It is 1 April. This is NOT a joke but it may not be real. It’s a science thought experiment.
There’s a tiny bit of physics in my distant past but I am not a real physicist. In the last few years I’ve noticed the models of information I’m investigating resemble the ‘multi-worlds interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which I have only heard about via radio, TV and Wikipedia. Quantum Mechanics is always rubbing up against Relativity, another idea about which I have a frustratingly inadequate understanding. I decided to investigate these worlds of weirdness but I find my brain getting horribly scrambled when I try to visualise space-time. I can’t and I don’t think anyone can. Our visual system has evolved for seeing a 3D world and that world changes. Humanity had lived, before the early 20th Century in a non-relativistic world. Those who do ‘get modern physics’ seem to rely on a mathematical understanding of the concepts.
In my models of information, I’d been thinking about the lack of a time-dimension in most computation. We usually model change in the world as a series of states, where data about a new state replaces the previous states. This starts to cause difficulties when computers have parallel paths of computation, as current multi-core processing chips do. Software has begun to address the problems with ‘immutability’. In simple terms, instead of replacing a value, a new value is added to the end of a sequence, so historic values are retained. We have gone back before the memory-constrained computer age to learn from the Victorian hand-written ledger.
I became aware of research work at Cambridge University to reconcile ‘QM and R’ which also modelled time as state-change but I’ve found it very difficult to think about ‘the state change dimension of space’ as a sequence of events without falling back on ideas of time, speed and rate of change. The ‘idea of time’ which may be a cultural concept is deeply woven into our current paradigm.
In trying to free my mind of time, I’ve been hanging out in ‘the difficult time questions’ corner of Quora. Someone gave me a breakthrough by describing a simple clock:
Imagine going into deep space where gravity and friction to movement can be assumed to be zero. Throw an object. The distance it has travelled is a clock.
An April Fool thought experiment of time:
Make the object a spacecraft containing a holographic camera. Time passed can now be measured as a distance. Let us assume we prepared by asking someone to invent a unit of distance and mark it repeatedly on a very long tape, alongside the path of our space-craft. We don’t know the size of that unit. Now retrieve the holographic camera and put the recording medium in a holographic projector and project it onto a screen.
Think of the ‘slide-show’ as you being equivalent to you travelling along a sequence of equally spaced ‘holographic plates’. Consider changing the distance between plates in some regions of the recording (analogous to compressing time) or having instantaneously (enough) reversed the spacecraft during recording. Evidence of events would be passed in the opposite order but time would still be one way. Time could appear to be reversed if the projector was modified to play the recording in reverse order but that’s model hacking not reality.
Stage 2 – imagine this model as a streamed live-view of the universe, with the universe interfering with distances, as Relativity tells us it does, and has been observed. The problem is that a lot of the science assumes time is constant and that’s difficult to disprove from inside the space-time paradigm. We can only observe a space/state-change view and we may have invented time. Have fun with it.
On The Outside 