Estranged

When it comes to jobs that may very well require the sacrifice of your life, all should have a choice. If someone believes in a cause, they should have the right to fight for it and sacrifice the self for it, and if they don't believe in it they should have the right to abstain. It should have nothing to do with male or female. The US draft system is sexist in the least and barbaric in truth.

A proposal: Time is actually a constant even though we may not ever be able to measure it with complete accuracy. Isn't it reasonable to believe that even with all the fancy clocks we can't really measure time as a constant? There's too many variables. Nothing is stationary. Relative station cannot be reasonably figured. We have human weaknesses. Measuring time is certainly one. The clocks on the planes going around the Earth, to think that they could account for all variables, and to think they could account for aging, seems absurd. 

I'm sorry y'all, this thread was driving me crazy and it seemed healthy to just ignore it. I'll get back to it one day. I do believe that the questions I'm asking are important. 

On 1/2/2018 at 4:39 AM, interested said:

I asked a question about how time is affected by gravity or acceleration, no one answered so having googled it, I will have a bash myself, but may have confused myself somewhat. 

A fundamental result in Special Relativety is that a clock along an accelerated world line through two events in space time records less elapsed time between those events than a clock along an unaccelerated world line through the same two events.

Since, in this case, an accelerated clock and an unaccelerated clock are co-located at two different events, the two clocks can be directly compared and, in this case, the time dilation is absolute - does the accelerated clock tick faster than the unaccelerated clock ?????? Is time slower in space?????????????

The muon decay mentioned by Mordred is an example of the above. The muon experiences no acceleration ie is in free fall as it enters the earths atmosphere and it experiences a slowing down of time relative to observers on the ground. Quantum excitations not being accelerated by gravity or any other force last longer. This must alsoi apply to all Quantum fluctuations and excitations in space, not experiencing acceleration.

Does a Photon of light travelling at c experience time, No it doesnt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

If a person leaves earth at 0.7c for 20  years before returning, how much as said person aged when acceleration and deceleration are taken into account. The above examples ignore acceleration?

Viewing the above as a bungey jump as your speed increases to earth time slows, like a muon, as the elastic takes up the tension you decelerate and experience an increase in the speed of time, if the rope breaks your life ends like the muon, if not you are accelerated back up towards the crane at what feels like a much faster rate than you descended, until you reach the height of your climb when you start on the way back down again.

For the observer on the ground time is not affected for the person doing the bungy jump they experience a decrease in the speed of time followed by an acceleration as the rope becomes taught again.

PS I do not recomend bungey jumping, I dont think it is good for the brain cells having so much blood rush into your head at once.

Edit Biological systems experiencing higher levels of gravity will have higher masses and will have to work harder, and use more energy, joints will ware out faster, and they will experience time ticking at a faster/slower ???? rate. It will feel longer due to the extra work that will have to be done, but may in fact be faster.

This is the most interesting post I've read. I'll have to read it another 20 or so times before I can begin to understand it though. 

9 hours ago, Strange said:

There is nothing special about biological systems. They brave the way they do because of complex sequences of chemical reactions. Those reaction take place at a rate determined by fundamental processes. We have observed this same processes being affected by time dilation. So there is no reason why biological system would not behave the same as any other clock.

The universe was evolving for billions of years before humans developed ways to measure time. So it is pretty clear that time is not a human invention. Our descriptions of what time "is" (philosophy) and ways of measuring it (science) are human inventions though.

There is nothing special about biological systems, but they're still different from mechanical systems. Biologic aging is different from mechanical clock rate. 

I'm not sure how you can claim that time is not a human invention. If you could describe time without being human then I'd be REALLY fascinated.

7 hours ago, studiot said:

 

Well you haven't said much about my posts, perhaps you missed them in the barrage.

 

One of them was about observing this 'fixed' clock.

The point being that the observation takes time and can't proceed faster than light.

 

This simple fact needs to be taken into consideration on any accounting of what is seen (observed) by two observers in relative motion.

OK, but what does that have to do with age?

1 minute ago, studiot said:

What meaning do you ascribe to the emboldened statement?

The clock can't be running at multiple speeds, right? It can run at one or the other, not both. Correct?

The important point here is that time dilation is not an effect on the clock. It can't be. For example, right now you are traveling at 0 km/h relative to your chair (no time dilation) you are also travelling at hundreds of miles per hour relative to Mars (a bit of time dilation) you are also travelling at 99% of the speed of light relative to cosmic rays (a lot of time dilation). Your clock can't be running at multiple different speeds, affected by every relative velocity.

OK, that's all fine, but does it have to do with human age?

The most public explaining I've tried to do is right here.

This stuff has really been bothering me to the extent it interferes with my life. And it seems like no one can really answer me. I just googled "science forums" and I got here. 

I don't know what else to do.

3 minutes ago, Mordred said:

I see nothing to incorrect in the last its accurate as far as the last post goes. However different parts of your body will age at different rates lol

Thank you. That means a lot to me actually that I'm not completely crazy!

But I guess physics is kinda wrong when they try and describe time in regards to age. 

3 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Explain the difference...

First, saying "explain the difference" is much like saying "explain the sameness." Anyhow, we all seem to agree that time is relative, right? There's also been assertions that age is a measure of time and that clock rate measures time. Correct? Now, considering the relativity of time, I think it not all so absurd that age measures time differently than clock rate. 

6 minutes ago, Mordred said:

Yes there is even different rates of time between your head and your feet. Its simply too small to be detectable 

I'm sorry I didn't see your response before. So you agree that age and clock rates can have time differences. That means that it's possible that if a person travels at a very high speed away from Earth and comes back a very high speed, then their age could be just the same as someone who stayed on Earth the whole time.

1 minute ago, Mordred said:

Yes there is even different rates of time between your head and your feet. Its simply too small to be detectable 

OK, given that, could there not be a difference when it comes to clock rate vs aging? 

Could age and clock rates have different reference frames? 

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

I expected more... 

Could you please elaborate?

1 minute ago, Mordred said:

There is always time processes but not an absolute rate of time.

OK, so if there's not an absolute rate of time then there are different rates of time, yes?

33 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Time ages everything...

But time isn't constant, as explained, so things age in different times I guess, or by different ages. 

Most of your responses are really confusing me. I'm just curious if anyone else could think of time measured by age vs a clock rate could be different?

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

Really???????

 

If I seem ridiculous, I'm sorry. I don't mean to. 

7 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

No. Things happen i.e. time progresses, whether we know it or not.

So time passing is an absolute?

2 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Nope, time is personal and is measured by time, space and everything...

But it always gets older.

Obviously. But you knew that was an "egging on" question, right? Time is personal, not mechanical. Agreed. The mechanism of time is an invention, not a given part of the universe. Time was never given to us, we created it.

1 minute ago, Mordred said:

describe a biological body under particle physics and a mechanical clock. There isn't much difference

Damn, I should've been a particle physicist...if only public schools weren't so bad maybe they would have identified me more easily.  

I do have a hard time understanding how the biological body, regarding it's acceptance of time especially, isn't much different from a mechanical clock with gears and arms and such. 

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

Time ages everything...

So you're saying that time is an absolute that can be measured by a clock?

Just now, dimreepr said:

Why not, given the context?

When the biological body made the mechanical body, it seems implausible that the two could be impacted by the same processes.

How do you know?

1 minute ago, Mordred said:

The aging is one aspect of it, aging can be considered another form of clock with similarities to radioactive decay. All particle processes that occur in a biological body is affected

Are processes in a biological body impacted the same as processes in a mechanical body?

15 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

All I can say is just accept what you've been told about this and eventually you'll get used to it. You are trying to absorb a lot of things at once and not just about relativity itself but the terminology and the way scientists think. Eventually, it will slowly come together. When you see someone like Mordred writing the way he does, that's more than twenty years of thinking about science and methodically unpicking what it means. You won't get your head around relativity in a few posts.

OK, to be fair, I've been trying to absorb this for the better part of a decade. My newness to it is certainly relative. It's those things that everyone says "just accept" that I don't get. When someone says "just accept it because it's accepted" that's when I become really interested.

8 minutes ago, Mordred said:

 Don't get stuck at looking for clock errors. This will lead you down garden paths.

 There are other processes not involving mechanical or atomic clocks that cannot be explained without time dilation. A common example being muon decay, muons have too short a mean lifetime to be able to pass through the Earths atmosphere. Yet they strike the Earths surface, thanks to time dilation. 

While not directly related to time dilation, it does affect the mass term, we can generate particles at an LHC which has a higher rest mass than the combined rest mass of the two colliding particles.

Then on top of the gravitational redshift demonstrates the effect of time dilation on signals recieved. Which is another piece of evidence. Another being GPS satelites if we didn't account for time dilation they wouldn't be accurate.

The list of tests is quite huge and far more encompassing than what could be explained as clock errors.

 

So the whole thing about the twins when one leaves Earth really fast and comes back really fast and the one who stayed on Earth is younger than the one who left...that's wrong? I'm talking specifically about age vs. clock rate, and how measures of clock rate haven't been shown to define aging. I'm just trying to start at a real low level, I can't think of any other way to build knowledge. 

6 hours ago, StringJunky said:

OK. Every time the clock counts one second, the clock is one second older. How is that different from an aging body. The clock will wear and ultimately stop, just like an aging body.

Man my head hurts. And Happy New Year to all! My New Year resolution is that I aim to go mad until I understand this stuff.

The clock is a mechanical device developed by biological humans who invented the units that the clock measures. So that's how clocks are different from an aging body. A clock can't make things age and it might not be perfect at measuring age either. An aging body ages whether there's a clock or not. Changes in a clock's rate do not mean there's changes in other things that are effected by time.

I get that clocks are supposed to measure time, and they do, but couldn't clocks be potentially bad at measuring time under certain conditions? Like when they go really fast? Maybe, while the clock changes under those conditions, other measures of time, like aging, do not. Aging and clocks are different kinds of time measures, right? This seems not only logically plausible to me, but likely. 

I hope I'm making some kind of sense. I really appreciate everyone trying to answer me. 

1 hour ago, Strange said:

If that were the case, then you would be aware of your clock running slow when you were moving faster. But that doesn't make sense because speed is only relative. So the time difference can only be seen from another frame of reference.

Why would you be aware if the difference is so minuscule? Maybe I'm not sure what you're saying. 

5 hours ago, studiot said:

 

Yes relativity is difficult to get your head around.

I read somewhere (Berkson :-  Fields of Force Routledge) that the main reason folks have difficulty is that we naturally cleave to the idea of an absolute time (and space) and struggle to leave this behind.

So the ghost of the absolute lingers and interferes when we try to understand.

 

Swansont said it all when he said "clocks measure elapsed time", not time. Perhaps you missed this.

 

There are many quantites in Physics that appear in two guises which have the same units but are not quite the same.
In each case one of these purports to be an absolute and the other relative.

Voltage and voltage difference

Gravitational potential and potential difference

Distance and length

Time and time difference or elapsed time

and so on.

 

 

I don't really think I'm saying anything differently from you, in essence. Especially the part where you say "there are many quantities in Physics that appear in two guises which have the same units but are not quite the same." That's what I'm saying about aging vs clock rates, that they may appear to have the same units, but they may not be quite the same. It seems rather arrogant to me to me that our biological humanity could presume to invent a mechanical device that could measure aging with atomic accuracy. 

1 minute ago, Strange said:

Aging is just another clock. It is equally affected. 

But why? Why is it equally explained by the clock? you take that as a given? 

Aging is a different kind of clock, but it's not the same clock measured by minutes and seconds. The clock that makes relativity is not the clock of age.