Is time a side effect of universal expansion?
Is time a side effect of universal expansion?





Is time a side effect of universal expansion?




I'm admittedly an armchair scientist... I believe I was quoted at one point as saying "well special relativity is just a THEORY, so it could be wrong" which was met at the time with a snarl from someone who kinda knew that stuff better than me. 

Here's my layman's question:  What if our perception and measurement of time is simply is flawed and time is really a function of how much the universe has expanded?  Put another way; assuming that universe is expanding at a (mostly) constant rate, might time not be an independent dimension, but simply derivable from the difference in size of the universe?

If this is actually true, then isn't time travel really a lot less complicated?  Don't we immediately remove paradoxes like  "if I go back in time and kill my father will I ever be born?".  

What it might mean is that time is not really some thing that exists independent of the spacial dimensions, but is simply a function of an underlying effect we don't yet fully understand.

Any physicists out there who could explain how to prove/disprove this idea?








Popular posts from this blog



the myth of asynchronous JDBC








  I keep seeing people (especially in the scala/typesafe world) posting about async jdbc libraries.  STOP IT!  Under the current APIs, async JDBC belongs in a realm with Unicorns, Tiger Squirrels, and 8' spiders.  While you might be able to move the blocking operations and queue requests and keep your "main" worker threads from blocking, jdbc is synchronous.  At some point, somewhere, there's going to be a thread blocking waiting for a response.   It's frustrating to see so many folks hyping this and muddying the waters.  Unless you write your own client for a dbms and have a dbms that can multiplex calls over a single connection (or using some other strategy to enable this capability) db access is going to block.  It's not impossible to make the calls completely async, but nobody's built it yet.  Yes, I know ajdbc  is taking a stab at this capability, but even IT uses a thread pool for the blocking calls (be default).   Someday we'll have async databa






The difference between Scalability, Performance, Efficiency, and Concurrency explained



I thought I'd give some explanation of the difference between scalability, performance, Efficiency, and concurrency.  To make things more accessible (and because I'm watching a cooking show on TV) I'm going to use a baking metaphor to help explain the differences.  In our case, the system in question is baking cookies for consumers.   Scalability, is how well something responds to adding more resources.  If we can double our capacity by doubling the number of resources, we've got linear scalability.  In our baking example, if we add more ingredients, we can scale to a larger number of cookies.  To contrast with our other metrics, this doesn't actually increase the performance of creating a single cookie (they still take 10 minutes to bake), and the efficiency is the same (we just have more capacity).  We also cannot bake more cookies in a fixed time period, but over a larger time period we can produce more cookies.   Performance is how fast something can get done, u




Push versus pull deployment models



There are two deployment models: push and pull.  In a "Pull" deployment model, the individual servers contact a master server, download their configuration and software, and configure themselves.  In a "Push" model, a master server pushes the configuration and software to the individual servers and runs commands remotely.  While neither technique is right or wrong, they both have some specific advantages and disadvantages that you should understand when making a decision.  In the ruby hosting world, an example of a "push" deployment is heroku , while Engine Yard  is an example of a "pull" type deployment.   In the Pull model, each server has information about how to obtain it's configuration, when it boots (or whatever the configuration triggering event happens to be) it can continue to proceed without intervention from the master server.  In the Push model, because the master server is orchestrating things, it will typically need to have a c




