What Happens When Time Ceases to Exist?
A Very Short Story That Could be Weird
The math is pretty simple. It says that as you approach the speed of light relative to an observer at rest, your time goes slower. But, for you, since you are at rest relative to yourself, your time is moving along just fine, and the observer’s time is going slower.
Then, when both of your relative speeds hits the speed of light or infinitely close to it, time just effectively stops. There is no time. Guaranteed you would have every symptom of being dead to your observer, and he would have every symptom of being dead to you. Both of your times stops in the view of the other.
If, perchance, what caused one of the two of you to go that relative speed to the other was a black hole, this is what they mean when they say all the information that is you, or perhaps the observer, is plastered on the surface of the black hole. This is because if the one plastered on the black hole falls in he will, in no time to himself, get to singularity which is just as undefined as time was when you or the observer hit light speed relatively to the other.
Both of you, in your own reality just watched the other vanish, and by the way, neither of you had time to notice that you were gone to the other.
Except, for other observers moving around in space who, perhaps, were moving very fast but not at light speed relative to you or your original observer. Weirdly for other observers flying about in space, they may still see one of you blink out before they see the other, and therefore, in their time, they would blink out at different times relative to some individuals in this crazy group.
Now, if you or an observer did not blink out by being pasted on a black hole from which no “escape” is entactly possible, you could, the theory goes, find time again by deaccelerating relatively and reappear.
Of course, initially you would be aging very slowly by now slowing down to less than light speed until you and one or more of the observers perhaps move along in the same direction and speed, where you two meet again. And neither you nor they will ever have thought that time was ticking for yourself, either faster or slower than it should. But one of you will probably be older or younger than the other, since this wasn’t a dream and it was really happening. It depends on the rest frame you came back to: the observer’s or yours. Or some other observer’s in this crazy but consistent universe.
But no worries. In the picture for this article is the curve, courtesy Einstein, for how much time gets dilated based on relative speed. The time you experience until you do not experience anything is just normal time the way you experience it right now. Relative energy, mass, and time grow by relative speed on the same curve, since they are the inextricably the same. E = mc² + pc² at whatever time you measure t except, precisely as c, when the math loses the time of measurement of t as anything at all.
Light, which has no mass, does not age at all without any progress for time itself. Light can travel without worries about itself unrelative to everything else that has mass. And how long can light last if it has no time? It was always travelling at lightspeed for perhaps billions of years unchanged from the star where it originated. Except, weirdly about space, for its experience from changes in space itself from the star from which it emanated as it got less forceful and shifted redward. But it always moved at its constant timeless speed c without fatigue, except this space-growing-loss of some of its inertial energy (the “p” above).
Of course, as you see in the graph, you really have to go really really really fast and there is no way either you or your massy human observer could move that fast relative to the other before just turning into a fireball first. Unless, of course, you were very very very lucky. So you have nothing to worry about except worry itself. And worry, as we all know, is just a waste of imagination.
This saying that “Worry is a Waste of Imagination” first appeared on a boarded up motel along US Route 101 near the San Francisco Airport. It was another instance where time had stopped in space and ceased to be rentable by people.
I wrote a whole book on this theme, which has been read, page by page, by millions, since I first put it up on the web in 1995ish free for humans to read.
But, better than that motel owner who was just telling plain truth, Physicists make the best liars particularly with their much more weird imaginations. Metafire is a story about physicists, too.
In my science, at least, we now understand to some decent approximation how the human brain computes. It is not so weird, but just as magnificent. And, noted by Rene Descartes in the early 1600s, it is far far more real than reality itself: “I think therefore I am.”
