Space and Time for a New Blog

Welcome! I started this new blog to create some separation between my Computer Circus blog, and my personal life. Not that there is really a distinct line between the two, but there are times when I contemplate issues that are unrelated to computers and would like to comment on them.

Tonight, I have some strange thoughts keeping me awake. I got to thinking about magnetism and how peculiar it is. Here is this invisible force that, when brought into the vacinity of ferrous materials, will create a tension that draws the material into (or into alignment with) the magnetic field.

But my thoughts quickly veered off that path, despite all the attractive avenues on that horizon. Instead, I thought how cool it would be if there was such thing as a light magnet. I have recently gleaned a new perspective about light, based on something I've kind of always known. When a light source is present (like a light bulb), the emitted light spills out in all [unhindered] directions...essentially flooding the room. I got to thinking about that and realized, after all the years of simply considering the term as a cliche, that this is rather literal. The room is filled with light, and I am swimming through it! But the only light I can actually see is the light that happens to fall on my eyes.

Light is not like water, however - it doesn't just fill a room and sit there. It travels in straight lines (relative to the fabric of space-time in which it travels). But it can be reflected. This pretty much amazes me, since you might think that anything travelling over 186,000 MPH should just blast right through anything it encountered. But we don't even feel it, and it bounces off just about everything. Everything that is visible, anyway. And the truly amazing thing about this (to me), is that it doesn't bounce like a ball - it simply, and instantaneously, veers off in another direction, not slowing down.

Light can be bent by a strong gravitational field or by sending it through a lens. Or can it? It is my contention that, from the light's perspective, it *always* travels in a straight line. But as I said previously, a straight line relative to the fabric of space-time through which it travels. It just makes sense to me [now] that space-time, itself, is altered by matter or by gravitational fields. I also had a revelation about time this evening that I won't even attempt to explain that was based on another recent contention of mine that time simply doesn't exist. I think time is an emergent conception or perception that exists merely because of our ability to perceive it, and is simply a measure of the rate at which things change. That is a very general, simplistic statement, but it is also a tangent to my current thoughts.

Or is it?

What if there was such a thing as a light magnet? Turn on this magnet, and it attracts light. Well, the thing is, I think it would have to be something that alters the nature of the surrounding region of space-time in order for the path of the light to be altered, to essentially draw the light into it. If that's the case, then it would effect everything around it, not just light (like a black hole). But aside from the technical details about how such a device might work, wouldn't it be cool? I think it would be very interesting to observe the visual effect. You could essentially make whatever is near it disappear, but it would disappear in the center of a sperical visual distortion. The view from inside would be just as peculiar as the outside appearance, but I think it would be cool either way. Actually, the effect would vary with the strength of the device, and a very high setting could probably create the appearance of a "black hole" (and, technically, might actually *be* a black hole).

Anyway, to kind of finish off my thought about light vs. space-time, it would explain the nature of light passing through, say, a glass of water or a block of glass. When you look through a glass of water, the view is distorted, because the light passing through it not only bends, but it slows down, too. At least from our perspective. The peculiar thing is that it instantaneously slows down when it enters the water, and instantaneously speeds up again when it exits.

From our perspective.

I believe if you were able to ride on a beam of light as it passed through a glass of water, you would not notice any change in speed or direction at all. The water, itself, is an alternate state of space-time, and as the light enters this realm, it merely becomes goverened by the nature of that alternate pocket of space-time, and since everything is relative, there is no apparent or perceptive change in speed or direction from the light's point of view, rather everything else around it would appear to change. To me, that is the only thing that could explain how the light appears to slow down and speed up, instantaneously. It is simply crossing between different fabrics of space-time.

So you have to wonder... If light appears to slow down when entering water from our perspective, is there another perspective on this universe within which light appears to be travelling slower within our familiar pocket of space-time? I mean, is there another realm where, from our perspective, light my actually appear to travel much faster that the speed limit that we observe from here?

Hmmm.

Anyway, I wish I had written down some thoughts the other day, because I was thinking about time dialation and how, when a mass (say, a human) is accelerated to near the speed of light, relative time tends to slow down for that mass. If you could hop in a ship and travel close to the speed of light, you could ride to the nearest star and back, packing only a sack lunch, yet would return to Earth thousands of years later to find nothing familiar. Oh, I remember what I was thinking about that. It takes infinite energy to accelerate mass to the speed of light. I *think* Einstein theorized that if you could exceed the speed of light, you could travel back in time.

But this would require more than infinite energy. From our perspective, anyway. But in the context of time travel, with my contention that time does not exist, this now makes sense to me. Of course it would take infinite energy to accelerate mass to the speed of light, because that is what it would take to "stop time" for that mass. From my perspective, time is merely a perception of changing states...and the universe is constantly changing states, at a rate of whatever the smallest increment of change is (though I'm not convinced there is an increment, as I think it is infinitely fluid). And in order to go back in time, everything in the entire universe would have to be reset to that previous state.

Everything.

This means even the time traveller...which means, if someone were to travel back in time, that person would be totally unaware that they did so, as they would return to the exact state they were in at the time to which they returned. That's my theory, anyway. And I would think that if you had inifinite energy, you could stop time (i.e. freeze the universe), or reshape it, if there was some way to do so, to put every atomic particle and whatever else this universe is built on, back to a previous state. The problem is, once you got everything stopped, you'd kind of lose control over what you could do next.

It's just fun to think of this kind of stuff. It's fun to dream and fun to try to figure shit out, even if it is all subjective and theoretical.

But what if it's true?

And why is it light can't pass through objects that we classify as "opaque"? Is it because the nature of their particular space-time "pockets" does not allow light to pass through, or is there something else going on? What happens to light energy that is supposedly "absorbed"? Is that just a convenient way of explaining an observation, or does that energy actually get transformed into another form of energy? And why are only certain frequencies of light absorbed in some materials, giving them the appearance of what we see as color?

Ah, the wandering mind. Sometimes it is a curse. It's 2:15 a.m. and I'd really rather be sleeping right now. But then the thought of that bothers me, because then I start wondering what dreams are.