What is Time Travel when Everyone is Time Traveling?

Last night I watched Part 1 of "Genius by Stephen Hawking," a PBS series. Part 1 is titled "Can We Time Travel?" I'd recorded it on my DVR a couple weeks ago. The entire episode is available for viewing on line at this link: http://www.pbs.org/video/2365757267/

It does a fairly good job of explaining how Time Dilation works, and how we can travel into the future but not into the past. Traveling into the past would require the creation of another you out of nothing, which is totally against all we know about science. (No, the universe wasn't created out of nothing. We just don't KNOW what was there just before the start of the Big Bang.)

Traveling into the future doesn't require creating another you. You travel 1 second into the future every second of your life.

In the PBS show, two of the experimenters take an atomic clock to the top of a mountain. After spending the night there, they compare their atomic clock to one at the bottom of the mountain. The clock on top of the mountain is 20 nanoseconds (billionths of a second) ahead of the clock at the bottom. So the two people who went up the mountain aged 20 microseconds more than the experimenter who stayed at the bottom of the mountain.  OR, you might say that those who went up the mountain traveled 20 nanoseconds into the future.

Things get complicated and confusing when one of the people who went up the mountain talks about using binoculars to look at people at the base of the mountain and how, "technically, they are in the past." Are they? If they are in the past, then the experimenter who spent the night at the bottom of the mountain is also in the past as he meets the two who spent the night on the mountain. And the people who live at the bottom of the mountain will be in the past when the people who went up the mountain come down again and walk among them.

Who is in the past and who is in the future when everyone of us  moves through time at a slightly different rate than everyone else?

If you think about it a bit (as I did overnight), you realize that if you stand on the street and yell back and forth with someone leaning out a window on the third floor of a building, that person is moving through time at a faster rate than you are.  Yet, you can communicate with each other.

So, while Time is passing at different rates for both parties, "now" is evidently somehow the same for both of them.  The situation illustrates something I wrote in my "scientific paper" about "Time Dilation Re-visualized."  I wrote this about the "twin paradox": Neither twin was ever behind or ahead of the other in time."  And the same holds true with two people yelling at each other from different heights.  Neither is behind or ahead of the other in time, even though time is going faster for the person who is farther from the center of the earth.

How can this be?  It can be because of something I wrote about in my 2nd "scientific paper," which was titled "What is Time?"  I wrote: "time is particle spin."  If you are on the third floor, the particles that make up your body are spinning faster than the particles that make up my body down at street level.  We are both in the "now," which means we can talk with each other even though time is going faster for you than it is for me. 

The main problem is putting this into words that can be easily understood.  Is it something that others have pointed out thousands of times before, or is this a new way to view Time?

Obviously, the person on "Genius" was wrong.  You are not viewing people in the past when you stand atop a mountain and look through a telescope at people at the bottom of a mountain.  You are both in the "here and now," even though time is moving at different rates for everyone.

I'm going to have to think about it some more.  There's got to be a better way to describe this.

Does Dark Energy Exist?

I recently watched a TV program about dark energy on the Science Channel.  It was an episode of "Space's Deepest Secrets."  Dark energy was something I'd never paid much attention to before.  Suddenly, I found the subject to be fascinating.  Looking around the Internet, I found some key information HERE about dark energy:

Assuming the existence of dark matter and that the law of gravitation is universal, two teams of astrophysicists—one led by Saul Perlmutter, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the other by Brian Schmidt, at Australian National University—set out to determine the future of the universe. Throughout the 1990s the rival teams closely analyzed a number of exploding stars, or supernovas, using those unusually bright, short-lived distant objects to gauge the universe’s growth. They knew how bright the supernovas should appear at different points across the universe if the rate of expansion were uniform. By comparing how much brighter the supernovas actually did appear, astronomers figured they could determine how much the expansion of the universe was slowing down. But to the astronomers’ surprise, when they looked as far as halfway across the universe, six or seven billion light-years away, they found that the supernovas weren’t brighter—and therefore nearer—than expected. They were dimmer—that is, more distant. The two teams both concluded that the expansion of the universe isn’t slowing down. It’s speeding up.
The implication of that discovery was momentous: it meant that the dominant force in the evolution of the universe isn’t gravity. It is...something else. Both teams announced their findings in 1998. Turner gave the “something” a nickname: dark energy. It stuck. Since then, astronomers have pursued the mystery of dark energy to the ends of the Earth—literally.

The program made it very clear that no one really knows if "dark energy" really exists.  They call it "dark" energy because they don't now what it is, not because it is somehow dark in color.  Everyone seems to realize it could very easily be that they are just looking at things from the wrong angle. 

On the Internet I'd previously argued with people who believe that "the aether" is slowing down light coming from distant galaxies, or gravity from dust particles is slowing down light.  They were usually arguing against the Big Bang theory, not against Dark Energy.  To me, it seemed "obvious" that some misunderstood factor about Time and/or the speed of light was causing the distant supernovae to appear to be moving so fast.  There are lots of things we do not know about Time and Light, so why assume that there is something totally new that is behind what is being observed?

Of course, my ignorance of these subjects is very great, but what I do know says that it makes no sense to assume that anything like "dark energy" actually exists.  Unlike Science Truthers, however, I'm not prepared to argue that the idea is wrong simply because it makes no sense to me.  What I am prepared to do is some "slow thinking" to try to figure out why it makes no sense to me.  Maybe there is something the Nobel Prize winners know that I do not know.  That certainly seems possible.

First of all, I know the official "speed of light" is the speed of light in a vacuum.  And I know that the speed of light is slower through air and water.  In a vacuum the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second, while in water it is 225,056,264 meters per second.  And that means that, if the light from a supernova is somehow going slower when it arrives, it would merely appear that the supernova is farther away than it really is, because scientists used an incorrect measurement for the speed of that specific light.     

If it is not possible for light to go slower simply because it is coming from an object that is moving away at a very high speed, then the question becomes: If an object is moving through Time at a much slower rate than we are, wouldn't the light the object emits be slowed down as well?  Is it possible for us to detect a difference between light that travels at a slow speed and light that moves at its maximum speed through a slow tunnel of time?  Does that question even make sense?
 
I did a Google search for "how is the speed of light measured" and found this question and answer:

Is The Speed of Light Everywhere the Same?

The short answer is that it depends on who is doing the measuring: the speed of light is only guaranteed to have a value of 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum when measured by someone situated right next to it.

Hmm.  Groan!  When I get some free time, I'm going to have to try to find out how the people who dreamed up "dark energy" eliminated all the other (seemingly) possible explanations for why light from a supernova shows that the universe is expanding faster and faster.  When you have an explosion, doesn't the material that ends farthest from the point of the explosion get there because it traveled faster than the other material involved in the explosion?  And who says that the universe has had sufficient time for gravity to start slowing things down?

Donald Trump's Upcoming Trial for Fraud

It seems like it should be in the news more often that Donald Trump will be going on trial on November 28 for Fraud.

It's all about his phony "Trump University," which advertised itself this way:

According to one source:

       Donald Trump will go to trial in a class-action lawsuit against him and his now-defunct Trump University after the presidential election but before the inauguration, setting the stage for a president-elect to take the witness stand if he wins the White House.

        U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel on Friday scheduled trial for Nov. 28 in the suit that alleges people who paid up to $35,000 for real estate seminars got defrauded. The likely Republican nominee planned to attend most, if not all, of the trial and would testify,Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli said.

I looked for other articles and found one from the National Review titled "Yes, Trump University was a Massive Scam."  It says,

First thing first, Trump University was never a university. When the “school” was established in 2005, the New York State Education Department warned that it was in violation of state law for operating without a NYSED license. Trump ignored the warnings. ...

The free seminars were the first step in a bait and switch to induce prospective students to enroll in increasingly expensive seminars starting with the three-day $1495 seminar and ultimately one of respondents’ advanced seminars such as the “Gold Elite” program costing $35,000.
At the “free” 90-minute introductory seminars to which Trump University advertisements and solicitations invited prospective students, Trump University instructors engaged in a methodical, systematic series of misrepresentations designed to convince students to sign up for the Trump University three-day seminar at a cost of $1495.

The article also says,

The New York lawsuit alone represents some 5,000 victims.

Meanwhile, Trump — who maintains that Trump University was “a terrific school that did a fantastic job” — has tried to bully his opponents out of the suit. Lawyers for [one of the victims] Tarla Makaeff have requested a protective order from the court “to protect her from further retaliation.” According to court documents, Trump has threatened to sue Makaeff personally, as well as her attorneys. He’s already brought a $100 million counterclaim against the New York attorney general’s office.

The article also provides a link to an article in The Atlantic which says,

Every university has admission standards and Trump University was no exception. The playbook spells out the one essential qualification in caps: “ALL PAYMENTS MUST BE RECEIVED IN FULL.” Basically, anyone with a valid credit card was “admitted” to Trump University.

I'm totally amazed that some Americans would elect someone like Donald Trump to run for President.  Who are these Americans?  I don't see any possibility that they represent any kind of majority, but they certainly seem fired up and dedicated.  And I certainly could be wrong about how many there are.  On TV they seem to be angry bullies, reminding me once more of the followers of fascist leaders in the mid 20th century.  Mussolini had his admirers and followers, too.  When I talk with my Republican relatives, all they will talk about is how much they dislike Hillary Clinton.  It's as if they are embarrassed to be supporting the Republican candidate, but they seem to feel it's their duty to make sure Hillary Clinton isn't elected.  Why won't they vote for Hillary Clinton?  Because they just don't like her.  They'd rather vote for a fascist nutcase instead.