Next Argument:
What time is it?
What if the Sun exploded? Boom! Blew up in a massive explosion. Pieces flying everywhere. How would that affect you and me at this moment? I mean at the moment it blew up. The answer is it would not affect us at all. In fact, there is no way we could possibly even know about it. That’s because the Sun is 15 “light minutes” away from us. And absolutely nothing can travel faster than light, not even information. So, it would be 15 minutes at best before we even knew. So why am I bringing this up? Because I want to emphasize the point that time, distance, and velocity are all related.
When I was a kid I thought the speed at which time went was the same as the speed of light. I figured that if you could go faster than the speed of light, you could out run time and end up in the future. Turns out, I was partially right. What I got wrong was assuming that there was a speed of time. There are in fact many speeds at which time travels. All of them depend on the relative velocity of two objects. If you’re sitting at a desk and I drive past you in a car, time moves slower for me than it does for you because I am moving faster than you. Sounds kinda strange, but it’s true. It’s just that in order to notice any difference, there has to be a really big difference between the velocity of the objects. So, you wouldn’t notice that time moved any slower for the guy in the car than it did for you. If however, the other guy was not moving at 60 mph but at 17,500 mph, say in a space ship instead of a car, well then you would indeed notice a difference. This difference has not only been noticed; it’s been measured. Again, and again. In fact, in order for your GPS to work properly, the software running it has to adjust for the time difference between the satellites and the Earth. So, as you can see, there is no one speed of time. How fast time moves depends upon how fast you move. So that brings up the following situation: Given that I just pointed out that we are all moving really, really fast. And given that time has no absolute speed, what would happen if we stopped?
Well, among other things, time would stop. Period.
So, to bring this argument together; We have established that everything has a series of positions in spacetime. That the only reason we have the time at all is because we are moving. If we stop, which we couldn’t, time would stop. Without time, we would cease to exist. Just like if you removed one of the three special dimensions, say height.
Got it? Good. Let’s leave this here for now.
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