- #1
PhyCurious
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- TL;DR Summary
- Given the principle of time dilation and the fact that matter and energy are one and the same, what does that tell us objectively about the passage of time?
I'm an amateur physics enthusiast, and there is a question that's been in the back of my mind for some time that I haven't been able to answer on my own, and haven't gotten a satisfactory answer elsewhere. First, I want to define a couple of terms and make sure my understanding isn't breaking down there before diving into my question on the implication.
First is the concept of time dilation. When an object / person / particle is traveling at an extremely high velocity or is near a massive gravitational object, they experience time dilation relative to an outside observer. E.g., me and my twin brother are on earth, I travel in a rocket at the speed of light for one light-year, and return to Earth at the same velocity, I experienced the trip as having been instant, but my twin brother is now two years older. Is this generally the correct understanding?
Next is the concept of mass-energy equivalence expressed in Einstein's famous equation, that mass is energy. So effectively, any piece of matter (an object with mass), is nothing but energy and simply condensed down so far that it appears solid to us as an observer in spacetime. I struggle to think of energy outside of electricity, so it's difficult for me to conceptualize it outside of that, but even thinking of a single atom, the component parts (protons, neutrons, and electrons, breaking it down even further into quarks and leptons) are moving around a central locus in spacetime (which appears classically as the nucleus. Again, please correct me here if I'm wrong.
If both of these definitions are correct, it seems to me that all of us as observers are really just energy traveling at light speed at an atomic or subatomic level. Does that mean that, as physical objects, we are not experiencing time, but rather just feel we are experiencing time as higher level observers? Or to put it another way, from the relativistic frame of my own experience, I experience time, but there is no objective experience of time? Or perhaps another way, time is a property I experience as an observer (my own subjective experience) but not a fundamental part of the universe?
This seems to be the implication given that the universe has been expanding out from the big bang, and all the mass / energy in the universe emerged from that event and has been traveling at the speed of light since. We experience time as the increase in entropy, but the reality of the universe simply is, and that experience is the result of our current relativistic frame.
When I google "Time is an illusion", I get a lot about Carlo Rovelli, of which I've read a decent amount (although not his book The Order of Time, just a synopsis so far), but I don't really get a definitive answer. I would love any input at all to help me better understand this quandary. Thank you!
First is the concept of time dilation. When an object / person / particle is traveling at an extremely high velocity or is near a massive gravitational object, they experience time dilation relative to an outside observer. E.g., me and my twin brother are on earth, I travel in a rocket at the speed of light for one light-year, and return to Earth at the same velocity, I experienced the trip as having been instant, but my twin brother is now two years older. Is this generally the correct understanding?
Next is the concept of mass-energy equivalence expressed in Einstein's famous equation, that mass is energy. So effectively, any piece of matter (an object with mass), is nothing but energy and simply condensed down so far that it appears solid to us as an observer in spacetime. I struggle to think of energy outside of electricity, so it's difficult for me to conceptualize it outside of that, but even thinking of a single atom, the component parts (protons, neutrons, and electrons, breaking it down even further into quarks and leptons) are moving around a central locus in spacetime (which appears classically as the nucleus. Again, please correct me here if I'm wrong.
If both of these definitions are correct, it seems to me that all of us as observers are really just energy traveling at light speed at an atomic or subatomic level. Does that mean that, as physical objects, we are not experiencing time, but rather just feel we are experiencing time as higher level observers? Or to put it another way, from the relativistic frame of my own experience, I experience time, but there is no objective experience of time? Or perhaps another way, time is a property I experience as an observer (my own subjective experience) but not a fundamental part of the universe?
This seems to be the implication given that the universe has been expanding out from the big bang, and all the mass / energy in the universe emerged from that event and has been traveling at the speed of light since. We experience time as the increase in entropy, but the reality of the universe simply is, and that experience is the result of our current relativistic frame.
When I google "Time is an illusion", I get a lot about Carlo Rovelli, of which I've read a decent amount (although not his book The Order of Time, just a synopsis so far), but I don't really get a definitive answer. I would love any input at all to help me better understand this quandary. Thank you!