Time Off

Chapter Seven

Nerds in love. Now I've seen it all, and believe me, I really have. Did you follow what just happened? Javier gave Angel the one gift that she prized perhaps more than anything. She was looking for a way to prove her idea of rarefaction and it's impact on time. She needed a massive obect traveling at high speed through space, with an ability to measure time in the front and the rear.

Well, Javier thought. How about earth? Indeed. We are zipping around the milky way at a half a million miles an hour and since we are pointing toward the direction of travel, there is a bias between north and south. In other words, north is in the front seat and south is in the rear.

Imagine that if earth's axis was parallel to the sun's and the sun's axis was parallel to the galactic north pole. Then you could never measure a time difference because the earth's rotation would cause all clocks to average out over the course of a day or any number of days.

I guess you could compare clocks at one of the poles compared to the equator. But then you have the confounding issue of higher gravity at the poles compared to the equator caused by the distances to the earth's center. Furthermore, the earth would be behind the sun especially in the fall months when the earth's orbit would put the earth directly in the sun's trail.

In case you're wondering, no I didn't extend my influence to Javier's brain. That was strictly speaking, pure chance when viewed at the human level. Less so from my perspective. You see, determinism is real, as I have mentioned before. But even at my level, with things slowed down giving us an ability to watch everything unfold step by step, chaos is still lurking and we can observe shifts that result in the eventual outcome, but only to a point.

There is always chaos that complicates our predictive capabilities, despite the incredible resolution afforded us due to size and speed. In this case, Javier is certainly a bonus because it has accelerated things and I expect that Angel's expertise and judgement, as well as her motivation will now increase even more rapidly. Javier's idea has great potential. But the devil is in the details.

Let's have a look at earth once again. The north pole is tilted about sixty degrees forward compared to the galactic pole and outward about twenty three degrees away from its path of motion. What you are left with is a less than ideal situation but there is a bias nevertheless. In December, if you are located at about minus sixty degrees latitude, which is very far south of the equator, at about five o'clock in the morning you will be pretty much at the trailing edge of the world as it moves through the galaxy.

By noon you are already on the side of the earth and by five or six in the evening, you are also on the side but more to the front. By June, the situation is really the same except shifted by twelve hours. In summary, in the deep southern hemisphere, you are behind the world for about a quarter of the time, year round. In contrast, the northern hemisphere is never behind the world at any time. So there is a bias there, but not an extreme bias. The question becomes one of measurement. How precise, and for how long?

You saw earlier that Angel was messing around with iphones and Casio watches – not what one would call precision instruments. And she is totally unaware of the degree to which the earth will create a rarified trail of space, especially given the suboptimal situation whereby the rarefaction, measured at a specific point, only occurs about one quarter of the time. In other words, the energy constraint and the resulting time dilation are diluted.

Furthermore, the earth is traveling in the galactic disc which serves to boost the velocity of the solar system, which reduces the velocity of the earth with respect to the surrounding space. Now this point is somewhat mitigated because our solar system also oscillates above and below the plane of the galactic disc and currently we are sitting quite some distance above it. Therefore, the rarefaction caused by all of the orbiting matter close to the disc is currently less than it will be in the distant future, so the current situation is somewhat better and we can consider the five hundred thousand miles per hour to be roughly a good number.

But all of this background aside, it is exciting to see Angel trying to make something happen. All we can hope, is that if Angel does not prevail in her attempt to measure the time dilation effect, that she will remain determined and seek better measurement capability. Because her claims are extraordinary. She will require extraordinary proof.

But let's say she does prove her point. So what? Does it really debunk General Relativity? Or will people find other plausible explanations that preserve General Relativity and quantum field theory? At a minimum, it will be a sensation, in that the results will be unexpected and will call into question those pillars of modern physics. But again I pose the question to you, reader, so what? What is the significance to not only humanity, but to my quest, which is to evolve to a new level of understanding? I will tell you later.