# I'm confused... what is space and time?



## Saltheart (Dec 3, 2006)

Well, the title says it all, but I suppose I must elaborate.

We all measure space, we all measure time, but what are they? What do the units of space and time represent? I mean, our measurements of space is dependant on time, and our measurements of time are dependant on space; so what exactly do they represent? Gravity's effect?

I'm really getting confused now... if anyone can explain what they represent, that would be good.


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## SpaceShip (Dec 3, 2006)

Yay!  Chrispenycate - I'm sure this is one for you!  I hadn't even thought of that before but I expect it has something to do with speed and light as well eh?


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## Urien (Dec 3, 2006)

Yeah I think Chrispenycate or JD for this.

But as they're not around at the mo... It's amatuer hour..

*Puts on gold suit*

See it's like this as the speed of light in a vacuum always appears constant to the observer, no matter how fast the observer is moving, then something else must be changing. The variable that squares the circle is time.

For a photon at light speed, and crossing great distances no time is passing. 

*Takes off suit, quiz show music plays, audience slow claps and boos*

Oh well something like that... as I say there will be experts to minister to the injuries I inflicted.


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## SpaceShip (Dec 3, 2006)

OOOOoooo I'm impressed AVS.  Wonder if I will be transferring my impressedness to someone else who comes up with more mind-boggling explanations later though!


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## HoopyFrood (Dec 3, 2006)

AVS....I haven't a clue what you've just said there....*Vacant expression*
See, this is why I do English...I'm not sciencey in the slighest. I wish I were, all this stuff I feel like I should know! *Shrugs* Ah well...*Wanders away looking confused and in need of conversation that will mostly be monosyllabic*


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## Maryjane (Dec 3, 2006)

Hi All, this is Maryjane come to visit. How are you folks all doin?
Space and time? Well it is all an illusion, a holographic universe. You see past present and future all existing simultaneously. 

Creation - Holographic Universe - Crystalinks

All is made of energy, mass as well. If you took a powerful enough microscope you would see that even the nucleus of an atom are made up of tiny particles, reduce these particles even more and you would find infinite voids of space between particles. Yet all energy is synchronised and balanced evenly through out universe where an atomic particle here would react exactly in synchrony with another atomic particle at the outer edge of the universe.  Property of entanglement. Compress all the mater in the universe and it would fit in the eye of a needle. 

Enjoy

Maryjane


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## Maryjane (Dec 3, 2006)

*Hello aint someone a gonna come back and say hello, we missed you???? 
Wow and holly smokes even. Did everyone ferget good old Maryjane from Canadar?

With Love

Maryjane
*


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## chrispenycate (Dec 3, 2006)

Hello; nice to see you; you don't come round oftern enough.
Now as for compressing my mother through the eye of a needle; she wasn't a camel, you know, it was me that was the mathematician - Oh, with two "t"s. Whell. I don't hold with that, either. If you squeezed it down that far, it'd be a black hole (if you squeezed all the energy in the universe that far, leaving the matter alone, it'd be a black hole; a very strange concept, making darkness out of too much light) and a black hole is dimensionless (and that one wouldn't evaporate in a long time, at least to an outside observer, of which there wouldn't be one, because all the matter is inside. inside, of course there's no passage of time)
"The outer edge of the universe" is another concept I don't hold with. If spacetime is expanding at the speed of light (yes. need another dimension for that, I know), any point can be taken as the centre from which the comegg exploded, and the concept of "edge" is meaningless. Quantum entanglement  _seems_ to imply a static four dimensional universe, with predestination and a single time path, but both I and my friend from CERN had had one or three drinks before arriving at this conclusion, so its veracity is questionable.
Dear me, I've already got incomprehensible without even attacking the original question; perhaps now is the time to stop, and see if I can simplify my thought processes some.


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## chrispenycate (Dec 3, 2006)

Maryjane said:


> *Hello aint someone a gonna come back and say hello, we missed you????
> Wow and holly smokes even. Did everyone ferget good old Maryjane from Canadar?
> 
> With Love
> ...



Big contenental kiss on each cheek XX
I'm just a very slow typist; I'd started that reply before you posted.
Mind you, I've only just got back from running a show; I could have missed you entirely.


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## El_L1 (Dec 6, 2006)

what is space and time?

Space is what is 'invisble' to the observer-'invisible' in the sense that the observer does not count 'space' as 'something' but as what is between 'things'.

Time is how long it takes to get from one 'thing' to another. Space and time are completely subjective. Time and space are one and the same like water and ice.

There are many who would argue that I am incorrect. 

Hope that helps.


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## SpaceShip (Dec 7, 2006)

chrispenycate said:


> Hello; nice to see you; you don't come round oftern enough.
> Now as for compressing my mother through the eye of a needle; she wasn't a camel, you know, it was me that was the mathematician - Oh, with two "t"s. Whell. I don't hold with that, either. If you squeezed it down that far, it'd be a black hole (if you squeezed all the energy in the universe that far, leaving the matter alone, it'd be a black hole; a very strange concept, making darkness out of too much light) and a black hole is dimensionless (and that one wouldn't evaporate in a long time, at least to an outside observer, of which there wouldn't be one, because all the matter is inside. inside, of course there's no passage of time)
> "The outer edge of the universe" is another concept I don't hold with. If spacetime is expanding at the speed of light (yes. need another dimension for that, I know), any point can be taken as the centre from which the comegg exploded, and the concept of "edge" is meaningless. Quantum entanglement _seems_ to imply a static four dimensional universe, with predestination and a single time path, but both I and my friend from CERN had had one or three drinks before arriving at this conclusion, so its veracity is questionable.
> Dear me, I've already got incomprehensible without even attacking the original question; perhaps now is the time to stop, and see if I can simplify my thought processes some.


 
WOW  ​ 
Now that's what I call impressive. As you say, Chris, incomprehensible - but impressive nonetheless!​ 
And Hello Maryjane. I think you went on vacation as I joined the Chrons so not met before. Nice to meet you.​


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## Foxbat (Dec 7, 2006)

Maryjane said:


> *Hello aint someone a gonna come back and say hello, we missed you???? *
> *Wow and holly smokes even. Did everyone ferget good old Maryjane from Canadar?*
> 
> *With Love*
> ...


 
 Hi Maryjane and welcome back. It's been a long time but I remember your colourful fonts from way back when Chronicles was still knee-high to a grasshopper. As you can see, we've grown. I hope you enjoy your return


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## Epic Universe (Jan 7, 2007)

About two weeks ago, thinking about this very thing kept me lost in thought for about five hours.


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## Admiral Ryouhei (Jan 7, 2007)

Okay, read a book on string theory and in the process or finished one on einstien which had ties to string theory, I'm 17, my head hurt, then I went back and read over the hurty parts several times till pain turned into understanding, well, mostly.

As I understand it, there is an end to smallness, called Planck length, which is really small, nothing can get any smaller than Planck length. Actually it can, but the mathematical translation of reducing something smaller than planck length is that it reaches planck and then reverses direction of shrinking into growth.

Yeah, and that was one of the simplest aspects in the books.

Also according to string and superstring theories, everything is made up of tiny vibrating one-dimensional strings, which have no constituent parts (i.e. you can't cut a string). Each base particle of the universe (quarks, electrons, photons, muons, *gravitons*, etc.) is really a string vibrating through all of the universal dimensions in a unique 'wavelength'. Though a material representation of such a multi-dimensional wave pattern would look insanely absurd to us, that is, if we could even percieve it.

Now a string is Planck length in its natural state (not sure what such a natural state is though), when energy is transfered to the string it grows, meaning the originally one-dimensional string expands and begins to thicken along its radial dimension (I think that's right) becoming a two-dimensional torus and then a 'brane' (short for membrane, a 2D brane is simply a plane).

The biggest of the biggest branes will define the size and shape of the universe, while the smallest strings will, to my understanding, define the laws of physics within that universe while the inbetween-sized strings will provide the matter of the universe.

I'm not 100% sure of this explaination, it's my extrapolation of what I got from the book and there are still many more aspects of it to discuss in excrutiating detail.
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The speed of light is constant in a vacuum, technically, the speed of light is constant, period, but the photon's path is disturbed by intervening matter, so in simple terms, it's dispersed, though the speed remains the same.

A problem introduced by the book which was intendid to ease the confusion stated that if you were traveling through space and a light beam was following you from behind and the speed of the beam was measured, it would read as the speed of light (whatever the number is), conversely of you were traveling behind the beam and measured it, the readings would be the same as stationary and leading measurements.

Hence, the speed of light is constant, no matter the reference point's velocity or acceleration.

=========================================================

Gravity is the most elusive particle, equations say gravity doesn’t work or it’s too weak to do what it does. Gravity, according to strings is a closed loop string, meaning it has no end-points (i.e. circle) and is not bound to the dimensions, where normal strings have two ends and are anchored to the dimensions. So if the graviton is in fact a circle string then it would account for its weak presence in our universe and the fact that a gravity wave weakens as it travels outwards from its point of origin. Oh, gravity also travels at the speed of light.

There is a method of FTL travel that doesn’t require any fancy PSB to work, just use an Electromagnetic ‘Net’ to catch tachyons until your ship’s mass equals a negative or imaginary number (i.e. square root of a negative number) and your ship becomes an object with negative mass and be able to travel faster than light. Of course I’m not sure EM fields stop Tachyons, the available data I have is inconclusive as to whether Tachyon-based FTL is possible. If EM fields do stop Tachyons, then it’s all good, but if they don’t then that means that tachyons have such high energy that they are unaffected by intervening matter (H-bar).

H-bar is pretty much the strings of energy, it’s the smallest unit of energy possible (i.e. the smallest amount of energy you can add and subtract to a particle). A particle can have zero energy, but you can’t add anything less than the value of H-bar at a time. No 1.2 H-bar either. To write it simpler: you cannot divide the value of H-bar into smaller amounts.

To continue, say a particle impacts into an impassable barrier, it is possible and highly likely that the particle will simply ignore the object and pass through it. As the number of particles passing through the object together in a group become less and less likely, but never impossible, so it is plausible and quite possible that a person could walk through a wall, though it will take many thousands of trillions of tries before the chances become remotely likely that it will happen on the next try of running full speed into the wall. It is possible that it happens on the first try, but highly unlikely.
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And to answer your question.


Think of three space dimensions as a sculpture in an art museum, by adding time the sculpture is able to move according to the laws of physics that exist within the sculpture, that is the space-time continoum (spelling?)


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## heusdens (Feb 25, 2007)

What space and time is, has been since long discussed, and our idea of space and time have changed much.

In Newton mechanics space and time were thought as an absolute continuum, existing seperate from matter.

Since general relativity that is no longer the case, because in fact spacetime is the geometry of space which is formed by the gravity field.
We have the the relationship that mass/energy defined the gravity field (curvature of space) and the gravity field defines how mass/energy moves.


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## dreamwalker (Mar 8, 2007)

I think you guys have gone far above and beyond the original point of this post!

Most simpley, time is a 3 dimensional beings way of seeing the 4 dimensional universe.

To put it another way, time, is the way an observer would view the dimension above.
If we where a flatlander (2d creature) we'd see the 3d world as a 2d slide show, which would be our perception of time... 

When imagining other dimensions (most of which have been invented purely for the purposes of solving math with incomplete data!), it's best to see the (multiverse?) as a single, solid state entity, with all things that did, are, and will, multipled by all the things that could have, may have, might happen, multiplied by all the universes (worlds with different fundimental laws of nature) that can exist.... 
in the grand scheme of things, space-time is but a fraction of all we, as 3d beings can perceive...

I hope that helps.


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## Dave (Mar 8, 2007)

The Superstring theories also predict that there are actually 27 dimensions (or some figure up in that range) which only shows why we find the universe so difficult to comprehend when our viewpoint is limited to only 4.


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## Riker (Mar 9, 2007)

Wow you guys have very complicated concepts of time.  I've never heard it defined like that before and I find it intersting.

Aquinas' definition of time has to do with matter.  Before the universe was created (by whatever means you wish to believe created the universe), there was no matter and therefore there was eternal time (also known as absolute time or B concept of time), and after the universe was created there was physical time (A concept of time).  I'm assuming you are asking about physical time.  And that can simply be defined as the movable objects.  So long as there are movable objects they are pressumed to be moving and that is how we account for time, ie. the moving of the objects themselves.

To go a bit further, there is no actual time in absolute time but there is a sequantial order to things.


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## Admiral Ryouhei (Mar 20, 2007)

and these four demensions we experience are larger than ourselves, so any and all other dimensions are smaller than current methods of micro-scale perception, smaller than we are capable of seeing

which, should mean that there are no higher dimensions, or we would experience them, only lower dimensions

but if there was a supreme entity, known to us as God, it would exist within at least one spatial dimension and be larger than time, IF it created the rest of existance, or at least expanded it

OR, God could exist on a lower dimension, in a 5d universe (or 6d or 7d, etc.) so it would be capable of further perceiving of the nature of things, but explaining God is all fine and dandy, I don't really care about that anymore, the singularity is much more interesting and would be first along our path to discover the essence of existance


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