Not much to report on today. Even Super Typhoon Champi in the West Pacific, at 185 MPH yesterday, and now the strongest ocean storm yet in 2026, has dropped to "only" 165 MPH. Expected to further weaken and sneak between Taiwan and some of those southern Okinawa islands, moving up north, losing typhoon strength in two days, with landfall near Nagasaki, Japan on Sunday as a tropical storm.
Yes, TIME is a magazine, but this is Wednesday, my day for sci-tech. What time is it? You look at a clock. But time is "different" in physics. I asked Google AI, how do they differ.
Yes, time is different in physics compared to everyday human life. For normal citizens, time feels like a steady, universal clock that ticks at the exact same speed for everyone. In physics, time is relative, meaning it stretches and slows down depending on speed and gravity. [1, 2]
In physics, time is not a flowing stream or a fixed clock. It is a fundamental dimension of spacetime, a metric that measures the duration and sequence of events, and a variable shaped by gravity and speed rather than a universal constant. [1, 2, 3]
Salvador Dalí used melting clocks in works like The Persistence of Memory to show that time is subjective, fluid, and malleable rather than rigid or mechanical. He argued that our internal experience of time—through memory, dreams, and emotion—warps and stretches compared to clock time. [1, 2]
- Spacetime: Albert Einstein showed that time is woven with the three dimensions of space into a single four-dimensional fabric called spacetime.
- Relativity and Dilation: Time is relative. It passes at different rates depending on how fast you move or how strong the gravitational field is around you, a phenomenon known as time dilation. [1]
- The Arrow of Time: While fundamental physics equations work equally well backward or forward in time, the second law of thermodynamics gives time a direction by stating that overall disorder (entropy) always increases.
- Time Crystals: Researchers using Google Quantum AI have observed "time crystals"—a unique phase of matter whose atomic structure repeats in time rather than just space, oscillating perpetually without losing energy. [1, 2]
Here is a video worthy of your watch: Is Time Real? The Physics Behind the Illusion of Time. That was only 6 minutes long and should be enough to get started. But, here is for those desiring to gain a more solid foundation, a 46-minute lecture On the Nature of Time According to Modern Physics by Jim Al-Khalili of Gresham College. Never heard of this institution? From Wikipedia.
Gresham College is a public institution of higher learning in Holborn, Central London, founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham. It does not enroll students or award degrees, instead hosting over 140 free public lectures each year and maintaining an online archive of thousands of talks. [1]
In many ways, this posting could have been titled: THE TRUTH ABOUT FLYING SAUCERS: Part 2b. Now that you're totally confused about the nature of time in physics, you're ready to better understand Arrival, a film made a decade ago, and selected as the #1 alien movie of all time by IMDb.
- I saw this film when it was first released.
- Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 94/83.
- Film received 8 Oscar nominations in 2017.
- Just looked at it again last night on Peacock. Hardly remembered anything. Felt almost like a new film. I was totally confused.
- Somehow, I never associated the meaning of time when I first watched Arrival. But this "dimension" of physics is everything.
- Directed by Denis Villeneuve, starring Amy Adams as a linguist, recruited by the U.S. Army to discover how to communicate with the arriving extraterrestrials. This is why I link it to UFOs Part 2b, because the film shows what they are, how they got here and their intention.
- My initial reaction was negative, for I wasn't able to appreciate what the film was portraying.
- The alien spacecrafts were named shells (2500 feet tall) and 12 of them suddenly appeared. They landed around the world for a purpose. They wanted to somehow get Homo sapiens to unite. Implicit was a known future that Planet Earth would destroy itself if they were not saved by them. How could they know this future? Well, keep reading.
- Simply, these Heptapods spoke in a totally different way, and were so advanced that they had learned how to control TIME. This is how they got to Planet Earth.
- If you attain this state of knowledge, your future and past are intermingled in your mind.
- Sort of related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on linguistic relativity. In other words, your language can affect your cognition.
- Adams somehow began to understand how they were communicating, and began to see things in her future. But this film gave you an impression that she was thinking about her past.
- For example, her co-star, Jeremy Renner, was someone she just met and they worked together at the ET spacecraft site. But her seeing the future meant she knew she would marry him, bear a daughter, and lose both. But the audience was not aware of all this.
- The whole point in saying all the above is that my view, and of SETI researchers, is that it is essentially impossible for aliens to visit Planet Earth....unless you have a way to control time.
- Mind you, I still think this will not be possible. But that's only me speaking.
- I have never before seen a complex film so well-explained. Click on studiobinder to yourself read it. Fabulous educational presentation, but still abstruse.
Physics equations work equally well whether time is moving forward into the future (positive time) or backward into the past (negative time.) However, time in the natural world has one direction, called the arrow of time. The question of why time is irreversible is one of the biggest unresolved questions in science.
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