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171 points belter | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.276s | source
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IgorPartola ◴[] No.41895504[source]
If I understand correctly, we experience time at nearly the speed of light. What I mean by that is that any particle’s 4 dimensional velocity vector has the magnitude of c which means that if it is mostly at rest in space then time has to be the major contributing factor but the magnitude of the vector. On the other hand something like a photon experiences to time at all as it moves through the 3 space dimensions at a total of c.
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crdrost ◴[] No.41897752[source]
You have understood it about as well as the article did!

Now, there is a huge nuance here, which is that you are moving near the speed of light, to certain observers. This is like the whole "relativ-" prefix in "relativity", you are at rest in your rest frame, you are moving very fast in some other rest frames. The cosmic muon crashing into Earth, sees you as time-dilated! So with that nuance "we experience time at nearly the speed of light" just becomes kind of a tautology like "we experience time how we experience time."

But a better way to think about this is, you are about two meters high, you are about a meter wide, about a half-meter dorsoventrally... and about 30 000 000 m in the other direction, if we're looking at the human reaction time/blink-of-an-eye range of 0.1s (think about how 10fps video is at the cusp of being continuous and how 20Hz is where clicks stop sounding differentiated and instead start sounding like a bass note).

What this means is that if we look at you relativistically, you kind of look like a big "rope" with worldlines of other atoms coming in, braiding into your body, eventually leaving... but the strands of this rope are bundled into these cells that have worldlines over 99.9999% parallel. (Atoms within those cells move faster, but you're probably at least 99.999% parallel even if we make that statement?) And that astonishing parallelism is precisely why relativity is not very intuitively plausible to us.

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1. strogonoff ◴[] No.41902976[source]
One of the big a-ha! moments for me was when I realized it’s possible to try (of course, impossible truly) to visualize things and people as smeared over the fourth dimension. In my case it was from trying to pinpoint what is good design, which is done in four dimensions, even if not consciously.