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narslut

i would be the worst referee in football history like if i had the entire team coming at me screaming why i carded one of their players i would just cry and break down in the middle of the pitch. match cancelled

My speech about time, as promised

Good afternoon my fellow human beings. My name is Lauren and I am currently studying to become a scientist sometime in the not-so-distant future. It is likely that many of you may think of science as just a boring subject you had to go through in school, but for me, it’s much more. For me it is a way of seeing life, in a way that is interconnected and elegant. I want to share with you a glimpse of the way I see the world; from the vantage point of science. I now wish to explore the concept of time through the lens of scientific thinking.

You can tell me what time it currently is, but can you tell me what time is? We think of time as the constant passing of moment to moment, which constitutes what we call life. Time controls and dictates every aspect of our lives. How many times a day do you check to see what time it is? At least 10 I would say. We need to know what time it is to create order and organisation in our lives. Not only that, but life would not make sense without time. It doesn’t make sense to say to someone “I’ll meet you at the library”: They need to know “when”, or the meeting cannot happen. We  use time all the time and yet, no one can give a satisfactory answer to the question: “What is time?” We can’t be blamed for not knowing; we are only human after all. And because we are only human, we struggle to fathom reality as it is. Humans evolved to understand the world on this macroscopic scale, not to understand the very large universe nor the very small quantum world. So it is impressive that we have the ability to even partially comprehend these complex ideas.  Our intuition tells us that time is fixed, and it projects us into the future no matter what we do. But this is an illusion. Some drugs have the ability to change our perception of time, and one minute could feel like an hour. You might think “Oh but drugs mess with your mind!” But who’s to say our sober minds are right? It is possible that time is nothing more than a construct of our minds. Anyway, enough philosophical discussion. Now let us take a more scientific approach.

The saying “Don’t cry over spilt milk” has a rather surprising implication towards the fate of the universe. Why? Because the spilling of the milk cannot be undone. Cannot be undone. Sure, the milk can spread out more, but the puddle does not spontaneously reassemble itself into the bottle that it came from. Why? The particles of the milk don’t want to create structure, they want to spread out; to create equilibrium.  But because the milk particles are contained within the bottle, they are being prevented from spilling everywhere. A sand castle is another example; it did not simply pop up out of nowhere; someone had to take a sand castle bucket and make it. But obviously the sand castle will not last for a long time, as the wind will blow its particles away. The reason why you never see a sand castle appear out of nowhere is because of probability. Nothing in the laws of physics prevents a sand castle from spontaneously assembling; however, it is highly unlikely. This is due to the fact that a sand castle is highly structured. A pile of sand, however, does not have a structure; you can pick up handfuls of sand and release them, but you still have a pile of sand.  So this state – of being unstructured or disorganised, is the state in which particles tend to go, because it is fair more likely than creating something which has structure. This is called the second law of thermodynamics, and it applies to everything in the universe. This why ice melts, why glass breaks, why leaves scatter everywhere in autumn. It may even explain why we die. Order turns into disorder; this is known as entropy. Entropy explains why everything eventually decays and dies. One of the proposed fates of the universe is that the universe will spread out and become unstructured and disorganised. When the universe has reached the point where it is as chaotic as it can possibly be, it will just be particles whizzing around with no aim and no purpose.  But this all sounds a little depressing. Let us now discuss a more hopeful prospect; time travel.

Imagine time as a large flexible sheet, which represents what Einstein thought of as the space-time continuum. Now imagine a heavy ball – which represents mass - placed in the centre of the sheet. What happens is that the sheet – the space-time continuum, bends. What this means is that a mass in space – say a star – will actually warp space-time. It means that time near the mass slows down. So believe it or not, our feet are slightly younger than our heads! It’s barely noticeable – but it matters when it comes to GPS systems. This time dilation needs to be accounted for; otherwise the GPS systems could not work. So mass is one factor that influences time. Another is motion. In 1971, an atomic clock was flown on a jet around the world. After the flight, the time of the atomic clock was compared to the time of another on the ground. The result was that the times were different. Even though they only differed by a few hundred billionths of a second, it was proof that motion has an effect on time, as Einstein predicted. So even when we’re walking, time runs slower for us than if we were standing still. You may be wondering, is it possible to go back in time? One thing is for sure: you will not go back in time by running at the speed of light, because you would need an infinite mass! E equals m c squared, remember, so that’s why that’s not possible. But there are other methods of time travelling into the past. Who has seen Interstellar? If you haven’t seen it, do it because it is goddamn amazing. So they use a wormhole to travel to another galaxy. It is a bold idea as for our current technology, but it is theoretically possible. A wormhole is like we talked about before, with the space-time continuum: it’s like folding space-time in half and going through a particular point so that you end up on the other side. But there are problems with travelling into the past. For example, the grandfather paradox: What if you went back in time and killed your grandfather? Without your grandfather, you couldn’t have existed in the first place. So what happens? Do you just disappear into thin air? Nobody knows.

There are many things to ponder in science. It is imperative that we never stop wondering, so that we may always see the beauty in the universe in which we find ourselves. I would love to share more, but I suppose I’ve used up all my time. Thank you for listening.