...is a very, very interesting subject. I'm reading this book, The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. So far, I haven't gotten past a kind of "Physics warm-up". He's explaining Einstein's theories of relativity, and that in itself is enough to keep me completely entertained. My nerd status has gone up since I started telling the people that were walking faster than me that they're aging slower than I am.

I now understand how space and time can be warped, even though a few bits are foggy. That's to be expected for most humans, seeing as how "spacetime" is 4-dimentional, and it's kind of hard to think in four dimentions. Hell, it's hard to think in three dementions for some people.

If the three dimentions we are used to are space (left-right, up-down, and forward-back are good examples,) and you consider time to be another dimention that we move in one direction in a (almost) constant speed, then you have a 4-dimentional mesh, and it's called space time. Now, here's the part I like. Photons (light particles) move at a constant speed. Some 670 million miles per hours or so. On the side, you might be interested in the fact that even if you could run away from light at a huge speed, if you turned around it would still be coming at you at the light speed. This might not seem weird at first, but consider this. If someone throws a baseball at you at 12 mph, and you're running away at 7mph, then the ball travels (compared to you) at (12-7=5)mph. However, this trick doesn't work on light. It comes at everything, moving or stationary, at the same speed. I don't see how this is possible, but there you go.

Back to the main topic. Everyone knows that in a square that's 10 miles by 10 miles, that a car moving at 20 mph would go from one edge to the opposite in 30 minutes. However, if the car's path is slanted, than it would take a while longer. This is because the car's motion is split between 2 different dimentions. Einstein realized this, and so he had an idea: If time is just another dimention, than that means our motion is being split between all three of our spacial dimentions, and the rest is devoted to moving through time. That's an amazing concept.

It means that the faster you move, the slower you age. Or, more accurate, the slower you move through time. (You might think that moving fast would make you live longer, but the catch is that you'd experience time slower too. So, not only do you only get to actually live the same amount of time, but you've wasted a ton of energy and outlived all your friends and family.)

Can anyone guess what all matter's overall speed through spacetime is? Some 670 million miles per hour, or so. What else does that mean? That photons from the beggining of the world haven't aged a bit. Also, if you could hit light speed, (it's impossible,) you'd be stuck. You can't do anything if you don't experience time, and the only way to stop would be to run into something pretty massive (by accident). Surely that'd kill you, if you weren't already dead from accelerating to light speed. The upside: you're traveling at light speed anyway, through time, minus the motion you're making.

If you're confused, interested, or in a questioning mood, go get the book. Great read, funny author. They're the best.

Maybe you should try reading Alice in Quantum Land and see if you feel the same then.
» randomjunk on 2007-02-07 07:12:46

Haha wow my nerd status just rose about a mole (6.02x10^23rd)
Because I read that whole thing word for word....and am still struggling to comprehend how lightspeed could remain proportional to something else traveling at a completely different speed...but who wants to argue with Einstein, seriously...I'd be even worse of a nerd.

There's this really wierd book called Slaughterhouse Five, where aliens observe that there are seven human genders, 5 of them being operational only in the fourth dimension lol...that's my next mission, to discover the next gender...
» The-Muffin-Man on 2007-02-07 07:56:38

haha, wow
i want to read both of these books
» middaymoon on 2007-02-07 08:10:50

actually..
the first paragraph has intrigued me enough to go pick it up after I get some money haha
» etheracide on 2007-02-07 10:50:07

Sweeeet. This sounds like a book I would like to read.
I think Neils Bohr once said about quantum physics (but it would work for relativity, too): "If you're not confused, you don't fully understand it yet."
» Zanzibar on 2007-02-11 08:56:27

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