Speed of Stop

If you launched in a rocket and went in direct opposite direction of our galaxies movement through space could you ever actually stop? In other words have no movement at all in relation to everything else in the universe? Would you age very fast. Would time exist at all if you had zero movement through space?

reply to post by Xeven


Time exists no matter what, now if you go faster and faster toward the speed of light you have to take relativity into account. You could live ten years on a ship in space traveling at .99% the speed of light and come back to find that 100k years have gone by.

Maybe phage can shed more light onto this subject.

reply to post by Xeven


You'll never be stopped relative to everything in the same epoch.

The nature of time isn't completely understood but most theories associate it with thermodynamic entropy because the both only go one "direction". You can't "stop" relative to everything though. That is a mind bender. The only place that has mass and experiences time stopping is inside the event horizon of a Black hole. Bosons are maximally packed and don't even vibrate.

I guess if you could calculate the momentum of everything and produce a vector and offset it, that would be closest to the notion of absolute stop. You need a lot of mass and velocity to do that though. So hang on to your coffee.

There is no "stop" except relative to something else that's moving.

Remember....ball of dirt hurtling through space.

You could physically stop, but you couldn't stop everything else.

Originally posted by Xeven
If you launched in a rocket and went in direct opposite direction of our galaxies movement through space could you ever actually stop? In other words have no movement at all in relation to everything else in the universe? Would you age very fast. Would time exist at all if you had zero movement through space?

It's possible though perhaps not with our current rocket technology.

The frame of reference one might apply in this situation is the cosmic microwave background, or CMB for short. You could become stationary with respect to that reference frame. The rate at which you'd age doesn't change much at non-relativistic velocities and while our galaxy is moving pretty fast relative to the CMB, it's still not that fast compared to the speed of light.

Where we don't know if time exists or not is inside the event horizon of a black hole. The math says time slows to a crawl just outside the event horizon and may stop at the event horizon and while there's math for what happens inside, we aren't sure if it's right. The density calculation is divide by zero and as many calculators tell you when you try to divide by zero, that's usually an error. If we ever develop a good theory of quantum gravity we might get some better math than dividing by zero.

Originally posted by Xeven
could you ever actually stop?. . .have no movement at all in relation to everything else in the universe?

You could be motionless in relation to the galaxy, BUT the galaxy IS moving too !!
. . .You know?. . . the univers expanding. . .?

Sooooooo, impossible to be motionless in the universe, I guess. . . B-)

EDIT to add:
Our points of reference are too far. . .
You measure your "so called" speed-in-the-universe in relation to what ? and how ?

Blue skies.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


It seems even the black holes move through space. Is our black hole driving us (our galaxy) through the Universe ? Is the black hole tugging on space and dragging everything else along?

I wonder what our actual speed as individuals is. In other words if you take the speed of the galaxy + speed of solar system + speed of Earth orbit etc... how fast am I moving through the universe and if I stop then what?

Back to speed of stop. If we could jump off our Galaxy and stop the galaxy would race away but would we dry up and rot away very fast since we are moving very slow or stopped?

Originally posted by Xeven
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

It seems even the black holes move through space. Is our black hole driving us (our galaxy) through the Universe ? Is the black hole tugging on space and dragging everything else along?

If dark matter really exists, that seems to be an even bigger factor than the black hole, according to current thinking.

I wonder what our actual speed as individuals is. In other words if you take the speed of the galaxy + speed of solar system + speed of Earth orbit etc... how fast am I moving through the universe and if I stop then what?

The angular momentum of the galaxy is a big factor you left out. If you spin a ball on a string over your head while running, the ball is going faster when it's going in the same direction you're running, and slower when going the opposite direction.

www.phy.duke.edu...

By measuring the amount of the dipole anisotropy (the bluest part of the sky is .0033 K hotter than average), we can determine the magnitude of the earth's motion with respect to the CMB: the earth is moving at a speed of 370 km/s in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

Back to speed of stop. If we could jump off our Galaxy and stop the galaxy would race away but would we dry up and rot away very fast since we are moving very slow or stopped?

You wouldn't notice much without instruments. With instruments you'd see this difference:

While on on Earth we see the CMB red-shifted in one direction and blue-shifted in the other, sort of like this graphic illustrates:

The earth is moving with respect to the matter that last emitted the CMB, and therefore the CMB spectrum looks bluest (and, by Wien's law, therefore hottest) in that direction and reddest (and coolest) opposite to that direction.

If you left Earth and stopped moving with respect to the CMB, you'd no longer see this effect, and if you subtract out all the motion effects we have relative to the CMB, it ends up looking like this:

Once the galactic contribution is removed, COBE saw this

When you see images of the CMB, this how they are usually presented.
Aside from that difference in appearance of the CMB which you need special instruments to detect, You probably wouldn't notice a big difference in anything else, aside from being lonely separated from the Earth's population. The speed of light is around 299,792 km/s, and 370 km/s is too small a fraction of that to cause significant aging discrepancies.

For example, the astronauts orbiting the Earth age at a different rate, due to combined gravitational and velocity effects which for the ISS end up with them aging a little slower, though satellites in higher orbits age slightly faster, but these discrepancies are measured in millionths of a second (microseconds) per day so it's not anything you'd notice without special instruments. Here's a site with a time dilation calculator so you can see how fast you'd need to go to slow down time by a certain amount:

www.1728.org...

Velocities in ordinary life which to us might seem incredibly fast have only a miniscule relativistic effect. For example, orbital velocity (5 miles per second) produces a relativistic factor of change of only 1.000000000360219.

Traveling at 93,141.1985 miles per second (half the speed of light) produces a factor of 1.1547005383792517. Here the velocity is incredibly fast and yet the change is still quite small.

You can plug in 370 km/s to see the relativistic factor for that velocity, 1.0000007616098334. So this illustrates the point that "Velocities in ordinary life which to us might seem incredibly fast have only a miniscule relativistic effect."