in the interim

No real post tonight. I'm getting ready for school. Oh that was fun to say. But I shall report the happenings of our class back to you and I might even get some of my classmates in on it. Oh I'm so excited! In the meantime here have an lolcat...err...loltiger!

General Relativity

Ok so I’m getting the general sense that I’m in over my head, with this stuff. But I have terrific news! I’ve been enrolled in a cosmology class! Imagine me an old man in a class with a bunch of young college students. But I hope to learn so much! And I shall report it all to you. But I think I need to finish up this discussion of time and metrics first. So when Minkowski came up with his space time, Einstein had a new setting for trying to figure out gravity. So what he decided (and it took him quite some time to figure it out too) he decided that gravity warped space, it sort of bends the metric. Where there was a straight line now that line has been bent by the object that has been placed there. Just like in the picture. This is what creates gravity. This is why we feel pulled towards the sun. We aren’t actually pulled towards the sun we are falling into it. And that is the basis of general relativity.

Metrics 2

So the first spacetime I would like to talk about is the Minkowski spacetime. It was first invented by the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski soon after Einstein came out with special relativity. Minkowski came up with it to supplement Einstein’s theory. It’s a 4D space consisting of 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimensions. A lot of rules that we are used to in 3D space apply but there are some differences. And they are very important differences. But the problem is that these difference only make sense if you know a good deal of linear algebra and differential equations and in all honesty I don’t understand all of it. So I’m not really sure who to proceed from here. I guess to make it very simple when you take a 4D vector in Minkowski space and multiply or add it to another one it doesn’t work the same way as another sort of space. It sorta has magic math. I know, that sounded stupid. Oh well. I guess that’s all I can say…like I said I don’t really understand it either so, yeah.

Metrics

There are more relationships like this one but I won’t take the time to explain them all…mainly cause I don’t really understand them all/don’t care that much. Let’s move on to bigger and better things, The Metric. Now we know about the metric system, right? You know that thing that America reuses to use with meters and kilometers? Well that is a metric of sorts. In math a metric is a sort of…well it’s like Middle Earth. It a place that has its own set of rules and laws. You can do magic there. And there are elves. It’s a lot different from here. And that’s what a metric is. It’s a space that exists outside our own, like scifi, with its own set of rules and laws and things like that. So for LOTR we would call it Tolkien’s metric. Other metrics you might be familiar with include Rowling’s metric (Harry Potter), Roddenberry’s metric (Star Trek) and the Blizzard Entertainment metric (WOW). Some which you may not be familiar with but which we will be using include the Riemannian metric, the Euclidian metric and the Minkowski metric. And we will talk more about those tomorrow.

Time 10 warning math included (but it's not that bad)

So now we get to deal with the classic sci-fi topic of causality. Now let’s pick two events and since we are dealing with sci-fi and I recently watched the movie I pick wolverine and deadpool causing the meltdown of the three-mile island reactor. Ok, I know that didn’t really happen but let’s say it did. So we have two distinct events wolverine fighting deadpool (we’ll say the instant that they start fighting) and the reactor meltdown (we’ll say they instant that the people monitoring it call the military). Now these two events are separated by a time-like interval. Because we know this and that one event causes the other, we know the above equation applies. What it says is that the square of the spatial distance between the events must be less than the speed of light multiplied by the time between the two events. The second equation therefore says that the spacetime interval (or ‘distance) between the two events must be greater than zero. All this says if that if the instant wolverine took a step forward to fight deadpool a light sensitive trigger went off, tripping, by electrical signal the phone that was to call the military it would take at least as much time as a beam of light to be shot from the warehouse opening to the phone. I know it really doesn’t tell you anything important does it. Well I suppose the most important thing is that wolverine won.

GOD! ?

ok so i continued reading the wikipedia article on spacetime and i am currently feeling like penny in the presents of sheldon. so i'm gonna try again tomorrow night. but in the mean time have some pictures of god, gods and the like. the last one is called a flower for god if that helps.

Time 9 warning math included

Ok I ended up not seeing him today but when I do see him I’ll get back with you on that stuff. So everyone know that the shortest distance between two points in space is a straight line. In math that straight line is designated the distance between the two objects and we use a lovely little formula to derive it which I’ve included in figure one it’s the first equation, it’s sort of the extension of the Pythagorean theorem(I’m really gonna have to find another way to write equations in there, any ideas???) but in space time this equations changes to the second equation where c is the speed of light and t is time. I think since this post has some math in in…as will most the consecutive posts on time, I’ll make it a little shorter and go at a slower rate.