Monday, July 19, 2010

The Juiciest Part of "A Brief History of Time" So Far...

So, tonight, I wasn't going to post, because my throat is killing me, as well as my stomach... But besides feeling like crap, I did happen to read more of "A Brief History of Time", and it was amazing!
I'm at the part where Hawking begins to talk about Einstein and the French guy (Can't remember his name) making the Theory of Relativity, and I was just getting into the part that most applies here, about the Theory of Special Relativity, which is the formula I had used originally to show why I thought I could pull through with "This does not mean you can't go faster than the speed of light, this means it is inconceivable to us because we are moving into the future, but when you go faster than the speed of light, time flips over relative to you, and you begin going BACK in time!"
Now, I didn't really get to explain the whole theory, so I'll say some more about the diagrammed aspect of it. Yes, I have a diagram, but unfortunately I couldn't find the energy to draw up a good one for the website...
It consists of an hourglass-shaped drawing with a little square near the top left corner of the page, and an arrow showing the square (representing matter) spiraling into the black hole, going straight through an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) and spiraling out of a white hole near the bottom. On the side there are two markings, positive infinity (the black hole) and negative infinity (the white hole) representing the direction of time away from zero, where you'd be meeting the speed of light, as if represented by a number-line of some sort.
Now, my next goal is to come up with some sort of equation to represent time according to when it flips over, and such. I was thinking of playing with the d=rt formula, kind of, only mixed with E=MC^2, and possibly even more mixed with the Special Relativity formula (which is a bit confusing when put into typing), and making it something of my own.
The Garbage Can Theorem (haha) keeps coming to my mind, and I'm thinking of what Stephen Hawking said too, about how the Creator of our universe (if there was really one Creator, who knows?) didn't have time: That time is only a dimension of our universe, but that maybe time has always happened with the Creator, too, we just don't know. He said that the common sense-way of thinking about time not being connected to space somehow may have to be altered (I mean, it was in 1990 but still), this may solve some of our problems. For instance, time could be a thing of reality outside our universe, too. Or it could only be for this universe, in this dimension. I mean, time doesn't really exist for the second dimension, so why should it exist for the fourth, the fifth, the sixth?
It's interesting to think about what the fourth dimension looks like: according to Lisa Randall, we already know. You see, to the second dimension, you can see one side of something 3 dimensional at a time. So to us, we can see a three dimensional figure that's one side of a four-dimensional object at a time.
Let's look at the hypercube. It consists of two large cubes connected by six smaller cubes making a ring around the middle of the two. If this were to pass into our plane, we'd see one cube appear, and that one disappear, then another cube, then that one would disappear, and so on...
So you see, it's very hard to visualize (I mean, obviously it'd be pretty weird if some random cubes appeared in the night sky and disappeared one after the other...)
But it makes sense, if you think about how if you're only looking at one side of cone, and you make cuts through it (like the plane barrier does) then you can only see slices of the cone at a time. It's sort of like that. You can only see one part a time, because of the way the planes of the dimensions work, slicing the objects so you can only see one part at a time.
Anyways, for tonight, I'm done.. I was going to talk more but I still feel like crap. It was great posting though!
Also, thanks for the follow, nick!

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