The Spurt of Time

I had once humorously postulated, "Time runs slower in the presence of a boring teacher", and I'm pretty sure that all of you would agree. As for my intention then, it's was all about amusing a couple of classmates, and nothing pretty much else. Perhaps, today is when I discover it's more than an amusing joke; it comes with its own story to tell.



We know that nothing transcends light when it comes to velocity, as proposed by Einstein's relativity. A wide number of verified mathematical formulae and theories is an open testimony to its success. But it was not where we stopped. We took it a step forward, to logically propose that time "travels" at the speed of light. It's the reason we don't see a dead star 13 billion light years away, even though they are, in a sense, history. The time of it's death has just not "reached" us. Simple as it seems, or is it?



Then came the "arrow", or rather, the "arrows of time", to count for time's unidirectional propagation; very much unlike light. If time is considered a vector, it can have one, and only one direction no matter the polarity of C & P symmetry, though the relative magnitude is governed by relativistic phenomena.

Consider the arrows of time mentioned afore. Stephan Hawking defines 3 arrows of time in his bestseller, A Brief History of Time, namely the thermodynamic arrow, physcological arrow, and finally the cosmological arrow.



Thermodynamic arrow is considered to exist in direction where enthropy, or randomness increases with time. It's somewhat to resemble Murphy's law: "Everything tends to go wrong!". A crude, but lively illustration would be a glass falling off a slab. It shatters to pieces, to represent enthropy. Back in time, the glass in it's pristine form can represent order. No matter where we exist, we'll always see a glass breaking, rather than it rebuilding on its own. That is, the backflow of enthropy in time is void, which seems very comparable to the arrow of time. I would hold relativity to govern the magnitude of this arrow.

The next in line is the physcological arrow of time. It's the direction we feel the time progressing. I would not pretend to be capable of elaborately explaining this, but one thing we could say with certainity is that it's directed the same way the thermodynamic arrow is. This is the reason why we always see a glass in it's pristine form before we see it broken. Now a question, as it may arise, does this arrow of time harbor a magnitude? If it does, is it independently assorted, or does it bear connections with the thermodynamic arrow of time?



My answer to the first question would be a big yes, as the first lines of this post goes. However, I don't really like the idea that this magnitude of this arrow is related to its thermodynamic counterpart. Again, the example of time "running" slow in the presence of a boring teacher illustrates this. There's nothing wrong with the relative magnitude of the thermodynamic arrow, but it's the physcological arrow of time under change. Analogously, when propagating at relativistic velocities, it's the thermodynamic arrow to slow down, but NOT the physcological one, as everything goes just "normal" with himself and his local surroundings. However, thing's not moving at his speed may seem wierd and simply, crazy! [Time dilation & Lorentz Contraction is what I'm talking about]. This simply implies that the physcological arrow of time is static. Even though the direction of the physcological arrow depends upon the thermodynamic arrow's, magnitude is mutually dynamic. That is, if that booooring teacher is to hop right into your spacecraft which takes you for excursions at relativistic speeds, and just if the teacher is boring enough, the physcological arrow of time in terms of magnitude may just coincide with the thermodynamic arrow!

The last arrow we have is the cosmological arrow of time. I don't really think there can be perceivable change in magnitude for this arrow, since it involves the entire cosmos at its scale. Law of conservation of collective energy & mass would imply that all the fluctuations in this arrow in terms of magnitude would simply "cancel" each other out. As for now, I can't really decide if the cosmological arrow is unidirectional. However, Hawking consider's the "expansion" of the universe as the determinant of the direction of the arrow of cosmological time.

It's all around us. It's all within us. Yet, all we know is that it's something that exists. Is it just a mind game? Not really...