Thread: Do We All Experience The Same Time Frame?

Time is relative.

Now this really has nothing and everything to do with Einstein's Theory of Relativity... and I thought about something. How is it possible for someone traveling near the speed of light to experience less time and yet still be in the same time frame as the still observer? Example: someone goes to another solar system near the speed of light, returns, and is 10 years younger than me. They experienced only 10 years of time, while I experienced 20 years, yet we are still in the same frame of time after this person returns.

Now, continuing, this is moving away from the paragraph above. When we sleep, we loose all track of time. A night seems like a few minutes. When I go to sleep, the next thing I know - it is morning. Now my brother, he goes to sleep two hours before me. The moment he goes unconscious, the next thing from his point of view, it is morning. However, from my point of view, I am still awake, aware of time, and it still night. Confusing right?

Well, let's say the person who traveled to another solar system - maybe this person went into the future. Maybe after 10 years had passed for me, he had arrived at a point that was still 10 years ahead of me. Maybe this happens when we loose awareness of time. From my little brother's point of view he had arrived to a point in time that was still a night's sleep away from mine. Because it's hard for me to comprehend someone only experiencing half the time that I have experienced, and yet still be in the same frame of time, both through near light speed travel, and complete loss of awareness of time as in sleep (though this is a lot easier to comprehend as fact).

I know time technically "doesn't exist" - but is classified as a dimension. I currently view time dialation like this as taking a meter stick, compressing it to 10cm, and still saying that it is 1m long.

Are you 2 years ahead of me? Is this post on the 15th page from your current point of view. Maybe this post doesn't even exist yet. (PS no I do not do drugs)

I don't know, I just have to many questions about the universe.

I have a theory that time actually has speeded up, for everybody. Used to just be old people saying time was going by so fast, now it's everybody, even kids. Does anybody have long boring stretches of time anymore? I don't think so--goes by too fast. Life is like a roll of toilet paper: the farther into you get, the faster it goes.

Does that help? I hope so.

Originally Posted by Moonbeam

I have a theory that time actually has speeded up, for everybody. Used to just be old people saying time was going by so fast, now it's everybody, even kids. Does anybody have long boring stretches of time anymore? I don't think so--goes by too fast. Life is like a roll of toilet paper: the farther into you get, the faster it goes.

Does that help? I hope so.[/b]

I myself have wondered why time flies when you are having fun. It really does! when you are doing something unexciting feel like time is going incredibly slowly but when you are having a good time, you pass through six hours in the snap of your fingers.

Originally Posted by blade5x

I know time technically "doesn't exist" - but is classified as a dimension. I currently view time dialation like this as taking a meter stick, compressing it to 10cm, and still saying that it is 1m long.

Are you 2 years ahead of me? Is this post on the 15th page from your current point of view. Maybe this post doesn't even exist yet. (PS no I do not do drugs)

I don't know, I just have to many questions about the universe.[/b]

Five miles is five miles, not matter how fast you drive. But five miles can be anything from a minute to an hour, depending on how fast you're going.

I liken this to time. We have a "rate of travel" through time that governs how much time we experience over the same amount of time. The faster we are going through space, the slower we are going through time. In fact, I think our overall speed (in both time and space combined) is always equal to the speed of light.

We are in approximately the same area of space-time; otherwise, we wouldn't be able to interact. I'd say I'm about where you are, give or take a second or so. Based on relativity, the maximum difference between our times is the time light would take to travel from me to you, which isn't long at all.

This post is not on page 15. You should know this forum doesn't distort our perception like that. And the post I just quoted most certainly exists.

Ask away, friend - I love to answer, although most of my answers are speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt.


"Time Flies" is psychological, though. When you have fun, you stop paying attention to the progression of time, and therefore whatever time you see when you finally pay attention will not be what you expected (becasue it is nowhere near the last time you paid attention to).

We are in approximately the same area of space-time; otherwise, we wouldn't be able to interact. I'd say I'm about where you are, give or take a second or so. Based on relativity, the maximum difference between our times is the time light would take to travel from me to you, which isn't long at all.

This post is not on page 15. You should know this forum doesn't distort our perception like that. And the post I just quoted most certainly exists.[/b]

I know, I was just throwing out numbers

The difference between our times - that makes sense. But how would that apply to person traveling near the speed of light who witnesses only 10 years pass by, while I witness 20 years pass by, and yet we still end up in the same time frame?

I know Einstein's T=T/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2))... but why does this work? How did he prove this? Does time just become independent for every observer - like there is the universal time, that we pretty much usually experience, and then there is the internal time, separate of the universal time, which is dependent on how fast you are moving? Maybe all time frames already exist?

I don't know see how traveling faster than someone has any affect on how long it takes their light to reach my eyes. I'm not sure this principle applies anymore for larger speeds. (doppler shifts do not apply because you can either see something speed up or slow down depending on which direction you'd be moving)

That is a VERY VERY hard question, well just look at dreams. ive hat a dream that lasted a week but in real life it was only 3 hours. how do you explain that?

You explain that like this, real time is irrelevant to dreams:

http://www.dreamviews.com/forum/inde...howtopic=44723

True but it is still time.

Dream time would be similar to me asking - is my little brother who is unconscious right now already experiencing tomorrow morning while I am sitting here experiencing this moment in time typing this message (this doesn't have to do with the light speed question, but it falls under the same category of the question).

I'm trying to deal with both "altered states of conscience time" and "real time", and both present the same questions to me in the end.

Thats not what i mean, imjust saying it doesnt add up . 2 hours sleep: 5 hours dream, there's 3 hours of time that went into a different dimension.thats all im sayin. and i know dream time isnt the same as real time

It didn't go into another dimension, it was built of conceptual thought. I don't think anyone really reads that topic I made. o.o

Also, your brother, who is unconscious isn't experiencing tomorrow morning already. This you can tell from your own experience of the moment. You wouldn't be in different frames of time and still be present physically, interactive and so on.

I went to a lecture by a guy who said time doesn't have a speed simply because speed is mesured based on time. So it would seem absurd to try to give time a speed when the notion of speed itself depends on time.
My 2 cents.

You don't understand the lightspeed - time travel stuff. At the time the guy is moving with (near) light speed, his timeframe slows down. If you could see him, he would seem as if he was doing everything very slowly. To him, everything would seem completely normal.

Sleep has nothing to do with it, people in a coma also age and just as fast as other people.

Originally Posted by Neruo

Sleep has nothing to do with it, people in a coma also age and just as fast as other people.[/b]

Yeah, but when they are in a coma, how do they percieve time? Would it be drawn out to seem like millennia? Or would it seem like only a few seconds passed even though they could have been incapacitated for 11 years. I have heard that when a person is in a coma, they are perfectly aware of everything around them.

Originally Posted by Chaos

Yeah, but when they are in a coma, how do they percieve time? Would it be drawn out to seem like millennia? Or would it seem like only a few seconds passed even though they could have been incapacitated for 11 years. I have heard that when a person is in a coma, they are perfectly aware of everything around them. [/b]

Sometimes people are aware, yes. Besides those cases, it is just like sleep. You lose sense of time. It doesn't seem long, it doesn't seem short. Maybe people are able to judge whether they have slept for 4 or 12 hours, but 1 or 10 years is hard to keep apart I would say.

Note that however authoritative I may sound, I'm thinking about it as I go along. I like to think about these things, but I don't have a degree in it.

Originally Posted by blade5x

The difference between our times - that makes sense. But how would that apply to person traveling near the speed of light who witnesses only 10 years pass by, while I witness 20 years pass by, and yet we still end up in the same time frame?[/b]

He passes through two time frames other than yours, and loses some time by doing so. He isn't really back in your time frame until he slows down to your speed.

A time frame is like a six-dimensional location (three coordinates space, three coordinates velocity). They cross each other in weird ways that can lose time through too many changes, but when we're in approximately the same place traveling at approximately the same speed our time frames are approximately the same.

Originally Posted by blade5x

I know Einstein's T=T/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2))... but why does this work? How did he prove this? Does time just become independent for every observer - like there is the universal time, that we pretty much usually experience, and then there is the internal time, separate of the universal time, which is dependent on how fast you are moving? Maybe all time frames already exist?[/b]

He didn't prove it - he made up something that sounded good, wrote some equations to describe it and turned out to be right. Much of science is creativity. Very little is solidly proven - it goes through hypothesis (cool idea), and eventually gets to theory (cool idea that really seems to work).

Originally Posted by blade5x

I don't know see how traveling faster than someone has any affect on how long it takes their light to reach my eyes. I'm not sure this principle applies anymore for larger speeds. (doppler shifts do not apply because you can either see something speed up or slow down depending on which direction you'd be moving)[/b]

It doesn't change the speed of light. The light will take exactly the same amount of time to reach your eye no matter how fast the source is traveling, but the distance does change the time. A red shift is the light coming to you more gradually than it was transmitted - not taking longer altogether, but longer delays between the parts because the source's location is changing mid-transmission. The light's lower-frequency because it's more spread out.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE("blade5x")</div>

They experienced only 10 years of time, while I experienced 20 years, yet we are still in the same frame of time after this person returns.[/b]

Well firstly, traveling at near speed of light for a while doesn&#39;t &#39;send&#39; anybody into the future. It simply means that time goes slower for the person travelling at that speed. 20 years of your time is equal to only 10 of his, and so he doesn&#39;t &#39;travel&#39; into the future in the sense you&#39;re thinking of. Interestingly, Einstein&#39;s special theory of relativity states that your friend could just as equally say that time was going normal for him - which it is - and you were the one speeding up.


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE("Moonbeam")</div>

I have a theory that time actually has speeded up, for everybody. Used to just be old people saying time was going by so fast, now it&#39;s everybody, even kids.[/b]

Granted, time might seem like it&#39;s going faster these days, but that&#39;s only a perceptual thing. It&#39;s like every generation claiming that the next generation is becoming immoral and is doomed to some sort of failure. Doesn&#39;t mean that it&#39;s happening. Technology might make our lives seem much more fast-paced, but all it has done is sped up communication - internet, media etc - so that our communication and development of ideas is generally much faster.


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE("CymekSniper&#39</div>

I myself have wondered why time flies when you are having fun. It really does&#33; when you are doing something unexciting feel like time is going incredibly slowly but when you are having a good time, you pass through six hours in the snap of your fingers.[/b]

It probably seems strange, but this is actually untrue. I understand that you&#39;re talking about our perceptions of time, but experiments show that we actually percieve time as going faster when we&#39;re doing absolutely nothing at all. A study was done where one group of people was shown an action movie and another sat in a blank room with nothing at all to do. Both groups did this for twenty minutes, and were asked to estimate how long they spent doing their task. Those doing nothing in the bare room felt that time went much faster than those who watched the movie. Our brains estimate time by asssessing how many &#39;tasks&#39; we&#39;ve done in that given time. Those who are constantly stimulated by different stimuli (having fun) feel that time has gone longer.

Time is just an idea to describe the speed of changes away from the singularity of the universe...


If you can&#39;t imagine what it&#39;s like to move at the speed of light just remember what it feels like to exist here on earth right now because we are always moving 670,684,629.384 miles through space, every hour of every day.

As I posted in another thread, the earth is rotating on it&#39;s axis at 1000 miles per hour. Not to mention, Earth is also moving around the Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. And how quickly we forget, that everything in our universe, including our sun and earth, is expanding outward, away from the singularity that spawned it at the speed of light of 670,616,629.384 miles per hour.

So basically, our perception of time is of our speed hurdling through space at any given moment. If someone went faster than we are currently moving, it would appear to them that outsiders are moving faster than normal. Did you know, satellites move about 13,000mph faster than us here on earth and as a result have to have their internal clocks sped up about 0.013seconds (or so?) every year to catch themselves up with us. So &#39;time&#39; isn&#39;t so much a law as it is, an idea to describe the speed of change from our point of view in our universe. I not quite sure what the question in this topic is posing. Personally, I feel the &#39;time is relative&#39; quite a simple idea to perceive, but I&#39;m also insanely cerebral most of the time so...yeah.
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In regards to our perception of time passing by quickly, anyone that has done ecstasy can attest to the feeling of 6hours going by in the blink of an eye. I&#39;ve felt so good that I&#39;ve had 6hours pass by to an almost scary degree. Where you and everyone around you are like, &#39;Say wha&#33;? It&#39;s morning already&#33;?&#39; That&#39;s one of those drugs that really puts a new meaning to the saying, &#39;Time flies...&#39;