1. THE REAL ACCELERATION OF TIME
From the school physics course we know that, according to the theory of relativity, space can contract and time can slow down (stretch). Is it only so, and never otherwise? Why can it not be the other way round? Are there no examples of such a symmetry of properties? And what if nobody has looked for them?
To detect distortions of space and time of this kind, there is no need at all to “dive” into neutron stars or to look for the underside of a black hole. A very clear example can be found at any metalworking plant. In the heat treatment of metal, use is made of its capacity for recrystallisation, one of the second-order phase transitions.
The essence of the recrystallisation of a metal is that, within a certain very narrow temperature interval, the crystal lattice of the metal is rearranged instantaneously. For this brief moment the metal becomes extremely plastic.
A simple analogy of this process is the following. In a certain vessel, glass beads of equal size are laid in a strictly defined order. We need to change the type of packing of the beads within a matter of moments, without taking them out of the vessel, for example to convert a face-centred cubic lattice into the closest-packed hexagonal one. Obviously, this cannot be done. First, we would need to widen the walls of the vessel somewhat, so that the beads acquire the degrees of freedom they need in order to move. Second, the vessel would have to be shaken for a long time, since in searching for its new position in a vibrating vessel, some beads inevitably get in the way of others. In a metal, however, a similar process of rearrangement, accompanied by a most complex mutual compensation of fields that creates a great deal of mutual interference, can take place instantaneously in only one case – if at the moment of the transition time itself is accelerated or compressed. Another method of heat treatment may be named for comparison – in annealing the structure of the metal is restored, but this process lasts many hours.
We likewise cannot accept that for some brief moment a sample of metal increases its volume – a phase transition does not take place simultaneously throughout the whole of the sample being treated, and local jumps of volume would inevitably destroy it. From the above, only one possibility remains – at the moment of a second-order phase transition it is not the volume of the material that expands but space itself, thereby providing the degrees of freedom the process requires.
At the moment of recrystallisation the metal briefly passes into a state of superplasticity – in the previous chapter an assumption was already made of a direct connection between the disappearance of the force of friction and a weakening of the Pauli exclusion principle, which makes the structure of atoms more “yielding”. In this connection, what is superplasticity if not the yielding of the structure of a material? The stretching of space makes the processes in the metal more indifferent, independent of one another, and this explains the weakening of the Pauli exclusion principle.
It must be said that with a state of affairs in which space can only contract and time can only stretch, theoretical physicists have long found that their “ends do not meet”. To remove the contradictions they are forced to invent wormholes of some kind that “stitch” space. Would it not be simpler to allow that the known distortions of space and time have symmetric counterparts of the opposite sign? It seems that space rather contracts and stretches than pierces itself.
Nikolai Alexandrovich Kozyrev devoted many years to the study of the properties of time. The results of a whole series of experiments he carried out point to a direct connection between phase transitions and the rate of the flow of time. “Near any sufficiently intense irreversible process, strange changes in many physical phenomena were observed. In the neighbourhood of a beaker of evaporating liquid nitrogen, or a vessel in which a solution is crystallising rapidly, the electrical resistance of conductors changes, even if they are separated by glass and metal screens. The level of fluctuation noise in radio equipment rises or, on the contrary, falls. The rate of growth of colonies of bacteria in a nutrient broth changes in a remarkable way.” Intense irreversible processes are nothing other than phase transitions.
It can be supposed that at the moment of a first-order phase transition time, on the contrary, slows down, and the level of mutual interference rises. Any such phase transition means above all a change in the number of bonds in a given quantity of substance, and such a process cannot fail to cause mutual interference. It is characteristic that where the sources of interference are insufficient, a first-order phase transition can be “delayed” by a long way. Thus water passed under pressure through a fine-purification filter may not freeze even at - 40° C. And, on the contrary, when a source of interference appears – a speck of dust in the water or a particle in a Wilson cloud chamber – an intense course of the process begins. Time also slows down near a black hole, but the process of its absorption of matter is also a first-order phase transition.
It is also appropriate here to recall an experiment by American physicists. Graphite compressed at room temperature under a pressure of 170 thousand atmospheres was temporarily transformed into diamond, acquiring all its properties, but once the pressure was removed it became graphite again. As already mentioned, in a first-order phase transition time slows down and the amount of mutual interference increases sharply. In the experiment only the enormous pressure counteracts this interference, not allowing the crystal to break down, while the removal of heat does not allow it to “settle down”, so that after the pressure is released it destroys the crystal again. In the formation of natural diamonds and in all methods of producing artificial ones, heat is not removed and the mutual interference gradually “calms down”. This is distantly reminiscent of the many-hour process of annealing a metal, which relieves internal stresses.
In general the phenomenon of a change in the rate of time can be explained by a simple example. If the workers in an enterprise work in concert and do not get in one another’s way, an order will be completed quickly. If their actions are poorly coordinated and they constantly interfere with one another’s work, the order will take a long time to complete.
It is quite probable that in phase transitions the rate of the flow of time takes extreme values. In second-order phase transitions time flows at its fastest, in first-order transitions at its slowest. Why, then, do we not notice these distortions of time? It should be remembered that, first, phase transitions exist within very narrow time limits – that is, only at the moment when the given molecule or atom is directly taking part in the process. Second, the effect is most strongly manifested in a relatively very small region of the space surrounding the electrons or the nuclei, and matter by and large consists of emptiness.
2. THE IMAGINARY ACCELERATION OF TIME
People who have lived through minutes of mortal danger sometimes note strange distortions of time: a situation that develops very rapidly seems to them, for some reason, to be slowed down. In this special state a person manages, within a matter of moments, to perform many precise actions that are so necessary for survival, and his physical capabilities increase many times over. There is a great deal of testimony to this, especially among people whose profession involves a risk to life.
It could be supposed that the cause of this phenomenon is simple – in an extreme situation the excited nervous system allows a person to make decisions faster, to move faster, and so on, but the character of the observations contradicts such a conclusion. Take, for example, a case that occurred during the war to Fedor Nikitovich Filatov. A shell fell beside him, and this is his description of what happened: “I clearly saw (and I shall never forget it!) how the snow melted around the red-hot blank, how fiery cracks snaked across the steel surface, how fragments slowly began to separate and rise smoothly. All this happened soundlessly, as if in a silent film. And then — everything took on its usual rhythm. The column of the explosion surged up furiously, there was a roar as if a board had struck my ears, and I lost consciousness”. It is hard not to believe the veteran, and yet the case described contradicts the known order in which information is transmitted along the neurons to the visual centre.
The frequency at which human vision turns a rapid succession of frames into a moving image is 50-60 Hz. It is determined by the length of the neural connection joining the eyeball and the visual centre and, accordingly, by the time the signal takes to pass. For this reason cats and dogs, whose skulls are smaller, perceive what happens on a screen only as separate slides succeeding one another. This indicates that a person simply could not observe fiery cracks slowly spreading across the casing of an exploding shell if the signal arrived along neural connections. His brain would have had time to register only one separate “frame”, not the whole sequence of changes.
It is obvious that there can be no question of any real slowing of time – a person cannot simply turn, say, into a neutron star for a second. What, then, can it be? One can suppose the existence in the body of some system of transmitting information that duplicates the neural one in case of emergency. After all, the presence of reserve, duplicating systems is not an exception but the norm, a necessary condition of survival for any organism. The system of acupuncture channels would be quite suitable as a candidate for this role.
The role of this system in the vital activity of the human body is now being intensively studied, and one of the established facts is that acupuncture channels act in the body as waveguides, and for a wide range of frequencies. Another of their features that is remarkable in this context is that they are surrounded by a dense network of neurons. It can be supposed that in an extreme situation information in the body begins to be transmitted not electrochemically by way of neural connections but along these waveguides, which sharply shortens the time taken to make decisions and speeds up the reactions of the body. A transition of this kind could also affect a person’s perception of time and produce a sensation of its “slowing down”. This way of transmitting information probably involves high energy costs, and is therefore used only in extreme situations.
Phenomenal successes in mobilising all the forces of the body, which masters of the eastern martial arts demonstrate, may well prove to be an ability, developed by many years of training, to “switch in” by an effort of will the reserve system of control of the body, which in an untrained person shows itself only in a minute of mortal danger.
The switching on of this reserve system may also be used to try to explain another incomprehensible and fairly rare phenomenon – the “visions” that remain in the memory of people who have been through clinical death. If the reserve communication system switches on in an extreme situation, then the approach of death is certainly one. At the moment death sets in, the action of the neural connection ceases, but it can be allowed that the wave one is able to go on functioning for some time, and this must necessarily show in outward signs. Such an explanation frees this hard-to-explain phenomenon from any mystical background, and, incidentally, the “visions” themselves in general have a quite expected character - in them a Muslim, for example, never communicates with the Buddha.
Yuri Mikhailovich Yurikov
E-mail: yurikov.yurij@yandex.ru
From the school physics course we know that, according to the theory of relativity, space can contract and time can slow down (stretch). Is it only so, and never otherwise? Why can it not be the other way round? Are there no examples of such a symmetry of properties? And what if nobody has looked for them?
To detect distortions of space and time of this kind, there is no need at all to “dive” into neutron stars or to look for the underside of a black hole. A very clear example can be found at any metalworking plant. In the heat treatment of metal, use is made of its capacity for recrystallisation, one of the second-order phase transitions.
The essence of the recrystallisation of a metal is that, within a certain very narrow temperature interval, the crystal lattice of the metal is rearranged instantaneously. For this brief moment the metal becomes extremely plastic.
A simple analogy of this process is the following. In a certain vessel, glass beads of equal size are laid in a strictly defined order. We need to change the type of packing of the beads within a matter of moments, without taking them out of the vessel, for example to convert a face-centred cubic lattice into the closest-packed hexagonal one. Obviously, this cannot be done. First, we would need to widen the walls of the vessel somewhat, so that the beads acquire the degrees of freedom they need in order to move. Second, the vessel would have to be shaken for a long time, since in searching for its new position in a vibrating vessel, some beads inevitably get in the way of others. In a metal, however, a similar process of rearrangement, accompanied by a most complex mutual compensation of fields that creates a great deal of mutual interference, can take place instantaneously in only one case – if at the moment of the transition time itself is accelerated or compressed. Another method of heat treatment may be named for comparison – in annealing the structure of the metal is restored, but this process lasts many hours.
We likewise cannot accept that for some brief moment a sample of metal increases its volume – a phase transition does not take place simultaneously throughout the whole of the sample being treated, and local jumps of volume would inevitably destroy it. From the above, only one possibility remains – at the moment of a second-order phase transition it is not the volume of the material that expands but space itself, thereby providing the degrees of freedom the process requires.
At the moment of recrystallisation the metal briefly passes into a state of superplasticity – in the previous chapter an assumption was already made of a direct connection between the disappearance of the force of friction and a weakening of the Pauli exclusion principle, which makes the structure of atoms more “yielding”. In this connection, what is superplasticity if not the yielding of the structure of a material? The stretching of space makes the processes in the metal more indifferent, independent of one another, and this explains the weakening of the Pauli exclusion principle.
It must be said that with a state of affairs in which space can only contract and time can only stretch, theoretical physicists have long found that their “ends do not meet”. To remove the contradictions they are forced to invent wormholes of some kind that “stitch” space. Would it not be simpler to allow that the known distortions of space and time have symmetric counterparts of the opposite sign? It seems that space rather contracts and stretches than pierces itself.
Nikolai Alexandrovich Kozyrev devoted many years to the study of the properties of time. The results of a whole series of experiments he carried out point to a direct connection between phase transitions and the rate of the flow of time. “Near any sufficiently intense irreversible process, strange changes in many physical phenomena were observed. In the neighbourhood of a beaker of evaporating liquid nitrogen, or a vessel in which a solution is crystallising rapidly, the electrical resistance of conductors changes, even if they are separated by glass and metal screens. The level of fluctuation noise in radio equipment rises or, on the contrary, falls. The rate of growth of colonies of bacteria in a nutrient broth changes in a remarkable way.” Intense irreversible processes are nothing other than phase transitions.
It can be supposed that at the moment of a first-order phase transition time, on the contrary, slows down, and the level of mutual interference rises. Any such phase transition means above all a change in the number of bonds in a given quantity of substance, and such a process cannot fail to cause mutual interference. It is characteristic that where the sources of interference are insufficient, a first-order phase transition can be “delayed” by a long way. Thus water passed under pressure through a fine-purification filter may not freeze even at - 40° C. And, on the contrary, when a source of interference appears – a speck of dust in the water or a particle in a Wilson cloud chamber – an intense course of the process begins. Time also slows down near a black hole, but the process of its absorption of matter is also a first-order phase transition.
It is also appropriate here to recall an experiment by American physicists. Graphite compressed at room temperature under a pressure of 170 thousand atmospheres was temporarily transformed into diamond, acquiring all its properties, but once the pressure was removed it became graphite again. As already mentioned, in a first-order phase transition time slows down and the amount of mutual interference increases sharply. In the experiment only the enormous pressure counteracts this interference, not allowing the crystal to break down, while the removal of heat does not allow it to “settle down”, so that after the pressure is released it destroys the crystal again. In the formation of natural diamonds and in all methods of producing artificial ones, heat is not removed and the mutual interference gradually “calms down”. This is distantly reminiscent of the many-hour process of annealing a metal, which relieves internal stresses.
In general the phenomenon of a change in the rate of time can be explained by a simple example. If the workers in an enterprise work in concert and do not get in one another’s way, an order will be completed quickly. If their actions are poorly coordinated and they constantly interfere with one another’s work, the order will take a long time to complete.
It is quite probable that in phase transitions the rate of the flow of time takes extreme values. In second-order phase transitions time flows at its fastest, in first-order transitions at its slowest. Why, then, do we not notice these distortions of time? It should be remembered that, first, phase transitions exist within very narrow time limits – that is, only at the moment when the given molecule or atom is directly taking part in the process. Second, the effect is most strongly manifested in a relatively very small region of the space surrounding the electrons or the nuclei, and matter by and large consists of emptiness.
2. THE IMAGINARY ACCELERATION OF TIME
People who have lived through minutes of mortal danger sometimes note strange distortions of time: a situation that develops very rapidly seems to them, for some reason, to be slowed down. In this special state a person manages, within a matter of moments, to perform many precise actions that are so necessary for survival, and his physical capabilities increase many times over. There is a great deal of testimony to this, especially among people whose profession involves a risk to life.
It could be supposed that the cause of this phenomenon is simple – in an extreme situation the excited nervous system allows a person to make decisions faster, to move faster, and so on, but the character of the observations contradicts such a conclusion. Take, for example, a case that occurred during the war to Fedor Nikitovich Filatov. A shell fell beside him, and this is his description of what happened: “I clearly saw (and I shall never forget it!) how the snow melted around the red-hot blank, how fiery cracks snaked across the steel surface, how fragments slowly began to separate and rise smoothly. All this happened soundlessly, as if in a silent film. And then — everything took on its usual rhythm. The column of the explosion surged up furiously, there was a roar as if a board had struck my ears, and I lost consciousness”. It is hard not to believe the veteran, and yet the case described contradicts the known order in which information is transmitted along the neurons to the visual centre.
The frequency at which human vision turns a rapid succession of frames into a moving image is 50-60 Hz. It is determined by the length of the neural connection joining the eyeball and the visual centre and, accordingly, by the time the signal takes to pass. For this reason cats and dogs, whose skulls are smaller, perceive what happens on a screen only as separate slides succeeding one another. This indicates that a person simply could not observe fiery cracks slowly spreading across the casing of an exploding shell if the signal arrived along neural connections. His brain would have had time to register only one separate “frame”, not the whole sequence of changes.
It is obvious that there can be no question of any real slowing of time – a person cannot simply turn, say, into a neutron star for a second. What, then, can it be? One can suppose the existence in the body of some system of transmitting information that duplicates the neural one in case of emergency. After all, the presence of reserve, duplicating systems is not an exception but the norm, a necessary condition of survival for any organism. The system of acupuncture channels would be quite suitable as a candidate for this role.
The role of this system in the vital activity of the human body is now being intensively studied, and one of the established facts is that acupuncture channels act in the body as waveguides, and for a wide range of frequencies. Another of their features that is remarkable in this context is that they are surrounded by a dense network of neurons. It can be supposed that in an extreme situation information in the body begins to be transmitted not electrochemically by way of neural connections but along these waveguides, which sharply shortens the time taken to make decisions and speeds up the reactions of the body. A transition of this kind could also affect a person’s perception of time and produce a sensation of its “slowing down”. This way of transmitting information probably involves high energy costs, and is therefore used only in extreme situations.
Phenomenal successes in mobilising all the forces of the body, which masters of the eastern martial arts demonstrate, may well prove to be an ability, developed by many years of training, to “switch in” by an effort of will the reserve system of control of the body, which in an untrained person shows itself only in a minute of mortal danger.
The switching on of this reserve system may also be used to try to explain another incomprehensible and fairly rare phenomenon – the “visions” that remain in the memory of people who have been through clinical death. If the reserve communication system switches on in an extreme situation, then the approach of death is certainly one. At the moment death sets in, the action of the neural connection ceases, but it can be allowed that the wave one is able to go on functioning for some time, and this must necessarily show in outward signs. Such an explanation frees this hard-to-explain phenomenon from any mystical background, and, incidentally, the “visions” themselves in general have a quite expected character - in them a Muslim, for example, never communicates with the Buddha.
Yuri Mikhailovich Yurikov
E-mail: yurikov.yurij@yandex.ru