Touching Time

Inertia is a property of matter that dictates that an object will stay in its current state of rest or motion until acted upon by an outside force. It is my belief that our minds are very much the same. It is for this reason, to continue in a trajectory of thought against the friction of fatigue or indifference, that this morning I opened a random volume of my encyclopedia set to an undetermined page and allowed my finger to fall by happenstance on the entry of inertia. So now here I am, surrounded by physics books (and I was ever so close to studying the industry of meat packing).

Now, back to inertia. The property of inertia states that an object will move, indefinitely, at a constant speed and direction until some outside force accelerates its motion to make it slow down, speed up, or turn. (If I hear one more person talk about this mythic "deacceleration", I am going to lose my last measure of sanity). One such force is friction, which affects two objects against each other. The force required to affect the movement of an object will depend firstly on that object's mass-- this can be defined, simply, as the density within the volume of an object, or in a sense, the amount of matter it contains. The official definition of mass is the property of resistance to acceleration.

 However, weight and mass are not the same! The measured weights of these two objects are included for comparison of density. On earth, it is simpler to measure the relative weight to determine the mass-- the explain how these two terms are different, picture weighing a bowling ball on your bathroom scale and then taking it to the moon. On a scale there, it will weigh far less than on earth even though the mass is the same. The object, despite its weight, retains its relative resistance to acceleration.

The greater an object's mass, the harder it will be to act against its inertia. If you've got to have either a bowling ball or a soccer ball flying at the same velocity towards your face, which miserable experience would you opt for? If you're not psychologically unsound, you'd choose the less excruciatingly painful one-- the soccer ball, which is lower in both mass and weight. Or, you'd run in the other direction and refuse to participate. Your face definitely won't exert a large enough opposite force to stop that bowling ball whatsoever, but either way you'll end up with a broken nose and a definite concussion. Bad news, Scott Sterling.

Well, similarly, this is why trains can't break fast. It takes a lot of force to stop that mass-momentum combo!

Another thing that influences the effort involved in changing an object's speed or direction is how quickly that change is made. It's harder to change momentum suddenly rather than gradually. If you're going around a go-cart track at 30 mph and you try to turn a corner or slam the breaks, you're going to spin out and slam into a pileup along with both of your sisters that results in multiple neck and back injuries from the sheer impact of the accelerative (fun story, that one). On the other hand, if you slow down gradually to turn those corners, you'll remain safe and have no fun and no friends.

Inertia is Newton's first law of motion, and thankfully, indisputable physical laws transcend the inevitable test of time. You can demonstrate inertia by dropping an apple on someone's head an observing how the impact against their cranium alters the object's acceleration (and the speed at which they will yell at you). OR, you can do what I did, and conveniently "borrow" someone's deck of cards and their wallet to demonstrate this property of physics. 

Place a card on top of a glass of water, and a penny on top of the card positioned over the center of the glass. Flick the card away, and the coin falls into the cup! Now the water is poisoned by excess copper and zinc. You're welcome.

Even though the card is flicked away, the penny doesn't travel along with it. This is because of inertia-- even though the penny was affected by the friction of the card moving against it, inertia dictated that it stay in place, until gravity pulled it down into the cup. That's also why you can set your mom's fine china on the table and yank out the tablecloth from beneath it without any collateral damage. That is, if you're skillful enough. (Please don't try this, I'm grounded for five months).

Can you imagine a world without the blessing of inertia? It'd be utter chaos! Sudden movement and inefficiency of force would reign an unparalleled kingdom of insanity-- take one step and you can't stop sliding; no one hit that ball and now it's hurtling across the room; heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects and Galileo was made to look like an idiot; jump and the whole planet moves; etc. It'd be, to say the least, interesting. Normal societal function would become obsolete in the wake of a universe descending into what would possibly literally be the dark ages in which not even photons would obey the properties of matter.

As we know it, matter exists in three dimensions, all of which we can sense and exist within. However, as the book Flatland and many others pertaining to the subjects of geometry and theoretical mathematics speculate, we have the privilege of partially viewing the fourth dimension as an incomplete representation within our three dimensions. This fourth dimension transcends all we can comprehend. To simplify the theory, let's break it down into two dimensions.

You now exist as a square on a plane of only length and width, something you wouldn't know unless you'd existed in the third dimension to look down as yourself from above. If a person, existing in three dimensions, were to stick their finger through the plane, it would appear as a circle (Though, as depicted in Flatland, to you the square it would appear as an unending, variant line).

Can we truly predict or even comprehend how the influence of a fourth dimension would appear in our three-dimensional perception of the universe? Well, some physicists theorize that this fourth dimension is time. Time can be warped, such as by the infamous singular gravity of a black hole, as can physical objects that can be stretched, squeezed, or even torn apart atomically by the intense pressure of such a gravitational pull. Light cannot escape. Time is not immune.

And, time is relative, both metaphorically and physically. One hour on a planet influenced greatly by the gravity of a black hole may be years to another planet in the outside realm. But the stream of time is not sped up or slowed, it is merely stretched, bent, and dis-configured into the delicate fabric that comprises our universe. Space-time is warped and disoriented by the energy and matter in it-- a measurable effect, such as how light waves bend when nearing the sun. This causes the sun to appear where it isn't. This theory is known as General Relativity, and perhaps time, then, is subject to the geodetic effect.

(Click the picture for a pertaining article)

It is altogether incredible and unbelievable. What if time, like physical matter, possesses inertia? What if it is, in the fourth dimension as well as our own, physical? Could it be influenced by force? Is it moving as a vector, continuous plane or indefinite line? Is there an original force that set the object of time into motion?

Can we touch time?

Such questions crave hope of answers. The law of the human pysche is that true curiosity can never be satisfied, and I hope it is so, for then there is no force to act against the perpetual motion of learning. Alas, we are Babylon.