Time is the fourth dimensional distance from the Big Bang to another point.

We can all theorize about how Time works, but it’s better if someone performs experiments to demonstrate how time works. The key points being made here are (1) Time Dilation is a real, it is a natural phenomenon, and it is not dependent upon Relativity; (2) although time may move at different rates for virtually everything and everyone, we all exist in the same “now;” and (3) there is much we do not yet understand about how Time works.

          Time was not "invented," it was OBSERVED in the form of aging and decay. In cave man times, a human lived about 25 winters and then died of old age. The start of one winter was about 12 full moons before the start of the next winter. And full moons were about 28 days apart. A day was measured from noon to noon with a sundial of some kind. Noon occurred at a different time almost everywhere, since it depended upon when the sun was at it highest point in the sky.
          Meat would decay and become poisonous if not eaten within a few days. Different kinds of fruits and vegetables decayed at different rates.
          Days were divided into hours and minutes when people needed to schedule things, like when to open and close a shop.
          Einstein made us aware of the fact that aging and decay are affected by motion and gravity. A man who ages ten years on Earth can have a twin brother who aged only ONE year in that same period of Earth time because the twin was traveling at very high speeds on a round trip to Alpha Centauri.
          Muons are particles that are created when cosmic rays collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere. How long the muon exists depends upon how fast it travels. A slow moving muon will decay before it reaches the earth. Fast moving muons age slower and can easily reach the surface of the earth.
     And that brings us back to the same question: What IS Time if motion and gravity can slow it down?

Black holes are nothing.
Black holes are special because there’s nothing there. There is no thing there.

The black hole is a not a thing. It is nothing. A bare black hole is pure empty spacetime—no atoms, light, strings, or particles of any kind, dark or bright. It’s empty space—or, in physics slang, the vacuum.

Black holes are a place in space and they barricade their secrets. They are a place that can also behave like an object. They are empty but have mass.

When I talk about the mass of a black hole and then say there is no stuff there, that seems like a sleight of hand. If there is no stuff, it would be fair to ask, how can it have any mass? The original star might be gone, but the energy equivalent of the mass of the star was imparted to the black hole. In the case of stellar collapse, physical things made of real material and having conventional mass impress their heft on space, leaving behind a gravitational attraction of equivalent value. If we discover a means by which the imploded object could form a remnant, an unrecognizable vestige of crushed matter, deep inside the event horizon, then we might rely on convention and connect the mass of the black hole to actual extant material. But this interpretation would be misleading, would allow the challenge to go unnoticed. The black hole is not the remnant, even if it hides one. Since the event horizon obscures from the outside the fate of the infalling matter, the black hole is indistinguishable whether the matter is destroyed, survives as a remnant, or finds life in another universe.

So this is what you must remember: The black hole event horizon is empty. The black hole is no thing. The black hole is nothing.

A black hole is a place, a location in spacetime, eerily dark and bare and empty. And yet, scientists have not been able to answer the seemingly simple question, Where do we go if we fall in? The mystery of the black hole interior imposed by the event horizon gives black holes a special cultural aura not permitted most astrophysical phenomena.

Before Einstein, anyone proclaiming that there could be holes in the universe bounded by event horizons where time comes to a stop and light becomes infinitely redshifted would probably have been considered to be crazy. Even after Schwarzschild used Einstein’s equations to show that they allowed for the existence of the things we now call black holes, nearly all scientists assumed that they were still too strange to be true. As recently as the 1960s, any poll of scientists would likely have found most of them assuming that some undiscovered law of nature would ensure that such strange objects could not really exist. Today, that situation has been completely reversed, and it’s difficult to find any physicist or astronomer who doubts that black holes are both real and common in the universe. This dramatic change in scientific outlook is a direct result of the evidence-based nature of science. No matter how strange any idea may seem at first, if the evidence becomes strong enough, scientists will ultimately come to accept it. That is why my personal favorite definition of science is that it is a way of using evidence to help us come to agreement.

Black holes are nothing.
Black holes are special because there’s nothing there. There is no thing there.

  

May 30, 2021 - Sometimes I wonder how many times per day people try to scam me in one way or another.  I get a truly annoying number of scam phone calls.  As a result, if I do not recognize the caller's phone number when my phone rings, I just wait for the answering machine to take over.  Phone scammers will normally just hang up instead of leaving a message.  I also get a lot of email scam attempts, maybe 40 or 50 per day, although most of those could just be simply classified as "advertising."  I get at least 5 emails per day advertising a quick cure for tinnitus.  And there are two or three emails a day advertising contacts with Russian or Asian women.  

I mention it, because last week I got an email from someone wanting to put my paper An Analysis of Einstein’s Second Postulate to his Theory of Special Relativity into a book.  It was a fairly long email, filled with praise for my efforts, and it wasn't until the fifth paragraph that it started mentioning the fact that it would cost me money to have my paper included in their book.  (They say they have published 82 books in the past month!)   They evidently do their publishing in Hooghly, West Bengal, India, but they also have an office in London.  Using Google Maps, I can see that their address is just a doorway between two shops, a doorway that leads to elevators to the offices on the 2nd and 3rd floors. 

If my papers ever get into a book, it will almost certainly be a book I publish myself via Amazon.   The only other "possibility" is if someone pays me to let them publish my papers.

Somehow, a change in my daily routine last week caused me to stop thinking about working on science papers for awhile.  Instead, I listed to podcast after podcast, mostly Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcasts. I'd downloaded 8 of them from the fall of 2020, each nearly 2 hours long.   When they talked about the Covid-19 pandemic, it was like going back in time.  Back then, there was no vaccine and no one had any idea how long it would take to develop one.  When I finished listing to those podcasts, I started going through others in my MP3 player, mostly just sampling and deleting them, since I'd somehow lost interest in celebrity interviews.  Then, on Friday, I finally began thinking about science subjects again.  I inexplicably awoke thinking about the first second after the Big Bang, specifically the period known as "inflation."

Here is how the period of "inflation" is illustrated on Wikipedia:



And the image below is from a NASA web site:



During the "period of time" known as "inflation," there were no atoms or sub-atomic particles and the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. But there was no light, either, so who knows?  According to my paper "What is Time?",  when there were no spinning particles, there was no "time" - except in the sense of history being a "period of time."  Without atoms and sub-atomic particles, there is no way to measure time.   Plus, according to an article in Forbes magazine, the whole idea of "inflation" is just a way Quantum Mechanics mathematicians invented to explain things. 

A New Scientist article says "Inflation was invented to explain a couple of features of the universe that are really hard to explain without it."  One alternative explanation is that the universe was never a single dot or infinitely small particle as mathematicians insist it was, instead it was a clump of dark matter of unknown size that had been crunched down when the previous version of the Big Bang universe collapsed.  So, we have a Big Bang Universe that expands until gravity stops it from expanding further, then it collapses until it can collapse no further, producing a massive sphere of dark matter which then explodes in a new "Big Bang" and starts the whole process over again.  There is no "period of inflation" because there is no need to explain how the universe expanded from a point to something much much bigger.

The only problem with this scenario is that no one knows what "dark matter" is or what properties it has - other than that it seems to be mass that does not emit or reflect light.  I'll bet that it doesn't "spin," either, so it does not experience time. Compress it too tightly, however, and BOOM - the whole thing explodes.

It's something I haven't thought about very much before.  Mathematicians may find it impossible, because there are too many unknowns, but logically it seems to make perfect sense.  It is called "The Big Bounce Theory" by the many scientists who like the idea - regardless of how many mathematicians hate it.  I like it.  Even though I hadn't thought much about it before, somewhere in the back of my mind I always envisioned the "Big Bang" as actually being a "Big Bounce" that may have happened countless times before.  It certainly makes more sense than the "Big Bang" being a one time thing.  And it's the way I would want things to be.  There is something satisfying and appealing about it.   

May 27, 2021 - I didn't write any comments for the past few days because I had an appointment for a physical at my local Veteran's Administration clinic.  That prevented me from thinking about anything else.  The physical took place yesterday morning, and everything is fine, but I still couldn't think about any thing else for the rest of the day.  Mostly I just thought about things I should have mentioned to the doctor or to the nurse, but didn't.  Somehow I forgot to mention my paper on "A Different Covid-19 Problem."  Less seriously, when we talked about my diet, I forgot to mention that I eat a cup of yogurt every afternoon between 2 and 3 p.m.  I'll  have to remember that when I go again next year.

Now I have to get back to thinking about science questions again.  But which question should I work on?  What I'm doing is just sitting in front of my computer trying to think of what to work on.  Sigh. 

May 24, 2021 - Evidently, the discussion I was having on the Astrophysics and Physics Facebook group has come to an end.  It was definitely the best discussion I've had about physics and science in years.  Unlike the arguments I've had on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet group, in the 156 posts to the thread there was no name calling or vicious personal attacks.  In addition, on Facebook you can indicate that you "like" a post without getting into an argument about it.  As of this moment, my post has 263 "likes" and 60 "shares," which I think means that 60 different people made a copy of the thread and put it on their own homepage. 

I thought that was very good, but this morning I noticed a thread that was started just yesterday (15 hours ago) and already has 772 "likes" and 165 "shares."  The thread is about old science fiction stories which assumed that by now we would have humans exploring every corner of the universe.  "2001: A Space Odyssey" is the best known example.  It's 20 years past that date and we still do not have Pan Am passenger flights to some rotating space station.

My discussion thread hit on some key points of disagreement in physics.  I was asked a lot of questions, and I answered all of them.  But the person I was arguing with could not answer even the simplest questions, like "What is the expanding universe expanding into?"  To him, the universe is everything there is, so it cannot be expanding into anything.  It is an infinite universe that is getting bigger.  How can something that is infinite in size get bigger?  He could not answer that.  I found that fascinating.  It says he has a BELIEF that he has never analyzed.  I don't think I changed his mind about anything, but maybe I made him think about things he'd never thought about before. 

How can anyone believe that the Big Bang Universe is infinite in size and is getting bigger and bigger?   But clearly the guy I was arguing with has the same belief as many many others.  And he somehow thought that no one in the entire world of scientists disagrees with him - until I showed him article after article about scientists who do disagree.  That is when he stopped posting and the thread came to an end.

Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon I listened to podcast #773 from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe series.  When I first discovered the world of podcasts, I downloaded samples from many different series and then began listening to them.  But I first listened to all of the podcasts in my favorite series.  That took months and months.  Meanwhile, my MP3 player is nearly filled with samples from series I never actually listened to.  Among them were episodes #773 through #801 of the Skeptics Guide.  Today, their most recent episode is #823.  They have been podcasting since 2005.

Anyway, I found podcast #773 to be fascinating.  The only problem with it (and all the others in the series) is its length.  Episode #773 is 1 hour and 43 minutes long.  And that seems to be about average.  The most recent episode (#826) is 1 hour and 55 minutes long.  It would take me years to listen to them all! 

Based on what I heard in #773, they cover a lot of topics in each podcast.  #773 was first aired in April 2020, so it began with a discussion of Covid-19 conspiracy theories and other crazy beliefs.  Then after 15 minutes or so, they changed topics and talked about creating new elements for the periodic table.  Then they talked about good and bad ways to make coffee.   Then they talked about UFO videos, which also happen to be in the news right now.  If the video is blurry, it is a UFO.  If the video is clear, we know what it is, and it is never an alien ship.  There were a few other topics, too, including hail cannons, something else I'd never heard of before, even though farmers have evidently been using them for decades to disrupt the formation of hailstones in the atmosphere.



Anyway, based on that one episode, I moved The Skeptics Guide to the Universe into position #6 in the Top 10 in my list of interesting podcasts.  

Added NOTE: When I listened to Episode #774, they said that while some farmers may still use hail cannons, the consensus is that they do not work.  

May 23, 2021 - On Friday morning, during breakfast, I finished reading another library book on my Kindle.  The book was "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth" by Avi Loeb.

It was a very interesting book, mostly about 'Oumuamua, the mysterious object that passed through our solar system in September and October of 2017.  Unfortunately, no one got any good pictures of it.  Below, from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day web site for November 22, 2017, is an artist's drawing of what it may have looked like:



According to Avi Loeb's book, however, it probably more likely looked like a disk, and the artist's drawing above just shows it edge-on.  It was first noticed by astronomer Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory, Hawaii, on 19 October 2017, 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun on 9 September. When it was first observed, it was about 21 million miles from Earth and already heading away from the Sun. The name 'Oumuamua is the Hawaiian word for "scout," and reflects the way the object is like a scout or messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to humanity. The word also roughly translates to "first distant messenger".

The author of the book definitely feels the object was most likely of alien origin and was not something natural.  There's a lot of evidence to support that belief, but none of it is conclusive.  It is just different from anything we've ever seen before.  It reflects light differently (almost like it was made of shiny metal), it did not emit gasses as a comet would while passing the sun (which is why astronomers initially failed to notice it), and it's certainly unusually shaped.  In addition, when our solar system is viewed as a nearly flat disk, 'Oumumua dropped down from above, fell between the sun and the orbit of Mercury, changed directions as a result of the sun's gravity, and passed back through the solar system disk again, this time between the orbits of Earth and Mars and once again heading upwards.  

The author of the book spends most of the book arguing that more time and money should be spent on the hunt for extraterrestrial life.  And he hits on a gripe of mine: the massive amount of  time and money spent on mathematical projects which can never be proved or disproved, such as String Theory and multiple universes.  Here's a passage about that from the book:

I have long been aware that within the discipline of astronomy, SETI faces hostility. And I have long found that hostility bizarre. Mainstream theoretical physicists now widely accept the study of extra-spatial dimensions beyond the three we are all familiar with—plainly put, height, width, and depth—and the fourth dimension, time. This is despite the fact that there is no evidence for any such extra dimensions. Similarly, a hypothetical multiverse—an infinite number of universes all existing simultaneously in which everything that could conceivably happen is happening—occupies many of our planet’s most admired minds, again despite the fact that there is no evidence that such a thing is possible.

Rather than spending one’s entire career going down mathematical alleys that will be regarded as irrelevant by future generations of physicists, young scientists should focus on those areas of research where the value of ideas can be tested and cashed in during their lifetimes. There is no field of research where the risk-and-reward calculus is greater than in the search for extraterrestrial life. What is more, with just eleven days’ worth of accumulated data gleaned from ‘Oumuamua’s passage, we already have more suggestive, observable evidence than we do for all the fashionable thought bubbles that currently hold sway in the field of astrophysics.

May 20, 2021 - Hmm.  Yesterday afternoon, some question I saw posted on the Astrophysics and Physics Facebook group prompted me to start a new thread there.  I began the thread with an illustration I created a couple years ago:


And I wrote this comment:

I'm wondering if things aren't a lot simpler than they are typically described. In the illustration, dark energy is simply the energy from the Big Bang Universe that we cannot see because it is beyond the Observable Universe. And Dark Matter is simply material that has been highly compressed to the point where it cannot reflect light nor emit any energy. It is also the stuff that is inside Black Holes.

The Big Bang didn’t happen at a single point, it happened everywhere!

There is no center for big bang.

No. First of all there is no "point of the Big Bang", because it happened (still does) everywhere at once.

Wasn’t there not a center though? I thought the expansion was equidistant everywhere, like the surface of a balloon when you blow it up.

The big bang did not occur at one point in space. There is not a 'center' of the universe.

          Observers moving with the moving rod would thus find that the two clocks were not synchronous, while observers in the stationary system would declare the clocks to be synchronous.
          So we see that we cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity, but that two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relatively to that system.

In Newtonian mechanics, simultaneity and time duration are absolute and therefore both methods lead to the equality of and . Yet in relativity theory the constancy of light velocity in all inertial frames in connection with relativity of simultaneity and time dilation destroys this equality. In the first method an observer in one frame claims to have measured the object's endpoints simultaneously, but the observers in all other inertial frames will argue that the object's endpoints were not measured simultaneously. In the second method, times and are not equal due to time dilation, resulting in different lengths too.

Semantic Scholar is an artificial-intelligence backed search engine for academic publications that was developed at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and publicly released in November 2015.^[1] It uses recent advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers.

The main objective of this paper is to create a car speed detecting software which can inform the concerned authorities if a car is over speeding. This software allows monitoring of cars through a single digital camera. Car and its speed are calculated the moment car enters into the region of camera’s FOV. This would help in more efficient and software-based surveillance.

II. RELATED WORK

Earlier, in the past decade the technologies used for this task were more hardware based. This included a handheld speed monitoring gun [3]. The traffic officers used to hold this gun in their hand. Aiming towards the speeding car they used to get to know its speed. These devices were based on Doppler’s Effect [4]. These sent a beam of radio waves to the moving car and then speed was calculated based on the change in the reflected frequency waves. These devices worked well when there was only one car in the field of view of the gun sensor.

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.

Time in physics is operationally defined as "what a clock reads"

One does NOT measure Time... Time is the measure

Julia Galef, host of Rationally Speaking, joins us to discuss her new book The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t.

Rationally Speaking is the official podcast of New York City Skeptics. Join Julia Galef and guests as they explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, likely and unlikely, science and pseudoscience. Rationally Speaking was co-created with Massimo Pigliucci.

Why is "speaking rationally" a worthwhile goal, anyway? It’s not self-evident, at least not to many people. Human beings certainly don’t seem made for it. Aristotle may have famously dubbed us "the rational animal," but cognitive science tells a different story, with plenty of evidence that our brains blithely flout logic all the time and are excellent at rationalizing our irrational decisions after the fact. Indeed, it is reasonable to ask why fight our irrational natures to begin with? After all, some argue that irrationality can make us happier, at least in certain situations. Then again, perhaps there is a problem with the whole idea of arguing for irrationality.

Imbecile Ed Lake quotes Einstein: "Time is what clocks measure" ... moron Ed Lake will die without ascertaining the fact that by that definition -Time is MEASURING 'particle  spin'- NOT 'partilce spin' itself

  On the other hand, the last time I had a lengthy discussion there was in July of 2015, which was before I started writing science papers.  Back then I was mostly arguing on blog files.  It now seems centuries ago.

Meanwhile, last week I got another view into the past when I checked my web site log file for May 5.  Here's a small part of that file.  You can click on it to view a larger version.



As you can see, there were 17 accesses from IP address 2.187.160.242 which is located in Tafresh, Iran.  The fact that it was someone in Iran wasn't particularly unusual, since I get visitors from just about everywhere.  What struck my eye was the fact that the access seemed to come via Google Scholar.  Plus, they were accessing a file on my web site that I couldn't recall putting there.  The file is Second-Postulate-01.pdf   The log entries indicate that someone did a full access of the file at 06:55:35 a.m, and then 16 partial accesses.  I have no idea what that is all about, nor why the full access shows up last in the log.

Checking my web site, the pdf file is there, of course.  And it appears I uploaded the file on the morning of April 20, 2017.  Since my web site is somewhat like a diary, I just had to look to see what I was doing on April 20, 2017.  What I was doing back then was trying to get that paper published in a journal and placed on arXiv.org.  On May 2, 2017, I was informed that it would cost me $127 per page to get it published in the journal that had agreed to publish it.  It's an 18 page paper!  I hadn't seen the part of their web site where the cost of publishing was given.  I thought they published for free.  Later, arXiv.org turned the paper down because I didn't have the proper credentials for putting papers on their web site.

I remember all that.  It basically ended my attempts to get my papers published.  Paying thousands of dollars to get my papers published would be a waste of money.  I am not in any "publish or perish" situation.  I just wanted to get other people's reactions to the ideas in my papers.

I put my first paper on viXra.org on February 22, 2016.  It was the first version of my paper "What is Time?"  ViXra.org doesn't have editors. So, you just upload your paper and it's on-line within a day.  When arXiv.org turned down my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate, I put it on viXra.org, too.  And, just as with my paper on "What is Time?", I gradually buried the paper under "revisions" that didn't include all the stuff that got me started.  I was writing new papers on the same topic, not revising the original paper.  The originals are still amazing, while the revised versions just seem to address some specific issue.  Plus, for some reason, I also started double-spacing the papers.  I'm going to have to find some way to fix all that and put the best version at the top of each list of versions.  I should also put the best ones in book format, too, but maybe getting the best versions into separate files will help me decide exactly what should be in the book.  All I need to do is find the time to do it all.  Groan!