Motion = Time ?

Motion and Velocity

By Vern A. Westfall

 Unfortunately we have woven our misconception that time is a real quality into our formulas with misleading terms like speed and velocity, both of which are defined as “distance” divided by “time”. Formulae for motion have been so useful in identifying past and predicting future relative positions, we assume they also prove the legitimacy of the terms; time and distance, but do they? Having a three legged horse listed on a betting slip doesn’t prove the horse really exists. If we really want to be accurate, or at least complete, we should recognize “D”, distance and, “T” time, are only comparative terms. The muzzle velocity of a bullet is described by our time/distance formula as 2,200 feet per second, and as long as we compare it to other velocities using the same time/ distance convention, we create a useful and accurate comparative concept. For example: A satellite in low earth orbit travels at about 26,400 feet per second or about 12 times faster than a bullet, but if we are after a clear and complete concept of these velocities we need to include the hidden comparisons used to arrive at the terms; (a second) and (a foot).

Most of our “time” increments are based on how far the earth turns during an artificial increment of a full revolution. For a second it is 1/86,000^th of a full rotation. Keep in mind that the rotating earth is a movement, not a time and to arrive at a velocity, (in feet per second), we are dividing a comparative separation, “distance” (in this case the length of a king’s foot) by a very small fraction of one full rotation of the earth, (a comparative movement) so we are really dividing an arbitrary separation by an arbitrary movement. Distance, like time, is only a comparison and velocity, like time and distance, is only the derivative of other arbitrary comparison. All we can do is compare. Everything is changing and nothing seems established, until we get to light and then what do we do? We use the movement of a photon of light through space, (which may not be a universal constant), to measure both time and distance by inventing something we call a light year and compare one trip around the sun by our planet to a photon’s speed, which we learned above is made up of two other comparatives, time and distance. When we use the speed of light as a standard we are comparing a comparison to a comparison to arrive at a standard measurement for a (time- distance), What ever that is?  

Even Einstein got tangled up in these comparisons of comparisons when formulating his field equations and arrived at his universal constant, (a concept he later called his greatest mistake). It’s difficult to think outside the practical concepts and artificial comparative standards that guide us through life. They have made us great engineers, but occasionally a human mind escapes from our conceptual traps and catches a glimpse of the magnificent swirling universe beyond our formulae and is inspired to search further. We measure distances we cannot fathom, time periods we cannot imagine and speeds beyond our comprehension and delude ourselves into thinking we are close to final answers, but, if we ever find one, will we be able to appreciate it?  Look at a star and try to appreciate the fact that you are observing, not the star, but a small trace of radiation emitted so long ago that the earth has rotated 73,000,000 times since the bit radiation you are witnessing was sent out in all directions long ago.. Star light is sent out in an expanding sphere for observers everywhere in the universe, not just us. Have other observers also adopted The Light Year as a standard but based it on the orbital period of their planet? I doubt it.   

Who Stirred The Pot?

Who stirred the pot?

By Vern A. Westfall

For a very long time we, (mankind), assumed that we were living on a static flat surface and the sun, the moon and the stars were moving through the sky and then diving into the underworld only to reappear on the other side. For a very long time we envisioned the sky as a dome with the sun dominant during the day and the stars dominant at night. It was a grand show made especially for us and we accepted it in much the same way we later accepted the video game, asteroids. When the little space ship disappeared when it reached the edge of the screen and reappeared on the opposite side, still moving at the same pace, I doubt if anyone ever turned the game over to see if the little space ship was racing across the back of the game to get to the other side. But curiosity finally got the better of us and, like my dog occasionally trying to squeeze behind the TV to see where Lassie had gone, we took a closer look and started to track the motions above us. It took a lot of stone monuments to get the intervals right, and I wonder if we were trying to measure the heavenly movements or capture and control them by trapping them between bigger and bigger stones. My dog still hasn’t figured out where Lassie goes when she walks off the TV screen, but we humans have figured out why and how the sun, moon and stars move, and that we don’t live on a flat fixed earth. Explaining to the general public and to the church, how a round earth orbits the sun with the moon orbiting the earth, in the early renaissance was almost as difficult as me trying to explain Lassies TV disappearance to my dog. Eventually most of humanity got the new concept and now we throw ourselves into orbit, try to measure everything, and have found that everything in space seems to be going in circles.

I am getting older and occasionally I feel a bit dizzy, especially after a martini. I attribute these periods of dizziness to having spun around on the earth 27,375 times since I was born and I suppose being a bit dizzy is to be expected, but why all this circling and spinning. Planets spin on their axis and circle stars that are spinning and ride around in circles inside galaxies that are circling each other. I understand the concept that an ice skater turning slowly will spin faster when her arms are drawn in, but if she wasn’t turning at all when she pulled her arms in nothing would happen. So what started all this rotating and orbiting? Who, or what, stirred the pot, and when? Was the singularity spinning just before the big bang, did it blow out on opposite sides like a fourth of July fireworks pinwheel, or was the initial angular momentum built up from the inside as a natural consequence of attractive forces as energy condensed into atoms, atoms were gathered into a stellar dust by electrostatic attractions and dust particles were gathered by gravity to form stars, planets, comets, asteroids and galaxies? Even black holes spin. There is an enormous amount of angular momentum in the universe and as Einstein pointed out, angular momentum affects time the same way gravity affects time, it makes it run slower. It would seem that as gravity creates great centers of mass and causes them to spin ever faster it also slows all natural processes. Radioactive elements decay at a slower pace, I age slower, and as a fortunate consequence, I have time for one more martini. But all this is occurring at macro scales. What about at micro scales? According to our atomic physicists every thing is spinning in their world as well, and angular momentum is at the core of quantum mechanics where things don’t need time to move about or change conditions. Whoa!

I think I’ll have that martini now.

Whats Happening?

 What’s Happening?

By Vern A. Westfall

“What’s happening?” or “Wie Gehts?” or “的情况怎样?” is a familiar greeting used around the world. It isn't a sincere inquiry made to illicit a full explanation, if it were, we would be hard pressed to explain everything going on in the universe at that moment. The greeting asks only, what is occurring in your life that is significant at the moment, or in the recent past? It also assumes that the greeter knows your location. If I ask you “what’s happening? And the last I knew you were in Denver, I expect your answer to reflect your recent activities in Denver. But as we have learned in previous blogs”, position and time are comparatives which are affected by motion and we have invented conventions that allow us to ignore most of reality’s swirling confusion. But if I ignore reality, and call Denver from London at 8:00 AM, I will wake you in the middle of your night. I am setting in the sunlight having a cup of tea, and if time were a real static thing you would be awake and having a cup of coffee, but instead you are trying to sleep. Your static position is relevant to my static position only in that we are sharing a ride on the surface of a giant ball that is spinning and traveling in an orbit around a star.

When I ask, “What’s happening?” and you answer, “Nothing much,” you make a universal understatement. We are bobbing up and down while we spin around on the outer arm of a spiral galaxy, racing away from hundreds of billions of other galaxies, except Andromeda, (with which we will eventually collide) and, (because of our newly invented methods of en-masse communications), are evolving a new type of living awareness.  If I accept “Nothing much” as an answer to, “What’s happening?” as a sufficient answer, I am not really expecting an answer at all, and if I explain this to you by pointing out that we are bouncing our voices off satellites in geo synchronous orbits, you will probably tell me to go to Hell, and hang up.

The point is that we are tiny specs on a tiny planet lost somewhere in space, busy feeding and breeding, trying to remain oblivious to the discoveries of our curious scientists as they expose miracle after miracle for us to explain, or ignore. We don’t have to climb to the top of a mountain on a clear night to marvel at the stars, or travel the world to marvel at the diversity and persistence of life because the curious among us have captured these marvels in language nets and as digital information and made them ready, on demand, as shared synaptic realities. Our scientists, mathematicians and philosophers are fisherman, catching facts with intellectual nets drawn through inner and outer space by tools invented to let us see further and think faster.

We have become a significant part of the many miracles that make up the magnificence around us, and when another advanced awareness from elsewhere in space eventually contacts us and asks, “Hey, what’s happening?” How will we answer?  

Hopefully it will be with something more significant than, “Nothing much.”

Size Matters

Size Matters

By Vern A. Westfall

The complex interaction of all movements and changing conditions in the universe is well beyond measurement or prediction. There is just too much going on. To compensate we restrict our comparisons to things and comparative positions that fit within our observational capabilities, (our scope of awareness). We focus on small parts of the universe and have invented numerical relationships and formulae to compare one point in a group of changing positions to another as a way to isolate past relationships and predict future relationships. Two of these comparatives are distance and size.

A fixed distance is the space between objects moving at the same rate on parallel paths. (If there is a true fixed point somewhere in the universe, we haven’t found it.)  Everything is in motion. Even New York is in motion as it rotates with the earth at about 600 mph, goes around the sun at about 6,000 mph and rotates with the galaxy at about 60,000 mph.

A varying distance between objects occurs when objects are moving at dissimilar rates and/or are on dissimilar paths. We measure both fixed and changing distances using artificial comparatives, standards we have created so we can make comparisons, and we have a lot of them; a foot, a meter, a furlong, a link, a chain, a mile, a kilometer, a parsec, etc. We divide our standard comparatives into smaller pieces in arbitrary units like twelve inches to every foot and 5,280 feet to every mile, and for reasons we have long forgotten, we, in the US and England, have trapped ourselves into using these historical remnants. We have also trapped ourselves into using the convoluted mathematics that goes with these remnants. In most of the rest of the world more rational units, that reflect the girth of the earth and are multiples of ten, are the norm. All the systems we use as a standard comparison, however, are arbitrary, (even the metric system), there is no standard universal macro separation comparatives in nature. If any universal standards exist, they exist at atomic or light speed scales and to be useful for our everyday applications become numbers with such very large or very small exponents they have little practical value.

Fixed distances, like the size of a room, (expressed in feet or meters), or the distance between cities, (expressed in miles or kilometers), are extremely useful comparisons. We are able to visualize these distances and we use them so frequently we forget they are arbitrary constructs. When we attempt to extend our common comparatives to very large distances, (like the distance to Mars or the nearest star), or to the very small, (like the size of a hydrogen atom), we find our comparative conventions inadequate. Our concepts of distance, like our concepts regarding time, are very useful, but if we want to understand more of the reality around us we need to remember that they are arbitrary constructs, and avoid assigning them a reality they don’t possess, especially in mathematical formulations where we often misuse them as universal constants.

Distance has meaning only as a comparative that is relevant to the human scale of awareness, or to the scale of a human inquiry. Time has meaning only as a comparative relevant to motions being observed within the human pace of awareness, or to a pace relevant to a human inquiry.

Are there any natural static distances or rates of motions in nature? Einstein gave up the idea of a universal constant calling it his biggest mistake, but what of the speed of light?

We use the pace of light through space at 670 million miles per hour as a standard in our cosmological examinations and consider it a constant. But is it? Has light always traveled at the rate we measure today or, when examine light that began its journey billions of years ago, are we using comparative variable distances and movements as constants when, in fact, they have changed as the universe expanded? If so we may be drawing false conclusions as to the actual age of the universe and as to its rate of expansion. Dark energy may be a false conclusion based on the false assumption that time has always been a constant.

When Time Is It?

When time is it?

By Vern A. Westfall

I find it curious that we don’t have a proper interrogative to ask for the current time. We use Why to get an explanation of purpose, Where to get a location, How to get an explanation of process, Who to get the identity of a person, Why to get a reason for an action, When to get a time specified in the past or the future, and What to get an explanation for a process or an explanation of an object, but we don’t ask; “When time is it?”, instead we ask “What time is it?” It’s as if we were asking for an explanation rather than specific current moment, and maybe we are. Time is a curious thing, especially since Einstein pointed out that acceleration changes the rate at which things happen and motion can go faster or slower depending on where you are. Even gravity can slow things down, but time is only a rate of motion and it’s obvious that things don’t all move at the same rate. Some things move faster and some things move slower. The only motion limits we know are a temperature of absolute zero, where everything stops and the speed limit of light which nothing can exceed. So what happens to our concept of time at these extremes? Curiously time comes to a dead stop at both extremes and none of this makes any sense to a life form with a pace of awareness geared to the slow rotation of a small planet.

If we want to know what is happening on the surface of the sun we have to wait for the Earth to rotate 1/160^th of a full rotation for the news to reach us. The reason we have to wait is for the information to cover the 93 million miles between us and the sun. Light from the sun, and all other electromagnetic radiation, travels fast, but things in space are far apart and our only link to what’s happening out there is from light traveling at 670 million miles an hour. Even at this speed, when we look at distant galaxies we aren’t looking at what is happening now. Instead we are looking at what was happening millions or even billions of years ago. Current events aren’t possible in space. Real time surveillance isn’t possible for distant objects.  

The most accurate clocks yet invented are two atomic clocks located in Bolder Colorado. They run at a rate determined by vibrating ions. The pace of vibration running these clocks is also determined by their location in the earth’s gravitational field. As an experiment one clock was raised above the other which created a very slight difference in gravity and caused the higher clock to run measurably faster. More gravity, (G force), produces slower comparative movements. Acceleration, (G force) also produces slower comparative movements. If you want to outlive your grandchildren go on a long space voyage under constant acceleration, both on your way out and on your way back or, strap yourself into a centrifuge and endure a very long period of high G’s, or move to the crushing gravity of a large planet. You won’t notice any difference in your heart beat or aging process but they will be out of sync with those still living in a one G environment. To reverse the process and let your grand children catch up, move back to Earth and put them in a zero G environment for an extended period. You will need extremes to make any significant difference, but the effect is real and it wouldn’t make any sense for you to ask your grand children “What time is it?

        When or Where time is it?” would be more appropriate.