Light does NOT travel at a "universal speed of light."

There's "an elephant in the room" that no one seems to want to talk about because it just generates arguments: Light does NOT travel at a "universal speed of light."  The "speed of light is different in water, in air, in glass, and in a vacuum.  So, there can be no "universal speed of light."  It is not even constant in a vacuum.

Einstein's relativity theory was presented as a PRINCIPLED, rather than a CONSTRUCTIVE, theory. A principled theory is one that begins with scientific principles and then uses those principles to explain the phenomena; a constructive theory starts with actual observations and culminates in theories that explain and reconcile those observations.

Einstein's "principled theory" is interpreted to say that the speed of light is "constant" throughout the universe and therefore light must cause Time to slow down or DILATE when the object emitting light is in motion or near a gravitational mass.

A CONSTRUCTIVE theory based upon observations, however, shows the reverse. The speed of light changes depending upon the "time" occurring at the source of the light.

Thus, due to gravitational time dilation, light coming from the Sun is traveling slower than the speed of light as we measure it here on Earth in a laboratory. And light coming from distant stars is coming at various speeds due to gravitational and velocity time dilation at the sources.

Any calculations which assume that the speed of light is fixed throughout the universe, such as the calculations involved in Dark Energy, will be incorrect.

A new scientific paper "Time Dilated Light (A Constructive Relativity Theory)" has been published to explain everything. It is available at this link: http://vixra.org/pdf/1607.0289v3.pdf

Dormant Black Holes and Dark Matter

Are dormant black holes the same thing as dark matter?  If not, why not?

It's been bugging me for a long time that dark matter and dormant black holes seem to be the same thing.  I'm not a scientist, I'm just a science buff, and I'd never really studied either subject in school.  But, I keep asking myself: why would there be two different mysterious substances (dark matter and whatever is at the centers of dormant black holes) that so closely resemble one another?

So, a few days ago, I started doing some focused research.  Over the years I've found that whenever I have a science question, it usually has already been asked and answered somewhere on the Internet.

I soon found a web site called "Ask Ethan," which has the exact question I was asking: "Are black holes made of dark matter?"  The page does a very good job of explaining how black holes are thought to be created.  However, it also contains arguable statements like this:

So initially, when they’re first formed, black holes are pretty much 100% normal (baryonic) matter, and just about 0% dark matter. Remember that dark matter interacts only gravitationally, unlike normal matter, which interacts via the gravitational, weak, electromagnetic and strong forces. All of this is a fancy way to say that when normal matter comes into contact with other normal matter, it goes “splat,” meaning that it can stick together, clump, exchange momentum and accrue even more normal matter when this occurs. Dark matter, on the other hand, doesn’t “splat” either with normal matter or with other dark matter. This is why, when we look at galaxies and clusters of galaxies, we picture spiral or elliptical galaxies where the normal matter is confined to a relatively small region of space, but they are embedded within dark matter halos that extend for maybe thousands of times the volume of the normal matter.

To me, the first sentence in the quoted paragraph above is highly questionable.  I would assume just the opposite.  I would assume that when a black hole is created, it is 100% dark matter, i.e., the normal matter that was ultra-compressed by the imploding supernova.  The supernova turns normal matter into the dark matter that is at the center of a black hole. 

The second sentence in the quoted paragraph does a good job of explaining what happens when a supernova creates a black hole consisting of dark matter.  It turns normal matter into a form of matter that is somehow stripped of all the properties which give it the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces.  That would explain how the matter that is at the center of a black hole can be so highly compressed without causing nuclear fusion.

The last paragraph in the article contains this conclusion:

And there you have it: a quantitative answer to the question of whether black holes are made of dark matter or not. At most they can only be made of about 0.004% dark matter, and that’s the most optimistic number that applies only to the most massive ones!

That might be so, but it's definitely not how I see things.  So, I looked for more information.

This article attracted my eye: "NASA simulation suggests black holes may make ideal dark matter labs."  It seemed to say what I've been thinking, that black holes are "factories" that create more dark matter.  They take in normal matter, strip normal matter of its weak, electromagnetic and strong forces, perhaps spewing out those forces in the form of X-rays, and leaving only dark matter behind at the center of the black hole.

Unfortunately, the article begins this way:

While we don’t yet know what dark matter is, we do know it interacts with the rest of the universe through gravity, which means it must accumulate around supermassive black holes.

Huh?  Reading the article, I found that it suggests that supermassive black holes concentrate dark matter that was created elsewhere and cause the dark matter particles to collide.  That has nothing to do with what I'd been thinking.  And there's nothing conclusive in the article, except for another description of some properties of dark matter that I consider to be very important:

dark matter [is] an elusive substance accounting for most of the mass of the universe that neither reflects, absorbs, nor emits light.

That description of dark matter should be compared to this description of dormant black holes I found elsewhere:

Roughly 90 percent of the biggest black holes in the known universe are dormant, meaning that they are not actively devouring matter and, consequently, not giving off any light or other radiation.

The source is this article: "Dormant Black Hole Eats Star, Becomes X-ray Flashlight."

Think about it.  A dormant black hole doesn't reflect light, nor does it emit light, and it doesn't absorb light, it bends the path of light - a process called "gravitational lensing."  What need is there to have two different things - dark matter and black holes - if they have the same physical properties?

Searching further, I soon found a web page where someone asked the question I've been asking, but just phrased in a different way: "Could the Universe's dark matter be made up of black holes?"

However, the answer was (in part):

What's important to realize about this is that our studies of dark matter don't just tell us that "it's out there somewhere"; when we study a galaxy, we learn something about the total distribution of matter within it. This means that we know the dark matter surrounds galaxies and is not a central object, like a black hole, within galaxies.
The problem with your idea is that black holes are nothing that special, gravitationally: they're just accretions of matter. They are centralized in the middle of the galaxy, and according to the laws of gravity, they can't pull very hard on stuff far out at the edge of a galaxy.

Who says black holes are "centralized in the middle of the galaxy"?  I'd seen an article which said there could be millions of black holes within our galaxy.  And who says "black holes are nothing that special, gravitationally"?  Just the opposite would seem to be true if a black hole can be dormant and yet be a massive gravitational source with no real explanation for what is inside the black hole.

A June 27, 2016, article on Astowatch.net web site titled "Clandestine Black Hole May Represent New Population" states:

Astronomers have combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to conclude that a peculiar source of radio waves thought to be a distant galaxy is actually a nearby binary star system containing a low-mass star and a black hole. This identification suggests there may be a vast number of black holes in our Galaxy that have gone unnoticed until now.

The article also says,

Because this study only covered a very small patch of sky, the implication is that there should be many of these quiet black holes around the Milky Way. The estimates are that tens of thousands to millions of these black holes could exist within our Galaxy, about three to thousands of times as many as previous studies have suggested.

But nowhere in the article does it mention "dark matter."  It's just about "millions" of black holes which could be in the same places where dark matter is believed to be.

It should seem "obvious" that dormant black holes and dark matter could be the same thing.  It seems so "obvious" that the question seems to be, What facts about dark matter show that it cannot possibly be dormant black holes?

I then found an article titled "Is Dark Matter Made of Tiny Black Holes?"  It's from November 14, 2013 and says,

A planet-hunting NASA spacecraft has detected no sign of moon-size black holes yet in the Milky Way galaxy, limiting the chances that such objects could make up most of the "dark matter" that has mystified scientists for decades.

Dark matter is one of the greatest scientific mysteries known — an invisible substance thought to constitute up five-sixths of all matter in the universe. It remains so mysterious that scientists are still uncertain as to whether dark matter is made of microscopic particles or far larger objects.

and

Over four years, Kepler monitored the brightness of more than 150,000 stars in the Milky Way to detect regular dimming caused by planets crossing in front of them. If a primordial black hole passed in front of one of these stars, the star would become temporarily brighter instead. That's because black holes warp light around them with their gravitational fields, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

and

Until now, researchers had eliminated the chances that black holes that are approximately the mass of the moon could make up dark matter. Kepler's data show no evidence of black holes between 5 and 80 percent of the moon's mass, suggesting these black holes could not constitute most dark matter.

However, even smaller primordial black holes, ones less than 0.0001 percent the mass of Earth's moon, could still make up the entirety of dark matter, Griest said. Future missions — such as the European Space Agency's Euclid spacecraft or NASA's proposed WFIRST satellite — could look for smaller black holes than those identified by the Kepler data.

"We've ruled out a range of primordial black holes as dark matter, but have not ruled them out completely," Griest told SPACE.com. "They're still a viable candidate for dark matter."

Hmm.  That definitely fits with the way I envision things. Most dark matter is supposed to be like a cloud surrounding the Milky Way galaxy.  Small black holes wouldn't produce any substantial gravitational lensing effect on distant stars and galaxies. 

It's quite possible that I'm totally misunderstanding everything.  But, if I'm understanding things correctly, there's also a key to "The Theory of Everything" in this.  The key is figuring out how you can strip a particle of normal matter of all of its electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, and produce a particle of dark matter that only possesses gravitational force, and thus can be packed like grains of wet sand into a spherical ball of dark matter that is so small that mathematicians can misinterpret it to be a single, dimensionless point of infinite density.

This "Theory of Everything" might also explain "The Big Bang."  A gigantic mass of dark matter encountered something that restored electromagnetism, weak and strong forces to the dormant dark matter - like a bowl of nitroglycerin being hit by a bullet.  And there could be lots of left-over "unexploded" dark matter floating around.

Of course, I could be wrong about all this. 

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.

Google street view time travel

I've used Google Maps' Street View to look around my home town, around Washington DC, and around Chicago its suburbs, and for awhile I assumed that Google just ran it's camera car up and down streets of the USA.

Then, about 6 months ago, I wondered if I could use it to locate where a Rational Science Methodist conference was held in a small town in Scotland.  Since I knew the address, I quickly discovered the "conference" was held in this pub:

I spent hours touring Dalmellington, Scotland, via Street View.  Then, when I was done, I never thought about touring any other location -- until yesterday.

Yesterday, I wondered what Misawa, Japan, looks like today.  When I was there from mid-1963 to mid-1965 I took hundreds of photographs.  I also wondered if Google Street View had ever been to such a remote place.

So, I used Google Maps to locate Misawa and then picked what looked like the main street to see (via Street View) what it looked like today.  It didn't look anything like what I remembered.  Nothing in the town looked anything like what I remembered. Then I realized I needed to find some reference point to make sure I knew where I was.  The only reference point that I was certain was in the same place today as it was 53 years ago was the main gate to Misawa Air Force Base.  Here is what it looked like in the winter of 1963 or 1964 (you can click on the images to view larger versions):

Here's what is looked like in September 2015, when Google's street view camera car passed by:

At some point in time, probably in 1964, they added a sign over the main gate:

These days, the sign seems to be stone or concrete, and it's located on a grassy area outside the gate:

Using the main gate as a starting point, I was able to locate the main street which looked like this in 1964 when the Emperor drove through on his way to his plane at the air base:

And here is what that approximate same point looks like today:

A big part of the change was undoubtedly the need to replace flammable wood structures with concrete block buildings.  I remember one major fire while I was there that burned down several side-by-side businesses.   But, they must have razed virtually every building on both sides of the main drag to widen the street and transform in into what it looks like today.  And they must have done the same thing to most of the rest of the town.

(Several days after writing the paragraph above, I found the explanation for how they were able to widen the main street.   The whole center of Misawa burned down in January 1966.  Click HERE to visit a web site with 75 photos related to the fire.)

Back in the 1960s, there was an alley less than a hundred feet from the Air Base main gate.  That alley (now a side street) was lined with a string of at least a dozen bars, restaurants and pawn shops side by side.  Back in the 1960s, it was called Nakashio Koji, which translated to "the small street next to the Nakashio department store."  It was the only street I knew by name.

I never took a picture of the entrance to Nakashio Koji while I was there, but today it is a narrow side street.  Here's a current picture showing how close it was and is to the main gate:

 
The side street makes a bend to the left behind the first building on the left.  Here's a picture I took of the area just beyond the bend when I was there:

 Here's what it looked like to Google's camera car in 2015:

The street still seems to have several bars and restaurants, but there's now one or two businesses occupying the same amount of space where there used to be a jumble of four or five bars.

After using Google street view to tour Misawa for a few hours, I tried finding some places in England to see what they look like today compared to the 1990's when was last there.  They don't look all that much different.   For example, here's a shot I took at an intersection in London at least 20 years ago:

The name of the street is clearly visible on the sign at the lower right corner of the picture, so I was able to easily locate it as it looks today:

The street sign is no longer on the fence, it's now on the corner of the building.  The ground floor windows of that building seem to now be bricked over.  And there seem to be fewer signs on the buildings down the street, but the Halepi Greek Restaurant is still there, just with a new paint job.  And the hospital a few doors down now seems to occupy additional space that was previously occupied by two other businesses, but generally things look about the same.

Then I tried Las Vegas, which I know is very different today compared to what it looked like when I last visited it.

Here's a photo I took of the Stratosphere Tower when it was under construction:

And here is what it looks like today:

Except for completing the construction, this particular view isn't all the different today.  The "General Store" is still there and looks virtually unchanged.  The biggest difference is that I used a standard camera lens and Google uses a wide-angle lens, which makes the "General Store" look a lot farther away from the tower than it really is.

Construction on the tower began in February 1992, so the photos show only 24 years of change.

I'm constantly amazed by the things that can be done on the Internet, and viewing previously visited locations is one of the more amazing things.

What is Time?

 

Albert Einstein’s explanation of Time Dilation, along with “The Twin Paradox” explained by Paul  Langevin, pose two scientific questions:  (1) ”What IS Time if it can be dilated?” and (2) “HOW is Time dilated by velocity and gravity?” The answers below may be only a re-visualization of what has been known for over a century, but it appears the topic has never before been explained by a layman in layman’s terms.   (For the complete explanation, click HERE.) 

Time is particle spin. What we perceive as time are the effects of particle spin.

We perceive time as non-cyclical processes, such as growth, aging and decay. We measure time by cyclical processes, such as the rotation of the earth, the seasons, the phases of the moon, etc. But Time itself is particle spin. Local particle spin determines how fast things grow, age and decay locally, and local particle spin determines the rate of local cyclical processes, such as our heart beat, our sleep cycles, and the ticking of local clocks. Thus we will perceive different effects of Time and particle spin in different locations depending upon our velocity through space and the gravitational strength at each location. 

What we commonly measure and call “Time” is just an agreed-upon standard.  Two centuries ago, “noon” occurred at a different time in nearly every town and city.   Clocks were set to 12:00 “noon” when the sun was at its highest point during the day.  Then the need for railroad schedules gradually created a requirement that everyone must use an agreed-upon standard for when “noon” occurred in a specific “time zone.”

In his 1905 paper, Albert Einstein viewed time in a very different way.  He explained that Time will run slower for an object whenever the object moves.  For convenience, he used clocks to describe how movement (velocity) dilates (slows down) Time: 

If at the points A and B of K there are stationary clocks which, viewed in the stationary system, are synchronous; and if the clock at A is moved with the velocity v along the line AB to B, then on its arrival at B the two clocks no longer synchronize, but the clock moved from A to B lags behind the other which has remained at B by ½tv²/c² (up to magnitudes of fourth and higher order), t being the time occupied in the journey from A to B.

It is at once apparent that this result still holds good if the clock moves from A to B in any polygonal line, and also when the points A and B coincide.

If we assume that the result proved for a polygonal line is also valid for a continuously curved line, we arrive at this result: If one of two synchronous clocks at A is moved in a closed curve with constant velocity until it returns to A, the journey lasting t seconds, then by the clock which has remained at rest the traveled clock on its arrival at A will be ½tv²/c² second slow. Thence we conclude that a balance-clock at the equator must go more slowly, by a very small amount, than a precisely similar clock situated at one of the poles under otherwise identical conditions.

The last sentence above explains that a clock at the equator will run slower than a clock at the North Pole simply because the clock at the equator is moving at about 1,000 miles per hour around the Earth’s axis while a clock at the North Pole just rotates in place once per 24 hours.  Everything at the equator that measures Time will run more slowly than an identical object at the North Pole.   A human being standing on the equator will age more slowly (by a very small amount) than a human being standing at the North Pole.

This means that Time can (and does) “move” at a different rate for each of us.  The rate with which Time “moves” depends upon your velocity and your distance from a large gravitational mass.  The closer you are to the center of a large gravitational mass – such as the Earth – the slower time will move.  Plus, because the Earth is not a perfect sphere but is slightly flattened at the poles, a clock at the North Pole is also 13 miles closer to the center of the Earth than a clock at the equator.  The clock at the North Pole will thus run slower by a very slight amount, an amount which must be added to any amount of slowing caused by velocity. 

  

The question then becomes: Exactly what are we measuring if Time will move at a different rate for someone on the equator versus someone at the North Pole? 

It isn’t just velocity.  A stationary person sitting motionless in “absolute space” will age normally, and his wristwatch will tick off the seconds normally.   

But, as soon as he starts to move, Time for him and his clocks will start to slow down in comparison to what was occurring when he was sitting motionless.

Since we are all moving, being “stationary” in “absolute space” is basically just a hypothetical concept.  But the speed of light is NOT hypothetical.  That is one reason why Time Dilation is typically computed by measuring an object’s velocity relative to the speed of light instead of relative to a purely hypothetical stationary object.

 

The speed of light is not only fixed, it cannot be exceeded by anything yet known to man.  And since nothing can move faster than the speed of light, that means that Time Dilation must be caused by a some kind of “conflict” with the speed of light – a circumstance where Time is somehow forced to slow down because the movement of Time cannot exceed the speed of light.

It appears there is only one “thing” that can cause Time to slow down when it conflicts with the speed of light – particle spin.  And that observation seems to indicate that particle spin IS Time, and Time IS particle spin.

One “fundamental unit of time” is one complete "spin" of a stationary particle.  When a particle moves, the completion of one full "spin" must slow in some way because the distance covered during the spin must be added to the lateral distance the particle itself has moved.  And that immediately conflicts with the fixed speed of light.  
 
(Muons are unstable subatomic particles with a mean lifetime of 2.2 microseconds.  They are created locally when cosmic rays collide with particles in Earth’s upper atmosphere.  Their short mean lifetime does not provide enough time for the particle to reach the surface of the Earth, yet they do reach the surface in great numbers.  That happens because their high speed (about 99 percent of the speed of light) slows down the Time they experience (i.e., they experience Time Dilation), allowing them to travel further before decaying.)

So, “a fundamental unit of time" is one complete spin of a hypothetical stationary particle.  However, the Time we all experience is NOT fixed because particles do not remain stationary, and thus the time it takes for a particle to complete one spin is not fixed.  One complete spin of a moving particle is one dilated unit of time. 

Unfortunately, we do not know with any precision what a particle looks like or how it spins.  Some theoretical models show an electron spinning just as the Earth spins on its axis.  A different model has the particle rotating like a spinning donut.  Another theory has particles vibrating instead of spinning.  Whatever is happening, the movement cannot exceed the speed of light and therefore the spinning must slow down.  A massive gravitational force will also slow the spin.   

This way of viewing time also indicates that Time can stop.  When an object (such as an electron or a human) reaches the speed of light, the object ceases to exist as a coherent object and will become waves of energy moving across the universe forever.  Time will stop for that object.  Likewise, when an object enters a black hole, the electron will cease to spin and Time will stop. 

This means that dilated Time is the normal form of Time.  Everything in the universe is moving and is being affected by gravity.  But the amount of Time Dilation is normally so small that we have all agreed to use a man-made "STANDARD" (such as the time measurement provided by the atomic clock at the National Institute for Standards and Technology) instead of trying to compute our own personal rate of time using the tiny clocks known as "particle spin.”

What is Time?  Time is the spin of sub-atomic particles at a specific location.  Time began shortly after the Big Bang, when particles such as electrons were formed, and Time will continue until electrons and other particles stop spinning.