this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Everyone has something they can't stop themselves from nerding out over - but often it's hard to find people to talk to about it. So go ahead, share your interests, and tell us about them!

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

The idea of time. It’s insane to me to think about events happening at different times in different places. Or for the same event to take different amounts of time depending on your reference points.

The sun is 8 minutes away from us, so we are looking at it 8 minutes in the past. If it were to suddenly disappear, it would take 8 minutes for us to find out. That’s mine-blowing to me! It’s like the past, present, and future are all happening at the same time.

Nobody cares to humor me when I bring the topic up lol

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So facinating, even gravity is affected by those 8 minutes. Iow we would rotate around a missing sun, for 8 minutes, same as with light.
This is all also related to relativity, that someone else wanted to talk about in this post, i am just saying ;)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

what is the speed of gravity

has anyone tried to measure that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are some links describing the projects working on this at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks

In the relativistic sense, the "speed of gravity" refers to the speed of a gravitational wave, which, as predicted by general relativity and confirmed by observation of the GW170817 neutron star merger, is the same speed as the speed of light (c).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It is also very weird that gravity is affected the same way!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll humour you! Time is fascinating and malleable and really quite intangible.

So, if you want, fire away with anything you find fascinating about the concept of time!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sometimes I feel like we’re living inside a firework. Like we’re just on an infinitesimally tiny fragment of an explosion that happened billions of years ago. Perhaps in another scale the entire universe is created and destroyed in the blink of an eye.

If a being were the size of a galaxy, how would our solar system appear to them? Would it look debris swirling around in air? Yet it spans countless lifetimes in a few seconds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I love this.

It's so weird that we exist at all.

Like, what even is the universe? Why do we happen to exist within this bubble of chemistry and physics?

One thing that always struck me is how anyone can act in selfishness given how lucky we are to exist in the first place. Why squander this opportunity to do something amazing? We should all be living in idyllic peace and comfort. Otherwise, what's the point?

We might be the only ones to ever be aware of our existence. Like you said, in another scale we might appear and be snuffed out in an instant. Why condemn our already uncertain legacy?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've thought about something related.

In one point of view, time traveling to the past can create paradoxes since it alters events after that moment in the past, which could cause you to never time travel to the past after.

After some thinking, I got the feeling that the fixed-point theorem was connected to this. As long as whatever you do in the past causes you to time travel to the past again and do the same thing in the future, the paradox doesn't happen. What you do when you time travel is like the input, and what you do when you time travel again in the resulting future is like the output.

When the input and output are the same, everything works out.

After searching about this on the internet, I saw other people have thought about and discussed this.