scotth wrote: “Please share with us even one piece of evidence that would lead you to this conclusion.”
Think of it like this. The natural state of the Earth is to rotate left to right (depending on where you are in relation to the Earth). The rotation of the Earth is waht causes time to pass. Look were the Sun is in the sky right now, in five hours it will be in a different spot. This rotation is what causes time to go by as we can see by the Sun. We can observe this. Now if we reverse the rotation of the Earth the Sun will be back were it started in another five hours, and thus we have reserved time. I don’t understand why this is so hard to understand. I was only using the Superman movie as a visual example of this.
Sure, the (apparent)position of the sun in the sky would change, but why do you assume that this is what causes the flow of time?
Sorry for the double post, but I didn’t notice on my first reading that you had said this outright.
No, it isn’t.
Oh, Lord. The “natural state of the Earth” is to sit motionless like a rock (which it is, mostly). Its rotation is the residual angular momentum of the creation of the solar system (and maybe the universe), and it has nothing to do with “causing time to go by.”
The sheer idiocy of thinking that “a person can’t go back in time,” but somehow a planet can, is so breathtaking that I can’t quite take it seriously. Obviously, no one else can either, which is why they’re making fun of you.
If this turns out to be a “whoosh,” I’ll first on the list to support a ban.
Your grasp of the passage of time is completely flawed.
The passage of time would be completely unaffected by stopping and/or reversing the spin of the earth. Yes, the position of the sun would be screwed up, but our perception of time passing would be completely unaffected. Time would not be would back.
This is besides the fact that if someone applied a force to the planet to stop and/or reverse its rotation, HUGE catastophies would result. The accelerations to do this would be huge. The earth moves at 1038 miles/hour at the equator. Stopping this rotation in any period of time shorter than at least a couple of months would cause the oceans to wash over the continents and scrub them clean.
The rotation of the earth is no more responsible for the passage of time than is the movement of the hands on a clock. Both are used as a means of measuring the passage of time; neither cause time itself to pass.
So if the rotation of the Earth does not cause time to pass, what does?
“(The) universe… …moves forward in time at the quantum level by a chain of handshakes between past and future. The psi-star time-reversed wave functions of (our) formulation of quantum mechanics… …represent the future reaching back to make an acommodation with the past that allows a quantum event to happen, to become reality. Each quantum event emerges into reality as a result of a feedback loop between past and future. These are allowed timelike loops that bring the universe into being.”
10 gold stars to anyone who knows where that quote came from.
In truth, physics knows very little about what time is. We know alot more about what it isn’t.
However, it is extremely safe to say that time would pass just the same if the Earth did not exist. Its rotation has nothing to do with the passage of time.
Using the logic of the collective “we” some of you refer to, what if we reversed the rotation of the Earth to a speed greater than the speed of light?
The C.I.A. , wheels within wheels man.
By the time the rotation of the earth exceeded the speed of 18,000 miles per hour (.0025% of the speed of light), the earth would begin flying apart due to centrifugal forces.
Not to mention the fact that accelerating anything real (has rest mass, ie not photons) to the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy and therefore couldn’t happen.
You can’t. The universe is not constituted so as to permit matter to travel faster than light. There is, in a sense, “no such thing” as “faster than light.” So asking would would happen is like asking “what is red and blue were the same color?”
scotth wrote: “By the time the rotation of the earth exceeded the speed of 18,000 miles per hour (.0025% of the speed of light), the earth would begin flying apart due to centrifugal forces.”
How do you know this? Couldn’t we put another force on the Earth to prevent the centifugal force from destroying the Earth?
“Not to mention the fact that accelerating anything real (has rest mass, ie not photons) to the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy and therefore couldn’t happen.”
How do you know this? The speed of sound was thought unbreakable at one time too?
I haven’t laughed this hard since I tried to explain to a guy how it can be 79 degrees Fahrenheit and 26 degrees Celsius at the same time.
Galileo, Newton & Einstein wept.
The speed of sound was never thought unbreakable. The speed of sound was very difficult to break, and it requires some top-notch engineering and materials that weren’t available at first, but the speed of sound was never a central paradigm of physics the way the speed of light is.
There are four known forces in the universe:
- Strong nuclear
- Weak nuclear
- Electromagnetic
- Gravity
Gravity is what is holding the Earth together (for the most part) right now. What force do you propose we use to hold the Earth together?
Physics has never considered the speed of sound to be a fundemental speed limit as light is now considered.
Our entire understanding of the universe is based on the assumption that the speed of light in a vacuum is the ultimate cosmic speed limit. The theory of relativity (which is based on this assumption and that this speed is the same for all observers in their own frame of referrence concurrently) has remained completely consistent with every available observation for nearly 100 years. (Since 1908) Since its publication, every possible effort has been made to find a single contradiction. The range of experiments has been truly breathtaking in their scope.
I know this because I have picked up some books in my life (and not all of them had glossy print and featured pictures).
How about this, we drill a hole to the center of the Earth, were we place an object that can create artificial gravity. The object will be programmed to increase the effects of the artificial gravity as the speed of the rotation increases. This keeps the Earth from flying apart. Or is artificial an impossiblity?
I’m not sure how to exceed the speed of light, but maybe someone does?
- We don’t have the means to drill anywhere near to the center of the earth. We can’t contemplate what a rig that would be capable of doing would even look like.
- By the laws of physics as we know them, there is not even a theoretical basis for any type of manipulation of gravity by some type of device. (Besides the obvious means of simply stacking a bunch of matter together).
- As stated before, our entire understanding of the universe we live on is predicated on the assumption that the speed of light is an absolute barrier for things made of matter. Any idea allowing an object to accelerate through the speed of light will also require a complete overthrow of the laws of physics as we know them. If anyone comes up with a workable idea on this, you will know about it. It will make the front page of every paper in the world. It will make the coverage of the Sniper in the DC area look like nothing.
Really, if you are not a troll you need to do some serious studying before your start suggesting ways to do stuff like this.
I would hope any high school graduate would have a good enough grasp of science to rule out of hand most of the suggestions you have put forward. Really, I would expect most people in Junior High not to put forward similar suggestions.
Your stuff is sooooooooo far off base, I still have a stong feeling that my chain is being pulled despite your claims to the contrary.
Rotating the Earth in the opposite direction at any speed will not reverse the flow of time any more than winding my wristwatch backwards would.
If we had an object that could produce variable artificial gravity, and we could put it at the centre of the Earth, and we had the means to change the rate of spin of the Earth, then yes, we could (to an extent, at least) compensate for the centrifugal forces, but it’s a case of If we had some ham, we’d have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
It would all be pretty pointless anyway because as we’ve been saying, spinning the Earth backwards isn’t going to do anything much except make the Earth go backwards.
Also, as others have said, it really looks as though the speed of light is not something that can be exceeded.