Have you ever seen someone from across the room? And you locked eyes with them, suddenly the only two people alive? And inexplicably — but unquestionably — nothing else mattered? And it was almost like time stood still?
I’m here to tell you that would be absolutely f*cking horrible.
The time standing still part. Not the other stuff. The other stuff sounds kinda nice.
But (semi) seriously, have you ever wondered what would happen if you could stop the clock, and time halted for everyone but you? If you could pull a Hiro from Heroes and walk around a frozen world?
Well, firstly, you’d fly off the face of the Earth.
Yeah. Sorry.
If we’re assuming that everything is frozen in time but you, we’re assuming that all of your physical properties remain also unfrozen in time, so you can, you know, continue to breathe and stuff. Which is cool.
What is uncool is that your velocity will remain unchanged.
“But Jerry,” you say, “I’m sitting on my posterior reading this primo article — I’m going nowhere both physically and in life!”
Well, actually, we’ve got to consider how fast Earth is moving, since we’re sitting on Earth and going the same speed as it is through the universe — if we were going slower it’d leave us behind and if we were going faster we would get ahead of it. Earth is moving at about 67 thousand miles per hour, and so are we.
But wait — it gets better. Earth is moving in tandem with the solar system, and the solar system is moving at some far crazier speed than Earth is. But wait — the solar system is moving in tandem with the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is going approximately fast enough to make Speed Racer weep.
If you freeze time, you’re reducing all of that motion to zero — while not changing your motion at all. That means you’re going however fast all of those things were going, while Earth stops completely.
It’s like if you were sitting on top of a train — which, bad move on your part in the first place — and the train stops dead in its tracks. You keep going forward. The train doesn’t.
It’s like that, if the train was going at — and this is an approximate figure — six bajillion miles per second.
Chin up though, because before you could die in the vacuum of space, you’d freeze to death first.
This just isn’t your day.
See, heat is the movement of particles. When something is hot, its particles are moving around a lot. If you stop time, you stop the movement of particles, meaning nothing has any heat at all. All the warmth will flow out of your body and — yeah. You’d be—think the end of Frozen. Which is to say, frozen.
On a slightly lighter note, as far as the motion of particles stopping, you’d also stop being able to see.
Hey, I said “slightly.”
We perceive objects by seeing the light that’s reflecting off of them into our eyes. Light is made up of photons — particles — which would also stop if time froze. They’d still be there, in the world, but not reaching our eyes. You could still see things, but only by walking towards them, and walking into the photons that have already reflected off of the object. But beyond essentially slamming your eyes into photons, if your evil genius plan involves freezing time to take over the world, Braille would be a good first move.
So if photons stopped moving, the next logical step is that you would explode.
No. Sorry. Let me walk you through that one.
There are four fundamental forces that govern pretty much every physical interaction in the universe. Three of the four forces result from matter (and sometimes space) sending and receiving certain particles which correspond to each particular force. For instance, according to the most widely accepted model of physics, particles called “gravitons” tell space to bend around matter, and space happily complies. Hence, gravity.
Photons are the particles that communicate the electromagnetic force, which, among other things, tells atoms to not spontaneously fly apart.
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this.
When photons stop moving, the electromagnetic force stops happening, and atoms, you guessed it, spontaneously fly apart.
That means that, by stopping time, you have caused not only yourself but everything else in the universe to literally disintegrate.
Hey. It could be worse.
So if I’ve convinced you to be deathly afraid of time-stoppery, you’re in luck, because the very concept of stopping time doesn’t make sense in a way that doesn’t even require you to say “Jerry, stopping time is a high-concept sci-fi idea why is this even an issue,” even though I know you want to. You have Einstein to thank for that. As usual.
We think of time as something that moves, as evidenced by even our language: we often talk about time “flying” or moving too slowly.
With his Theory of Relativity, however, Einstein combined space and time into one fabric, the space-time continuum.
He wasn’t very imaginative when it comes to names.
This was a total revolution of the concept of time. Time’s relationship to space via relativity is a little too complicated for a gratuitously sassy 1000-word article, but suffice it to say that time is a lot more like space than we previously imagined.
It makes a lot more sense when you accept that the word “time” can replace the word “space” in most situations. So, the question of “What would happen if we stop time?” becomes “What would happen if we stop space?” Well, not a lot, because you can’t stop space. It doesn’t work like that. Space is just there; you can move around in it but you can’t stop it.
It’s the same with time. It’s just there, it exists as a dimension and we move through it, even though we only move in a forward direction. It’s a little tricky, but time is immutable in a similar way to space. Some people argue that all of time already exists, from the beginning of the universe to the end of it, and we’re just moving through a predetermined track, like a car moves down a road. That’s a story for another sassy article, though.
Anyway, that’s why you won’t be disintegrating the universe any time soon. Unless you mess up good. Like, real good.
Good luck!
