Well, this all started when I used to walk down my way from my coaching class to the railway station, which was few kilo meters away , an easy 20 - 30 mins walk. Each day I get on the same way watching different birds, butterfly, trees etc..Then one fine day i was so impressed by the bird’s flight. Wow! What a beauty our nature is. Then came the very first questions "(1) How are we living things here? ". i mean this is so very magical , its as if we were dropped down from somewhere, the earth we humans , birds, animals other stuffs. it made me think so because everything around us we see, cat, dog ,rat ,donkey anything for that mater seemed to be so intricately designed and fits the surrounding so well that made me think that we people should have a "creator".
While I was thinking this, my mind kicked off to one of the very old question I had (hope many had this too! "(2) What is god and why do we need a god?" basically this question drops down to answer the fact what is the purpose of god in scientific terms. If science could answer any question thrown to it then what is the reason for the theory of god!. Then I thought I could answer the reason for that theory. The “creator” I mentioned above could be the “god” that we know now. But I was not sure whether the “creator” theory that came into my mind was rich and support full enough. But my luck! I came to see a biology book of my sis which contained a chapter “Darwin’s theory”. What a brain Darwin had! Jut an awesome theory. That answered my question how we beings are here.
That day, the day I started to think, gave me a very pleasant discomfort in my mind. I started to think! That’s nice!. The question which came on its own into my mind made me search for questions which I didn’t have answer. After a couple of days another interesting question popped up while a stranger asked me the “time”. “(3) What is time?”
I think this is a very absurd question. Why should one think about time when he has his watch rolling in his hand with two hands ticking a 360’ turn? But I did think how time could be defined. First thought that we could say time as the one which flows only in one direction, but wait anything that flows in one direction cannot be time. Then I added which flowed with constant speed oh my god! The realized if Einstein was alive he would have thrown stones on me!. Then what else is time? Maybe can we define it has the one which we can count within a constant or particular time interval. Like the sun raising up and going down. But this would make it too clumsy to handle. Then what else is this bloody time? I got fed up and thought we could define time as the one which has no definition! Wow! So beautiful I thought – “stupidity” replied my brain. But just a second Ya! Now I remember my teachers said about time! A second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. Phew! This is really bad.! So this is what time is eh? I surely nodded my head and said a NO.
And started again to think about it , I remember my physics sir saying about science “my aim , as a teacher, is to create intellectual discomfort in your mind” excellent lines by my prof. I couldn’t feel free without answering it. But jut then realized every definition I gave had one thing in common, the big word “motion” !.. yes, I thought of defining as a change of any measurable quantity.. Would this do? Nope I redefined it as relative change. That made sense for me. I convinced myself by this thought experiment- imagine only you are in space, nothing else, everywhere you see just darkness no light and nothing and there you try to define time what will you do? You start counting numbers at regular intervals and say this is my time. Fair enough! Now instead of you, keep a wooden box surrounded by noting but just black space, then how would the wooden box define time?. It tries to move in a circle so that it could count the number of circle It made and define a unit time, but it couldn’t go in a circle or not even move! Why? Because it had noting relative to which it can check if it was moving. Fine!. Now you throw a spherical into the space and now you tell the box to define time. Now the box tries to move in circle revolving the sphere as center. Puff! Box failed. Every time it covered a distance it could see the same sphere with no difference. But now box has another chance, it can move about repeatedly making oscillations in any way such that it is not at constant distance from the sphere. Now what happens? It did succeeded in defining time . how ? Every time it made an oscillation it saw a change in “shape” of the ball. Each time it went nearer to it the ball grew shorter and each time it went away from it the ball grew bigger. And the “gap (time)” between the shortest and biggest (or any gap) cold be the defining unit of time for that ball.
This seemed logical so I thought the eq. d(x)/d(t) = v could pour me out some information why cant we define the time as d(x)/d(v)…? This clearly shows out why velocity(relative motion) when there is no relative motion (dv = 0) time tends to infinity meaning the time interval or the basic time unit (where there is no relative motion) would be infinity or it is like the smallest time difference one can measure in a relative motionless space is infinity. This makes sense. But till now, I still don’t know whether am right or wrong. It seemed to work fine for me. Time from my poin of view is defined by this equation – t = d(x)/d(v) .
Note: things written here are my personal experience feel free to coment and point out my mistakes.Part II will be posted soon. Have hell a lot of unanswered question in my mind.
Santosh Kumar
Physics lover,Tamil nadu,
Chennai,
India
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