A question about time

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Question: Are time and motion relative to size? Now if you’re not a physicist or scientific reader you may not know that “relative” means somehow in relation to or influenced by or dependent on. So, again the question is: Are time and motion relative to size?

Okay, a race is about to take place. In fact, it is the well known hare and tortoise competition, but with one “big” difference. Well, actually two, but let’s start with the one. The hare is incredibly huge. In fact, he’s the size of small mountain, with feet each the size of a huge building. Now, you have to think about that. Visualize it. One foot the size of, say, a ten story building. A full city block at its base. Sounds bizarre I know, but you’ll see where I’m going with this in a second.

The tortoise, on the other hand, is equally disproportionate to what your or I would call normal in size – but in the opposite “direction.” He’s the size of a tiny, miscroscopic mite. He’s so small, in fact, that he’d be just barely visible if he were sitting on your thumb nail right now. Okay, so Look down at your thumb nail and take a second to visualize that. A little tortoise, just barely visible.

Okay, so now you have to imagine the size difference between these two as they both step up to the starting line. A mountainous hare and a microscopic speck of a tortoise. Got it?

The race is a straight dirt track, by the way, exactly one hundred yards long.
A guy on the sidelines yells, “Ready…set…” and he fires his pistol.
Now let’s start with the hare.

Looking down, the hare sees – now remember, he’s tremendous – and he sees that the hundred yard space between the Start and Finish line is way, way down below him (his head is like up in the clouds) and it’s a tiny, short kind of a mini stamp looking thing which he knows he can cover with the slightest forward movement of one huge foot. Positive of his win, when the gun goes off, he simply lifts and barely moves a single foot in a very leisurely manner from the Start line across the Finish line. And it takes one second. Piece of cake, right? Got it visualized?

Well, the microscopic tortoise, on the other hand, has looked at that same hundred yard stretch and he sees what appears to be an infinite distance in front of him. In fact just the Starting line itself is an incredibly wide band of white powder (lie) in front of him. You have to visualize his view! Picture how that Finish line is much too far out there to even be visible through the expanse of boulders (grains of sand) and huge white dunes (the starting line lie powder) in front of him. But this microscopic little tortoise is no weenie. The instant the starting gun is fired, he takes off like a shot – literaly like a shot!

And who wins? Who do you guess? The hare? Well, to everyone’s surprise, the race is a photo finish – an exact tie! And this is where the relativity comes in.

You see by the standard clock on the sidelines, the hare and the tortoise moved at exactly the same speed. They had to, right? Because they both started on the gun shot and crossed the finish line at exactly the same instant. But think about what that “same” speed was like in each of their “worlds.” And to get this you have to separate these worlds and look at each one individually.

In the hare’s huge world, the motion was a slow, easy movement of one foot. He just lifted it up and barely moved it. In the microscopic world of the tortoise, though, in order to get to the finish line at the same time, the motion was lightning fast, way faster than any speed he’d ever dreamed of in his normal world. To travel that far in such a short period of time, he had to literally blast down the track like a bullet. Just think about it. Imagine the view of something that small going a hundred yards in a one second. You have visualize it. See?

So again, here’s the big question: “Are these differences only perceptions? Or, is the speed of an object and the time involved in its movement somehow relative to it’s size?

2

Do you mean the white powder starting line isn’t really there? Why are you saying that your description of it is a lie?

Or did you mean that it’s made of lye? 'Cos I’m not sure a critter made of organic matter is going to survive standing on that while he waits for the starter’s pistol to go off.

Unless you meant lime. Although that might pose the same problems as lye…

Welcome to the Dope, btw. I hope you’re able to find someone who comprehends this OP a little better than I did.

3

What’s the rules here, btw? Do both racers have to begin with their entire bodies behind the entire width of the starting line? And does the winner have to have his entire body cross the entire width of the finish line?

4

Bump, just in case you’re interested in continuing to explore this.

5

I think your own mental image of the tortoise and the hare is off. I think to the original tellers of these tales, they were about the same size. Certainly I have seen comparable-sized animals, and expect that when I visualize the story. You seem to be thinking about some pet-shop-sized baby turtle vs. a full-grown hare.

Your question suggests a dfifferent sort of relativity to me. Isaac asimov, in one of his many columns for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, noted that the lifetimes of a surprisingly large number of animals seems to be the same if measured in units of their heartbeats. In other words, everything lives about the same length if you uwse their heartbeat as the “internal clock”. Tortoises have long life spans. The largest of them have lifespans approaching two centuries, but even smaller, more common ones have long lives of up to 50 years. Hares, on the other hand, live 5-11 years. But a giant tortoise has a heartbeat of 6 beats/minute, while a hare has on the order of 300 beats per minute. So, arguably, to a tortoise’s slower time sense, the rabbit is always moving at super-speed. But he dies sooner, too.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18115080

6

Sorry for the miss-spelling. I meant Lye
– white powder used on track and football fields.

7

Your two comments aren’t really “relevent” to this question. Whether they start in front or behind the starting line makes no difference.

8

Yes.

9

Agreed.

10

That is the question. Are they only perceptions? And if so, are different perceptions valid…real (as in Einstein’s bouncing ball analogy). In other words, if you were as small as the mite-sized tortoise, or as large as the mountain-sized hare, would time/movement/velocity pass at different rates for each of you. Would your lives thus pass at different rates? Would you age at different speeds?

11

If we assume their brains work the same way, then they both perceive time the same. A second is a second. Even if the rabbit barely has to exert any effort and the turtle has to turn on his jetpack, for both of them it still only takes one second. This is ignoring gravitational time dilation the rabbit might feel for being so tall but the effect would be minuscule anyway.

What’s relative is how fast something seems to be going based on its size. If the rabbit and the turtle both start 100 m from the starting line and arrive at the finish line in one second, they are both going the same speed, objectively. It only seems like the rabbit is going slower because the distance it covers is small compared to its size. To us, a car going 60 mph is fast. Meanwhile, the Earth spinning around at 700 mph seems slow. Objectively, the Earth is spinning much faster than any car can drive, but because the Earth is so big, we don’t really notice it.

12

As an aside, the white powder used to mark playing surfaces is chalk or possibly lime. Lye is the white powder that dissolves clogs and causes chemical burns.

13

You’re absolutely right. Sorry!

14

Time is only relative to size when stuck with fluffy people in elevators.

15

It has nothing to do with physical size. It has to do with how fast your brain processes information. If your brain worked twice as fast, time would seem to flow twice as slow.

But that’s just perception. It doesn’t mean the world actually slows down.