Can you stop time temporarily? What I propose is that if you travel on the equator in the opposite direction of the spin of the Earth, at the same speed of the spin, time will essentially stop until you hit the international date line. Hours would stop since you are passing time zones at the same speed of the rotation of the Earth. Only the date would change when you cross the date line. Is this possible?
Time wouldn’t stop, just the relative position of the sun in the sky. If you use local time, you’d have to adjust it by an hour for every 1000 miles you travel (roughly) as you crossed time zones. If you use universal time, well an hour would still be an hour.
please don’t hang me from my thumbs because obviously time zones are not exactly 1000 miles wide
Why do it at the equator? You wouldn’t have to travel nearly as fast if you did it closer to the poles. If you did it at a pole you could just slowly pivot so that you always faced the sun, you would never age.
Timezones on Earth are merely an arbitrary thing.
Yes, you could travel west in a fashion that cancels out the Earth’s rotation to the east such that the time, relative to those below you, would seem to stand still. Put another way the sun would appear to not move.
But the flaw in “stopping” time for this can be seen if you travel faster than the Earth rotates.
The (now defunct) Concord flew faster than the Earth spun on its axis. You could take off from Paris and land in New York “before” you left. Obviously time still passed though. If not people would make a killing buying lottery tickets.
Put another way it is a frame of reference thing. Time always moves forward in your frame of reference. Weird things can happen at extreme speeds such that people in two different frames may disagree (but both be right) on the order of events but time still moves forward for both regardless.
It’s simple to stop time… just travel at 180,282 miles per second.
How do you stop time temporarily? I mean, it doesn’t exactly make much sense to say that ‘time stopped for five minutes’, right?
Well, photons do it all the time as I understand; since they travel at c they don’t experience time, so a photon that lasts for five minutes from our viewpoint does so for no time at all from its own “viewpoint”.
If you mean light speed it’s always that last few miles per second that’s the hardest. Maybe if you supe it up an Alcubierre super charger.
Why move at all? Why not just let your watch run down?
Lets get very basic here : Velocity = Distance / Time or Time = Distance/Velocity
You’ll be moving and covering distance so time will pass. Just because we have time zones for convince sake doesn’t embed them into the fabric of the universe.
Well, the ‘viewpoint’ of a photon is a bit of a difficult thing to get a clear grip on – generally, the viewpoint of anything is its rest frame, i.e. the frame of reference in which the object is at rest. Time for that object is what the clock shows in that frame. However, such a thing simply doesn’t exist for a photon – it travels at light speed in all frames of reference. So there’s no really clear meaning to saying that photons don’t experience time, IMO.
Ow! You just made my head hurt.
[nitpick]You’d actually have to go about 6,000 miles per second faster than that.[/nitpick]
The earth spins, at the equator, around 1,000 mph, which is well past the speed of sound. So in a supersonic jet you could do the exact speed the earth spins. I guess you would need a military jet or an old Concorde to do this.
Bolding mine. Yeah, freezing does that.
My oven has a “stop time” button. When I pressed it, nothing happened.
In order for that to work, you can’t just press the button and walk away. You have to leave your finger on the button, and never move. Ever.
You didn’t notice anything happening. You were frozen with the rest of the universe until a time master came along and lifted your finger off a millimeter.
This is one of those curious things that I think some illustration helps out. Ignoring the moving for a moment, just imagine you’re standing just to one side of the border between two timezones, lets say EST and CST. Obviously, if you were to look at a clock just to the East of that border and it would be one hour earlier than the one just to the West of it. The thing is, as you can intuit, you don’t really gain an hour by walking 5 feet from East to West across that imaginary line, you’re just changing how you represent the same time.
The part that I think people find confusing is that, well, if it’s always represented as the same time, then if I keep doing that, it’s always the same time so somehow time stops. But the part you’re forgetting is the international dateline. It may be noon just to the East of it, but it’s not 1 hour earlier on the West of it, it’s 23 hours later, or one hour earlier the next day.
So what would happen, if your watch changed dynamically as you crossed timezones travelling fast enough to keep the sun overhead, your watch would read Noon August 7th as you travelled West until you got to the date line, then it would read Noon August 8th. By the time you made one whole lap around the world and got back to where you started, it would correctly read Noon August 8th. Remember, you were travelling just as fast as the world rotates, so while it was always noon where you happened to be, it still took 24 hours to make the lap, and thus it would be 24 hours later where you started.
I hope that makes sense and I didn’t just make it worse.