Why 60

Now here is a short cut that will explain why in a base 10 system our time is base 60.  Haven't you ever wondered that?  I started noticing things like this when I was first studying digital logic and binary which, obviously, is base 2 or base 1 if you use 0 to start.  In binary 1 is one 2 is 10 and 3 is 11   see?  Am I weird or does that just give you goose bumps?  Now I am not going to ruin the short other than to say it quite obviously is still in use and it was like a light going on...  a Sextant! and if you want to explore THAT though a bit further go here

Experiment Succeeds in Hiding Object in Time

Wow, forget about just hiding under an invisibility cloak.
Yep old news! In an article in Nature: Scientists have successfully hidden an object in both space and time. That is right, that second word is time. Think about it....any thing put in this device, for a moment in time, does not exist. That send the creepy crawlies up the spine? Next question is how de do dat? Right? Ok, so, from the article:

• The technique relies on what's known as a split-time lens to create a temporal hole. A beam of light is pushed through the lens, which speeds up the travel of the fast moving blue light, and slows down the comparatively sluggish red, leaving a gap in the middle — a gap ripe for exploitation. The light is recombined on the other side, and for a window of trillionths of a second, whatever goes on in that gap is undetectable.

Whatever is in the gap should react with the light right?  Nope....nada, nichts, nothing.  The light come out of the device as it went in, none the worst for wear,  so for a fraction of a second, our temporal traveler was just not there. 

Cornell Scientists Build a Time Cloak?!

That's exactly what I just read in this Gizmodo article!

Yep, it seems that Cornell researchers:

• have designed, built and demonstrated the first "cloak" that hides events in time.

The researchers say that their method works the same way other "cloaks" work in various other electromagnetic spectrum. A "lens" decompresses light, for all intents splitting it. At the other end of the experimental area is a compression lens that returns the field to normal. The net effect is a void between the two lenses where for all intents time has no effect.

Again from the article:

• Right now, the cloak can only last for 120 nanoseconds, and the theoretical max for the current design measures just microseconds.

anyone want to call it before I do?

Driving Fast....fountain of youth?

Dan just turned me on to an article that is a real fun way to look at Einstein's predictions on relativity. The funny thing is in this discussion is I often made these same observations, when I was much younger, on time dilation, mainly from observing common occurrences while riding in a car. Relativity of course says that two object traveling at different speeds relative to each other will experience time differently. Today it is widely accepted that an object traveling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light will experience time much more slowly, relative to someone or something that is stationary (relatively speaking)

Even though a speeding car will not slow time down by much, the observational example can, however, still be very striking. This is how I would explain it. You're sitting in a car and a friend is standing outside the car and neither is moving. Time is experienced by the both of you the same. Now your friend starts walking and walks for an hour (at a normal pace he should now be about 2.5 miles ahead) Now for both, 1 hour has passed and you both have experienced it but at slightly different frames of reference. Now you accelerate your car to 60mph. You will cover the same distance in 2 minutes 30 seconds. You now continue to drive for an hour. Your friend has managed to now cover 5 miles and you 60. Speed relative to each other was vastly different, but this is where I would loose people. When you catch up to your friend at the end of that first hour you both start listening to a song that is four minutes long. At the end of the song your friend has covered roughly 900 feet. In your car, after the same 4 minutes you have covered 21120 feet or 4 four miles. Relative to your friend (or at least observationally) time would appear to be going 23 times slower (of course it isnt really, but relativity uses basically the same thought experiments ) If you put speakers outside your car, your friend would hear the sound being stretched to a lower / slower frequency which is much the same as what happens to light at the vast speeds needed to make relativity's time dilation work.

The story Dan brought me from the Los Angeles Time was the fact that even small changes have a dilation effect. Clocks at sea level run slower than counterparts on top of mountains which proves out Einstein's theory that gravity fields affect time and it has been documented since the Apollo age that clocks on high speed rockets run slower than fixed clocks.

Of course astrophysicists have long seen the effects of gravity on light and time. They have been using the gravity of suns or whole galaxies to slow time and therefor bend light allowing them to see further into the universe.

Is there really any uses past thought experiments that these effects can be useful towards? Mostly likely not in the near future. However as data streams become vastly more dense and complex, timing will become even more crucial in the future. Knowing that time runs faster off planet and slower in high speed craft could be very important to maintaining accurate timing of data streams etc.

wikipedia article on time dilation

Wikipedia article on Special Relativity

Are we missing a dimension of time?

From the Telegraph

A scientist has put forward the bizarre suggestion that there are two dimensions of time, not the one that we are all familiar with, and even proposed a way to test his heretical idea next year.
Time is no longer a simple line from the past to the future, in a four dimensional world consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. Instead, the physicist envisages the passage of history as curves embedded in a six dimensions, with four of space and two of time. If it is confirmed, it could point the way to a "theory of everything" that unites all the physical laws of the universe into one, notably general relativity that governs gravity and the large scale structure of the universe, and quantum theory that rules the subatomic world.

click on the article title for the complete story

thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post