No Time is Spacetime

Copyright 2014, John Manimas Medeiros

 

At this point in time, I have posted nine works on the "Time Works" section of my website (J Manimas).  Each of those documents is intended to explain and or defend the proposition that time is a fiction of consciousness.  The longest document, entitled Crazy James Clocks, is in the form of a short story that is intended to be more interesting and entertaining than an essay.  In any case, it seems appropriate for me to now present my viewpoint that my concept of "no time" is in fact the same as Einstein's concept of relativity or the "spacetime continuum," with an important exception.  I do believe that my exposition of time as a fiction of consciousness actually explains Einstein's relativity better than it has been explained by others.  Conforming physicists insist, as does "Wikipedia" and other information sources, that time dilation occurs for a person or object traveling at or faster than the velocity of light, because of the inherent nature of spacetime.  The occurrence of "time dilation" is not a matter, they argue, of technical changes in clocks or the need for signals to travel long distances before they are received or detected.

 

My proposition is that this doctrine of spacetime is wrong because it is consistent with the viewpoint that time is attached to space, or to matter, and that time is itself an independent thing and that the real experience of time changes with changes in relative velocity.  My proposition is that time is a count and only a count and therefore time does not exist as an independent entity or as an attachment to matter or space.  No matter what anyone, physicist or taxi driver, attempts to say about time, the reality that time is a count and only a count cannot be changed by argument, or by evidence of changes in the count (changes in the clock) that occur with a change in physical conditions.  My viewpoint, which I believe will soon be proven correct, is that we can travel only through space, but not through time, because time is not a physical medium.  It is not possible to define time properly as anything other than an intellect counting the repetitions of a cyclical event.  And that is what the process of Nature is, the unfolding of cyclical events.  We humans, and any technological beings, must measure duration and other things in order to exercise technological control and in order to conceive of and describe cause and effect.  Duration is the quality that time represents in the counting of repeated cyclical events.  Those cyclical events that repeat themselves in regular – equal – intervals lend themselves well to the measurement of duration, or time, because of the equality detected in the intervals.  A clock that counted birdsongs would not be very accurate because the intervals between birdsongs are not equal.  Therefore, the concept of relativity and time dilation falls apart when one sees time as I do, as a count, because the only thing that is happening when a light-speed traveler observes the count of time is that the detection of the cyclical events is greatly changed by the great velocity.  Look at the following example:

 

We are in a space vehicle approximately 500 miles above the Earth.  It can accelerate to the velocity of light or even faster.  As we speed up, we begin to orbit the sun much faster than the Earth does.  When we arrive at the velocity of light, we are traveling the circumference of an orbit that is about 186 million miles in diameter, a circumferential distance of 584.3 million miles, and we will pass over the Earth about every 52 minutes and 15 seconds, or every 3,138 seconds (approximately).  It takes the Earth about 525,600 minutes to orbit the Sun (60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days).  We are now orbiting the Sun in a period that equals 52 / 525,600 minutes as compared to the Earth's orbital period, or we orbit the sun more than 10,000 times for each complete Earth orbit.  So, what does this tell us about time and time dilation?  Nothing, really.  We have previously defined the time interval of one year as the completion of one Earth orbit.  We have defined a day, being one rotation of the planet, as 24 hours, and an hour as 60 minutes and a minute as 60 seconds.  None of those definitions have changed, precisely because time is a count of a cyclical event and nothing other than that.  The conforming physicists argue that for us in the spaceship, being subject to the reality of "spacetime" the duration of time, or seconds, minutes and hours, and years, changes.  But that is wrong because if the Earth slowed down in its orbital velocity such that orbiting the sun required 366 of our current days, then all of the traditional clock measurements would change, a year would be longer, a day, an hour, a minute and a second, because time is a count of a cyclical event and nothing other than that.  Duration is real, it is something, but it is a count.  Time exists only for an intellect that counts and it does not and cannot exist outside of an intellect.  Cyclical events in the universe are only the process or processes of Nature.  They occur regardless of whether they are being counted by technological animals.  Nature does not need to count its own events.  They just occur.  There is no past, present or future for the unfolding of the processes of Nature, but only the process.  Therefore, because time is a count and only a count, it is a fiction of intellectual or technological consciousness.  No one can travel through time.  We can travel through space, on land, through air, through water, but not through time, because to travel through time would mean to travel through 1, 2, 3, 4 …   cyclical events.  One can travel through cyclical events, while counting them, but that is traveling through space and only through space, traveling through Nature while it continues, and the one who travels through space as the process of Nature unfolds is nothing more than another one of the processes unfolding.  What can change for us is the count, the clock, but not time.  Although this argument may make some conforming scientists angry, they still cannot make any statement about time without reference to the count of a cyclical event.  If you must insist that one can travel through time, go to a farm and count the cows, and while you are counting the cows, travel through it, not through the cows, not through the field, but through the count.  Or, if you visit a redwood forest, and look at one tree that is a thousand years old and then a seedling that is two years old, you have traveled through time, but that is the best that one can do.  We can visit a past cyclical event as it is repeated now, but not when it occurred before.  When you look at the two-year-old redwood seedling, you are looking at the past of the thousand-year old tree.  That is all the time travel one can do.  Look at my time-works stories and you will find one or two that illustrate, with some humor, the ridiculous and useless conditions that would come about if people of the future could travel back in time, to our present, and try to change history (Caesar is Rome!).  Nature does not do anything that is not necessary, and it is not necessary to have people from the future come back to us to change history; that's your job.  You are, if you have purpose and intent to influence the outcome of human history, of the future and from the future.  It does not matter what "time" one is from.  If your purpose is to act in the present in order to produce a future outcome, you are already traveling "through time."   

 

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