What if the time part in the space-time continuum equation was literally eliminated? One of the latest studies, perhaps, indicates that time is slowly and gradually disappearing from our universe and one day it will evaporate completely. A radical new theory could explain the cosmological puzzle that has been fooling scientists for years.
Scientists have previously measured the light of distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding, and the rate of this expansion is constantly increasing. Scientists have suggested that these supernovae are flying apart faster than the aging of the universe. Physicists also concluded that some anti-gravitational force must pull galaxies apart, and began to call this unknown force "dark energy."
The idea that time itself could disappear in billions of years - and everything will stop - was proposed back in 2009 by professors Jose Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raul Vera of the University of Basque Country in Bilbao and the University of Salamanca in Spain. The consequence of this cardinal movement of time itself towards the end is an alternative explanation for "dark energy" - a mysterious anti-gravitational force that has been proposed to explain some cosmic phenomena.
However, to this day, no one knows what dark energy really is and where it comes from. Professor Senovilla and his colleagues have come up with an incredible alternative. Scientists have proposed to exclude such a concept as dark energy altogether and to reconsider our views. According to Senovilla, we are fooling ourselves into thinking that the universe is expanding when in fact this time is slowing down. At the everyday level, this slowdown will be imperceptible. But if you track the progress of the Universe over billions of years, then on a cosmic scale everything will become obvious. This change will be infinitely slow from a human point of view, but from a cosmological point of view, the power of which to study the light of ancient suns that shone billions of years ago, it can be easily measured.
A proposal by a group of scientists, published in the journal Physical Review D, excludes dark energy as fiction. Instead, Senovilla explains the appearance of acceleration by the gradual slowing down of time itself.
If time is gradually slowing down, "and we naively continue to use our equations to determine changes in the rate of expansion relative to the normal course of time, then the simple model demonstrated in our work shows an effective acceleration of this expansion."
Currently, astronomers can determine the rate of expansion of the universe using the so-called "redshift" method. This technique is based on the understanding that stars that move away from us are redder than those that move in our direction. Scientists are looking for a certain kind of supernova, which have become the benchmark in this regard. However, the accuracy of these measurements assumes time invariance throughout the universe. If time slows down, according to the new theory, our lonely time dimension slowly transforms into a new spatial dimension. Thus, the distant, ancient stars observed by cosmologists from our perspective appear to be accelerating.
Despite all their radicalism and unprecedentedness, these ideas do not remain without support. Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, says the concept has its advantages. "We believe that time appeared in the process of the Big Bang, and if time can appear, then it can disappear - this is just the opposite effect."
Does time exist?
In 2011, scientists at the Bista Research Center in Ptuj, Slovenia, suggested that Newton's idea of time as an absolute quantity flowing by itself, as well as the assumption that time is the fourth dimension of space-time, were incorrect. They proposed to replace these concepts of time with more appropriate to our physical world: time as a quantitative order of changes.
In two papers published in the Physics Essays, Amrit Sorli, David Fiscalletti, and Duchamp Klinard have attempted to explain that what we mean by time is actually an absolute physical quantity acting as an independent variable (time, t, often is the X-axis in the coordinate system showing the evolution of the physical system). But, as scientists note, we never measure t. We measure the frequency and speed of an object. Time itself is a purely mathematical quantity and does not exist physically.
This point of view does not mean that time does not exist, but that time has more to do with space than with the idea of absolute time. Thus, although four-dimensional spacetime is often assumed to consist of three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, the view of scientists suggests that it would be more correct to represent spacetime in the form of four dimensions of space. In other words, the universe is "timeless."
“Minkowski space is not three dimensions plus time, but four dimensions,” the scientists wrote. The view that time is represented by a physical entity in which material change occurs is replaced by a more convenient view in which time is simply the numerical order of material change. This view better responds to the physical world and better explains instantaneous physical phenomena: gravity, electrostatic interaction, information transfer during the EPR experiment, and others."
Scientists give an example of this concept of time by depicting a photon moving between two points in space. The space between them consists entirely of Planck lengths, that is, of the smallest distances that a photon can overcome at a time. When a photon travels the Planck length, it is described as traveling exclusively in space and not in absolute time. A photon can be thought of as moving from point 1 to point 2, and its position at point 1 is "before" the position at point 2, literally, since the number 1 comes before the number 2 in the number series. Numeric order is not equivalent to temporal order, that is, digit 1 in time does not exist before digit 2, only numerically.
Without using time as the fourth dimension of space-time, the physical world could be described more accurately. As noted by physicist Enrico Prati in a recent study, Hamiltonian dynamics (equations in classical mechanics) is very clearly defined without the concept of absolute time.
Other scientists noted that the mathematical model of space-time does not correspond to physical reality, and suggested using a timeless "state of space", which would provide a more accurate framework. Also, scientists noted the falsification of two concepts of time. For example, the concept of time as the fourth dimension of space - as the fundamental physical container in which an experiment takes place - can be falsified by an experiment in which time does not exist.
Achilles and the turtle
In addition to providing a more accurate description of the nature of physical reality, the notion of time as a quantitative order of change can resolve Zeno's Achilles and the Turtle paradox. In this paradox, Achilles tries to catch up with the tortoise in a race. But while Achilles can run 10 times faster than a turtle, he will never overtake a turtle, because whenever Achilles runs a certain distance, the turtle travels one tenth of that distance. Thus, whenever Achilles reaches the point where the turtle was, it will still be slightly ahead. While the conclusion that Achilles can never outrun the tortoise is obviously false, there are many other explanations for this paradox.
The paradox can be resolved by redefining the speed so that the speed of both runners will be determined by the numerical order of their movements, and not by their movement and direction in time. From this point of view, Achilles and the tortoise will only move through space, and Achilles will definitely overtake his opponent in space, although not in absolute time.
Some of the more recent studies have questioned the theory that the brain represents time as an internal “clock” emitting neural tics, and suggested that the brain represents time as a spatial distribution by registering the activation of different neural nodes. Although we perceive events as occurring in the past, present, or in the future, these concepts may simply be part of the psychological framework within which we experience material changes in space.
In any case, if this theory can be considered mathematically (in the form of a solution to the problem of the arrow of time), there remains one more unanswered question: what is time?
Ilya Khel