Reply
Mon 30 May, 2005 05:35 pm
Something that's always bothered me about relativity is how space/time is presented as though it's an actually thing. As though we're moving through a thick gooey soup of time with every step we take. I've always thought of time as just that, a relative measure of speed over distance.
What confuses me is these theory's about time travel and relativity. Why would going faster than the speed of light cause time to move backwards?
Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. I assume that you are talking hypothetical?
No material object can be accelerated to the speed with which light travels through vacuum, and light itself travels at a maximum of that speed. Therefore, your question has no answer, since it assumes an impossible condition. Where did you get the idea that this was so?
To address your earlier concern about spacetime being treated like a thing, rather than like the absence of a thing, the reason is that regions of spacetime can possess properties. Gravity, for instance, according to General Relativity, is actually the curvature of a region of spacetime. The degree of curvature can be described with the Reimann curvature tensor. If I remember my history correctly, Einstein had hit an impasse in fleshing out General Relativity until his old school chum Marcel Grossman gave him some tutoring in the geometry of curved surfaces.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace