The Improbable Dances of Space and Time
Let me challenge your perceptions. Almost everything modern physics thinks it knows about reality is wrong, and I can prove it!
The last time I did one of these articles, it was looking at Parallel Worlds, and it was such fun that I have turned around to go again! A long time ago (August 2011, in fact), I wrote Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming, which made the basic assumption that Faster-Than-Light travel was possible because RPGs required it to be so – hence any in-game physics needed to stretch to incorporate it. So this time around, I’m going down the opposite rabbit-hole and assuming that FTL is Not possible, and discovering that physics needs to evolve even more if that’s the case…!
The speed of light is a finite value, which – according to current physics – limits the speed of propagation of phenomena throughout space-time. That doesn’t mean that any given phenomenon will propagate at that speed, only that it won’t go faster.
It follows that we never see the stars and other celestial bodies as they are, only as they were. The light and other phenomena that characterize the object takes as many years, weeks, minutes, and seconds to reach us as the object was distant at the time the phenomena originated at the distant body (it will have moved since), measured in light-years, -days, -weeks, -minutes and -seconds.
Yet, we are so accustomed to our position of privilege as the observers of these phenomena that we treat what we perceive “now” as being contemporary with us. Only if we were somehow able to travel fast enough, far enough, could we reach a position of knowing the way these phenomena really are, right now.
There really is no substitute for going there and looking for ourselves; anything else leaves us with yesterday’s news, or that of the day before, or… well, you take the point.
Anyone got the time?
Earth has a series of wholly-artificial lines that delineate “Time Zones” which signify what the time, and therefore the date, is – locally.
If the moon were to be stolen, dragged away by some cosmic dustbin-cleaner in the twinkling of an eye, the effects would be felt instantly, or almost so (see the sidebar below), all over the world, but every different time-zone would have a different local time at which the effects would begin to be experienced.
Sidebar: Oh, Yeah?
The effects of the moon effectively vanishing would be felt instantly only if gravity has an infinite speed of propagation, which kind of violates the premise of paragraph one.
Gravity is, these days, considered to be a deformation in the “shape” of space-time resulting from the concentration of energy in the form of mass (which, generally speaking, has a higher energy density than any other conceivable form, all the way up to an effectively infinite value beyond the event horizon of a black hole). When an object with mass moves, it’s something like a heavy ball rolling across a rubber sheet suspended from the sides, the sheet stretches and deforms underneath the mass, wherever it happens to be located.
But does that mean that if someone were to pick up the ball, the sheet would spring back into position perfectly and instantaneously? Or would there be some elastic delay, however minuscule? It’s a really unpleasant question for a physicist, who really hate the concept of anything “instantaneous” happening, because it violates the cosmic speed limit.
Wait – are there any natural phenomena in which mass changes? Sure there are – atomic reactions of any sort qualify – but these are generally changes in ‘objects” (particles) so small that detecting the changes is extraordinarily difficult. Of course, in a chain reaction, you get a lot of these changes happening in a very short span of time – but that might turn out to be a very long span of time relative to the time required for light to cross the intervening distance.
A collision between two planetary-sized objects, one composed of antimatter, might yield some interesting results! The mass doesn’t go away, but it is explosively dispersed in all directions, pushing the two bodies apart with explosive force, which might be enough to render the question macroscopically answerable for an infinitesimally-short span of time. The smaller we make those masses, the more any measurement we might try to make would get drowned out by other quantum-level interactions.
Even then, an effect might be observable statistically by conducting a whole lot of experiments. But all that you can really do in that way unless you can actually detect a finite limit to the elasticity of space-time is establish a minimum level of elastic rebound; you can’t ever say for certain that it’s infinitely quick, only that any rate of rebound is greater than the limit of statistical collection.
But I won’t tell physicists about their glaring inconsistency if you don’t.
The Shape Of A Day
Where we we? Oh, yeah – Time Zones.
At a particular tick of the clock, the hour advances. At some specific tick, the day advances.
Assuming for a moment that all motion is relative to the Earth, i.e. the observer, simply because in this case that’s more convenient, that gives us the following:
I wanted this to show a full day out from the Earth, but it simply wasn’t legible. The best I could manage was the 13 hours shown here. While it would be correct to think of a day as being a 24-light-hour-long bar rising directly from the Earth’s surface, it’s equally correct to view it as a spiral outward – the zones of space highlighted in red are ALL 1 AM on the same day, at the same time. The arrow at the center shows the rotation of the Earth on it’s axis as viewed from the North Pole. Because this image is right at the limit of resolution, it can be hard to see clearly; if you have trouble, or want to see it in more detail, click the thumbnail for a larger image.If we map a single day of the calendar, the space occupied by that day therefore has two partial rings divided at the place on the planet where it’s midnight, except for the one instant each day when that mark falls at the international date line, when the momentarily one whole and complete circle.
The larger shape of a day
Earth’s orbit around the sun takes roughly 365 days, but that’s very tricky to illustrate at this scale. It’s also roughly 52 weeks, which is a little more practical to show, and can then be subdivided:
Because a year is a solar phenomenon, and we have defined a week as a specific fraction of the period of that event, weeks (and week-days within successive weeks) spiral outward from the sun in a similar fashion to the way hours spiral out from the earth. There is one significant difference: Because the week is the fundamental unit being mapped, the entire week occupies part of a ring, with previous weeks farther out. There’s a lot going on in this illustration, so if you have trouble making it out, click on the thumbnail for a larger image.As you can see, the days of the week spiral outward, wrapping themselves around the sun approximately 52 times in the space of one light-year. And that means that what might at first glance be a mere mathematical tool, the application of statistics to the calendars that we have constructed for our convenience here on Earth, in fact describe a completely unfamiliar reality – when viewed in exactly the right way.
If, in fact, we define the limiting speed of the universe to be anything – the speed of light, or the speed with which pigs might fly, or the speed of propagation of rumors and paranoia, or anything,, time itself propagates through observable space-time from the observer at that speed.
But that’s getting a little off-track, again.
The Emotive context of Weekdays
There’s exactly one Monday in the week, and one Friday that gets followed by two days of weekend. But back when I was a working stiff, though, we always considered the weekend to start whenever we finished work on the Friday (and all sympathy for those who have to work on Saturdays). So let’s call that two-and-a-half days of weekend.
In exactly 5/14ths of the universe, it is the weekend at any given instant. In only 2/14ths is it a Monday. Remember that when the start of the working week gets you down!
You could even say that the weekend has an inexorable momentum, inevitably rushing toward you at the speed of light itself. It will not be denied!
Over The Martian Moon And Far Away
All this becomes far more interesting when we introduce other habitats for life into the discussion. Let us, for example, talk about Mars. The martian year is 687 days long – that’s how long it takes to complete an orbit around the sun. In that span of time, the Earth completes almost one and 322/365ths rotations about the sun.
That’s very close to two years. For all but about 6 weeks, any given earth date will roll around twice in each martian year. If that martian year were to be divided up into 52 weeks, each would be 13, almost 14, days long!
Actually, I should clarify that and say “13, almost 14, Earth-days long.” The martian day is more than 37 minutes longer than ours – not all that noticeable over the span of a single day, but over a 14-day period, that adds up to around eight-and-a-half hours difference – about 1/3rd of a day, not enough to completely eat that almost-day, but enough that every third 14-day week would actually have to be a 13-day week.
And yet, the neatness implicit in a usually-14-day week means that humans would have little difficulty adjusting or normal working practices to fit.
The pattern would be something like:
- Mon, Tues, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun;
- Mon, Tues, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun;
- Tues, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun;
- Mon, Tues, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun;
- Mon, Tues, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun;
- Tues, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun.
If we were to call this 6-earth-week pattern a Martian Month, we would end up with 16 of them in a Martian Year, with almost another left over (31 days).
The “16” seems workable enough, dividing the year into four approximately-equal seasons. Most of the 31-day remainder can be solved by tacking on an extra 7-day week to each season, leaving just three days to be added to the calendar somewhere – public holidays to commemorate First Landing, perhaps?
Further Afield
If we look even further out, say to Alpha Centauri, what do we find? If one of us can be said to revolve around the other, it is exceedingly slowly, to the point of illegibility. In effect, time is a straight line outwards, relative to the sun, in any units larger than a light-week (assuming that our time units derive from the rotation of The Earth, of course).
Another Ginormous Image (2200 pixels across) which is only marginally legible at the size available here. You can click the thumbnail to open the full image in a new tab.It would even be true to consider Earth Time to be like a strip of film, each frame containing a day, or an hour, each sliding over the top of the point of measurement, as though it were feeding past the bulb of a projector.
(In fact, Alpha Centauri is approaching Earth at a speed of 14 miles a second, which means that in about 56,922 years, we’ll have a real problem on our hands. Somehow, I think other problems should have a higher priority in the meantime, though.)
Right now, as I write this, it’s 4 years and 134 days into the past on Alpha Centauri, according to Einstein. That makes it October 1, 2014. The first Ebola case has just been diagnosed from within the US, the Secret Service is under fire for a White House security Breach, there’s a major protest going on in Hong Kong, a Federal Judge has just ruled against some Obamacare subsidies, and Microsoft has just introduced Windows 10. It’s also a Wednesday.
On Epsilon Eridani, home to the Vulcans in Star Trek lore, it’s 10 1/2 years ago – early may of 2007. The Scottish National Party has just won the general election for the first time ever, there are riots in Karachi, Spider-man 3 is about two weeks old, as is the Virginia Tech massacre.
On Vega, where E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith placed a race of cat-people, it’s 25 years ago, and the millennium is still only a distant threat. The Airbus A330 has just had it’s first test flight, Bill Clinton has just been elected, Whitney Houston has just released “I Will Always Love You”, and Carol Moseley Brown has just become the first African American Woman in the US Senate. In less than a week, Nigel Mansell will win the Formula One World Championship and a week from now, the Church Of England will approve the ordination of Female Priests.
On Capella (alpha Aurigae), which was the brightest star in Earth’s Sky for almost 50,000 years starting 210,000 years ago, it’s August of 1975. Springsteen’s “Born To Run” album has just been released, the defendants of the Kent State University shootings have just been acquitted of responsibility, PVC is about to be banned as a food packaging because of its carcinogenic potential, the founder of Cosmetics company Revlon has just passed away, Charlize Theron is about two weeks old, and Gerald Ford will be US President for another two years, when he will be succeeded by Jimmy Carter.
Somewhere out there, Man has just walked on the Moon, Adolf Hitler has just come to power, World War I has just been won, Henry VIII has just been divorced for the first time, and the Romans have just invaded England. I’m sure you can sympathize with this confused and befuddled would-be historian:
The Outer Limits: Is This All There Is?
There’s a concept called “the Observable Universe”. It’s radius is that distance away at which the travel time from there to us for light equals the known lifespan of the universe, to date. If the physicists are right, and the speed of light is an absolute limiting velocity, we can never be aware of anything outside this ‘bubble’ of space-time; for all intents and purposes, it is the totality of the universe so far as we are concerned.
Except that it’s not. This is another suggestion that has logical holes of such magnitude that the whole concept falls over – unless we add one key word to the definition: “we can never be directly aware of anything outside….” Don’t see why that word makes such a big difference?
It’s easy to show that this cannot possibly be the sum total of the universe, simply by considering what someone located close to the edge of that wave front “now” could perceive. The answer is that they would be at the center of an “Observable Universe” of their own – one which would contain some of the same cosmic phenomena that we observe (because they lie between us), and some that we can’t, because they lie outside our Observable Universe.
Sidebar:
I want to interrupt with a couple of notes that didn’t quite fit into the main text, but that are important enough to justify inclusion. First, because they are closer to some phenomena than we are, they would observe a more contemporarily-accurate view of those objects. Evolutionary changes in stars, for example, that we are only just becoming aware of, happened quite a long time ago from their perceptions. Equally, there are some phenomena that would be a lot closer to us, in which we have the more modern view, and they are seeing the same object farther back in time. Only at the exact midpoint between us would both of us get exactly the same view.
And second, this all exposes a logical flaw in the concept of the speed of light as a limiting factor. You see, the universe has to be larger than the Observable Universe, as I was in the middle of explaining, and we have defined the Observable Universe as being the age of the Universe in light-years – and the universe is believes to have started as just a single point at the instant of the Big Bang, which means that the only way the universe could be larger than the observable universe is if it expanded faster than the speed of light following the big bang.
One way out of this is to state that no such observer could actually exist, but then you have to explain why not. One physics student with whom I discussed the subject made the classic mistake of arguing that for them, it would be mere seconds after the Big Bang, completely ignoring the requirement for light to move at the speed of light or less (if it’s passing through certain materials). So far as we can detect the edge of our observable space-time, that vicinity is indeed mere moments after the big bang – but that was the age of the universe ago, because it’s taken that long for the information we are observing to reach us. So there has been plenty of time for the universe to have evolved there to the point of supporting life of some sort.
No, you either have to radically redefine the nature of the Big Bang, or lose the notion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, granting an exception for the growth of space-time itself. But that solution opens other cans of worms – for example, the deformation of space-time is what causes the phenomenon called gravity, and that in turn expresses itself by accelerating objects relative to other gravitational fields. The expansion of the universe can carry matter with it, in other words, and that requires matter to also exceed that speed of light limitation.
Solving that requires another shakeup in modern physics – the suggestion that space-time’s rate of expansion can only exceed the speed of light when there is no matter in it. So, for the first few milliseconds or whatever after the big bang, the universe is capable of infinite or near-infinite expansion, but as soon as it’s energy density cools enough for particles to coalesce, the brakes slam on. But under close examination, that theory falls apart, too:
Counter-argument number one derives from the question, “what is space time that has no matter in it?” If we have a cubic meter of space-time that’s completely empty, except for a single proton or photon or whatever, doesn’t that mean that the 99.9999999% or whatever of that space-time that isn’t actually occupied by that particle is still capable of infinite or near-infinite expansion? It doesn’t matter what your particle density is, even the most solid matter known to exist outside of Neutronium contains more “empty space” than it does particles – unless we redefine our particles as being the size of the influence they can have over other particles. Redefining the nature of matter can get us out of this mess, and bring objective reality a step closer to according with quantum theory in the process. But doesn’t all this also mean that the speed-of-light limit is actually a property of matter, and not of the universe itself?
Counter-argument two points out that matter is just a highly structured form of energy, and that there was plenty of energy around long before particles could coalesce. Doesn’t that mean that the speed of light is actually a consequence of the structuring of energy in this way, and not a property of energy itself? Einstein’s famous “E=MC squared” has often been described as stating the equivalence of mass and energy, but that too needs to change before this lot can be untangled. It still works – if we redefine it as describing the equivalence of the structure of energy into matter and ‘raw’ energy. It says nothing about the equivalence of matter and energy at all, only about the equivalence of the structuring process.
Where was I? Oh yes, our almost-outside observer, with his own Observable Universe that partially overlaps with out own:

Combines Hubble’s Cross Section Of The Cosmos (ESA/Hubble [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) and Capodimonte Deep Field By ESO (http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0116a/) [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
As soon as you get intelligent observation from somewhere else in the universe – it could be the Milk Way or some galaxy on the fringes of detection such as z8 GND 5296 (13.41 Billion light years, and the most distant confirmed galaxy – you are required to differentiate between reality as you perceive it and an objective reality that we can never fully observe. Trying to twist that objective reality to conform to our ability to observe events results in those obviously nonsensical “at a distance of X the date is Y” results.
At a distance of X, the date is today. But if we were there, and the speed of light was a true limitation, what we would (theoretically) see happening on Earth through our telescope would be the long-past date of Y – events that could be years or millennia out of date in terms of the objective reality.
Light is like an inefficient postal service delivering the newspaper that is some shut-in’s only source of news. It’s always behind, always later, always distorting out views of the objective reality into an observable reality.
Planet X
So, let’s assume that there is a planet out there, at the very fringes of our Observable Universe
at the current instant (give it a year and our observable universe will be a light-year bigger in that direction, and Planet X will no longer be at the very fringe) (and so will his, and we will no longer be at the very fringe of His Observable Universe).
So far as an observer on Planet X is concerned, his universe looks pretty similar to our own. There are stars all around, and galaxies, and his planet is part of a solar system, and so on., And, just to make things more interesting, let’s say that Solar System X is traveling away from us at something close to the speed of light, so that it stays at the fringe for an appreciable length of time.
We can’t observe anything that’s outside our Observable Universe, but those stars and planets and so on are still there in the objective reality, and we CAN see the influence they have, through that objective reality, on the objects that we CAN see (if we wait long enough for the light to reach us). We can detect things outside our Observable Universe even if we can’t actually see them.
Interstellar Civilization
All this starts to really matter when you start setting up Interstellar Empires and Alien Civilizations and all the other staples of space-fairing science fiction, because as soon as you introduce FTL, you put your astronauts in a position to become those “alien observers at a distance” – once again, objective reality becomes the only valid common ground because that’s what you find when you go there.
Let’s say that there’s a habitable world exactly 5 light-years away from Earth, and that in 2150, humans successfully colonize it, a date determined by adding the objective length of the journey to the launch date. As soon as they land, they send a signal back to earth to tell them “We made it!” When that signal arrives, the date on Earth will presumably be 2155. Upon what date will the Earth record the success of the mission – 2150, or 2155? The human habit of dating stellar events as occurring on the date of observation suggests the latter.
Mission Control on Earth immediately sends out a reply of congratulations, which also contains information on various scientific and social developments that have taken place. It is received by the colonists five years later, when they have completed ten years of construction and progress toward their colony. On what date will the colonists record that the home world became aware of the successful landing? Assuming that the human social convention was carried with them, they will record that in 2060 ties with home were reestablished. The histories of neither world will ever be accurate with respect to the other, they will always be five or ten years removed – five years in terms of isolated events, ten years in terms of any dialogue or interaction.

If this isn’t a paradox, I don’t know what is. But it’s a PERCEIVED paradox and not a real one.
If you were an archaeologist studying the records of a species or culture that had long ago vanished, and you discovered these mutually-contradictory histories, you would forever be unsure of the actual dates of singular events. Until sufficient correlations were obtained between the two histories, you might even be unsure that they two were related.
But human experience with Time Zones holds the solution. Humans would probably create an entirely artificial social device, the “Date Zone”, based purely upon the distance between the two, and times be measured against some objective standard of reality based around am agreed-upon standard calendar. Just as various parts of the White House have multiple clocks, one set to local time, another to the local time wherever the President is, and a third set to local time at some point of contemporary interest – be that London, or Moscow, or wherever – so, in the future, multiple calendars side-by-side would become the norm wherever it was relevant; and just as it is commonplace to presage any communications to elsewhere with “Here, it’s X O’clock, but where you are, it must be Y O’clock”, so the pattern would be, “Here, it’s 2055, but you’re in Date Zone +5 years, so it will be 2060 by the time you hear this”.
Establishing a mutual synchronization of time will be a fundamental stage in understanding any messages received. In other words, for meaningful communications without the confusion, we have to employ a standard based on Objective Reality and some defined standard, just as we do with GMT and Time Zones.
Time is a human construct, built upon our perceptions of the world around us, and one that will have to be redefined from the ground up when we travel to the stars – or receive a communication from them. Or, as Douglas Adams put it, “Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.”
But it’s always the weekend right now in almost 36% of the universe. If that condition doesn’t happen to be the case for you, wherever you are, whenever you are, be a little patient; the weekend is inevitable and will not be denied. It’s got Mondays outnumbered, two-and-a-half to one. And that thought should give everyone some comfort!
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