Warning: Science talk contained herein.

I think this post has a little in common with a concept that I wrote about a few months ago, the fact that there are people who are considered specialists, but I think there need to be people who are generalists. Connecting the similarities between different professions or disciplines. I wish I was one of those people.

I woke up this morning, following some very bizarre dreams (picture a mixture of Harry Potter and Star Trek: Voyager), with a rather striking thought. It came to me fully formed, but I'm having trouble verbalizing it. Eric, you better read this and help me refine the concept, or at least the description.

Here it is, and it has to do with the concept of time: First, some setting. The way that most theorists think of space as a stretched piece of trampoline-like material and gravity interacting with it like a heavy weight, stretching and distorting space into a dimpled or cratered type of surface. Well, my thought is that time exists in the same way. Time is like the surface of space, and all time exists right now simultaneously (at the "same time"?). Not sure of a different way to describe it, but I'm working on it.

There is a great book called "Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide". Contained in that book are various thought exercises, and well-described scenarios that are clearly laid out. There is a chapter that explains how gravity effects the passage of time. If you took twin atomic clocks that were perfectly synchronized and left one sitting alone on the equator, and then took the other and placed it on a plane and flew it around the Earth for a few years, and then brought it back down and compared the two times, then you would find that they weren't sychronized anymore. Gravity would have caused time to act slower on the clock farthest from earth's gravity well. That would also happen if you took the same twin atomic clocks and put them in different orbital distances around a black hole, or the sun. The tidal differences between the different gravities act upon time as if it is a surface that can be distorted, or caused to ripple.

I'll keep thinking about this and try to keep going on it.