Glints of Failure

You might have heard that light goes in a straight line, moving in a certain direction and never slowing down or accelerating, everywhere in the universe.

If you know anything about relativity, you know this is incorrect. Light can be curved by gravity. This has been observed around black holes for instance. But light never changes direction on its own. 

Time can also "bend." It can appear to go slower or faster depending on speed, gravity and energy. 

Time travel is an interesting idea. But it is also incorrect. You don't "travel" in time. Time is effectively just the the successive happening of events. These events have actors which are particles and energy. And they have a stage, which is spacetime. So what we observe as time distortions are caused by is ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Faster, slower areas in the structure of the universe.

Imagine you're flying by black hole. Time is slowing down as you get closer to it. Every meter you get closer, the passing of time is going slower and slower. From far away from the black hole, looking at the space ship, you will see that something weird is going on. Time has slowed down so much that you see through the space ship's window people walking in slow motion. Suddenly, in an effort to leave the black hole's gravity, the space ship turns on its engine to go even faster. You see the ship stopping almost completely. According to relativity, the faster an object, the slower the time. This keeps the speed of light constant. Photons, electrons, etc, which move at the speed of light, don't experience time at all. From their perspective, every single one of them exists in every possible place in the universe at once. It is us who can't perceive more than a single moment at a time. We cannot "see" in the fourth dimension.

They say that the Big Bang is a moment at the beginning of spacetime when, spontaneously, energy got released from, most probably, the infinite potential of emptiness. (The fact that total emptiness contains an unimaginable amount of energy is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice to say, virtual particles sometimes pop into existence and immediately disappear, which is evidence of this potential energy and its spontaneous release.) What would a Big Bang look like from the inside versus the outside. From the inside, it would look like what we're seeing around us; time seems to flow and everything is normal.

But from the outside, that's another story. Infinite amounts of energy would bend spacetime and make everything look extremely slow. At its very beginning, the Big Bang isn't happening. It's frozen in time.

There's a question that keeps me awake at night. If there is a Big Bang, why isn't there more? Maybe there are. Maybe at any given moment there are infinite Big Bangs throughout the totality of spacetime. But we can't see them. They're frozen in time at the very moment they're ready to pop into existence. If that's the case, virtual particle are tiny sparks resulting from missed Big Bangs; glints of failure.