Time Dilation

It's all hidden in the subtext and the deleted scenes do possibly answer some questions. Janek wanted to remind them that time for them still seemed like it was moving the same as back on Earth. That for them, they had spent so much time aboard the ship that it would be Christmas. Although, time's not really still moving the same for them as the people back on Earth. It's already passed Christmas back on Earth... past New years, at the beginning of the story. Shaw knows nothing of time dilation and neither do any of the crew except Janek and he's messing with them. They missed Christmas so he has to put up the tree. If things had gone smoothly he may have informed them it was already well passed that Christmas. For them it would seem like it was Christmas, but time is relative. Janek, Vickers and Weyland didn't explain to them the nature of traveling through deep space... In one deleted scene Janek ask something like "haven't you ever been in deep space before?" He's setting up the tree almost immediately after waking up because it's already well past Christmas back on Earth.

I had to search for a clearer meaning of Time Dilation but I now have better understand your comments. To me this also ties in with communication delays not so much in this movie but in others. 2001 sort of brought this probelm to light and it is a facinating subject. I hope there are several posts on this subject.

Me too, it's really intriguing. I know there were some people who are much more into math than I am that had a lot of the time dilation stuff being worked on before the movie was released. It'd be interesting to know again exactly how much time may have passed in those 2.5 years traveling away from Earth at light-speed for the people back on Earth. If this is true more time has passed for the company back on Earth than the characters, and Weyland may have screwed over the crew if LV-223 is further than most of the colonies are according to the map on the Weyland website. maybe the Engineers don't have time dilation problems, and don't change very much over time or evolve unless they make themselves bio-mechanical? Maybe the one new thing about the technology of the future in Alien, after Weyland corp's golden age/paradise period, is stolen Jockey propulsion/wormhole or gateway technology picked up in the Engineer Paradise. While Weyland corp is crumbling, its Kingdom is crumbling, and most things get less shiny... the company becomes spread too thin--using the bare minimum amount of resources for technology. Taking a step back with most of the androids and controlling them more. Turns out Gateway station is more of a gateway than we realized and connects to Anchorage station overseeing Alaska. It and Gateway station would be a part of my ideas for Paradise.

We know from the intro that the Prometheus travelled about 35 light years. Therefore, at least 35 years passed back on Earth. A little longer, in fact, since they were travelling very close to light speed, but not quite. Although physically impossible, if they were actually able to travel at light speed, 35 years would elapse on Earth, but from the ship's perspective, it would complete the journey instantaneously, with no passage of time whatsoever. That's how photons experience existence — from their perspective, they are at the beginning and the end of their journey at the same instant in time. We live in a strange place. I like to think that the Engineers have this kind of stuff cracked, and can do better than photons. That is, they can travel right across the galaxy in a few short years, yet leave light far behind them. When Shaw announces the date at the end of the movie, there's a real problem because there is no such thing as an absolute date or time. We use UTC on Earth (universal time) to get round things like time zones and daylight saving adjustments to local time, but it's far from universal. When very high speed travel is concerned, our normal perspective on time goes out the window. On LV-223, where vast distances and speeds are involved, the 'current' time back on Earth is largely meaningless. Even GPS satellites have a different idea of Christmas to us, though to a much much smaller extent than Shaw.

Thanks zzplural for clarifying that. That really is amazing if this idea is true, I like this idea because it could mean that things have completely changed for the company back on Earth. And we'd be right around the time of the first Alien... Weyland was going to get his eternal life, so it didn't matter to him that 35 years of the company wondering about things had gone by. Vickers really should have just stayed home if she wanted control of the company for a while. The board probably would have put her in charge eventually if Weyland's mission was kept secret from enough people within the company. And all the old board members die or move on.

Sorry but i dont beleive in spacetime theory (shock horror gasp!) time isnt a physical dimension its the observers way of measuring the progression of events, you cant bend it dilate it travel back/forward in it and physicists really need to stop including it in their theoretical equations regarding space because imho they are 'wasting time' (pun intended) i [i]had[/i] a friend who was an avid dr who fan hates me now lol.....

[url=http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/04/spacetime-has-no-time-dimension-new-theory-claims-that-time-is-not-the-4th-dimension.html]"Spacetime has No Time Dimension" -- New Theory Claims that Time is Not the 4th Dimension[/url] *Link fixed by Svanya

caenorhabhditis, does that mean that you dont believe in special relativity, and you do think it is possible to travel faster than light? Because im one of those who still cannot understand that theory, cant understand why couldnt we travel faster..

oh i bet we could travel faster than light because thats just a matter of gaining a certain velocity, but the idea that time is a 4th dimension and can be manipulated a' la event horizon (now there was a good sci-fi horror wonder if it would feel dated now?) anyway yes arrogant as it may sound to disagree with someone like Einstein and Newton? i dont beleive special relativity is correct... but then i'm no physicist it just doesnt fit logic wise into my world view along with the big bang theory i cant imagine how suddenly nothing became something let alone a whole lotta exploding something! lol

I'm sorry caenorhabhditis, but that just sounds quite arrogant to believe that.

okay fairynuff but im a gonna anyhow lol

Thanks for your thoughts. Re: Special relativity & Time dilation - while it does seem counter-intuitive to a layman like me, there does appear to be experimental proof of its precepts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Experimental_confirmation Muons (a species of heavy electron) take far longer to decay at near-light-speed than at much lower lab-induced speeds, apparently because their frame of reference (ie their little quadrant in Space-time) at such high speed is distinct from that of lower speeds ie the clock of the muon's immediate fast-moving vicinity appears to tick more slowly than the relatively-slow lab-muon world to the speeding cosmic-ray muon.

its a fascinating area of science i can think of possible reasons why muons do that which dont depend on the existance of spacetime but i have to be honest its not my field of science and thankyou for thanking me for my thoughts (if twas indeed aimed at or included my post)

some particles have negative mass such as the predicted Tachyon and its believed that they could travel faster than light without challenging Einsteins Theory of relativity [img]http://nicosteyn.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/einstein1-e1295937841431.jpg[/img] the idea goes that the greater the velocity the greater the increase of mass until it would take such an extreme amount of energy that it becomes impossible to go any faster but if a Tachyon approached the speed of light.. it will not have gained as much mass... because it began with a negative value. so it is able to increase the energy enough to reach light speed with out meeting the critical mass : Spooky action at a distance or Quantum Entanglement is another way around it I believe caenor referred to this earlier that can happen instantaneously over huge distances but it is really confined to the micro rather than macro world...at least for the moment when CERN seemed to detect that neutrinos may have traveled faster than light they pondered several ideas including popping in and out of wormholes

If you don't believe in Special Relativity, don't use your car's SATNAV to get around. If the effects of relativity are not taken into account when calculating your position, you will be miles off course. By the way, time is simply nature's way of stopping everything from happening at once.

[i]By the way, time is simply nature's way of stopping everything from happening at once[/i] zzplural thats an interesting idea you say nature like nature has a rationale or 'design' do you mean god when you say nature maybe i personally beleive in chaos and with what appears as order being patterns which form by coincidence when similair features or objects fall into place together Time is [b]our[/b] perception of continuing physical events things can only happen as they happen not faster, slower, or "all at once" not under any circumstances i cant percieve but then thats "just what i choose to beleive"... or disbeleive rather i dont claim to [b]know[/b] because the minute you think you know something you are most likely wrong, i'm sure Einstein said something to that effect once undoubtedly a great mind like Darwin but what i like most about Einstein was his modesty i think if he was alive today he wouldn't be at all upset if a small feature of one of his theories had to be modified or corrected :)

[i]Time is simply nature's way of stopping everything from happening at once[/i] Theoretical physicists tell us that our everyday human perceptions of reality are very very far from the truth of what's really going on in the universe. I've spent a lot of time on Wikipedia trying to make sense of stuff, but it seems that the universe is not interested in sense. Or a lot of other things that we take for granted and consider to be normal in our everyday lives. It just is what it is. Some of the brightest minds in physics (far cleverer than mine) have declared that the universe cannot be understood, even in principle! You'll find plenty of physicists who say that time is a complete illusion, and does not exist at all (whatever the word [i]exist[/i] means). At extreme scales of size, mass, speed and time, things go to pieces, and God/Nature/The Universe, whatever you want to call it, sticks two fingers up to reality. There are some people who believe that the simplest explanation for all this nonsense, is that none of us exist at all; that we are simply the results of a simulation in some kind of super machine. If, for example, you can believe there is a computing device so fantastic that it houses 'creatures' that believe themselves to be alive and intelligent, any universe you like is possible within that simulation. Even mad stuff like quantum mechanics. A simulation can very easily have a universe that has no outside, because there isn't even an inside. None of it is real! Alright, I'll let you think about that :)

Adding to ZZPurals post... a very interesting read : ) A team of researchers are going down the theoretical rabbit hole with a test to find out if our universe is nothing more than a computer program. [url=http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-10/how-do-we-know-were-not-living-inside-massive-computer-simulation]How do We Know We're Not Living In A Massive Computer Simulation[/url]

hahahaha too much time spent in front of whiteboards squinting at equations lol the majority of physicist that i've met are well.... a bit mental they'd use math to prove black was white and up was down haha but i will agree the universe is scarily complex no-one could be blamed for going crazy just encompassing the enormity of it sometimes the complexity of what seems at first to be so simple like a cell is bizarre when you get into it at a molecular level but when you have to get down to finding practical solutions for the here and now i feel safer and more productive by not straying too far from what seems logical and i think physicists would get further quicker when it comes to space travel ship design and so-on if they tried to be a bit more grounded contradictory as that sounds when i was young i found the stars in the night sky beautiful and promising nowadays i dunno makes me feel cold and small

and tankgirl if im living in a computer simulation then the programmers an arse i wheres my tomb-raider boobs eh? :p

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha yea I reckon tehee you talked about looking into the night sky as a kid reminds me of one of my favorite poems... WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. walt whitman [img]http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdcsunFQuA1qc26bqo8_1280.jpg[/img]

@caenorhabhditis Don't worry about it. Anything more than a handful is a waste :)

nice poem tanky :) , zzplural lol yeh suppose dont really wanna take anyones eyes out xD