Next Argument:

Where am I going?

Where are you reading this? On your living room couch? In a car? On a plane? I’m writing this sitting at a desk in New York City. Other than my fingers typing, I do not appear to be moving. Are you? Ok, those of you who are reading this in some sort of vehicle are obviously moving, but what about the rest of us? Are we moving? The answer is yes. Not only are we moving, we are moving in more than one direction at once. We are also moving at absolutely mind-numbing speeds. Let me explain;

At the latitude I am sitting, the Earth is rotating about 800 mph to the East. That’s faster than a jet flies. It’s also faster than sound, so we are technically breaking the sound barrier just sitting here. But that’s probably the slowest of all the speeds. The Earth, the entire planet, is moving around the sun at about 64,000 mph! That’s about 20 miles PER SECOND. The Solar System is moving around the center of the Galaxy at about 514,000 mph, or almost 143 miles per second. The Galaxy in turn is moving at 1.3 MILLION mph through the universe, or more than 360 miles per second. But it’s not quite enough to simply state that you are or are not moving. What matters is are you moving with respect to what? So, the first movement is with respect to the Earth’s poles. We are moving 800 mph faster than if we were standing at the North Pole. The next movement would be our movement with respect to the Sun. The third movement would be with respect to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. But perhaps the most significant movement is our movement with respect to the Universe itself. That is, how fast are we moving away from the Singularity? Singularity is what physicists like to call it, but out of deference to Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hoffsteader, I am going to refer to it by it’s colloquial name, “The Big Bang”. That speed turns out to be 823,000 mph or almost 229 miles per second. Whew! And you thought you were just sitting there?

Ok, so we’re moving. So, we’re moving fast, really, really fast. So what? Well speed and movement have no particular meaning all by themselves. They only mean something when they are measured over a given time. That is a very important concept! One almost everyone overlooks. Notice the velocities I posted here. They are all in units of miles per HOUR. Or per SECOND. This means distance, time, and velocity are inextricably linked. One unit has no meaning without the other two. It’s like just knowing the height of something. If it doesn’t have the other dimensions, it’s a meaningless number.

So, you want to know what one second is? It’s the distance you traveled from a starting point 229 miles away at the velocity of our movement through the universe. It’s the 20 miles I traveled around the Earth’s Axis heading east or somewhere in New Jersey. The point is, time is distance at a given velocity. The bigger point is, that a point in time is a specific place. An actual place in the universe. A place that exists independent of us.

I’m sure you’ve heard it said that there are 4 dimensions. Length, Width, Depth, and the fourth one is time. Somehow everyone forgets that fourth one, but we do so at our peril.

Let me explain. I am sitting in a house with an address. The address helps people find me on a map and allows me to get mail and such. But there is also a calendar. The calendar tells me where both me and the house are in time. If I was in this exact physical spot 200 years ago there would not be a house here. Same thing if I was here 200 years from now, well probably no house anyway. The point is, the house, me, and everything else have a particular point in spacetime, spacetime meaning all 4 dimensions, where we start and where we end. That is a series of physical places that exist in a straight line from beginning to end. There is actually a word for it, a World Line. Most people just think in terms of now. But “now” is just a concept. To the extent that there actually is a now, it just that fleeting second where you’re in a particular spot in spacetime. What you really think of when you think of “now” is the immediate area on that World Line. Meaning a few seconds into the future and a few seconds into the past. Or in a physical sense, all the stuff that changes in the 229 miles since the last second.

Whew! Might want to take a moment to stop and let that sink in. It is, as before all absolutely true.