10 ms·

Is the Physics of Time Changing?

73 points by fortran77 3y ago

lyapunova 3y ago
I'm sorry but this is just a depressing article... Seems like it offers no upside.
kawhah 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- bawolff 3y ago
  In this case, the article doesn't even seen to try to answer the question posed.
bawolff 3y ago
> Intrigued by the pervasive sense of pandemic-induced time distortion, psychologists at first speculated that loss of temporal landmarks was at work: office, gym, pulling on of pants. Words such as “Blursday” crept into the vocabulary, along with “polycrisis” and “permacrisis,” referring to the plethora of perturbances creating instability, pushing time out of sync: war, climate, politics. I dont know. To me it seems like the obvious answer is a bunch of people who have never been depressed before became depressed during covid.
- atoav 3y ago
  As a freelancer who always lived like that (but ironically had to work with people throughtout the whole pandemic): I thought it was kind of curious what toll that livestyle change took on people. Granted I did choose that life voluntarily and it naturally feels different if something is forced on you — but the pandemic was really revealing in many ways. I was surprised how afraid many people are of being left to themselves in their own flats and what a big topic this was for them. Many people don't seem to have any other interest than meeting other people. On top of they couldn't take it that a governmental body mandated some reasonable rules binding them within a global pandemic of a (back then: unknown) virus. So they priorized their hurt feelings over the literal existence of hundreds of their peers, whom they ironically longed to see. As if they were leeches who miss their hosts. It also revealed some interesting things about social contracts, about who is really essential for the functioning of a society and how little we value them. A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. People just wanted to get rid of their kids and they hated being alone with them as much as they hated being alone with themselves. Mow I am of course underlining all the bad actors and not the many heroic, reasonable, strong and caring people who volunteered to help others. But the number of bad actors shocked me. If anything, the whole episode left me with the feeling that I am a stable adult person with a good moral compass and that many people of whom I had assumed the same are neither.
  - firstplacelast 3y ago
    That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think. I'm an introvert, I remember craving friendly interaction 6-months in and then being worried about my extrovert friends. If I am feeling crazy about the lack of human interaction, I KNEW some friends that must be having a hard time. I made it a point to call those people to catch up. I do agree about the weird "hero/essential workers", the same "salt of the earth" BS that has been spouted for decades. Essential people that we want to pay like crap to keep our society running. They should all stop, be willing to die, until they are paid enough to buy a crappy home. Essential means they have big negotiating power, organize/unionize and stick the screws to society. Think like a CEO. Also saw all the crazy bad actors, the insane takes on social media (on both sides- though more so on one side), the insanity, the lack of nuance, the shit throwing...I lost a lot of respect for humanity. As a person that was working in biotech in an R&D department at the time, something in my brain broke. Could not care anymore about making the world better, helping people live longer, contributing to coffers of multi-millionaires bc I was "making the world better". Just done with it. There's no global moral compass, otherwise you would jump off a bridge, just a local one, as far as I'm concerned.
    - atoav 3y ago
      > That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think. Don't get me wrong here, I am a very (sometimes overly) empathic person, I am the guy people run to for advice when they want to know how to talk to other people, because I can put myself into other people's shoes. But that doesn't necessarily mean I like what I see when I put myself into thoes shoes. So if my post sounds unempathic, it does so because it is the pure distilled cycism of someone who really has it up to here with a certain unempathic, egomanic type of person — call it a enritled, vocal, screaming minority if you will. I understand how horrible the whole thing felt to them. To a certain degree I even subscribe to Schopenhauer's notion of: "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants", so I am not even sure they can be blamed that they felt that way. But because I understand a feeling doesn't mean I have to approve with the actions and words they derived from those feelings. That doesn't mean that in my view we gave those people way to much area on the stage of the pandemic as opposed to all the pressing social issues that actually emerged.
- logicchains 3y ago
  Recent research supports this: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2809947 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... . People staying at home led to depression, and the less people went out, the more depressed they were.
3seashells 3y ago
Time is subjective, as in new memories or new things are perceived as more time. Thus doing the same thing over and over shortens your life.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  It's funny because when I'm doing the same thing over and over it feels like time never ends and it takes forever.
davedx 3y ago
Spoiler: no
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Worse spoiler: We would never know. It may turn out that the time-space manifold is not only locally curved (as a view on gravity), but that the laws of physics - in concert - change across space-time. But any observer "looking out", as it were, from a single point using the instruments, telescopes and clocks to hand, would see no change. Therefore questions about whether the laws of physics are universal or local seem unfalsifiable and on a par with whether or not God exists.
- Spare_account 3y ago
  As per Betteridge's law of headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
  - tempodox 3y ago
    This just in: Is Betteridge's law of headlines changing?
rhdunn 3y ago
Our brains filter out repetitive events, so if every day follows the same routine you are going to remember less of those than if something happened on those days -- like going on holiday, or the start of the pandemic. When you look back, you will remember those key events, but everything else will be a blur. This happens a lot as you grow older, but the pandemic is a shared collective version of this, so may be a young adult's first experience of this phenomena. There's also an interesting thought experiment I came up with for this. Spend an hour each on the following tasks: 1. sitting on a chair watching a clock; 2. reading a book you like. In the first task you would say that time was slow as you are aware of it passing. In the second task you would say that time flew past as you are not consciously aware of the time passing, being engrossed in the book (or other activity where you are not actively monitoring time in some way). Time passed by the same, its just the perception of it that differs.
- yunohn 3y ago
  > Our brains filter out repetitive events Literal compression by neural networks.
  - whycome 3y ago
    literal neural literal networks
- varispeed 3y ago
  Could this have something to do with quantum physics? As in we only experience / feel time when we observe it?
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Highly unlikely. It has more to do with what we focus our attention on, rather than anything in physics. It's like Einstein's[1] explanation of the relativity of time - "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours” - which actually has nothing to do with the relativity of time, since the entities are not moving with respect to each other. [1] Einstein apparently had his secretary give this answer when people asked for an explanation of relativity, because they didn't understand accurate answers (source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/24/hot-stove/#:~:text=That's%20relativity.,-In%20June%201930&text=Prof.,it%20seems%20like%20an%20hour.%E2%80%9D) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/24/hot-stove/#:~:text=....
nologic01 3y ago
It did for a moment, but then some time passed and it was all back to normal again.
GnarfGnarf 3y ago
Time does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative movement of matter. Every way we measure "time" involves the movement of matter: sun dial, pendulum, spring & gears in a mechanical watch, vibrations of electrons in an electronic watch. When you say that an hour has elapsed, it simply means the earth has rotated 15°. When you go 60 mph, you have moved 60 miles while the earth has rotated 15°. The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Time is a creation of the mind. If there were no matter, there would be no time.
- tikwidd 3y ago
  Matter does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative progress of time. Every way we measure "matter" involves the progress of time: microscope, telescope, ruler, calipers, vibrations of photons hitting the eye. When you say that the earth has rotated 15°, it simply means an hour has elapsed. When you move 60 miles while the earth rotates 15°, you have gone 60 mph. The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Matter is a creation of the mind. If there were no time, there would be no matter. (sorry)
  - krapp 3y ago
    EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE WITHIN SINGLE ROTATION. 4 CORNER DAYS PROVES 1 DAY 1 GOD IS TAUGHT EVIL. IGNORANCE OF TIMECUBE4 SIMPLE MATH IS RETARDATION AND EVIL EDUCATION DAMNATION. CUBELESS AMERICANS DESERVE - AND SHALL BE EXTERMINATED. (sorry not sorry.)
    - standardly 3y ago
      I think you're on to something! You should create a website about it
- zigzag312 3y ago
  If time is a creation of the mind why can't we reverse it? :)
nmeofthestate 3y ago
Sorry, I don't have time to extract the point from this rambling discursive style of content.
rippeltippel 3y ago
There's a featured video linked from the article: "Theoretical Physicist Explains Time in 5 Levels of Difficulty" [1] with physicist Brian Greene. At minute 5:52 he describes the light clock, and at 6:36 he computes the ratio between a stationary and a moving clock. In the first passage, he writes T_s / T_m = D / L. Shouldn't it be the opposite (i.e. L / D), since D is the distance that a photon travels in the moving clock? Can anyone clarify that, please? [1] https://www.wired.com/video/watch/theoretical-physicist-explains-time-in-5-levels-of-difficulty https://www.wired.com/video/watch/theoretical-physicist-expl...
jablongo 3y ago
Not seeing this in any of the comments but may have missed it: To me the obvious answer here is increased screen time across the board, precipitated by the pandemic. It's easy to see why this would lead to a perceived faster flow of time; do you form memories of your screen time? Personally I have next to no distinct memories of consuming content on the internet, especially of doom scrolling. Also interestingly, as far as I can tell we never dream about consuming content, or our devices really. If we are going into a trance like state consuming content for a larger proportion of our lives, the time when we actually are cognizant / conscious / forming memories will feel less voluminous overall, thus making perceived time feel faster. The more I think about it, the more this seems like one of the most important issues facing humanity currently... AI doomers should probably be very worried about this in the near term.
- chamsom 3y ago
  I think you're onto something. I recall that you do not form memories with things that you don't bond with. Hence why there are very few accounts of dreaming on cellphones. Time also isn't perceivable when we can't see the gradual change in physical properties. It's like a suburban life where you are at home, then you travel in a metal block, to then arrive at another room. But you're not doing the in between stuff.
  - romesmoke 3y ago
    Unfortunately, digital dreams are real. That's how I decided to quit social media cold turkey, actually; I was dreamscrolling my FB homepage every other night. ...of course, this tale may be conveying more about me than about our time. But it was too weird an experience to leave unshared.
Sloppy 3y ago
The article is a load of confused rubbish. I couldn't find anything remotely insightful or even coherent in it.

73 points by fortran77 3y ago

I'm sorry but this is just a depressing article... Seems like it offers no upside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

bawolff 3y ago
In this case, the article doesn't even seen to try to answer the question posed.

bawolff 3y ago

> Intrigued by the pervasive sense of pandemic-induced time distortion, psychologists at first speculated that loss of temporal landmarks was at work: office, gym, pulling on of pants. Words such as “Blursday” crept into the vocabulary, along with “polycrisis” and “permacrisis,” referring to the plethora of perturbances creating instability, pushing time out of sync: war, climate, politics. I dont know. To me it seems like the obvious answer is a bunch of people who have never been depressed before became depressed during covid.

atoav 3y ago
As a freelancer who always lived like that (but ironically had to work with people throughtout the whole pandemic): I thought it was kind of curious what toll that livestyle change took on people. Granted I did choose that life voluntarily and it naturally feels different if something is forced on you — but the pandemic was really revealing in many ways. I was surprised how afraid many people are of being left to themselves in their own flats and what a big topic this was for them. Many people don't seem to have any other interest than meeting other people. On top of they couldn't take it that a governmental body mandated some reasonable rules binding them within a global pandemic of a (back then: unknown) virus. So they priorized their hurt feelings over the literal existence of hundreds of their peers, whom they ironically longed to see. As if they were leeches who miss their hosts. It also revealed some interesting things about social contracts, about who is really essential for the functioning of a society and how little we value them. A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. People just wanted to get rid of their kids and they hated being alone with them as much as they hated being alone with themselves. Mow I am of course underlining all the bad actors and not the many heroic, reasonable, strong and caring people who volunteered to help others. But the number of bad actors shocked me. If anything, the whole episode left me with the feeling that I am a stable adult person with a good moral compass and that many people of whom I had assumed the same are neither.
- firstplacelast 3y ago
  That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think. I'm an introvert, I remember craving friendly interaction 6-months in and then being worried about my extrovert friends. If I am feeling crazy about the lack of human interaction, I KNEW some friends that must be having a hard time. I made it a point to call those people to catch up. I do agree about the weird "hero/essential workers", the same "salt of the earth" BS that has been spouted for decades. Essential people that we want to pay like crap to keep our society running. They should all stop, be willing to die, until they are paid enough to buy a crappy home. Essential means they have big negotiating power, organize/unionize and stick the screws to society. Think like a CEO. Also saw all the crazy bad actors, the insane takes on social media (on both sides- though more so on one side), the insanity, the lack of nuance, the shit throwing...I lost a lot of respect for humanity. As a person that was working in biotech in an R&D department at the time, something in my brain broke. Could not care anymore about making the world better, helping people live longer, contributing to coffers of multi-millionaires bc I was "making the world better". Just done with it. There's no global moral compass, otherwise you would jump off a bridge, just a local one, as far as I'm concerned.
  - atoav 3y ago
    > That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think. Don't get me wrong here, I am a very (sometimes overly) empathic person, I am the guy people run to for advice when they want to know how to talk to other people, because I can put myself into other people's shoes. But that doesn't necessarily mean I like what I see when I put myself into thoes shoes. So if my post sounds unempathic, it does so because it is the pure distilled cycism of someone who really has it up to here with a certain unempathic, egomanic type of person — call it a enritled, vocal, screaming minority if you will. I understand how horrible the whole thing felt to them. To a certain degree I even subscribe to Schopenhauer's notion of: "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants", so I am not even sure they can be blamed that they felt that way. But because I understand a feeling doesn't mean I have to approve with the actions and words they derived from those feelings. That doesn't mean that in my view we gave those people way to much area on the stage of the pandemic as opposed to all the pressing social issues that actually emerged.
logicchains 3y ago
Recent research supports this: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2809947 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... . People staying at home led to depression, and the less people went out, the more depressed they were.

3seashells 3y ago

Time is subjective, as in new memories or new things are perceived as more time. Thus doing the same thing over and over shortens your life.

nemo44x 3y ago
It's funny because when I'm doing the same thing over and over it feels like time never ends and it takes forever.

davedx 3y ago

Spoiler: no

nonrandomstring 3y ago
Worse spoiler: We would never know. It may turn out that the time-space manifold is not only locally curved (as a view on gravity), but that the laws of physics - in concert - change across space-time. But any observer "looking out", as it were, from a single point using the instruments, telescopes and clocks to hand, would see no change. Therefore questions about whether the laws of physics are universal or local seem unfalsifiable and on a par with whether or not God exists.
Spare_account 3y ago
As per Betteridge's law of headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- tempodox 3y ago
  This just in: Is Betteridge's law of headlines changing?

rhdunn 3y ago

Our brains filter out repetitive events, so if every day follows the same routine you are going to remember less of those than if something happened on those days -- like going on holiday, or the start of the pandemic. When you look back, you will remember those key events, but everything else will be a blur. This happens a lot as you grow older, but the pandemic is a shared collective version of this, so may be a young adult's first experience of this phenomena. There's also an interesting thought experiment I came up with for this. Spend an hour each on the following tasks: 1. sitting on a chair watching a clock; 2. reading a book you like. In the first task you would say that time was slow as you are aware of it passing. In the second task you would say that time flew past as you are not consciously aware of the time passing, being engrossed in the book (or other activity where you are not actively monitoring time in some way). Time passed by the same, its just the perception of it that differs.

yunohn 3y ago
> Our brains filter out repetitive events Literal compression by neural networks.
- whycome 3y ago
  literal neural literal networks
varispeed 3y ago
Could this have something to do with quantum physics? As in we only experience / feel time when we observe it?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Highly unlikely. It has more to do with what we focus our attention on, rather than anything in physics. It's like Einstein's[1] explanation of the relativity of time - "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours” - which actually has nothing to do with the relativity of time, since the entities are not moving with respect to each other. [1] Einstein apparently had his secretary give this answer when people asked for an explanation of relativity, because they didn't understand accurate answers (source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/24/hot-stove/#:~:text=That's%20relativity.,-In%20June%201930&text=Prof.,it%20seems%20like%20an%20hour.%E2%80%9D) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/24/hot-stove/#:~:text=....

nologic01 3y ago

It did for a moment, but then some time passed and it was all back to normal again.

GnarfGnarf 3y ago

Time does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative movement of matter. Every way we measure "time" involves the movement of matter: sun dial, pendulum, spring & gears in a mechanical watch, vibrations of electrons in an electronic watch. When you say that an hour has elapsed, it simply means the earth has rotated 15°. When you go 60 mph, you have moved 60 miles while the earth has rotated 15°. The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Time is a creation of the mind. If there were no matter, there would be no time.

tikwidd 3y ago
Matter does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative progress of time. Every way we measure "matter" involves the progress of time: microscope, telescope, ruler, calipers, vibrations of photons hitting the eye. When you say that the earth has rotated 15°, it simply means an hour has elapsed. When you move 60 miles while the earth rotates 15°, you have gone 60 mph. The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Matter is a creation of the mind. If there were no time, there would be no matter. (sorry)
- krapp 3y ago
  EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE WITHIN SINGLE ROTATION. 4 CORNER DAYS PROVES 1 DAY 1 GOD IS TAUGHT EVIL. IGNORANCE OF TIMECUBE4 SIMPLE MATH IS RETARDATION AND EVIL EDUCATION DAMNATION. CUBELESS AMERICANS DESERVE - AND SHALL BE EXTERMINATED. (sorry not sorry.)
  - standardly 3y ago
    I think you're on to something! You should create a website about it
zigzag312 3y ago
If time is a creation of the mind why can't we reverse it? :)

nmeofthestate 3y ago

Sorry, I don't have time to extract the point from this rambling discursive style of content.

rippeltippel 3y ago

There's a featured video linked from the article: "Theoretical Physicist Explains Time in 5 Levels of Difficulty" [1] with physicist Brian Greene. At minute 5:52 he describes the light clock, and at 6:36 he computes the ratio between a stationary and a moving clock. In the first passage, he writes T_s / T_m = D / L. Shouldn't it be the opposite (i.e. L / D), since D is the distance that a photon travels in the moving clock? Can anyone clarify that, please? [1] https://www.wired.com/video/watch/theoretical-physicist-explains-time-in-5-levels-of-difficulty https://www.wired.com/video/watch/theoretical-physicist-expl...

jablongo 3y ago

Not seeing this in any of the comments but may have missed it: To me the obvious answer here is increased screen time across the board, precipitated by the pandemic. It's easy to see why this would lead to a perceived faster flow of time; do you form memories of your screen time? Personally I have next to no distinct memories of consuming content on the internet, especially of doom scrolling. Also interestingly, as far as I can tell we never dream about consuming content, or our devices really. If we are going into a trance like state consuming content for a larger proportion of our lives, the time when we actually are cognizant / conscious / forming memories will feel less voluminous overall, thus making perceived time feel faster. The more I think about it, the more this seems like one of the most important issues facing humanity currently... AI doomers should probably be very worried about this in the near term.

chamsom 3y ago
I think you're onto something. I recall that you do not form memories with things that you don't bond with. Hence why there are very few accounts of dreaming on cellphones. Time also isn't perceivable when we can't see the gradual change in physical properties. It's like a suburban life where you are at home, then you travel in a metal block, to then arrive at another room. But you're not doing the in between stuff.
- romesmoke 3y ago
  Unfortunately, digital dreams are real. That's how I decided to quit social media cold turkey, actually; I was dreamscrolling my FB homepage every other night. ...of course, this tale may be conveying more about me than about our time. But it was too weird an experience to leave unshared.

Sloppy 3y ago

The article is a load of confused rubbish. I couldn't find anything remotely insightful or even coherent in it.