Negative Geez by CH3SH1R3 M4TT	Last Updated: 04 July, 2010
Modern Philosophy

Zero to Infinity Instantly 05/04/10 You are, right now, zooming along at the speed of light. Of course you would reply to me, however: Einstein said travelling the speed of light is impossible, so you must be crazy or drunk. Well I might be crazy, but I'm not drunk, and my statement still stands either way. You see we normally think of our existence as taking place in three dimensions, height - up and down, length - back and forth and width - left and right. Now, lets put aside the fact that our most talented and trusted physicists tell us that we actually exist in a universe with up to eleven independent space-time dimensions and just focus on the fact that our daily perception actually takes place in not three, but four dimensions. The additional dimension is time, which, by all accounts and experiences seems to travel around us while we stand still. The sun comes up and goes down, the moon goes round and round and the seasons change like clockwork, all of which tells us that time keeps on ticking away regardless of what we may do or how we might move. This is how it feels to us, our evolutionary ancestors had no need for and would have reaped little benefits from adapting a conception of time other than a linear, one way flow through which we meander and coast with little control over the speeds and directions we can move. And while we may feel that we have a solid concept of time, we do not. It turns out that space and time are just two manifestations of the same substance, a substance dubbed appropriately: space-time. In fact, they are interdependent, and may not be anything other than one single substance that reacts in interesting ways to give us our perception of the passage of time. Here's how it works: if you are in empty space, free from the influence of any gravitational field and you are not accelerating or decelerating (which means you have to either be not moving at all or moving at a constant rate, free from change), then your motion through the dimension of time can be considered to be at the speed of light. When you start to move however, accelerating, decelerating or otherwise changing the way you are moving at all, a curious thing happens to your speed through time. It slows down. Take the following example, sometimes numbers help to simplify concepts and this is no exception: Take our sun as a reference point, and imagine yourself on top of it (yes, it would be quite dangerous to take a stroll on the sun, but just forget the fact that it's a giant ball of nuclear flame and just think about it as a point relative to yourself and your motion). While standing on the sun you notice the clock you have installed on it and the watch you are wearing on your wrist are ticking along at exactly the same rate. You and the Sun are travelling at exactly the same rate through time, the speed of light. But say you jump off the sun and speed into space at exactly half of the speed of light. At this point we can still consider the sun to be moving through time at the speed of light and space at the speed of exactly zero. You, yourself however, are now moving through space at .5 times the speed of light and through time at the same rate, half of the speed of light. So basically what I'm getting at is that the combination of your speed through time and your speed through space always adds up to a total of 100% light speed. This is why as you approach the speed of light time comes to a standstill, if all your motion is tied up in space, none of it can occur through time. If you are standing still, then all of your motion occurs through the dimension of time instead. This is the very essence of relativity itself. Time and space relate to one another in that motion through one detracts from motion through the other, so remember, no matter what, if someone tells you that you cannot travel at the speed of light, you can tell them yes I can, and I am right now. -CH3SH1R3 M4TT Share

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