late wrote:Physics often doesn't understand the why. They are kept plenty busy trying to capture the what.
You are right, of course, we create a fictional linear version of time because it's extremely useful. But now that we know Space-Time is wildly variable, time isn't the way we act like it is.
Indeed, and Albert Einstein became wildly famous precisely because he successfully challenged our everyday assumptions about both time and space.
The way I look at it is that Space-Time says that Space isn't a constant, either. And that those fluctuations also alter time. IOW, in Space-Time, Space is the important bit. Time is a variable that will change in tandem with changes in Space.
In the theory of relativity, neither space nor time are "the important bit". What Einstein demonstrated was the
inseparability of time and space. Which is 'time' and which is 'space' can vary, depending on our perspective. Time and space are linked together in a 4-dimensional space-time manifold. How we divide that manifold up into 'time' or 'space' depends on our point of view.
Like in a Black Hole where Space collapses and time stops.
Not quite. What happens in the interior region of a black hole is that time and space
swap places - you are being drawn inescapably towards the central singularity of the black hole, just as we are normally drawn inescapably into the future, but inside the black hole you are free to move backwards and forwards in what an external observer would call 'time'. The singularity itself, however, is where the theory of relativity breaks down. It predicts infinite quantities (of density and space-time curvature), so cannot be correct.
I'm still drinking my first cuppa tea. This is way too serious for first thing in the morning. Back to the frivolity of politics..
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Marx (Groucho)