate this. He asked, “Then what is time?”
“Time, as is all else in the universe, is a form of energy. It is the energy that maintains equilibrium in a system. It is an energy created and released by stars. And, as you already know, energy must be conserved. It is never lost. Each particle in the universe carries this charge. The charge varies with motion – not absolute motion, but motion relative to the light which was created by the same star from which both energies were born. This is a vastly simplified description but, suffice it to say, there is a cost associated with this motion, and that cost is a decrease in field strength of the charge. The faster your motion, the lower your charge, until at the speed of light, the charge reaches zero. What you consider to be time is simply a measurement of that charge.”
Reese asked, “How can we measure something that we don’t know exists?”
Penfield answered, “Black-box physics. The Manhattan Project designed the atomic bomb without having ever viewed the atom. It’s a common methodology in physics. Imagine something inside a black box. You can’t see what it is. You can’t study it directly, but you can study what effect it has on the environment. You can also study what occurs as you heat it, freeze it, bombard it with x-rays, shake it, and perform any other experiment you can concoct. If you do that enough, inductive reasoning will lead you to the point where you can predict what the item in the box will do in a given set of circumstances.”
“Precisely,” confirmed Elohim.
Penfield continued, “I would pr
esume that this energy charge has to do with entropy?”
Reese asked, “Entropy, the rate that everything decays?”
“Yes,” said Elohim. “And, yes, not just the rate of aging within organics. Since every particle is imbued with this charge, every particle is affected. A radioactive particle with a half-life of one thousand years would possess a half-life of two thousand years if its energy state was cut in half, but only if the balance of the environment maintained its current energy value; otherwise, the change to that one radioactive particle would not be apparent.”
Reese groaned. “I’m getting a headache.”
The Harvest Page 24