In his opinion, there are only 16 hours in a day now.
Public lectures by former Cisco Systems CTO Greg Braden are being held with great success in the United States these days. Braden says that over the past fifty years, time has shrunk, and in fact now there are only 16 hours in a day. That is why we are in a hurry, we rush, but still do not have time for anything. The clock deceives us, because it "shrank" along with the time. It sounds crazy, but we tried to figure out what's what - it turned out that there is something to talk about.
Pulse of the Earth
Do you often hear: “how time flies”, “I didn’t have time to come to my senses, the vacation is gone”, and so on in the same spirit? - Braden says theatrically and, like an experienced orator, circles the silent audience with his hand. You, of course, blame everything on the fact that you are just getting old, he continues. But really … Braden pauses theatrical - in fact, time has really tightened. Your age has nothing to do with it.
Braden says: ask any cardiologist, and he will tell you that a person with a fast heart rate, other things being equal, lives less. It seems that each of us is assigned a certain number of heart beats. The Earth also has a pulse. It is called the "Schumann resonance". When it was opened in the 1950s, it was 7.8 beats per second. And that was until 1980. Then he went up, and now - 13 hits. The earth "breathes" faster. And it changes the space-time around it. Namely: if with a "pulse" of 7.8 beats per second, a day lasts 24 hours, with a "pulse" of 13 - only 16 hours, the researcher says. Everything around looks the same: the sun rises and sets, we did not run faster, the clock is ticking in the old way, but this is an illusion. There are REALLY 16 hours left in the day.
Radio waves and clocks - what is the connection?
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Numerous Braden fans are reminded of the Bible. It says that before the end of the world time will shrink. Many religious leaders have already stated that we are living in the end times, so here's the scientific proof!
At first glance, the concept of the former top executive of Cisco looks so-so. First, it is unclear how exactly the "pulse of the Earth" is related to space-time. We read everything that Braden wrote about it, but we did not find the specifics. Secondly, the Schumann resonance is still not the "pulse of the Earth", but the frequency of resonance between the Earth and the layer of charged particles at an altitude of about one hundred kilometers above it, the ionosphere. Resonance is undoubtedly important. Physically, it manifests itself as a hum that can be heard with a special radio receiver (by the way, it is not very difficult, it is also soldered by a teenager). This hum is somehow connected with the alpha rhythms of our brain, that is, with the frequency at which the biological "processor" in our heads works.
But these are all radio waves and electrical vibrations, where does time come in? Third, scientists actually found febrile failures in the Schumann resonance, "arrhythmia." For example, during solar flares, the resonance "breaks". And this is one of the reasons why we feel bad during magnetic storms. But globally, the researchers say, the “pulse” rate is still between seven and eight beats per second, with the “pulse” not accelerating from year to year. And the most important thing. It was Braden who came up with the idea that in 2012 the Mayan calendar will end, and the Earth will stop. Well, how did he come up with … The Mayan calendar was actually calculated only until 2012. But the Earth seems to be spinning.
Here it would be to put an end, but not so simple. Braden, as an experienced "provocateur from science", raised a problem that very serious researchers write about. Time flows evenly, in a straight line? You will be surprised, but high science says no. Braden simplified the essence of advanced research, invented something, and put it on public display - but the masses learned about the paradox of time. What have you heard, for example, about the Turin Experiment? Now you will hear.
He just doesn't exist
Plato said that time is just an illusion. He believed that all "times" actually exist simultaneously, the past has not gone anywhere, the future has already been created and already exists. Higher beings (demons) see, as it were, a tape of events, they can twist it back and forth. And people are doomed to slide along this tape at a given speed, and contemplate only one “frame” of this great “film”.
In the twentieth century, science pulled up, and everything became even more confused. To listen to Einstein, time is a very relative thing. It completely depends on gravity and speed, the stronger the gravity and the higher the speed - the slower the passage of time. But, being "inside" the process, you will never know it (here Braden is absolutely right). We must look outside. Einstein wrote: Imagine that you are looking through the window of a spaceship, which is flying in front of you at almost the speed of light. It will seem to you that the movements of the crew are terribly slow. In this case, everything inside the ship will be as usual.
Is it strange? And experiments have confirmed! On the top floor of a skyscraper, the Earth's gravity is less than at the bottom, so time flows faster there? Scientists have set up an experiment with a very accurate atomic clock, and it is! The Independent has even tricked the rich living in penthouses by the rooftops of skyscrapers: you age faster! The atomic clock sees the change in time, even if it is raised only half a meter. No longer a theory: GPS satellites fly high, and the time is different there. And they need to give you, to Earth, your exact coordinates. So, for several years now, engineers have been introducing this "Einstein correction" into the data of navigators, otherwise the satellites would lie even more.
But, besides the teachings of Einstein, there is also quantum mechanics, no less great thing in science, and it considers time as constant and "eternal". Quantum theory is correct, all experiments speak about it. The best minds are struggling to solve the paradox, for example, the great Richard Feynman, the equally cool Bryce de Witt, and many others. First, they put forward in essence the concept of Plato, only in modern scientific language. Each moment of time corresponds to "its own" universe. Otherwise: an infinite number of universes each experience its own scenario of development. In one universe you read this article in KP, in another - the same article, but in Otechestvennye zapiski, because there was no revolution in Russia, and therefore no Komsomol members, in the third, you read in KP, but the article differs by one letter, and so on ad infinitum.
In the end, everything turned out to be even more interesting. In 2013, an experiment was carried out in Turin, and it was proved: for an external observer, time does not exist at all, it exists only if you are inside the process. Looking from the outside at our Universe, you will see nothing, because without time there is no space. But, as soon as you fly inside, everything appears as if by magic. Materialization from nothing! This construction is described by the famous Wheeler-De Wit equation and seems to reflect the reality in which we live. It turns out that time is still just an illusion of our world.
All this forces us to raise the question once again: maybe Braden is right, only in vain did he drag Schumann's resonances? Or not in vain?
The paradox of Christmas
Now we need to go into the field of psychology for a while and decide: maybe we are still facing the paradox of our perception? Old people grumble that "the years fly by," Braden has grown old, and began to grumble too. You might be surprised, but a lot of research has been devoted to the perception of time at different ages. And that's what it turned out.
When subjects of different ages were simply asked how, they say, your relationship with time is developing, they said: yes, in childhood it stretched like rubber, but now - like pictures from a carriage window. This was called the "Christmas paradox" - they say, children are waiting for Santa Claus and gifts, they cannot wait, and their parents do not have time to buy them. But when they began to make tests to objectively assess the perception, it turned out that there was almost no effect! More precisely: up to 50 years old, the subjective time for a person slows down slightly, but then it reaches a plateau, and so it remains. For a two-year-old child, a year is 50% of his life, for a fifty-year-old person - 2%, and it will be perceived accordingly, this is true. But in general, that at 17 years old, that at 50, time - it is time.
It turned out also something else. People really began to do less, although they seem to be working tirelessly. As the founder of the company "Ali Baba" Jack Ma said, "my father worked in the field from dawn to dawn, and did everything, but today there are a lot of equipment in the offices, but they do not have time to do anything." One interesting study says gadgets are to blame, but not in the sense that we're staring at the screen and wasting time. Gadgets somehow supposedly affect a certain center of the brain, seemingly discovered by psychologists and responsible for the perception of time. Do they act like an electromagnetic field? Flashing pictures on the screen? Unclear.
So it looks like there is a problem, but psychology has nothing to do with it. We are looking further.
Zero of all eras
The key, perhaps, lies in the research of Terence McKenna, who put forward the concept of "zero time" a few years ago. Time is a wave, and it has a zero point, a phase after which nothing “new” happens, instead, the world is filled with replicas of the old, and a kind of zombie apocalypse sets in. I liked how one of the bloggers wrote about it, who believes that zero has already happened: “I look around and feel that we are stuck in the past. Our presidential candidates (the author lives in the US - KP) are a throwback to the 90s. Most of the music is remakes of old songs. It's the same with books and TV shows. " Another delirium? How to look. One person calculated (with the help of search engines it's easy to do this) that there are as many as 37 million posts in which people claim that something is wrong with time. And it seems to everyone?
Is there a physical basis at McKenna's zero point? Several years ago, the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein were discovered. The term "gravitational" covers the fact that they are also waves of time (and space too). That is, when you are covered by such a wave, gravity changes around you (this is what modern detectors see), but time and space are also distorted. Let us now pose the question, what if all the time in which we live is also a wave? So it is, and this wave is given by the entire mass of the existing universe. But do waves have peaks and dips? Exactly, and the waves of time too. And what do we know about this? We don't know anything. If you cling to matter (at least you can touch it) in order to gain an understanding of time through it, the universe is full of some kind of dark matter incomprehensible to our devices, and what it is, no one understands.
And now - the most amazing thing. If we leave physicists alone and ask geologists, they will say: yes, this is no secret for a long time, time on Earth is a fickle thing. When geologists study ancient sediments, they can tell the duration of "those" prehistoric days, for example, by the frequency of the tides, the traces of which are perfectly readable in the sediments. So, one and a half billion years ago, a day lasted only 18 hours. Usually the Moon is blamed: it allegedly moves away from the Earth, and thereby slows down the Earth. But it is not exactly. Okay, the geological record sees what was billions of years ago, but what was the situation, for example, in Ancient Greece? Here it is already necessary to ask astronomers: the most ancient (and accurate) observations of eclipses were carried out in the 8th century BC. So, it turned out that since then the Earth has slowed down by six hours.
Does passionarity generate not the Sun, but the waves of time?
All this is still fragmentary data, but they indicate that a day may not last 24 hours. Maybe Braden is right, and the day now is actually 16 hours. To check, you need to look from the outside. It's like the Turin experiment, remember? When we look into the past, we seem to see the system from the outside. And move into the conventional VIII century BC, and you will not notice anything, a day is like a day, an hourglass counts the usual seconds. But, most likely, it is not the speed of rotation of the Earth that changes, but the time itself.
"Zero time" can also be considered by historians. Our compatriot Lev Gumilyov (and not he alone) noticed that history seems to be moving in waves. Either nothing happens, or else suddenly “everything” begins to happen: tribes are thrown off their seats, empires are crumbling, a breakthrough in the sciences. He called it passionarity and linked it, in the fashion of his time, with the activity of the Sun. But in the same way, the peaks of passionarity can be called “take-off points” of the wave of time, and vice versa. Another example. Historians have long noticed that "fashion" is repeated in art. Deep antiquity loved symbol and abstraction - modern art too. When the Pompeian frescoes were uncovered, they were stunned - these are the impressionists, the cast of Van Gogh! It seems that the "new" is, as it were, carried out to us by a certain wave, and the same wave carries it back into the ocean of eternity.
The issue will be finally resolved when we finally build a space base far enough, for example, on the Moon, or better on Mars, and we will observe the Earth from the side. However, it seems that the first results are already there. Recently, a message was received from the Martian seismograph that the red planet was buzzing strangely with a frequency of 2.5 beats per second. We have not yet figured out what it is, but it may turn out that time itself is buzzing. Mars is smaller, so it resonates at a lower frequency than Earth.
In short, when your child utters the old man's phrase “I don’t have enough time for anything,” do not rush to laugh or scold the education system. Perhaps it is.
EVGENY ARSYUKHIN