A Relatively Timely Podcast

I make a time joke. They both grown. Because we are talking about time today, and we're talking about time and relativity and sort of the challenges that we're going to have in keeping time in the future. And you might think, well, the thought we'd got pretty good at keeping time by now. I mean, we've got a long history of keeping time, centuries of keeping time, and uh,

and it's true. We have gotten very good at keeping local time, particularly things like, oh, I don't know, making sure that we are seconds match up every single second of the day, like, for instance, the quantum clock, which is keeping time so accurately that it won't lose a second for three point seven billion years, as opposed to the old standard, which is one second every hundred million years,

which is just you know, acceptable. We can't live like that, right, But but so so from a local perspective, we are very good at keeping time. But that local perspective is all based on the fact that we're all pretty much stuck here on this big old rock we call the Earth, traveling around the Sun together, more or less moving at the same speed, although depending upon where you want are

on Earth, that actually changes just a little bit. But it turns out that time is not something that's universally standard, right, Joe, what I didn't know this was news to you. You wrote a whole episode of forward thinking about time. You don't remember that, No, maybe it was in the future. Anyway, time is not standing a second, all right. So you're telling me, you're telling me what that that time is

not a real thing. What about all of the physical laws we think of that are based on time, Like light takes this long to cross this amount of distance, all right? So time is time is relative, Joe. Time is relative depending upon a few things like gravity or mass, or the speed at which at which you travel and uh for us, for human beings, time is a very subjective experience where we experience time the way most of

us are familiar. You know, a second takes a second, a minute, It is sixty seconds, an hour or sixty minutes, unless you're sitting in a doctor's office, or you know, attending a really boring lecture, in which case a second is much longer than or you're having fun, in which case a second is much smaller than. That kind of goes back to the subjective part. But well, I mean we we don't even know how long a second takes for somebody else, right, I mean, I know what a

second feels like to me. What if your second feels a lot longer than mine does? Okay? Yeah, and what if the color blue looks different to you than us to me. That's beside the point here, Joe. What I'm trying to get at is that depending upon how fast you, Joe, are traveling, time will pass at a different rate for you than it would for someone who is not traveling at that same speed. This gets really complicated because we're technically all traveling already. We're on a planet that is moving.

That planet is not stationary. Now, if we had gone back to pre Copernican times, where we all had just assumed the Earth is a fixed location that is static and is not moving, and if that were in fact true, time would be a pretty simple thing for us to keep track of. But it's not true. We are on a planet that's moving around, and that is part of

what determines how time passes for us. Now, if you, Joe, we're to get into say, I don't know, a spaceship that has a really fast propulsion system on it, like close to the speed of light, and you were to just do a quick joy ride around the Solar System and come back. For arguments sake, we'll say that you you spent one hour according to your experience, your your watch says one hour has passed, and you land back

on Earth. Now, you were to compare your watch with my watch, which we had synchronized before you've gotten that space ship, you would see that more time had passed on my watch than on your watch. That's true, isn't it. Yeah? So, uh, I actually did a little research on this, Joe, you were pulling my legs. I'm I'm not that well, Okay,

I'm pretty misinformed. But so I I say, what if what if you start watching a movie when you get on your spaceship, and then somebody back on Earth starts watching a movie at the same time, how much time do you have to finish a movie. If say you're going at nine percent of the speed of light, and I looked up the Lorenz transformation ratio on this and it says, if you're going about nine of the speed of light, the transformation is effect is at a ratio of I think like it was two point two nine.

And that works out that the per some on the ship who leaves in time to watch a movie comes back when it's over, has time to watch The Little Mermaid back on Earth. At the same time that the Little Mermaid viewer arrives home, you have just finished watching The Godfather Part two, two hundred minutes long, the full thing that you know, the sadness at the end. So you get you get some pacino in de Niro while

the other person's singing part of your world. Right. So so the person on the space ship, it feels like only ninety minutes have passed. The person on Earth. It's much longer, or minutes only have passed for the person on this that's true. That's true. It doesn't it doesn't feel like it, but it is. Yeah, because that's the way time we're subjective. It's a subjective experience. That's the thing subjective in the sense that it feels normal for

everybody right right you on the spaceship. It doesn't feel to you like your time is going any slower. Everything seems totally normal. Your watch, the second hand takes a second to tick. The movie looks like it's playing at

a regular speed. But if somehow the people on the Earth were able to peer in the window of your spaceship, obviously they wouldn't be able to, but if we could just imagine that it would seem to them like you were watching the movie in slow motion, right, and that that everything was going in slow motion, not just you watching the movie, but you're watch the second hand would be ticking away at a slower rate than it should from that other observer. This is also tricky because we

often talk about from a stationary observer. Well, we don't really have any stationary observers because we're on a planet. It's a giant spaceship, essentially, isn't Isn't it even like just just theoretically a rule that there's no such thing as a stationary observer's I think you can only sort you can sort of posit one, but there's no way of actually confirming. Maybe you are stationary, you're technically in

a universe that's expanding. So I mean, it's it's it's a complicated thing, right because if you're if you are part of whatever system you are in, then you are moving right so that this gets really this gets to be a mind bender and you might think, oh, well, this is kind of crazy. We're talking about near speed

of light travel. We have to contend with this. Right now, there are satellites in orbit there in geosynchronous orbit over the Earth that are keeping track things like like your GPS stuff, which isn't necessarily geosynchronous orbit, but you've got satellites up there that that are sending down information and our GPS systems, which I'm sorry I just said GPS system. I'll have to go to the A T M machine and use my pin number. Um. But but let's say

you've got a GPS and it's getting information. It's technically getting information from multiple satellites, and that information includes when the satellite sent down a packet of information and by using this this data, the GPS can determine where you are on the surface of the Earth. It triangulates all that data and it's all in the one of the important things in that is when was the data sent

by the satellite supertime sensitive? Right exactly, because that's what determines where you you know, how it how it figures out where you are on the surface of the Earth. Those those seconds matter, right. And the thing is, those satellites that are in orbit are tracking time to us, it seems like at a different rate because their clocks over the course of a good span of time start to lose time and due to the distance from the center of gravity of the Earth and due to the

speed at which they're they're moving. Right. To be fair, that change is so tiny. It is like if if we were just to you know, be aboard this satellite or something, we wouldn't even notice it. It's we're talking about the tiny, tiny fractions of a second. Now it matters if you're doing really precise calculations, like I assumed the kind of the GPS on matter. But but those kinds of speeds, it doesn't become a really noticeable problem the same way it was when we talked about, you know,

watching The Godfather, right that that's much more. It's it's like an instant realization. Whereas with the satellite it's an accute lative thing as well. It would take months before people would even start to notice something' hinky here. I know that we synchronize them and they're all tomic clocks. Why would why is this happening? But we have to contend with that that macro dilation reality too, don't we.

I mean, if we're talking about the future and we're talking about expanding into space, I mean, assuming we really are going to explore the cosmos, right, which you know I'm going to, I don't know about the rest of humanity, so that everyone else better catch at Lawrence like sia, I just call our major Tom from I'm out right.

But yeah, if we want to do that, I mean, for instance, if we want to try and find another planet to colonize, most of the most of the plants that would be even remotely possible for that are hundreds of light years away. I mean, I mean the nearest systems period are hundreds of light years away. But you know, talking sing of Kepler twenty two. You know, that was the one that the Kepler found and they were like, oh, this one looks pretty cool. Six light years away, Yeah,

six hundred light years away. That that's light years. I mean, technically, according to relativity, you cannot travel at that speed, right, you can't go at light speed. The closest we could hope to do if we if we accept the universal speed limit of of light speed, is getting you know, close to light speed, like we were talking about earlier. It's possible. Maybe we could someday get a craft that goes the speed of light and then traveling to these

places becomes a lot more feasible. Right, but you're still talking about the descendants of the people who got on board the ship. Are the ones who are there or some kind of cryogenic sort of we managed to find some way of turning off the aging gene, and so we're perpetually the same age as whenever we got that treatment done. I wish that they would hurry up with that because my time is running out. People. I've heard

you're very old, Jonathan. That's what I hear, Lauren. I don't trust the cryogenic freezing, by the way, because every time you do that, mother wakes you up halfway there and there's some beacon you've got to go check out on some weird blasted rock in the middle of space. This this kind of brings me to mind of another science fiction, beloved science fiction franchise, and I'm talking specifically about Star Trek, where they've established the idea of the

star date. Right. Yeah, star date is is essentially it's it's well, I guess they do it in quadrants in Star Trek, but they have an established time that everyone can magically work on. And that way, when you refer to a star date, everyone else that you encounter knows exactly when you're you know what time you're talking about,

because they're all keeping that same star date. Something. I can only assume that they either have a computer on some planet, probably Earth, because Earth is clearly the center of the entire universe, or or something else that is keeping time and is so technologically advanced lee that it seems like magic to us transmitting that signal simultaneously to

every clock in the rest of the universe. Or I don't know that the quantum logic has has advanced to a state that that the computers can handle the log room. Maybe they've they've got the they've got the entangled electrons, and the spin of the electron tells the onboard ship clock. Okay, yeah, ship time, because you would have to have ship time. Ship time would be what it would feel like to the people who are on board the ship, right, and that time would feel like just like on any other service,

that the second is a second, a minutism, etcetera. The star date is supposed to be outside of that, it's supposed to be this universal time. And again I agree, I think it's probably something that's supposed to be said on Earth because starf Lead is that's where Earth is. And I can't believe we're having this discussion this in depth.

But they didn't even keep it consistent on the show. No, no, no, no, the early days, they just had a shorthand you know, back back before like the first if you watch that the original series and uh and you watch those first few episodes there, they aren't consistent. In fact, there are later episodes that have earlier star dates because they were just kind of they thought it sounded cool. They were just spitting out numbers. Yeah, they were like like number

forty seven, etcetera. Yeah, yeah, that is a cool number. And in the Star Trek University seven is pretty big. But anyway, that's the thing is that you would have to have some sort of really complex computer to be able to take in that information and take your onboard ship's clock, and it was just ridiculous. Wait a second, let's break this down. Okay, let's talk about what's really the problem here. Okay, Now, in Star Trek, they're going faster than the speed of light. So let's just maybe

that's possible. You know, maybe everything we know is wrong. But let's let's just say right for right now that that that's not actually what we're gonna be doing. Okay, Okay, we're just we're ignore test or as entirely. Just skip over that. That's cool. Let's imagine that that we can go the speed of light. Okay, like we were talking about before, break it down. What what's the actual problem.

Why can't we keep clocks synchronized? Well, because again time is from from a stationary observer, which again from the observer down here, time is is literally moving differently. You know, it's it's it's it's all the theory of relativity by by Einstein. It says that that time is part of the fabric of space, and that the fabric of space time is is warped by both gravity and speed, and so so you're you're changing, you are intrinsically changing the

nature of this imaginary thing. You're changing your experience. Well, it sounds like it sounds like essentially, what we're saying is that time is an experience. It's not something that you can track in any kind of standard or universal way. It's also a magazine. Yeah, I just didn't want you to pigeonhole. It's also a print side project. That's true, Yeah, Morris Day. Yeah, anyway, Yeah, that's Joe and I are bonding over terrible references. Uh, yeah, I mean it's it is.

It's totally subjective and really the the to me, one of the interesting things is that, uh, from the perspective of any one individual, whether that person is aboard a spaceship or on a planet or drifting out into the dark, cold clutches of space itself, time is passing at a very at that normal rate, normal being like, this is

this is what I'm used to. It's not until you meet up with someone else who has been traveling at a different speed and you compare notes that you even have the moment where you're like, wow, that's that's weird. So maybe we would just have to give up the fact that Okay, if you're traveling it is, you know, very significant fraction of the speed of light. Everything's gonna get messed up. Actually, no matter how fast you're traveling, right,

it's going to get messed up a little bit. It's just a question of the faster you travel, the more messed up it gets. Right in a in an exponential way, yes, okay, so we understand that traveling in the spaceships at a near fraction the speed of light will will make keeping track of time across distances completely pointless. You just can't really do it. Maybe you could, I'd imagine have different sort of galactic time zones, right, like each planet keeps

its own time. Solar System keeps its own time in a way that is useful locally, and when you get somewhere new you just have to adapt to their time. But that introduces another idea to me. So, if we're traveling beyond Earth, aren't we going to get messed up real bad? Just our bodies, our brains. I mean, we are so deeply programmed to work on this planet that has an essentially twenty four hour day in particular circadian Right, what happens to us when suddenly we just do not

have day and night anymore. Well, if if you're a board a ship, I assume, I mean, we're talking about far enough in the future where we have these propulsion systems. It's it's far enough to say that I think we would be able to simulate not day cycles aboard the ship. So at least on on ship, your night day cycles to you would seem normal. They would seem to be transpiring at the same rate as they would if you

were back on Earth. Now. Meanwhile, so when back on Earth would be uh, if they were able to see what your night day cycles would look like, they would say, wow, that's nothing like what it is on Earth, because again, you're traveling at near the speed of light. So it's you know, from the two different from the two different perspectives, it's gonna seem totally different, but from each individual it's

going to seem perfectly normal. That would allow you to at least maintain some sense of balance from a normal day night cycle while you're on the ship on another planet totally different story, you're pretty much you know, I mean, unless you're living inside all the time with no windows out to the outside world, or you're on a planet that has a day night cycle. It's so near to Earth's that it doesn't really matter, which is possible, Like

Mars is really close, yeah, like three something something ours. Yeah, it's really it's it's not it's very similar. It's similar enough where I think it would be fairly easy to adapt to the day night cycle. Uh. Not a whole lot to see outside on Mars though, So I mean you'll be like, is it a nice day, Well, it's dusty. It's kind of kind of dusty. It's a little less rusty today than it was yesterday. It's not true, it's all oxidized. Yeah, So I mean that's just what does

night even look like on Mars? I feel like all the pictures I've seen were taken during the day, and well that night it's pretty dark. They don't have any street lamps out there, all right, you know, you know, guys,

I mean, this is incredibly interesting conversation. But as it turns out, I mean, it's it's going to be really hard, if not impossible, to manage time across both Earth and UH interstellar traveling UH spaceships that are moving at near the speed of light or really any significant speed significant enough to get out of our solar system and perhaps into another one, just because that's the way time works. And it's, uh, it's pretty hard to wrap your head around.

I mean, it's it's weird to think that the second hand on my watch would be moving to me the same amount as it with on Earth if I were on a really fast ship, but from an outside observer who somehow is magically able to see this, it was like it's moving in slow motion. That's that seems crazy and counterintuitive to us, but that's the way time works. I actually don't wear a watch, so I don't even know why I bothered doing this show. Yeah, me neither

are we are we three non latch wears. So, as the Great Douglas Adams once said, time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. And I think that pretty much sums it up. Guys, Uh, we hear it. Forward thinking. Are really excited to have a conversation with you, our audience, and to really make this an interactive experience, not just us gathering around and chatting into microphones and being silly, but to really have conversations about the future and things that are going to play a role in our future.

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