ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Daniel Harper]

On Thursday 05 April 2007 08:56, you wrote:
<snip>
>
> OK, so if one could travel AT the speed of light (the fastest speed
> possible), then experience, memory, consciousness would cease to be
> because time itself would stop, right?  And time's passage slows
> relatively the closer one approaches that top speed, right?  And we're
> talking about travel through universal  space relative to some
> starting point?
>
> So here's a question that may or may not have meaning (I'm a complete
> novice with this stuff):  Is it possible to REDUCE the speed one is
> traveling through this universal space?  And if that were possible, I
> guess relative time (I guess relative to the expansion of space from
> the origin of the Big Bang?) would speed up?  So if we knew the
> location of the origin of the Big Bang and started flying there at a
> speed close to that of light, our relative time would speed up?
>
> This is really trippy,
>
> David Morris

I don't think it works that way. The point is that it's all _relative_, that 
you and I in our relatively small gravity well here on Earth are experiencing 
some sort of time dilation due to the motion of the Earth around the sun, the 
motion of the sun in the galaxy, the motion of the galaxy relative to other 
galaxies... et cetera. There is no single, fixed, objective standard that we 
can measure all time dilation by, no perfect clock that "ticks" at some rate 
by which all things can be compared.

I suppose you could measure the dilation experiences by a stable electron 
sitting in the middle of the Bootes Void or something, about as far from any 
dilating effects as possible, and use that as a reference point, but even 
compared to that theoretical limit, we're not moving fast enough (ie we're 
not dilated enough relative to that) to make a serious difference in terms of 
our sense of time.

In other words, in realspeak terms, we can make our lives pass more slowly, 
but I don't think there's a way to make it go more quickly.

-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper
countermonkey.blogspot.com