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I was answering a question for an individual on a different forum about space-time and I figured I would go ahead and share this with everyone.

In order to fully understand space-time you must consider the progression of our concept of time. During Newton's time physicists believed that time was an unchanging constant. The problem was that, is there was no reference point in space to measure velocity. When measuring velocity it has to be measured in a frame of reference. This mean that when you tell me your car is driving at 45mph - we ask, 45mph relative to what? I hope that didn't confuse you, but it's vital to understanding space-time. Carrying on, classical physicists pre-Einstein believed that the universe was filled with an ether. They used the ether (only in equations, there was never actual physical evidence of such a substance) as the reference point in measuring velocity and a number of other things. Thus, we have time as a constant, unchanging at any given point in the universe; and we have our ether.

Well, Einstein comes along and publishes a paper in 1905 on special relativity. Einstein says this about the ether:

"... the introduction of a light-ether will prove to be superfluous since, according to the view to be developed here, neither will a space in absolute rest endowed with special properties be introduced nor will a velocity vector be associated with a point of empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place."

Concluding:
1. The laws of physics take the same form in all inertial frames.
2. In any inertial frame, the velocity of light c is the same whether the light is emitted by a body at rest or by a body in uniform motion.

This basically means that there is no need for an ether, because time is not absolute. Thus, he concludes that space and time are one in the same. He doesn't get in much detail about that until he publishes his paper on general relativity in 1915. General relativity concludes that space and time are intertwined in the universe and gravity affects them both. The more mass an abject, the more it warps space and time around it. Hence, existing in a curved space-time. Gravity from a massive celestial object affects time. Time runs faster on Earth than in its orbit. Also, when an object accelerates to near light speeds, time slows for that object (hence, relativistic time dilation).

The very fabric of our universe is space and time combined into space-time. Gravity warps space around a massive object, and time is also affected in the same way. We've experimented for decades on this and so far, Einstein's equations hold up. The easiest way to experiment and test relativity for yourself is to take two clock and place one on the ground and one on a very high structure (water tower, skyscraper). Allow an hour to pass and retrieve the clocks. The clock that was elevated will be behind the one that was at sea level.

I know this post was a bit long winded, but knowing the history helps the present make more sense.

so puting clocks at an elevated area slows them down? i guess i dont understand how time and space are both warped by gravity. i understand gravity acts on matter in space and that it can be warped but how does it effect time?

Clocks are only devices, they can't manipulate time they just meassure it, if time meassuring can be done. for example, you meassure something with a 20Cm ruler, the lenght is 13.0Cms now you meassure with a 30Cm Ruler, did the 13Cm thing changed size? no right.
What einstein proposed and what many scientifics think, if i remember right. is that a molecule or particule travelling at the speed of light may cause that it's perception of time may be loss, in effect it will travel in time faster than us just to say so in a determinated space, the problem is that there is no possible way to keep that particle in the "future" and if so, there's no possible way to bring it back to the past.

Didn't Einstein told sth about that Matter can't reach the speed of light?

I may be remembering sth wrong about Einstein though, but i'm sure i remember that in other Authors book, the speed of light was described like a horizon, you can travel no matter how fast, but u can never reach it..


And that clock thing sounds pretty interesting... Does that affect digital clocks too? It would be completely weird if it did..

I don't want to lie, but i have never thought of this or cared. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't affect any one in their lives.. Maybe that is a bit...self centered in a way but true.. But your profe and conpect for that matter is well done and interesting for what it is.

They have figured out a way to travel the speed of light, or faster! They cant do it yet because to do this one of the things is to find negative energy, which we have not discovered yet. Another thing that we have to do is find another dimension, there is believed to be more than the dimensions found on earth in space, this would be true because black holes. To travel this speed we have to move time from in front of us to behind us, using a bubble time zone. But we have no brakes for it either. So if we figured it out and did it, we would be in their forever traveling at whatever speed for ever!

Light travels the speed of light (yes light is matter. its called the photon. it can also be a wave at the same time though, thus the complexity of light. this is one branch of quantum mechanics)
holy crap no offence but i mean c'mon guys... im serious very disappointed in you
time can be messured man diff way, depends how you want messure it
we messure it with our orbit around the sun and our spinning motion because its constant and makes the most sense

WHy are you spazzing out, is it because what I said, because nothing I said you talked about and I know that light is matter. I was just saying that we have figured out a way to travel this speed, but e have not yet figured out how to do things that we need to do to do this. It is kind of like we have the medicine for the cold, but we dont have a cold to give the medicine for. Or we know what we need to make a computer, but we dont have the money to buy the things to get the computer to be made!

We learned this in science this year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon

Well what Science are you in, because I didnt have to be in Science to learn (know) this myself. I dont knormally learn huge events at school, I normally get them from the outside world. TV!

negative energies have been found 70 years ago. read antimatter. although i doubt that we will be able to do that within our life time... since creating antimatter is massively expensive. i've heard that it costs a billion dollar just to create one miligram. and it quickly disperses because they do not know how to contain one and it reacts with its surrounding atoms.

Anti-matter... eheh cool. Maybe you guys can take advanced sciences at school to learn more and have credit for actually knowing this information? Interesting nonetheless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

A summary of this..

Well see antimatter is this.
There are Quarks and there are Antiquarks.

Basically if a particle and the antiparticle come in contact with eachother they basically release all there energy like an explosion.
When matter releases all its energy.. lets just say there is a lot of energy packed within a single piece of matter.

Antimatter can be found from radioactive decay and cosmic rays on earth.

"The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×1017 J (180 petajoules) of energy (by the equation E=mc²). This is about 35 times as much energy as nuclear fusion of the same mass of hydrogen (fusion of two kg of hydrogen produces 5.2×1015 J), or as much energy as burning 6.2 billion liters (1.6 billion US gallon) of gasoline (the combustion of one liter of gasoline in oxygen produces 2.9×107 J).

Not all of that energy can be utilized by any realistic technology, because as much as 50% of energy produced in reactions between nucleons and antinucleons is carried away by neutrinos, so, for all intents and purposes, it can be considered lost.[2]"

"Dirac himself was the first to consider the existence of antimatter in an astronomical scale. But it was only after the confirmation of his theory, with the discovery of the positron, antiproton and antineutron that real speculation began on the possible existence of an antiuniverse. In the following years, motivated by basic symmetry principles, it was believed that the universe must consist of both matter and antimatter in equal amounts. If, however there were an isolated system of antimatter in the universe, free from interaction with ordinary matter, no earthbound observation could distinguish its true content, as photons (being their own antiparticle) are the same whether originate from a “universe” or an “antiuniverse”.

But assuming large zones of antimatter exist, there must be some boundary where antimatter atoms from the antimatter galaxies or stars will come into contact with normal atoms. In those regions a powerful flux of gamma rays would be produced. This has never been observed despite deployment of very sensitive instruments in space to detect them.

It is now thought that symmetry was broken in the early universe during a period of baryogenesis, when matter-antimatter symmetry was violated. Standard Big Bang cosmology tells us that the universe initially contained equal amounts of matter and antimatter: however particles and antiparticles evolved slightly differently. It was found that a particular heavy unstable particle, which is its own antiparticle, decays slightly more often to positrons (e+) than to electrons (e−). How this accounts for the preponderance of matter over antimatter has not been completely explained. The Standard Model of particle physics does have a way of accommodating a difference between the evolution of matter and antimatter, but it falls short of explaining the net excess of matter in the universe by about 10 orders of magnitude.

After Dirac, science fiction writers produced myriad visions of antiworlds, antistars and antiuniverses, all made of antimatter, and it is still a common plot device; however, suppositions of the existence a coeval, antimatter duplicate of this universe are not taken seriously in modern cosmology."

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Another nice reading:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast29may_1m.htm

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http://science.howstuffworks.com/antimatter.htm

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Heres something very cool:
"Antimatter has tremendous energy potential, if it could ever be harnessed. A solar flare in July 2002 created about a pound of antimatter, or half a kilo, according to new NASA-led research. That's enough to power the United States for two days."

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