What If Time Stopped? | Unveiled
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VOICE OVER: Peter DeGiglio
WRITTEN BY: Dylan Musselman
Could TIME ever STOP?? Join us... and find out!
In this video, Unveiled takes a closer look at a bizarre "what if" scenario that some scientists claim COULD HAPPEN - What if time stopped? The true structure and nature of time remains one of the greatest unknowns in all of science, but can we really count on it always "being there"?? Some say no, we can't!
In this video, Unveiled takes a closer look at a bizarre "what if" scenario that some scientists claim COULD HAPPEN - What if time stopped? The true structure and nature of time remains one of the greatest unknowns in all of science, but can we really count on it always "being there"?? Some say no, we can't!
What If Time Stopped?
It’s said that time seems to speed up with age; that the older a person is, the quicker time passes for them. Others report time going by faster when having fun and slower when they’ve nothing to do. Of course, in all these cases, it isn’t time that’s actually changing but rather our perception of it. But what if time itself did literally change, or even grind to a halt?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if time stopped?
Time has been one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe since the beginning of… well, time. And, yes, it likely did have a beginning. Though some argue that it’s just always been there, most physicists agree that time probably started around when our universe did, with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Which is why, according to some, asking what came before the big bang doesn’t even make sense… because there was no before.
Broadly, the concept of time has different definitions ascribed to it, but it’s generally the progression of events from the past, to the present, and onto the future. The arrow of time is built into its definition because (for us, at least) it only moves in one direction. However, we know there’s all sorts of temporal trickery at play. Although time appears constant, for instance, it actually varies depending on the observer… and how fast that observer is traveling through space. It’s an ever-growing science, but we know that time can be manipulated in strange ways with gravity and speed. Could it ever be manipulated to an end, though? What if it was made to stop, just as bluntly and universally as it once seemingly started?
Curiously, if time did stop right now - by whatever means - no one would ever know that it had happened. No one would have the time to think about the fact that time stopped, because information of course takes time to travel through our minds and consciousness. If the electrical signals in our brain don’t have the time to travel, then we’re unavoidably none-the-wiser. And, even if time started back up again, it’s likely no one would understand or even notice the incredible event that had just unfolded. Because, actually, it won’t have “just unfolded”, seeing as during our hypothetical gap in time (when time stops) no past, present, or future will have formed.
So, that’s one answer to today’s question. But now let’s assume that time only stops around you, and your body is unaffected. Then you’d be able to see what happens to the world without your own self switching off, as well. And this is a truly “total” event. Everything - from cars in the street, to rain falling from the sky, to the Earth’s movement around the sun - is affected, halting instantly. But, although this might seem like it’d be a cool kind of superpower, in reality it would probably be a pretty terrifying experience.
Perhaps the first thing you’d notice is the distinct lack of sound. Like most everything else in the universe, sound waves require time to travel. So, even if someone had just that instant blown an air horn by your ear, once time had stopped you’d hear nothing. The entire world, all of existence, would be thrust into a relentless silence. However, since your body is unaffected in this scenario, you would be left alone with the inner sound of your own heartbeat. If you then tried to speak, you’d only hear the internal sound of the words you were trying to make, too… outside of your body, those words would have nowhere to go.
The destiny of time-less light is a little trickier to predict. As light particles naturally move at the speed of light and don’t experience time in quite the same way, those already emitted before time stopped might, bizarrely, continue to travel. It therefore might not be instant darkness, but rather a gradual “turning off” of all the lights on Earth and in the sky, from our point of view. In this way, then, it might actually take time for time to stop. Although this aspect of the hypothetical is up for debate.
Really though, the absence of light and sound would be the least of your problems.With time stopping for everything except your own body, it means that all the molecules in the air around you are also frozen. This is more than being unable to breathe, though, although that is a major issue. Even if you had the unfortunate luxury of still being conscious, and even if you could somehow live off of the oxygen that’s still within you, then you wouldn’t be able to move your body at all. With the breakdown of physics (as well as of “cause and effect”) it would be as though you were locked inside an invisible prison, with the walls built of the static, lifeless, never-changing atoms that just so happened to be around you at the time that time stopped. In fact, the atoms aren’t even “never-changing” any more, because there’s no concept of “never” or of “change”.
Next, there’s gravity. We know that gravity isn’t simply an instantaneous pull through space. It remains one of the enduring mysteries of the universe as to exactly how it works at the very root, but it isn’t just “there”. And so, if time switched off, we might expect some trouble with it, too. Should gravity cease to hold you to the ground (seeing as the entire universe will’ve stopped moving and therefore all expected laws will’ve broken down) then as an observer you might feel the weightlessness hit you. But, at the same time, you wouldn’t actually move from your position, to float away forever, since you'd still be trapped by those same fixed molecules.
Even if you could move around, though, the outlook remains bleak. No time means no radiation, which means no heat transfer. Unless, again, your body was able to somehow maintain its condition internally, your temperature would drop (as it would for everything else) and you’d freeze to death. Even if you were standing right next to a frozen fire - a fire that before time stopped had been bathing your body in warmth - you would no longer feel anything from it.
So, all in all, this is one “what if?” hypothetical where even though it perhaps sounds like fun… would actually be terrible. If time truly stopped for everything but you, then you’d be thrust into a reality where you can’t see, hear, breathe, move, or physically feel anything. And, what’s more, were time to ever switch back on again, then no-one else would even have noticed your ordeal. Should you survive, you might try telling them all what you’d been through… but would they believe you?
Thankfully, stopping time is almost certainly a physical impossibility. That doesn’t mean that scientists haven’t thought of ways in which we might get close, though. Theoretically, you could move at the speed of light, so that time stopped at least from your perspective… but Einstein's theories tell us that matter can’t ever reach the speed of light, in reality. Alternatively, you could try to travel to a universe where time just works differently... but that would require proof of the multiverse, and a means by which to travel through it. Yet another way to potentially accomplish something similar to “stopping time” is to forcibly drop the temperature of the universe overall. As motion comes to halt at absolute zero, if the universe were to drop that far then, theoretically, it would be as though time was standing still… because all particles would've stopped moving. Although, even then, time won’t really have stopped… and, again, there’s no way in reality to simply “switch off” the universe, anyway.
Finally, though, and according to one study, while stopping time might be impossible for us to achieve, the slowing down of time may well be unavoidably happening regardless. In a multi-authored paper published in 2007, from the University of the Basque Country and the University of Salamanca in Spain, it’s argued that time really could be slowing down in our universe, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So the theory goes, instead of the rate of universal expansion increasing, it may be that time is decreasing… in a kind of subversion of everything that we might expect. And the end point for this alternate model of reality, likely still billions of years from now, could be that, one day, time really will disappear. Effectively. It’s not an instant break, more a gradual decline, and it remains an unproven concept… but it goes to show just how mysterious this business of time really is.
For now, we know that despite the stopping of it (or a break in it) sounding like a cool concept, if you were ever made to endure it then the reality would be anything but. Or else, if you weren’t afforded such a unique position, then you’d likely never know that anything had happened at all. Because, technically, it won’t have done. And that’s what would happen if time stopped.
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