What a Time We Hadby Tom Slattery

Could we view the Big Bang as starting out as a magic lump of sugar in a hypothetical infinite ocean? All at once the lump begins to dissolve, and dissolved sugar spreads ever outward into the infinite vacuum-ocean.

Now, 13.82 billion years later, the intense sugary sweetness has been diluted. But within the sphere of the expansion of sweetness, the infinite vacuum-ocean is still sweet. And the sweetness continues to expand.

We look at the universe like it is a something -- a lump of sugar or a lump of mass-energy -- that began expanding into a volume of nothingness.

We do not know what dark matter and dark energy are. So it would be fair to wonder whether there already may have already been dark matter and dark energy in what we have been assuming was a giant vacuum before the Big Bang.

But let's include the two big darks in the Big Bang. There may still be a fault in looking at things this way.

We are looking at detectable "stuff" expanding. And while there is nothing wrong with this, we could be looking at the universe backward.

That is to say the "stuff" and the "space "of the universe may have already been there. Everything may have been there, but the "stuff" that was destined to expand into that "space" was packed into a static, inert three-dimensional dot.

Were the stuff and space already there, the stuff packed inside the dot and the space all around it? Then what makes that highly compact stuff and the pure unpolluted space so different all of these 13.82 billion light years of radius bigger, and all of these 13.82 billion years later?

Time could be the answer. The 13.82 billion light years of expanding radius and the 13.82 billion years of elapsed past is time, time involved in interactions and time gone by while expanding.

That is to say, time itself may be what was born 13.82 billion years ago. Everything else may have been already there. Compact matter and the great empty volume that it expanded into might have been already there. The lump of sugar and the infinite vacuum-ocean were already there.

Whatever the compact "stuff" was at first, time created mass and energy as we know them. Without time all of the blackboard expressions of mass and energy are nothing, mean nothing. Time, then, created the larger sizes, including the size of the universe.

We live time, but we tend to ignore time like our recent ancestors ignored air. It's just there, everywhere.

Before the 17th century discoveries by Evangelista Torricelli there was little notion of air as a substance. Aspects of air had names like wind or breath as if they were independent of it. Air was invisible and ubiquitous, and no one realized that it was there. Torricelli showed that it was a substance that could be weighed.

From that example we might wonder whether time might be a substance, or some kind of "stuff" like a blueberry muffin. That is to say, could time be something tangible like mass-energy is tangible? Could there be a weighable, measurable particle carrying time, a "timeton"?

Gut experience tells us that time and energy are interrelated. For example, we step harder on the gas pedal and give our car more energy and as a result we can get where we are going in less time even though we burn more fuel. But is this relationship between time and energy what we are wondering about here?

Does the petrol pedal analogy represent a flow of time that surrounds us like air surrounds us so that we go through our lives almost oblivious of it? Or does it hint at a specific and yet unconsidered interaction of the substance of time -- of "timetons" -- with energy-matter?

Picking this apart will be tricky partly because we do not know what a "substance" of time might actually be like, feel like, and act like, and what it might and might not do.

We are trying to guess at a ghost. At best, any new speculation like this is less than perfect and has to work itself out in comparisons with the already known. This speculation about time as a substance and the "bang" of the Big Bang may take centuries before anything testable is discovered. But the speculation may spark a thought that will spark a thought that may lead to something.

Gravity appears to interact with time. Time, for instance, is involved in the acceleration expressions of gravity. But gravity is not only acceleration.

The "equivalence principle" shows that acceleration generated by other than a gravity-generating mass -- for instance, the acceleration of a spaceship -- can mimic the acceleration of gravity.

The "equivalence principle" is not the "identical principle." To look at it from another angle, the totally different physical force of a magnet on an iron pellet could probably be made to mimic the "attractingness" and acceleration of gravity. But magnetism is in no way the same as gravity.

Nor is the spaceship acceleration entirely like gravity. Acceleration of the spaceship example is produced by added energy. The acceleration of gravity comes from added

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mass. Consider that gravity also "senses" other gravity -- "senses" another gravitational mass in any spherical direction -- and pulls and accelerates it. In this paper on time we are interested in acceleration because it is pure time. But acceleration is not everything.

"Mass" is deceptive. Things look and feel solid. If you look down at your hand, it looks solid. But microscopic forces and fields cause this appearance and feel.

In proportion to diameters, the atoms in your hand are as far apart from each other as the stars are far apart from each other. Between atoms or stars there is a vast amount of empty space. The mass of your hand or anything else is an illusion.

Before the Big Bang the mass of the universe was squashed together in that dot. Then, all of space surrounded it. Now great volumes of space are between everything that was once in it and the once tiny universe has become vast.

What makes tiny into vast? Time makes tiny into vast. Not only are 13.82 billion years of time involved in expanding tiny into vast, time is involved in our perception of mass and energy. For example, in Newton's F = MA (Force equals Mass times Acceleration) time is built into the acceleration component. Time makes mass. Time also makes energy. Time gives size to the substance of atoms and galaxies.

Time turned that stuff of the primal dot into great size, powerful forces, solid-seeming mass, and the energy of the sun and other stars. All of those galaxies of stars and their would still be inside the three-dimensional dot without time.

Einstein showed that there is no such thing as gravity, only distortions in space-time. So it may become awkward to talk about a possible substance called time creating distortions in space-time -- that is, a substance called time ultimately interacting with time.

In view of this you could choose a different word, say "Einsteinian." There may or may not be something more to this than that which is locked into the dual concepts of relativity and thus we may need to avoid the term "relativity."

"Einsteinian" gravitational time dilation appears in a manner of playful searching whimsy to shed light on an interaction of time with gravity. What is gravitational time dilation? It is a relationship between gravity and time. To condense Wikipedia's explanation, clocks that are far from massive gravitational bodies run faster, and clocks close to massive gravitational bodies run slower. In other words, gravity makes a clock on Earth tick slower than a clock that is halfway to the Moon.

Since it has been shown that time interacts with gravity, then it is not too unreasonable to entertain a whim that time could be a substance or stuff like a blueberry muffin that interacts with gravity, yet undiscovered "timetons" of time perhaps interacting with yet undiscovered "gravitons" of gravity.

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There are other indications that the whim may not be absurd. There are the curious twin limitations on the "speed of light" and "absolute zero" temperature. Both are limitations on the motion of energy as if there was an "upper limit" and a "lower limit" on the movement of energy. (The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, and absolute zero temperature is just short of minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit.)

What limits the speed of light? Is there an internal intelligence, a magic mini-chip inside every photon or energy entity that acts to slow it down when it gets going too fast? Or alternatively is there something like a medium through which all photons pass, including the phonons in electric wires, the properties of which forbid light to move any faster than the speed limit? The former would seem to require a universe that has intelligence, and the latter would seem to re-impose the discredited aether medium, aether wind unsuccessfully sought in the Michaelson-Morley experiment.

Or might one propose in an adventurous moment that possibly time itself ceases beyond the maximum velocity of light, that whatever was born of time when it erupted in the Big Bang abandons time when it surpasses the speed of light? Or maybe time can no longer be detected?

Time is detectable by motion, motion of matter-energy. At absolute zero movement ceases and thus time would seem to also cease. The reverse of absolute zero, "absolute hot," would seem to be the temperature of the universe in the first instants of its Big Bang inflation when time was in its infancy and when time may have been different than what it is now. Both at a temperature of absolute zero and at Big Bang zero -- just before the Big Bang -- matter and time could tempt one to see similarity between these two "zeros.".

Presumably before the Big Bang, light (energy) packed into a point had no "speed" and thus had no time. After the Big Bang light seems always to have had a precisely defined "speed," a strange precise relationship with time. Minds can be forgiven for asking why there is a fixed speed of light. But in fact there is a speed of light. If unobstructed by material or by gravity, the "speed of light" seems constant throughout the universe.

Let's look at the speed of light and go back to the earlier gas-pedal analogy. We step on the gas pedal and use more energy, and this use of more energy reduces the time it takes to get where we are going. But what if we have a super-car that can go the speed of light and that car's wheels are on a treadmill that is already going the speed of light?

We step on the gas pedal and give the car more energy, but stepping on the gas pedal doesn't reduce the amount of time it takes to get us where we are going. It only makes the treadmill go faster. If we look at the engine, the pistons are going up and down faster and faster. If the car was energy, that is to say light, the up and down light frequency, like the up and down of the car pistons, would increase. But since the speed of light cannot change, light with a lot more up and down motion doesn't get where it is going any faster.

So can we analogize that the conveyor belt might represent time, perhaps represent a particle of energy riding on a particle of time? Yes, but analogies eventually fall apart.

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Both the super-car and the photon of light can accept and use the increased energy, but either something would seem to be absorbing the saved time or time is transforming into matter-energy. Are particles of time becoming photons and protons?

Could these two very rigidly set numbers, "speed of light" and its companion "absolute zero," be yet two more indications of interactions between matter-energy and the "stuff" of time? Could this interaction of the substance of time with light be what creates light "waves" and then squeezes "wavelengths" as more energy reacts with the substance of time?

Let's divert for a moment and look at something else that might indicate an interaction with time, radioactivity and equally important, non-radioactivity. There are four known "eternal" particles: protons, electrons, photons, and neutrinos. Left to themselves they stay and don't decay.

Neutrons may last forever inside a nucleus, but outside a nucleus neutrons decay. A neutron out of the nucleus lasts just under 15 minutes. It decays into a proton, electron, an (anti) neutrino, and energy. This decay appears to be a reversible process in mu mesons (using mu-meson neutrinos) and apparently in making neutrons resulting from capture of electron neutrinos and protons in neutrino experiments in deep mines. And apparently in the high-energy condition of the first moments of the Big Bang, protons could become neutrons.

So free neutrons outside the nucleus relate to time with a measurable decay time of about 15 minutes. Mu mesons relate to time with a measurable decay time of about 2.2 microseconds. And for that matter, the multitude of the non-stable isotopes in the Chart of the Nuclides each have their own characteristic decay times (half-lives), which is to say their fixed personal relationships with time.

If time is a substance, it seems to interact independently with each other substance and property of our universe. Moreover, if time is a substance, that substance of time (as opposed to an intuitive flow of time) would have been created in the Big Bang.

Can we speculate? In some alternative universe could there have been a Big Bang that had no substance of time?

Absurd as it might be, let's look at it. A pre-Big Bang singular point becomes a whole universe in a timeless instant. Whatever the characteristics of repellant gravity may be, without time this universe would be motionless and dead. But the main point is that unlike our own universe, it would not take the stuff of time almost 14 billion years to expand to where we are now. In one timeless instant it would have been a point. In the next timeless blink of an eye it would have been a done-deal universe.

That scenario of the absurd requires a stretch of imagination. But if time is a substance it would have been born in the Big Bang and immediately it would have governed everything else in the universe. Would this mean free timetons like air governing the

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behavior of the universe? Or might it mean timetons imbedded in every detectable or measurable particle in the universe (possibly those particles without timetons being undetectable)?

But less taxing on the imagination, what about an alternative universe that was born with only half as much of the substance of time and all the rest of the substance of time went instead into being something else, perhaps more of the same electrons, photons, protons, mesons, neutrinos, or perhaps something very different?

Or vice versa, if an alternative Big Bang created a universe with twice the substance of time and only half of the substance of the rest of electrons, protons, photons, mesons, neutrinos, would we live much longer but with great scarcity?

How might time, as a substance, exist or work in an expanding universe?

Time appears to act evenly and thus be dispersed evenly throughout the universe. Might this indicate that time came into existence with the very earliest instants of the Big Bang, perhaps even in the earliest instants of some yet-undiscovered pre-inflation proto-Big Bang and it attached itself to everything?

And in what form? Might time be carried in particles? And if there might be a time-particle, a "timeton," might it have become embedded in every atom and sub-atomic entity that exists in our universe? Or is it like a field that affects everything?

Could it be that deeply embedded "timetons" are the whole driving force of the Big Bang, "timetons" pushing light and everything else outward, causing the expansion of everything, and striving to reach an impossible time-eternity?

Time, like air, is all around us. But unlike air, it governs everything detectable in the universe. The Big Bang might have been a bang of time, everything else having been already present. We don't know what time is. But only by asking uninhibited questions can we ever find out.

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Tom SlatteryRocky River, OhioRevised June 11, 2014

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