People say that time waits for no one, but what if we do have a say in the passing of time? Here, I take a closer look at time; its fundamentals, and especially its loopholes.

Perceptual Change:

What is the perceptual changing of time

• Although time is measured in standard units: days, hours, seconds, years, for some reason, it seems to pass differently depending on the moment. 
• This is because time for humans is all about perspective. As Einstein figured out, time is relative to our frame of reference. 
• Our brains process time at various rates depending on setting, activity, emotions, etc. 
• To the view of humans, the passing of time is subjective.

Literal Change:

What is the literal changing of time (time dilation)

• Time dilation is a difference in elapsed time displayed by two clocks, but not due to an error in one of the clocks. 
• When two observers move differently through time but they are in the same inertial frame, this phenomenon is referred to as time dilation. 
• In time dilation, time moves slower for an observer who is in motion compared to a stationary observer. 
• For example, a stationary observer will find a clock on a moving train will tick slower than the clock on the observer’s wristwatch. 
• Time dilation can be illustrated through Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Perceptual Change:

Changing your routine

• When we fall into a structured, mundane routine, the days seem to blur together. 
• Usually at certain points in our life, our days are filled with repetitive activities we already know how to do, and have done day after day. 
• That causes time to just feel as if it is slipping away from us.
• A large factor for why we can start to feel this way, is that dullness can cause us to become cut off from our feelings. Our perception of time is relative to emotion. 
• Living your life as a routine can result in less of a need for our brain to stimulate, which seemingly causes time to speed up and blur together. Our brains get set on autopilot, and we tend to lose touch with our sense of emotion and eventually time.
• The way for us to claim time back is to switch up the way you do something every once in a while. 
• Making adjustments, even minor, to our schedule allows our brain to re-alert itself, and create new connections which makes us more time-aware. 
• Testing out various hobbies, taking a different route to work, switching up the foods you eat, and changing the way you end your day, are great examples on how to break out of the spell, and feel that time is in your hands again. [5]

 

New experiences

• When we try new things for the first time, the passing of time seems very slow, and we are able to feel every moment. 
• To learn or to do something for the first time, our brain has to make a lot of new connections. 
• Every experience leaves its mark on your brain. When you learn or do something new, the neurons involved grow new projections and start to form new connections, and your brain may even produce new neurons. [6] 
• That results in our brain having to stimulate more, which seemingly causes time to slow down, and experience every moment of that activity, but say if that activity is done over and over again, it doesn’t have that same effect anymore, for example: someone’s first time skydiving, a first day of school or work, learning a new skill, playing in a sports game for the first time, etc.
• This tricks your brain into thinking differently about how fast time actually passed. 

 

Years getting shorter as you get older

• Why is it when you are a young child, each year feels like it takes forever, but the older you get, each year seems to be slipping away faster?
• Although the amount of time in a year hasn’t changed, your perception of a year changes as you get older. This is because a year takes up a smaller fraction of your life the older you get. 
• For example, when you are five years old, a single year is 20% of your life, but say you are fifty years old, a year makes up only a total of 2% of your life.

 

Doing something you love vs something you hate

• “Time flies when you’re having fun.” is a very common saying, and there is actually evidence behind this. 
• A person’s experience of time is relative to factors such as emotion. 
• How we perceive time is based on cognitive biases, and during various stimuli, our brains process time differently depending on how the stimuli makes you feel.[5]
• This has been proven by a behavioral study in 2012. 
• Some participants were engaged in activities that triggered happy or exciting emotions, while others were partaking in activities which triggered feelings of boredom or annoyance. 
• The participants who were enjoying their activities reported how the time they spent doing their activities felt less than how much time actually did pass, whereas the participants who were not enjoying their activity claimed that the time they spent doing it was more than how much they actually spent. 
• A person experiencing positive emotions during an activity feels more "in the moment" and causes them to perceive time as more abundant. [4]

 

Fear

• When a person is overwhelmed with fear, time seems to slow down by an incredible amount. 
• Neuroscientist David Eagleman showed a connection between fear and the brain’s perception of time. 
• He conducted an experiment where participants were sent on a 15-story drop on an amusement park ride. The participants were later asked about how they felt about the duration of time during the drop, and the majority of the participants had overestimated the length of time during the fall. 
• In another study, scientist Droit-Volet and her colleagues ran an experiment on university students. They had the students watch video clips: ones that induced fear from horror movies, sadness from dramas, and a neutral emotion from weather forecasts. 
• She had the students estimate the duration of the emotional stimulus after viewing each set of video clippings. 
• Droit-Volet and her colleagues found a significant change in the participants’ time perception after the fear segment, whereas no outstanding change in time judgment was seen after the students saw the sad and neutral video clips. 
• Scientists believe that when our amygdala feels there is a threatening stimulus, our brain causes intense physiological reactions that warp our internal clock, thus making us perceive time incorrectly. [4]
• These results can help us hypothesize that fear distorts how our brains judge time so it seems that we have time to get prepared to act in the face of danger.

 

Literal Change: 

Einstein’s theory of relativity

• According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, the faster an object moves through space, the slower it moves through time. 
• Einstein had disproved Isaac Newton’s original theory of time being a constant, and only moving in one direction: forward. 
• Einstein had found out that time is not a constant, but instead can stretch or contract due to the object’s speed. 
• He had found out that time is relative. 
• The saying time is relative means that time is different for everyone depending on the frame of reference. For example, if we keep in mind that time and speed are interconnected, it explains why a clock on a moving airplane moves faster than a stationary clock on the ground. 
• Special relativity explains that time slows down, time dilation, occurs when an object moves faster than when at rest.

 

Time moves slower the faster you move through space

• With current technology, our experimentation on the velocity of space travel is quite limited, having the International Space Station as the best thing we have so far. However, although miniscule, there is indeed a difference in time for the passengers in the ISS compared to here on Earth. 
• After spending 6 months in the ISS, orbiting Earth at a speed of about 7,700 m/s, a person would have aged about 5 milliseconds (0.005 seconds) less than a person on Earth.
• Putting it into a real life perspective, astronaut Sergei Avdeyev spent a total of 748 days during three separate missions on the Russian space station Mir.
• Since Mir was moving relative to Earth, Sergei Avdeyev is 20 milliseconds younger than he would have been if he never had left Earth. [1]
• Another example is astronaut Scott Kelly. While his twin brother, Mark, was on Earth, moving no faster than at the speed of a car, Scott spent 520 days aboard the International Space Station, which was orbiting the Earth at a speed of 7,700 m/s. 
• There was a time dilation between the two brothers when Scott returned to Earth because of their varying speeds. 
• Although Scott and Mark's age difference was previously only 6 minutes, they now have an additional 5 millisecond gap. [2]

 

Time moves slower closer to the core (gravitational time dilation)

• After an average 79 year lifespan, a person’s head is 90 billionths of a second older than their feet. 
• This is due to the fact that there is more gravity closer to the core, and a difference in gravitational pull causes a slight time dilation. 
• With this reasoning, the higher up you get, say, a really tall apartment building, or even higher, an airplane, there will be a greater time dilation, because you are in an area with less of a gravitational pull. 
• The way gravity affects time is called Gravitational Time Dilation, and can be explained by keeping in mind that objects with mass bend the fabric of space-time. An object with more mass has more gravity. Objects with more gravity warp space-time even more, which causes distortion to the regular passing of time.
• Because of gravitational time dilation, the way time passes on different planets is different compared to Earth, depending on the strength of gravity on that planet.
• This has been proven several times by Global Positioning Systems, or GPS. 
• GPS satellites are around 20,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface, where there is minimal gravity. The clocks on GPSs move faster than the ones on Earth, and scientists have had to add corrections to the clocks on the GPS satellites so that they match the ones on Earth.[3]

 

Black holes, white holes, and wormholes

• Black Holes: There are two types of black holes: static and rotating. 
• As we know, different gravitational strengths cause an effect called gravitational time dilation. 
• Rotating black holes are so dense that they create a gravitational pull so strong that it actually slows down and bends space-time itself, and theoretically, could slow it down enough that it starts to create loops of time.
• There are many theories about how time actually moves in or near a black hole, but for now, our research is very limited due to our minimal contact and information about black holes. 
• White Holes: There is a celestial object that only exists in theory called a white hole. It is the exact opposite of a black hole, where instead of sucking in all energy and matter, it expels it. If we were to find a white hole which released all the energy and matter a black hole absorbed, it could create a wormhole.
• Wormholes: A wormhole is also just theoretically possible, and it happens when the fabric of space-time is bent so much that it forms a tunnel. It would allow anything that entered one end of the tunnel to be released from the other end of the tunnel, in a completely different place in space-time. 
• So the question on whether or not black holes, white holes, and wormholes can make it possible to time travel is still unknown, since most connections made between them and time are just purely theoretical.

Speed of light

• So far as we know, the speed of light in a vacuum is the fastest possible speed in the universe. 
• Already keeping Einstein’s theory of relativity in mind, the faster an object travels through space, the slower it moves through time. 
• This becomes more evident the closer the object is to reaching the speed of light. 
• So if an object were somehow able to reach the fastest speed possible, the speed of light, theoretically, time would just stop for the object.

Conclusion

Time is a tricky thing. The more we learn about it, the more grey areas seem to appear, so the best we can do is try to wrap our heads around the information about time we do have, hoping that it will lead to more theories and discoveries. But to answer the well pondered question throughout science history: can time be manipulated? Evidence, physics, discoveries, and calculations help us prove that the answer is yes, perceptually and literally, time can be manipulated.

 

[1]https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/time/time-travel#:~:text=Time%20traveler,he%20never%20traveled%20in%20space.

 

[2]https://www.adventurestoauthenticity.com/blog/how-to-be-a-time-wizard-can-we-change-our-perception-of-time-speeding-it-up

 

[3]http://thescienceexplorer.com/universe/how-gravity-changes-time-effect-known-gravitational-time-dilation

 

[4]https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-fluidity-of-time 

 

[5]https://www.makeuseof.com/reshape-perception-of-time-for-productivity/#:~:text=Integrating%20mindfulness%20into%20your%20daily%20routines%20can%20heighten,in%20a%20task%20that%20time%20seems%20to%20dissolve.

 

[6]https://elifesciences.org/digests/52743/how-experience-shapes-the-brain#:~:text=Everything%20that%20you%20experience%20leaves,changes%2C%20as%20can%20taking%20antidepressants

 

https://www.newsweek.com/time-warp-where-find-one-1423508

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuD34tEpRFw