Speed of Time: How Fast Does Time Travel?

[conner.ubert]

How fast does time travel when it is not interrupted by curves in space-time? In other words what is the fastest time can travel? By how fast does it travel, to elaborate, I mean what is the fastest possible transition from one moment in the past to another moment in the future? Is it the speed of light or maybe faster? Or is time the fastest thing in the universe and light can only travel as fast as time will allow?

I hope this makes sense.

 

[Bloodthunder]

Time always travels at a very slow rate of 1 second per second.

 

[conner.ubert]

how is that defined as a slow rate? since time is directly proportional to itself wouldn't it travel .00000000001 seconds every .00000000001 seconds. To define time as slow something would have to travel faster than time to demean its speed.

 

[Oldfart]

I'm confused. Can one measure the speed of time in terms of feet per second, like light? It does sound better to me to say seconds per second, but is that really a speed (velocity)?

We do use speed-like descriptions for time, like time slows down near a black hole, or speeds up as we carry an atomic clock up the stairs. But does "speed of time" really have meaning?

Duhh...

 

[rbj]

Time always travels at a very slow rate of 1 second per second.

Steve Miller: "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', into the future..."

(i like quoting that song every time someone asks about time travel. while i doubt that time travel to the past can ever be possible, any of us can time travel to the future.)

and i would not characterize that rate as slow or fast. it is what it is.

 

[easyrider]

I think bloodthunder was joking, this is a strange question. I think 10E-43 seconds is the shortest possible time if that's what youre wondering. OTOH, v=d/t, substitue d for t and you always end up with 1. Its like how much faster could something be, and the answer is none, none more fast. Lol, pretty much nonsense.

 

[Travis_King]

Time is relative.

 

[Hootenanny]

I think that your question probably boils down to this: "What is the smallest chunk of time we can have?" or in the jargon: "Is time quantized?". The short answer is maybe. The is no experimental evidence supporting the idea of quantized time, but at the same time, there are no theories prohibiting it, yet again, there are no well developed theories that propose it.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Time does not travel, things travel through time. Everything travels through time at the same rate in their own reference frame but different frames will disagree.

 

[Polyrhythmic]

The question makes no sense, that's like asking "how long is length?".

 

[Naty1]

How fast does time travel when it is not interrupted by curves in space-time?

Time is not "interrupted" by curves in space time.

In other words what is the fastest time can travel?

It passes at it's regulalarly observed rate in local reference frames.


But according to Einstein, the observed passage of time depends on the reference frame of the observer and is different for observers in relative motion. Einstein showed that people traveling at different speeds will measure different time separations. The effects usually become noticeable for objects moving at speeds approaching the speed of light.

 

[SamuelRiv]

The question is legitimate. We often say "The faster you go, the slower time goes" or "Time slows down when you get close to a black hole".

Special relativity: see the Twin Paradox for the basic idea. If I travel very fast away from you to a distant star and back, the time I experience relative to you is multiplied by a factor of gamma = sqrt(1-v²/c²). So if I travel at 0.87c (nearly 90% of the speed of light) relative to you, gamma = 0.5, so my "time" went half as fast during that journey.

One could then perhaps say that time for me goes at a speed of 1 second-of-me per 2 seconds-of-you?

There's no absolute time frame, however, as all positions and speeds are relative, so the best one can say is that all time is fixed to the speed of light.

People more versed in relativity could probably give you more.

 

[ZapperZ]

The question is legitimate. We often say "The faster you go, the slower time goes" or "Time slows down when you get close to a black hole".

Special relativity: see the Twin Paradox for the basic idea. If I travel very fast away from you to a distant star and back, the time I experience relative to you is multiplied by a factor of gamma = sqrt(1-v²/c²). So if I travel at 0.87c (nearly 90% of the speed of light) relative to you, gamma = 0.5, so my "time" went half as fast during that journey.

One could then perhaps say that time for me goes at a speed of 1 second-of-me per 2 seconds-of-you?

There's no absolute time frame, however, as all positions and speeds are relative, so the best one can say is that all time is fixed to the speed of light.

People more versed in relativity could probably give you more.

People more versed in relativity would NOT consider this as "speed of time". For example, have you ever seen such a phrase being used in a paper?

Zz.

 

[DaveC426913]

This is the definitive answer:

The question makes no sense, that's like asking "how long is length?".

Time is a dimension, like length.

 

[WannabeNewton]

We often say "The faster you go, the slower time goes" or "Time slows down when you get close to a black hole".

Both statements are incorrect in the context you are speaking of. One measures time in his/her reference frame and in that frame time goes neither faster nor slower due to "increased speed" because in your own locally inertial frame you are at rest. Frames that are non - inertial with respect to yours will experience time dilation. Similarly, proper time, which is the frame - invariant measure of time, does not slow down to zero at the event horizon of a black hole.

 

[bobc2]

Conner.ubert,

Hopefully this does not add confusion to the discussion. But, you may be interested in considering the motion of an observer in his own "rest" frame. His velocity is zero along any of our 3-D world directions (X1, X2, X3). But every observer is moving at the speed of light, c, along his own 4th dimension, X4. dX4/dt = c.

Some people like to say that all observers are moving straight into time at the speed of light. I prefer to focus on the 4th dimension as a spatial dimension with motion along the 4th spatial dimension described by dX4/dt = c. So, you might think of yourself as you sit still in a chair, observing the motion of the second hand on your clock, as moving into the 4th dimension at the speed of light, observing a continuous sequence of 3-D cross-section views of your 4-dimensional clock. You are not watching time go by, rather you are experiencing new 3-D cross-sections of 4-dimensional space. Your clock may extend for billions (or trillions) of miles into the 4th dimension. Each second you have moved another 186,000 miles along that direction--every 186,000 miles the second hand is found to be in another position. The marks and labels on the face of the clock could just as easily be displayed as distance traveled along the 4th dimension from some established starting point.

I thought you might be confusing the speed of time with the speed of an observer along the 4th dimension.

 

[bobc2]

...Frames that are non - inertial with respect to yours will experience time dilation...

I know what you are saying, WannabeNewton. I would be careful not to imply that the frame moving with respect to my rest frame experiences time dilation. Rather, I would observe his clock running slow compared to mine. His time is only dilated from my point of view. His frame is not really experiencing the dilation. And of course this is because the 3-D cross-section of his 4-dimensional clock is part of my 3-D world, which is a different instantaneous 3-D world than the one he is living in at that instant.

Our two different instantaneous 3-D worlds occupy different 3-D cross-section views of his 4-dimensional clock.

I know you are fully aware of this, because in previous posts you have pointed out the error of thinking someone's clock is running slow in his own inertial frame just because he is in motion with respect to someone else. Please don't think I was being argumentative (admittedly a little picky--perhaps unecessarily).

 

[samm dickens]

How fast does time travel when it is not interrupted by curves in space-time? In other words what is the fastest time can travel? By how fast does it travel, to elaborate, I mean what is the fastest possible transition from one moment in the past to another moment in the future? Is it the speed of light or maybe faster? Or is time the fastest thing in the universe and light can only travel as fast as time will allow?

I hope this makes sense.

Hi, conner. We say that someone moving away from us at near light speed appears to move slower through time than we do. In this sense we say that time has a relative speed. Furthermore, we say that a clock in orbit around the Earth moves faster than a clock on the earth, so again we are saying that time has a relative speed. I believe you are talking about these relative speeds of time and asking how fast time can travel in the absense of (1) all relative motion and (2) all gravitational slowing.

Would an answer based on Earth time as a stationary speed of time (that's all relative anyway), and corrected for the effect of Earth's gravity (and maybe the gravitational effects of the Sun and Moon, etc.?) give you the answer you need? I don't know how much time dilation is caused by one gee of gravity so I can't even give you the simple answer, but I think someone can.

Samm

 

[manojr]

How fast does time travel when it is not interrupted by curves in space-time? In other words what is the fastest time can travel?

Some members have correctly mentioned that time does not travel.

Does following make sense, can some expert comment please?
Clocks run more slowly in deeper gravitational wells (gravitational time dilation), and moving clocks tick more slowly than an observer's stationary clock. In both cases, we see the effect of time ticking slowly. Never do we see clocks ticking faster. So, answer to your question is, time can travel (tick) only as fast as it travels in your reference frame. It may tick slower, but never faster.

 

[DaveC426913]

Some members have correctly mentioned that time does not travel.

Does following make sense, can some expert comment please?
Clocks run more slowly in deeper gravitational wells (gravitational time dilation), and moving clocks tick more slowly than an observer's stationary clock. In both cases, we see the effect of time ticking slowly. Never do we see clocks ticking faster. So, answer to your question is, time can travel (tick) only as fast as it travels in your reference frame. It may tick slower, but never faster.

Perfect.

 

[marcus]

How fast does time travel when it is not interrupted by curves in space-time? In other words what is the fastest time can travel? By how fast does it travel, to elaborate, I mean what is the fastest possible transition from one moment in the past to another moment in the future?...
...

Some members have correctly mentioned that time does not travel.

Does following make sense, can some expert comment please?
Clocks run more slowly in deeper gravitational wells (gravitational time dilation), and moving clocks tick more slowly than an observer's stationary clock. In both cases, we see the effect of time ticking slowly. Never do we see clocks ticking faster. So, answer to your question is, time can travel (tick) only as fast as it travels in your reference frame. It may tick slower, but never faster.

The speed of time (in the sense of a ratio between two rates of time-passage) was the topic of a technical paper recently, and a talk by Matteo Smerlak, a postdoc at Perimeter Institute in Canada. I think it's still an area of active research interest---not everything is resolved about it. Just my non-expert opinion.

Around 1930 Tolman (a relativist at Oxford) discovered that the gravitational field has a temperature---this is called the Tolman effect, or the Tolman-Ehrenfest effect.

In 2011 Smerlak and Rovelli published a paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity showing that this Tolman temperature was the ratio of two rates of time-passage i.e. the speed of one time compared with the other.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2985
Thermal time and the Tolman-Ehrenfest effect: temperature as the "speed of time"
Carlo Rovelli, Matteo Smerlak
The notion of thermal time has been introduced as a possible basis for a fully general-relativistic thermodynamics. Here we study this notion in the restricted context of stationary spacetimes. We show that the Tolman-Ehrenfest effect (in a stationary gravitational field, temperature is not constant in space at thermal equilibrium) can be derived very simply by applying the equivalence principle to a key property of thermal time: at equilibrium, temperature is the rate of thermal time with respect to proper time - the 'speed of (thermal) time'. Unlike other published derivations of the Tolman-Ehrenfest relation, this one is free from any further dynamical assumption, thereby illustrating the physical import of the notion of thermal time.
4 pages Class.Quant.Grav.28,2011

Here is a Vimeo (online video) of a portion of Smerlak's talk about this in March 2011:
http://vimeo.com/33363491

 

[Low-Q]

Time and speed of light are related. Both are slowing down in a gravity field at the same rate. GPS satelites are compensated for the less gravity in space. Their clock are tuned slightly slower than the clock on earth. When the satelite is orbiting, its clock speeds up due to less gravity and finally syncs correctly with the clock on the ground. If not, the GPS in your car would display an error of several meters over a relative short distance of travel.

 

[Naty1]

Time passes one second locally when local light has traveled 299,792,458 meters locally.

 

[cosmik debris]

Some members have correctly mentioned that time does not travel.

Does following make sense, can some expert comment please?
Clocks run more slowly in deeper gravitational wells (gravitational time dilation), and moving clocks tick more slowly than an observer's stationary clock. In both cases, we see the effect of time ticking slowly. Never do we see clocks ticking faster. So, answer to your question is, time can travel (tick) only as fast as it travels in your reference frame. It may tick slower, but never faster.

Suppose you are in a deep gravitational well, doesn't a clock higher up appear to tick faster?

 

[Oldfart]

Suppose you are in a deep gravitational well, doesn't a clock higher up appear to tick faster?

This question seems to beg another: What is the MAXIMUM possible speed-up of a clock, assuming it is a vast distance from the gravity well (Earth) and assuming it has no relative velocity relative to Earth? I suppose that the mass if the clock itself needs to be considered, let's say it's one Kg.

 

[manojr]

Suppose you are in a deep gravitational well, doesn't a clock higher up appear to tick faster?

Yes, clocks up in satellites do tick faster.

This question seems to beg another: What is the MAXIMUM possible speed-up of a clock, assuming it is a vast distance from the gravity well (Earth) and assuming it has no relative velocity relative to Earth? I suppose that the mass if the clock itself needs to be considered, let's say it's one Kg.

From wikipedia (Gravitational time_dilation Outside a non rotating sphere):
the fast-ticking observer is using Schwarzschild coordinates, a coordinate system where a clock at infinite distance from the massive sphere would tick at one second per second of coordinate time, while closer clocks would tick at less than that rate".
"clock on the surface of the Earth (assuming it does not rotate) will accumulate around 0.0219 seconds less than a distant observer over a period of one year."

To compare with solar system, I did some calculation, assuming sun as point mass, it's Schwarzschild Radius of 3000 meters, the ratio of coordinate time to proper time at various distances from sun are as following:
At Schwarzschild Radius: Undefined (clock runs infinitely slow)
At 1 meter from Schwarzschild Radius: 0.018596951
At Earth (1 AU): 1.000141631
At outer edge of solar system (at around 1000 AU): 1.000001416
Far away from solar system (at around 1000000 AU): 1

 

[Bobbywhy]

How fast does time travel when it is not interrupted by curves in space-time? In other words what is the fastest time can travel? By how fast does it travel, to elaborate, I mean what is the fastest possible transition from one moment in the past to another moment in the future? Is it the speed of light or maybe faster? Or is time the fastest thing in the universe and light can only travel as fast as time will allow?

I hope this makes sense.

I agree with Hootenanny here in post #8 where, on 14 September 2011, he said the question can be restated to "Can time be quantized?"

My answer is yes, time can be quantized. One may google "chronon" to find a description of this shortest duration of time, plus these two additional sources for reference:

arXiv.org > hep-th > arXiv:hep-th/0308190
High Energy Physics - Theory
Title:Time Quantization and q-Deformations
Authors:Claudio Albanese, Stephan Lawi


arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:quant-ph/9706059
Quantum Physics
Title:Introduction of a Quantum of Time ("chronon"), and its Consequences for Quantum Mechanics
Authors:Ruy A. H. Farias, Erasmo Recami

Cheers,
Bobbywhy