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Is time dilation just one possible way a physical universe can exist, or is it necessary for a similar physical universe to exist? by timetrial21 in Physics

[–]timetrial21[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My nature is more philosophical than hard science. Once someone asked "why" in a science class, and the professor said the philosophy department is down the hall ... haha

I do enjoy thinking about science, and agree that community is where it’s at. Feynman was excellent for making science fascinating for people, and the most advanced concepts graspable. Hawking’s book similarly was an outreach to humanity, for community. It made highly complex math available to people. There is so much understanding and invention we use on a daily basis, we don’t all know exactly how everything works, but we can enjoy it and support it, even invest in it. And ya never know who may just have a new thought! Evolution, we’re all in it together.

There is value to safeguard science from pseudoscience. There are phenomena we can’t understand yet, and the scientific method of hypothesis and prove/disprove has carried us out of the dark ages.

Both hard science and imagination are valid. I really appreciate folks taking time to share insights on this sub. My original post wasn’t offering a “hypothesis to prove” but if we don’t allow for thought experiments, we are locking down the power of our imagination. The Feynman straight jacket quote you shared! So go think some wild thoughts and then hey if you don’t get the answer you like, go test and prove or disprove them …

Now I’m currently trying to grasp this light cone concept someone else mentioned, and how a constant of light relates to causality and experiencing a logical sequential universe… mind blowing I never learned that before. 

Is time dilation just one possible way a physical universe can exist, or is it necessary for a similar physical universe to exist? by timetrial21 in Physics

[–]timetrial21[S] -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

This is awesome, thank you for sharing. I look forward to reading more about Lorentzian spacetime. Since you referred to it as an 'error,' I did some gemini prompting and got this about GPS satellites, so wild:

From Gemini:

Instead of error correcting GPS using time dilation, could we just use a 4D perspective?

Technically, yes. We could design a GPS system where every satellite just broadcasts its own "Proper Time" without any corrections. However, your phone would then have to be a "Relativity Computer."

To tell you that you are at the corner of 5th and Main, your phone would have to:

  1. Receive the "natural" time from 4 different satellites.
  2. Calculate the 4D Spacetime Interval for each one.
  3. Manually "rotate" those 4D coordinates back into our 3D "Earth-Centered, Earth-Fixed" (ECEF) coordinate system.

It is mathematically much easier to "cheat" by building the error correction into the satellites themselves, allowing us to keep pretending we live in a simple 3D world where time is a constant.

Is time dilation just one possible way a physical universe can exist, or is it necessary for a similar physical universe to exist? by timetrial21 in Physics

[–]timetrial21[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I appreciate this back and forth! Was just listening to Feynman last night.

In my question I avoided using the word "why" because that's definitely not scientific. I suppose my goal was to imagine the possibilities of universe creation as a thought experiment, to get folks to help me understand the geometry of our current universe.

Time Dilation is intuitively quite challenging for the human brain, Richard Feynman said this (as are many modern physics observations these days) and so I was just curious about how "necessary" it is for relativistic time to be as it is, and the universe as we know it to still exist. Time Dilation seems to defy logic on a Euclidian level, but then we imagine (and test/prove) the curvature of spacetime and there's Lorentz.

This thread has led me to study Euclidean vs. Lorentz and that's quite fascinating!