if you could stop time, what happens to physics?

this was from the "superpower/wish" thread, I was wondering about it - lets suppose that you or someone has the ability to stop time (and/or travel at near the speed of light) - my question is what happens to gravity? do you "float" if you aren't careful? what about if you touch something? does it "fall" from gravity? could you walk on water? - now I realize that this is a "what if" question that is unanswerable, so let me re-phrase it as "what would make the most sense/be the best"

The speed of timeflow would reach 0 and therefore pause physics, as time is governing physics. When it was resumed it would continue to play out as it otherwise would have.

Think of this way, can you explain time in the first place? No one really can, aside from making (maybe) educated guesses. Time is something that is constantly thought about, but no one has been able to prove what time IS, and how to actually do anything to it. As far as I know anyway.

I would say physics would not exist, because time is an important factor in any physics, however I do also agree with Renendaru, that time has never fully been quantified.

Varine said:

The speed of timeflow would reach 0 and therefore pause physics, as time is governing physics. When it was resumed it would continue to play out as it otherwise would have.

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and what about interactions between the person who has paused time and the paused objects?

@ ren - I don't expect you to prove anything, but what is your theory (or educated guess)?

Renendaru said:

Think of this way, can you explain time in the first place? No one really can, aside from making (maybe) educated guesses. Time is something that is constantly thought about, but no one has been able to prove what time IS, and how to actually do anything to it. As far as I know anyway.

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Entropy proves time. It's not that complicated.

Pause physics for everything except me.

Varine said:

Entropy proves time. It's not that complicated.

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I think I speak for many of us when I ask you to explain it in simple terms to us; since it's simple.-

Zakyath said:

I think I speak for many of us when I ask you to explain it in simple terms to us; since it's simple.-

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... fine. Have you ever built a sand castle? A sand castle has a low entropy; it will fall apart eventually. But it will not just appear there, even though there is nothing, physically, that says sand can't fall in such a fashion as to become a sand castle. It flows from low entropy (the sand castle) to high entropy (a sand pile). This flow of events suggest that there is a direction, an 'arrow of time', that moves forward. If you slow time, you slow the way this flow of events would carry out, it would not inherently affect the way they play out. It doesn't actually PROVE time, but it's suggested. I think the CPT theorem or something talks about time being irreversible, but that's not totally relevant. It flows from order to chaos (typically, assuming the big bang theory, where it seems to go from chaos to order then back to chaos, then it gets extremely complicated and we leave the discussion of isolated objects and get into dealing with every other physical property, like gravity and weak and strong forces, etc). If you would like I can kind of describe that, but then we get far beyond the scope of this topic.

There is no actual measure of time, though. So it may very well slow and speed up as it will and you wouldn't notice because everything you do would be slowed and sped accordingly.

Varine said:

There is no actual measure of time, though. So it may very well slow and speed up as it will and you wouldn't notice because everything you do would be slowed and sped accordingly.

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and if somehow there was a way to isolate or separate a person from this flow of time, such that they see the speed up/down of others, or move with a speed of a different time flow, what laws would govern such interactions?

Slapshot136 said:

and if somehow there was a way to isolate or separate a person from this flow of time, such that they see the speed up/down of others, or move with a speed of a different time flow, what laws would govern such interactions?

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I don't know. Physics (at least as we know it) would likely break down or go chaotic around you if you were separated from time; if you're outside of the flow of time then you would effectively not exist. Slowing or stopping time is one thing that can be somewhat rationally thought about and explained; leaving time entirely is a totally different game to deal with. The only thing I can think that MIGHT possibly simulate that would be a black hole, in which you would basically exponentially increase in velocity infinitely; at some point in that, our physics break down. But as you increase in velocity, time becomes slower than it does at rest (or we understand it to, according to the theory of relativity). At the center of that black hole, time would come to a flat out stop, but technically is still accelerating as far as I know, so particles there might fall out of the loop. M-theory might explain it, but I think it's stupid personally so I won't get into that.

The thing about time is that it's hard to describe what it truly is. On top of that time is relevant, it's been proven that as you get closer to the gravitational pull time speeds up, and the further away time move slower. For the most part this is hardly noticeable, but it's perceived by two separate entities none the less. Now in order to see an object light must first bounce off the object and then travel to your eyes. Depending on how far some one is away from said object changes how long it would take for the light to travel, so again, two separate entities are seeing things in a different time frame. If you could move near the speed of light to an observer you would seem to vanish and then re-appear elsewhere in the time it took for the light to reflect off you and reach them. Essentially the world wouldn't change, you would only be moving so fast that it would appear as if you jumped forward a position.

Now that sounds all fun and awesome, but you're asking for time travel, not a cheap teleportation trick. Let's say that we develop technology to push us beyond the light barrier. At this point you'd be moving faster then light can reach you, thus light wouldn't reflect off you, to an observer you wouldn't exist. What effect would this have on your aging process? Assuming it didn't cause you to age you could keep running forward in time pushing the limits further and further until you stopped, light would catch up, and reflect of you and who knows where you'd be.

In all honesty this is all I can offer, I can't begin to comprehend the physics behind this, and it's all theoretical at this point. To sum it up...

Time travel into the past: Near impossible
Time travel into the future: slightly more possible then traveling to the past.
FTL travel: goes hand in hand with traveling to the future.
near FTL travel: possible, but way out of our current technological reach.

Bartuc08 said:

The thing about time is that it's hard to describe what it truly is. On top of that time is relevant, it's been proven that as you get closer to the gravitational pull time speeds up, and the further away time move slower. For the most part this is hardly noticeable, but it's perceived by two separate entities none the less. Now in order to see an object light must first bounce off the object and then travel to your eyes. Depending on how far some one is away from said object changes how long it would take for the light to travel, so again, two separate entities are seeing things in a different time frame. If you could move near the speed of light to an observer you would seem to vanish and then re-appear elsewhere in the time it took for the light to reflect off you and reach them. Essentially the world wouldn't change, you would only be moving so fast that it would appear as if you jumped forward a position.

Now that sounds all fun and awesome, but you're asking for time travel, not a cheap teleportation trick. Let's say that we develop technology to push us beyond the light barrier. At this point you'd be moving faster then light can reach you, thus light wouldn't reflect off you, to an observer you wouldn't exist. What effect would this have on your aging process? Assuming it didn't cause you to age you could keep running forward in time pushing the limits further and further until you stopped, light would catch up, and reflect of you and who knows where you'd be.

In all honesty this is all I can offer, I can't begin to comprehend the physics behind this, and it's all theoretical at this point. To sum it up...

Time travel into the past: Near impossible
Time travel into the future: slightly more possible then traveling to the past.
FTL travel: goes hand in hand with traveling to the future.
near FTL travel: possible, but way out of our current technological reach.

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The speed of light is relative. If you're going to the speed of light, light does not stand still and you wouldn't pass it as I recallo (Maxwell's theory I think... Einstein refers to it a few times. Admittedly it's been a while since I looked at it, and even then I didn't much care as I was more interested in the time dilation equation then, but I believe that's right still). To you, it's the same. To an outside observer it's totally different though, thus the relative bit. The primary reason you can't go the speed of light is because as you increase in velocity, you, in some sense, shrink. So by the time you reached it, you would be two dimensional.

I could've sworn that as things reach the speed of light their mass increases because they can no longer increase in velocity?

They do. As you approach c, the mass increases making it require more energy to move at the same velocity, and as you would get closer to c it would become increasingly noticeable. And considering there is no limit on it, theoretically the increase in mass could be infinite, so the concept is that it eventually requires infinite energy to continue moving it. However I think that's less of an issue. It's all relative though, so it's only noticeable by an outside observer. In the event you broke the barrier, then said observer would see you moving backwards.

Which brings me back to black holes (because they're awesome). As particles move towards singularity, they gain mass infinitely, coming together towards an infinitely dense point, and it's gravity is powerful enough to stop light from escaping after passing the event horizon. So if we accept that black holes exist, we accept that it's possible for something to travel beyond light speed, or at least at the speed of light, which according to relativity should send it back in time. Meaning physically it's possible, and the mass thing isn't an issue (well it is an issue, but one that apparently can be overcome, just not by our current physics).

And things do, likely, break the light barrier. I don't know a lot about it, but it's called Hawking Radiation, which are basically particles with negative energy that are thrown out of black holes, eventually causing them to evaporate. I've never actually read much about it, but I believe that in order for it to happen, particles eventually break the light barrier within the black hole and therefore move backwards through time, eventually getting spewed out by the black hole. Because the holes evaporate, this would mean that when particles reach singularity, they break the barrier and are therefore sent back out, possibly increasing in velocity negatively (i.e. moving away from the center). So that might be the cause of the universe: as black holes form, they basically engulf everything, combine with other black holes to become big black holes, and eventually that would consume the entirety of the universe. Then particles would eventually reach singularity and would be thrown back out, causing something like a big bang (only with negative energy, basically the opposite of our particles).