Monday 10 November 2008

Proving Einstein Wrong


TZZZZzzzzzz... Have you ever picked up your sandal and tried to swat that annoying little mosquito you are sharing a holiday hotel room with? It will always confound us on just how many times we miss because the tiny swine is just too darned fast. After a time, the mosquito starts to take on the appearance of predicting our every move - it's practically taunting us. With science developing new ideas about the way we look at time, we are starting to understand that the mosquito is not necessarily moving fast, but that it is us whom are percieving things very, very slowly. New proposals about time are about to turn everything that we thought we knew about our Universe on its head.

Let's imagine the scene where I am about to try and bring my sandal down on the head of that pesky mosquito. In the room we have set-up two digital cameras (don't worry, nothing sordid's going on). One of the camera's has a shutter speed which opens and closes in seconds, while the other camera's using a shutter speed which is a thousand times faster and operates in milliseconds. By the time I have raised and lowered my hand, the mosquito has made good its' escape. It's as if the little brute saw me coming a mile-off, so let's see if by playing back the two films that were taken, we might catch a better idea of what's happening from the perspective of the mosquito.

Each camera has an LCD display which will play-back the film at the rate of one exposure per second. We'll start with the film taken where the shutter speed plodded and took a second to open and close. It shows me with my hand in the air, now it's halfway down and then it's ..SLAM... 4 seconds and it's all over. Next we play the film where the shutter speed was in milliseconds. Okay, so my hands in the air...... still in the air..... I count to 200 and it's barely budged an inch. I've got time to make a cup of tea, pop to the shops, and watch a bit of telly because this film is 1000 times as long as the previous one - it would take over an hour to watch it.


What the shutter speed is inferring as it opens and closes, is my rate of perception - or rather the speed at which neurons open and close circuits in the brain. The rate of perception is how long it takes the brain to process the outside world into information the mind can understand. This process in the brain is dictated by signals carried by neurons. If you reduce the distance travelled by these signals by half, you effectively double the speed at which the brain understands the outside world. Try to imagine that our blood-sucking fiend, on account of its very small size and very simple brain, is able to percieve reality much faster than I can - my vengeful sandal would appear like it was moving in slow motion. No wonder it felt like the mosquito was blowing raspberries at me.

Okay. Now for the biggy. What does this mean for Einstein's Theory of Relativity? Is it wrong? For his calculations Einstein required a measuring stick which was unchanging and invariable, and one which would remain as a reliable benchmark for any observer regardless of their position in space. It was something which needed to comply with both the macrocosm and the microcosm. Einstein's genius came in choosing the speed of light as that benchmark. Scientists now understand that Einstein fell into the trap of believing the speed of light is constant and independent of an observer, where in-fact, the speed of light is actually a variable that is wholly dependent upon an observer.

According to Einstein the speed of light in a vacuum is 300,000 km/s. It takes light travelling from the Sun, 9 minutes to reach our planet. Imagine then that we have two observers watching the night-sky from my backyard. In this experiment we are going to turn on a torch from the position of the Sun, 150 million kilometres away, and then we shall ask both our observers to make their own steady, ticking head-count to imitate a clock (1...2...3...4...) - and to count the time it takes for the light travel to Earth. One of the observers I shall take into my laboratory (think Weird Science), and shrink to a size where the distance travelled by signals in his brain are halved. We are effectively accelerating his brain's shutter speed to being twice as fast as normal, so that the brain is able to communicate with itself at a speed which is twice that of ours, and his mind will produce twice the amount of conscious thoughts.

This difference in the rate of perception would become much more apparent once we hear each observers' head-count - the observer we shrank will make a count that is twice the speed of ours. When we add up the seconds counted by this tiny little man, it reaches a figure that is no longer 9 minutes but nearer 18 minutes! Our dwindled chum has experienced the speed of light as 150,000 km/s - half its normal speed. This demonstrates that the speed of light is not a constant, and that the speed of light is dependent upon the rate of experience. Einstein's Theory of Relativity has been proven wrong. There's no such thing as space-time. The Universe has now been deflated from the four-dimensional space that we thought was there, and is now presented in its true nature - zero point energy. The balloon has well and truly burst.

Time is thus revealed as this incredible intrapersonal experience. Every living thing on Earth is revealed as its very own clock. The ticking hands of the clock of the Universe no longer exist, and on a very real and fundamental level, all we have is 'now'. In each and every single of one those moments which we so often overlook and discard, there is the potential of infinite possibilities.

Will scientists now be able to merge all the forces in the Universe with gravity into a Theory of Everything? Probably. But perhaps this is more of an opportunity for each and every one of us who live on this planet, to finally understand how important our own place is in the grand scheme of the Universe. For if you, as an indivual, were not here to make the simple act of observation - time and space would not even exist.



I would like to thank these sites for aiding my research, and they are well worth a look if you get time....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_synapse
http://www.astronomynotes.com/relativity/s2.htm
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/510
http://my.nowpublic.com/world/scientists-show-time-and-space-do-not-exist
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_astro/submm/CMB1.html

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