The Shape of Time

Today is the tomorrow that we used to worry about yesterday

So folks, stop worrying, for worry is the misuse of imagination.

Use your imagination wisely, and think about the “shape” of time!

Shape? Yes, not a physical shape, but an imaginay one.

As we are aware, time flows at the rate of one second per second, locally!

Why only locally? Because time is relative.. remember relativity? So the rate of flow of time is one second per second, only locally.

How about globally? (technically ‘in other frames of reference’)

Special relativity - The faster somebody moves relative to you, the slower will his time tick compared to yours! So if you are standing still on a railway platform and if the other is in a speeding train, then his time as measured by you will be slower than yours!

General relativity - The more the gravity in which somebody lives in, relative to yours, the slower will his time tick compared to yours! So if one person lives on moon and the other on earth, then the time will be slower on earth compared to the time on moon! why? because gravity on earth is more than on moon!

We all are time travelers. Traveling at a constant rate of one second per second. We can refuse to move in space (at least locally), but not in time!!

How nice it would have been, if it were possible to make a right about turn and go back in time, where our actions get undone as we move back! Then we will do another about turn, and start rewriting the past(future?) by doing things differently this time!

We/matter travel forward in time. Does antimatter travel backwards in time? Feynman diagrams indicate so! Antimatter looks like matter traveling back in time! So is it then possible to exchange information with antimatter humans for mutual benefit? We ask them about how things are in the future, and we tell them about how things will be to them in our past (their future)!

But how to prevent matter/anti-matter annihilation ? Otherwise, everytime we meet our antimatter counterparts, there will be gamma ray bursts with mystery, and both of us will become history

Now the shape of time.
Note: that I am not talking about the pear shaped light cone model (shown below). That is actually the shape of the path of the light rays (not time) projected on a 2d plane (traced back to bigbang singularity), and supposedly providing the boundary to separate causally related and causally unrelated events. I really dont understand why some call it the shape of time!

Coming back to the shape of the time (not the one shown above)..

Space can be n-dimensional , but time is one-dimensional. So is time a straight line?

Not really because gravity bends time. How? The nearer we move towards a massive object, the slower the time becomes! So time is curved! A smooth curve when we assume a smooth perfectly spherical mass.

This curvature but is actually the static shape of time, when imagined over a short duration! Over a longer duration the curvature changes its shape!

Let me explain how.

Assuming Earth, Sun and Moon are not moving in space. Now we can see the static picture of time. Time is most curved near Sun because of a more massive Sun, and this curvature straightens as we move away from Sun (because gravity decreases), then as we move towards earth again the time starts curving, but not as much as it was near Sun (Sun is over 33000 times massive than earth). Again on the other side as we move towards Moon, time again gets curved, but this time even more lesser than the curvature near Earth.

Now this as we saw is when Earth , Sun and Moon are thought to be static.

But in the universe everything is in motion, and in this dynamic universe, even the curvature of time keeps changing everywhere. Because, as Sun, Earth, Moon etc move, they drag the curvature along with them. And not only that, as their relative positions keep changing, the shape of the curvature keeps changing as well! For instance as Moon moves around the earth, the curvature caused by moon points towards that direction.

This applies to the shape of space as well, or in other words to space-time! Look at the oceans tides which point towards that curvature, jump up as if they are saying, “its here, its here” !

Again as we approach the surface of the earth, the curvature varies because Earth is not a perfect sphere! There are mountains, valleys, continental plates etc!

Then again take this down to a quantum level, and we have the most dense nucleus with foot ball fields of empty space between atoms! Welcome to the world of Quantum foam !

Today is tomorrow’s yesterday and yesterday’s tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life