goodabouthood said:
I also was thinking how moving through time could be the distance something travels at a certain speed.
For instance I say light travels at 186,000 miles per second but what do I even mean by saying one second?
I'm confused more now.
goodabouthood, I really hesitate to jump in here, because you have hit on a controversal subject in special relativity. The forum tries to stay clear of speculative hypotheses for which there is not widely held respect as a serious candidate for physical theory. I'll try to be reasonable here.
First of all, the sketches in my posts above are not out of the mainstream at all. However, the implications of my questioning hint of the controversial aspect of special relativity. In any case, here are at least two concepts that go to an attempt to bring some kind of physical understanding to the question I posed--and shed light on your questions about time.
1) The space-time diagrams along with the mathematical equations (Lorentz transformations) are to be taken only as symbolic mathematical representations of the relationships among observers in a mathematical 4-dimensional space-time. In other words, the 4-dimensional space is not to be taken as a real external objective world "out there." The 3-D world is real and "out there", but the special relativistic effects can only be explained mathematically and taken as "that's just how nature works." (Many philosophers will not accept that there is really an external objective 3-D world "out there.").
The effects predicted by special relativity are correct. That is, for example, time dilation really happens, length contraction is a real observable effect, and the twin paradox result would really occur as predicted by special relativity. It's just that there is no underlying physical explanation--there's just the mathematics that predicts results, and there is the actual observation of the predicted phenomena.
Special relativity is a proven theory (so far as can be validated after over one hundred years of experimentation).
2) A quite natural underlying physical explanation for the question I posed with the above space-time diagram (how can the black guy be in two places at once?) is the following: The black guy can be in two places at once (and many more) because he physically IS in two different places in 4-dimensional space at once.
It works quite easily if you regard the universe as having four spatial dimensions and is populated by 4-dimensional objects (including the bodies of the black and blue observers in the diagrams). But if the objects populating the 4-D universe are themselves 4-dimensional, that means they are frozen in 4-D space and do not move at all. Thus, in the space-time diagram, one 3-D section of the 4-D black guy is at event "A" while another 3-D section of the 4-D black guy is at event "C".
Then, you say, "Wait a minute, I thought all observers move along their 4th dimension at the speed of light?" The answer to that is that the bodies do not move at all--just some aspect of consciousness is doing the moving. It's a little like watching a movie. The movie film is a physical structure--a sequence of frames which give the psychological impression of time flowing with the action viewed by the observer.
A clock is not intrinsically connected to time; it is after all just a 4-dimensional object with periodic markers along the spatial 4th dimension, indicating elapsed time via psychological effects (since the consciousness is moving along watching the clock frames fly by at the speed of light).
We could put one minute time markers along an interstate and require all drivers to drive 60 mph, then, going from point A to point B along the highway we could keep track of our progress by reading how many minutes have elapsed since leaving point A. The time markers on the highway become a clock. That doesn't make the path along the highway "time." The 4th dimension is just another spatial dimension with the special aspect that it is the direction our conscousness moves at light speed. Presumeably, it has something to do with the fact the objects are typically thousands of billions of miles long along the 4th dimension (X4) and only a few feet in the other dimensions (X1, X2, X3).
Many other questions flow from this, but then we get dangerously close to violating the ground rules of the physics forum. We begin to stray far away from established physics principles and end up discussing philosophy.
There is more we could say and more space-time sketches that could be presented to clarify these ideas, but we have covered this topic in other threads and many here are pretty weary of the subject. I just thought it not fair to you to cut it too short, since it's not your fault that contentious discussions have already taken place.
You should check out the other posts linked to with ghwellsjr's post above. And yoron's post gives you a pretty good link, although it seems you would like a little clarification on some of what you've read there.
