What if time doesn't exist outside of a black hole's event horizon?

a reply to: Jekka

It's something I've wondered about quite a bit, in conjunction with the human aging process. Obviously, physical changes are inevitable as we age, but I think that those changes might not be quite so profound if it were not for the psychological impact on the human body due to the power of our own minds. It is a well-known truth that those who have the longest lifespans, aside from genetics and environmental factors, tend to age differently because their outlook on age is different.

I think that over time (haha no pun intended), we have conditioned ourselves to expect certain things to happen at certain stages of life, based on chronological age, and we might very well be literally causing a more rapid advancement of age simply by having those expectations. We know the power that the mind has over the body is quite profound. We can literally manifest physical symptoms--and even disease processes--if we believe that we may be afflicted with something strongly enough, so it stands to reason that we could just as literally be manifesting a more rapid aging process and shortening our own lifespans, simply because it is ingrained in us that the passage of time will result in certain changes that we view and accept as being inevitable.

People in biblical times for instance, apparently lived incredibly long lives. We can read about that in the bible, and I'm sure other ancient texts as well, and I just have always wondered if perhaps it had something to do with the way they measured the passage of time. Obviously we're not going to stop measuring time, but if such an experiment could be done I would be most curious to see the results on the human body in relation to longevity, and perhaps even disease processes such as Alzheimer's that become a risk only after a certain chronological age. People always say "age is just a number" and relative to chronological age versus mental age, that is true...but what if it really isn't just a number? What if it's only a number because we say so? We might literally be cheating ourselves out of extra years simply because we count them in the first place.

a reply to: tigertatzen

Interesting thought process there. As far as some of the anticipated effects of aging I can see that being possible. Certain things are going to happen to us regardless due to the shortening of telomeres in our DNA strands as time passes but I do agree that the less one thinks about their age or at the very least the expected effects of certain chronological milestones, they would possibly have better health even if their lifespan isn't affected.

The Past once existed but it no longer exists only in recollection
The future has not happened yet only in imagination
How do we measure now
How long is an instant?

we passed it.....when? Just now.

a reply to: wdkirk

As I am reading your post it is but a recording of what you typed in the past as are these words
Time is a man made construct an abstract idea

Everything is constantly changing relative to what is affecting it

a reply to: Jekka

Space and time are inseperable that's why it's normally stated as spacetime. Gravity bends, curves and warps spacetime.

The closer you get to the EH the more dramatic the effect. If you watched someone fall into a black hole once they reached the EH you would see a stationary image of this person for an indeterminate amount of time then 'blink' gone. If you were falling in looking out, other then being moleculary shredded, you would not notice anything weird timewise until you die.

Given your op, it is similar to a theory I have regarding the big bang throughout to entropy. In the initial formation of the universe when space was infinitely small was time also following suit (actual time < 1 sec). As the universe grows becoming infinitely large does time distort with it(actual time > 1 sec). We are caught in an area of expansion where obviously 1 sec = 1 sec, but what if it doesn't start or end that way. We as humans gave time a value, what if the actually value of time stretches as our universe expands. In the grand scheme of 16 billion years so far, I'm not convinced we can make this determination from a few thousand years of observation.

Of course there is no simple way to determine this even if it's possible because it wouldn't alter our perception of time. Almost in the same way traveling at the speed of light one would not notice the dialation effects.

originally posted by: beezzer
a reply to: Jekka

*raises hand slowly*

Um, I was under the impression that gravity only affected mass.

How much does time weigh?

(or is that a stupid question. I'll accept stupid, if it is.)

you would be incorrect because mass does effect time. time passes slower next to a big mass such as say the pyramids compared to someone 1/4 of a mile away. it's not pyramid magic; its the mass/gravity thing. the truth is time does slow for someone near a black hole. in fact to a distant observer there is a point at which someone nearing a black hole just freezes in place. this does not save the hapless black hole explorer, though. they still from their point of view get spaghettified and eaten. however in theory if you approach a black hole closely enough you can use it to travel time. though most physicists believe that other physical principles would prevent you from taking advantage of your time shenanigens.

originally posted by: chr0naut

originally posted by: Brotherman
I thought time was an invention to measure how things change incrementally time really only effects humans.

Time is real and physical because everything does not happen at once, whether humans are present to perceive it, or not.

Everything could happen at once and we just slowly watch it unfold. My sole point is, time does not matter because it is not a force it is somethin we made to quantify change over an increment, without humans time does not matter. The other physical forces of the universe continue, and time ends because no one could be there to quantify change.

originally posted by: chr0naut

originally posted by: Brotherman
I thought time was an invention to measure how things change incrementally time really only effects humans.

Time is real and physical because everything does not happen at once, whether humans are present to perceive it, or not.

Time is a concept created by man to observe processes in the making. Surely when you are enjoying yourself time as we know it flies by and what could have been only an hour experienced, you looked at the clock and realise 4 hours has passed.

So you plug back into the general consenses of time and accept 4 hours has passed, but in fact you only created or experienced only 1 hour of time in your own reality.

In other words you've only aged 1 hour and the rest of the world aged 4 hours.

In that context time becomes irrelevant. Just throwing a spin on this interesting discussion.

So they say, enjoy life and stay young

Peace

Not sure if a super massive black hole creates time itself but it certainly can affect it. If you take it one step further....

Physicist Mark Hadley of the University of Warwick in England calculated the effects of the Milky Way's spin on the space-time around it. According to the theory of general relativity, the speed and angular momentum of such a large spinning body twists the space and time around it in a process called frame-dragging.
Because of the mammoth mass of our galaxy, this twisting should have an impact on space-time that is more than a million times stronger than that of Earth's spin, Hadley found.
link

Without Ambient Time, our universe just wouldn't be.
a reply to: Jekka

What if this was true and we were all slowly being sucked into the center of the SMBH, and the closer we got to the center, the further away everything further out would seem to move as time would almost seem to move backwards. All the while, everyone close to the center would think the universe was expanding and everyone far out would think that it was shrinking.

This is probably not how it would work in reality, but I just woke up and this is what my brain farted out after reading the OP lol...

Time is the locomotion of matter in a perceived space. If everything was static there would be no time and no perception of what time would be because essentially there would be nothing due to the fact that it was needed to birth to the universe.

There has been time since the beginning and until there is no more matter left in space it will not end.

And to some of the posters to this thread, if you think that because you're watching tv and it's an hour long and it feels like twenty minutes to you, you still aged an hour not twenty minutes. You can go to sleep for eight hours but it may feel like one hour, but dimensional time still ages you. Let's say you shave before you sleep and have a smooth face, sleep for your perceptional hour, then wake up, is your face still smooth or is it stubble again? I would say that you have aged eight hours regardless of perceptional time. Yet it's up to your mind on how it interprets it.

There is an episode of Bleach where a guy has been stabbed by a sword. The swords ability is when you impale someone it alters the perception of time to the victim. The victims perceptional time is slowed down so far that it would take a thousand years plus to finally die, having to be tortured by feeling the pain of the sword to what would feel like an eternity. To the attacker time to them flowed at the normal rate and the guy died instantly. So how long did time pass? A second or an eternity?

originally posted by: Jekka

originally posted by: Soylent Green Is People

originally posted by: Elvis_Is_Dead
a reply to: Jekka

Surely time is just a human concept, I would argue that time doesn't exist at all.

Then why doesn't everything in the universe happen at once?

To answer your rhetoric, because gravity as it affects what we call time causes entropic flow.

Yes. So in our universe (the universe we live in, react with, which reacts with us, and which we perceive) has an entropic flow of causality -- one event proceeding another event. Therefore, our universe has a flow of time.

I should add, physics shows that the causality does not necessarily have only one direction (even though we perceive it as such), but even if (for example) my broken coffee cup on the floor comes before it fell from the table, there is still a causality and entropic flow.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

you would be incorrect because mass does effect time. time passes slower next to a big mass such as say the pyramids compared to someone 1/4 of a mile away. it's not pyramid magic; its the mass/gravity thing.

Really? How fascinating! So you could set two synchronized clocks out, one at the pyramids and the other 1/4 mile away and they would actually record different increments of time? One would be behind the other?

a reply to: InnerPeace2012

Time is a concept created by man to observe processes in the making. Surely when you are enjoying yourself time as we know it flies by and what could have been only an hour experienced, you looked at the clock and realise 4 hours has passed.

So you plug back into the general consenses of time and accept 4 hours has passed, but in fact you only created or experienced only 1 hour of time in your own reality.

In other words you've only aged 1 hour and the rest of the world aged 4 hours.

In that context time becomes irrelevant. Just throwing a spin on this interesting discussion.

Is that why people always see something that is happening to them...say an accident...in slow motion? It really is happening in slow motion?

originally posted by: tigertatzen
a reply to: InnerPeace2012

Is that why people always see something that is happening to them...say an accident...in slow motion? It really is happening in slow motion?

Yes, you can take that literally, cause that's what people experience...

Peace

originally posted by: AnteBellum
a reply to: Jekka

The closer you get to the EH the more dramatic the effect. If you watched someone fall into a black hole once they reached the EH you would see a stationary image of this person for an indeterminate amount of time then 'blink' gone. If you were falling in looking out, other then being moleculary shredded, you would not notice anything weird timewise until you die.

This may sound ridiculous, but what if "time" at the event horizon appears to stand still to an outside observer because space is compressed, so that traveling an infinite(or exceedingly long) distance instantly appears to an outside observer as traveling no distance for an infinite (or exceedingly long) amount of time. Does that even make sense...I think I just confused myself.

Does the event horizon have to be a sharp cutoff...a boundary? Could it just be a perceived boundary from an outside time reference? What if inside the event horizon it just seemed like you were driving, swimming, strolling a really, really long way. If space-time is compressed wouldn't you become part of that reference? At what point would you pass over that you would be ripped to shreds, where is that line. Perhaps it is like a mirage, where we can only see so far into the event horizon before the differential is too great, but as you approach the event horizon that point moves ever farther.

Very clever.
If you go as far from galaxy's as you can.
Then for you time would be so slow that a galaxy would die before you did!
And you could not tel the difference.

So the galaxies we can see in space are a Lot older than we think.

Hmm? Light and the speed of light from that persons prospective?
Would the light they see slow too?
Yes, So they would see it as normal.