You are moving at the speed of light right now
Required:
Due to Special Relativity, we know that when an object is traveling at the speed of light, it experiences no time.
Conversely, an object that has no motion through space will experience 100% of the flow of time.
The Linear Model
We can put these 2 values on a graph:
Intuitively, we can now draw a line connecting these two points that should theoretically contain every object in the universe. We can determine it’s flow of time from it’s speed through space:
An object traveling at 50% of the speed of light should experience time 50% slower.
We can also extend this line further to discover that traveling faster than the speed of light must result in traveling backwards through time.
We could suppose that traveling 200% the speed of light would result in moving backwards in time at our current rate.
Observation
The linear model is incorrect.
In reality:
- An object moving at 50% of the speed of light does not see time flow at 50%, but at 87%.
- An object moving at 80% of the speed of light sees time flow at 60%
- An object moving at 25% of the speed of light sees almost no difference, time flows by at 97% of it’s normal rate.
Let’s put the real values on the graph:
Those with a keen eye will notice that the points are not connected by a straight line, but by the quarter arc of a circle.
Any matter in the universe can be placed along this quarter circle.
The Circle
Like before with the linear plot, we can expand this into a full circle:
-100% on the velocity axis just means moving in the opposite direction in space. This graph is only accounting for 1 dimension of space. So instead of moving right, negative velocity is moving left. Reality has 3 dimensions of space, all of them have this same relationship with time.
We can also see that objects on the bottom half of the circle move backwards in time. We’ll talk about them later.
So why does the curve take the form of a circle, and what is so special about the speed of light?
The Radius
The key property of a circle is that all points on it’s curve are equidistant from the center. This is it’s radius.
For any object on our curve, the only meaningful measure is not the speed at which it moves through space or the rate at which it’s time flows, but it’s distance from the center.
This measure takes into account both it’s movement through space and time.
It is a unification of the 2 speeds.
By unifying the speed through space and the speed through time, this radius is the object’s speed through spacetime.
The object can change it’s position on the curve, but it’s distance from the center will always remain the same:
This radius is a fundamental constant, that rules over all things in the universe. You may have guessed by now it is the constant: c, the speed of light.
The Speed of Everything
We can now see that c does not come from the fact that it is the speed at which light travels through space, it comes from being the speed that all things move through spacetime.
We can also see that there is no going faster than the speed of light. All objects exist on this curve, and cannot go beyond it.
Light is at the furthermost right point of the circle, where it experiences no time and thus moves through space at it’s maximum speed.
We also exist on this curve, as does everything else. All objects in the universe are moving at this precise speed in all circumstances.
You probably know that the earth moves through space around the sun, which moves around the galaxy, which is itself moving through intergalactic space. Relative to c, all of this motion only adds up to 0.2% of c, so we are very much still at the top of the circle, where basically all of our speed is through time.
Temporal Speed
We know that space and time are not separate, but different dimensions of the same thing. You can not travel slower than the speed of light through spacetime, you can only trade your speed through space for speed through time.
When I say we are Falling through time, I mean we are falling incomprehensibly fast. We are falling at the speed of light.
Transferring Speed
Anytime you move through space, you do so by transferring some of your speed through time. Once you get up to the speed of light, you have no more temporal speed, and time stops.
At our human scale, our movements through space make almost no difference to the flow of time. That’s how fast we move through time, at 300,000 kilometers per hour.
Sitting still doesn’t feel as comfortable when you understand this.
The circle in the graph is assuming that spacetime is flat. In other words, this post so far has all been according to Special Relativity.
Curved Spacetime
General Relativity is hard to visualize without animation, as it involves curving time, but I’ll try my best here.
In curved spacetime, the circle can become warped and change as a result of spacetime curvature. This will change the transfer of speeds and cause temporal velocity to change directions into spacial velocities.
For example, imagine the circle becoming warped and squashed so now moving 10% the speed of light through space results in 0% time.
This doesn’t indicated that c is now smaller, it’s meant to show a curving of spacetime (like bending a piece of paper). The other 90% of c is made up by the curvature of spacetime.
What this looks like, is when a massive object curves spacetime in General Relativity. It converts your temporal speed into movement through space by curving spacetime and changing your direction.
Think of the curvature in the spacetime grid as an animated grid, constantly falling down through the ground. You are moving up according to this grid.
Depending on the strength of the curvature, you may be moving up very fast (grid is moving down very fast), thus converting most of your temporal speed into spacial motion and slowing down time. This is Gravitational Time Dilation.
The Bottom Half
You’ve probably been wondering about the bottom half of the circle, as theoretically it seems as though backwards time travel is possible from this interpretation.
Since the top half encompasses all of matter, the bottom half is composed of anti-matter.
Anti-matter is a result of x Super-Symmetry - when you reverse the charge of all of the fundamental particles in The Standard Model.
For example, an electron with a positive charge instead of negative is it’s antimatter pair, called a positron. The photon, which resides exactly in between the 2 halves of the circle since it travels at light-speed, is it’s own antimatter pair.
Anti-matter travels backwards in time.