Heresy For Beginners

A few months ago I borrowed a book called Introducing Einstein from my local library. It was more than a little discouraging that I didn't understand it very well. I think I could cope with the prose, on the whole, but it was punctuated with complex sums and formulae with unexplained algebra. So, I think I got the broader themes without understanding to the point of being able to see the sense of it. If I understood the formulae I might have understood/agreed the more nonsensical bits within the prose.

As I understand it, the potentially relevant bit that Einstein says is that time slows down with motion, and the higher one's speed the more time slows down, until at the speed of light time stands still; and potentially beyond the speed of light time starts to go backwards. If you get into a space craft and fly off into space at very high speed and come back after what seems like a few days you might find that years have passed on earth. (Something like this happened in the film Flight of the Navigator)

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It sounds quite loopy but it seems to be generally accepted among those who know anything about science which makes me think there must be some logic to it. Also, they put an atomic clock (I think) onto a space shuttle which was synchronised with one on the ground. When the space shuttle returned the on-board clock was marginally behind the other one. This is said to have proved Einstein right. That also points to it being logical, the fact that Einstein could predict it.

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Einstein also said that mass increases with speed. The faster one travels the higher the mass until at the speed of light mass is infinite; which would preclude the possibility of going faster than light. (Presumably photons have zero mass or else they would crush us) The increase in mass seems to corellate with the slowing down of time. As mass increases, so time slows down until at infinte mass time stands still.

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It seems to me that it's not so much that time slows down as that with increased mass at high speed phsical processes slow down. ie. a clock ticks more slowly. I suggested this to a more enlightened former housemate, he said (in the case of the space shuttle experiment, above) they probably would have put the clock into a vacuum which would counter physical effects. I don't really know whether an atomic clock has physical workings anyway but presumably, if it has a readable display that changes, there must be some physical process going on. (I'm puzzled about this, does the vacuum make any difference? Isn't space a bit of a vacuum anyway? Is 'a bit of a vacuum' the worst ever description of space?)

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The other point I might make is that the illustration seems to assume the that the space ship was actually away for the same amount of time, it's just the people on the ground experienced that same quantity of time differently from those on board the space ship. Einstein, as far as I know, remained a thiest throughout his life, one of his most famous quotes is, 'God does not play dice'. Presumably, an objective observer (such as God) could see that while the the Earth orbitted the sun a few times the space ship flew off for a few laps of Uranus, Pluto, Jupiter and Saturn, and wherever else, and returned to the earth. From the objective observer's point of view the time was the same.

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One of the conclusions that I came to in my essay is that time is a feature of God's being and this time is 'objective time'. In this, I thought I was agreeing with Isaac Newton although I don't know his theory in any detail. (see paragraph on time without beginning) Einstein is said to have disproved Newton's theory that time was objective. It certainly seems true, given the experimental evidence that time can be exprerienced differently. But I might still contend that, if there is a God, then he/she stands in a position to say what the time actually is.

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Presumably, we can also say that by being very still we can speed up time. This might explain why I can never get enough sleep, as soon as I lose consciousness the planets whizz around to their morning/afternoon/evening position when I need to be up again. Of course, I can't be entirely static, my heart continues to beat, and my mind is active (hopefully), and I'm sat on this planet that's hurtling through space on its unending course around the sun. On the earth, we generally experience 1 second per second, but that's not objective time is it? Perhaps the best position from which to assess time is an absolutely static one from which 1 earth day passes in a second, or possibly all of time passes in an instant. If this is the best position from which to measure time then it suggests that God is static and possibly, therefore timeless.

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But if this is so, how can God be conscious or aware of anything? Consciousness and awareness suggest, to me at least, dynamism. And presumably, the more conscious and aware one is, the more dynamic too.

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The alternative seems to be to go to the opposite extreme and say that God's frequency is lightspeed. If this is so he/she observes all of human history in super-super-sllllooooowwwwww-motion. (I saw a documentary once about flies, which beat their wings 100 times per second, It showed a flies view of the world as one of slow motion, which might explain why it's difficult to swat them, they react too quickly for us at our lower frequency) This assumes that lightspeed is the limit, why could God not exist at an even higher frequency? Lightspeed might be a very arbitrary limit for a super-natural being abiding beyond our physical universe.

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Why am I so obsessed with this subject? Please help me somebody.

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One more little aside.

The book that I partially read about Einstein used the illustration of a car travelling at 50mph. When that car switches its lights on, the light still travels at the speed of light, not the speed of light + 50mph. This, it said, was evidenced by the fact that when you see a car travelling at night the glow of light eminating from the front of the car stays same distance from the front of the car. I can go along with that although it hurts my head to think about it. But what I don't understand is why. If photons have zero mass, why should they be limited to lightspeed?