Steevo, I've had that feeling on shrooms. Let me tell you, I was quite surprised when I found myself back in reality. I was convinced I had been gone for an eternity. My perception seemed to have slowed down asymptotically, but time doesn't stop for nobody. To put it another way, imagine that you have a lamp. You turn it on after half a second, then you turn it off after a quarter of a second, then you turn it on after an eighth of a second, then you turn it on after a sixteenth of a second, and so on and so forth. The question is (forget that it isn't physically possible), is the light on or off after one second? See it reaches some asymptotic state of neither/both, but time wouldn't stop just to accomodate the lamp... In an analogous, albeit much more complex, way, it was a great shock to me to find that I could experience an eternity, but still have it only really have been a few hours.

However, physically speaking, there's no way for time to slow down for everything around you and not slow down as well in your brain. Time isn't really slowing down, it's just that whatever mechanism our brain uses to produce the conscious sensation of time is being messed with by the substance or by meditation.

There are a few competing neuroscientific theories regarding the perception of time, but one of them states that a specific circuit sort of acts as a clock tick and that this would represent the base unit of conscious time perception. That is, two things that happened between two ticks of this circuit would be perceived as simultaneous, while things that occurred in different ticks could be temporally differentiated.

There are a lot of factors that can influence the length of the clock tick, such that the threshold for temporal discrimination is not constant, though in normal life it does not vary significantly (I believe on the order of tens of ms). However, it is possible that the feeling of timelessness can be explained by a more profound alteration of the clock tick circuit such that you experience one extremely long tick, such that you cannot temporally discriminate between any and all the events that occurred during that tick, which is reflected by a conscious feeling of intense simultaneity.

Ah, but ChrisP, time can be observed objectively through the use of an atomic clock on board a fast moving object. Shuttle missions have run experiments with perfectly sy nchronized clocks that come back out of sync by milliseconds, proving that time does vary based on velocity.

While I don't know any of the science behind it, the two options seem to me to be that time is either a sort of fourth dimension or it's mental (which still allows for the former).

Do you have any sources on that tick in the brain stuff? Sounds very interesting.

No, Draugnar, that's not actually what was proven, though it was an incredibly accurate prediction made by relativity. I'm going to point out the absurdity in saying that time varies based on velocity when velocity is a function of time (displacement/time). What it shows is that the mechanics governing the movement of atoms and consequently, clocks, changes based on velocity. Your experience on the shuttle would be as equally out of sync because the same mechanisms that affect the atomic clock affect the processing of information in your brain. If anything, this might be more evidence that time is merely a counting device used by humans since it is inconstant.

A human with a clock moving at near the speed of light who left Earth and came back in what to him seemed like a few hours to find that instead a few decades had passed could attest that he really only experienced a few hours, and point to his clock to show that yes, only a few hours had passed. However, his perception of time is based on the same mechanisms as the clock, which apparently vary with velocity, and the best he can do is count the atomic events and add them up and conclude he had been gone for a few hours, while on Earth we would have counted far more atomic events and conclude that far more time had passed. Is this evidence of dimensional time? It sounds like evidence that time is just humans counting events.

Perception wise, you are right. I was just pointing out the flaw from your earlier statement that we could not perceive fluctuations in time because our timing mechanism matchs that of all things by pointing out that our timing mechanism can be altered by velocity (and yes, velocity is based on time, I do see the potential paradox there). If you compare the altered to the base, you can perceive that the flow of time can be altered and in a semi-predictable way. But, as you point out, time is mearly a measure of entropy. The key is, entropy can be slowed.

I will say the reason I don't believe what I'm saying is because the concept of time as a dimension has been an extremely useful physical model, and while it's possible that it is flawed, we have been making extremely accurate predictions with that understanding of time. I can't think of any experimental paradigms that could differentiate between time as a dimension and time as a mere counting device, but I'm not a physicist.

Steevo, I've more recently been reading primary articles which I could link you to, but aren't actually going over that theory per se, so much as specific experiments such as the effect of voluntary action versus passive participation on the perceptio nof time. I would like to find you some nice review articles that sum it up, but I only get free access to most articles and reviews on campus, but I'm at home now. However, I'm sure you could do your own research into it. You could try googling, or better yet, searching at pubmed.org, terms like 'temporal discrimination threshold', or perhaps 'temporal perception'. If you're still interested, I could try to find some review articles that would be much easier to read than primary research and e-mail you the .pdfs.

As a Neuroscience major, I very much view the phenomena of temporal distortion in substance use and meditation to be a mental one. Given that we're not really equipped to sense dimensions beyond that with which we are familiar, I don't think substances or meditation are somehow unlocking some part of our brain and giving us access to another dimension, though it certainly feels like it when you're there!

"If you're still interested, I could try to find some review articles that would be much easier to read than primary research and e-mail you the .pdfs."

That is, next time I'm on campus.

"The key is, entropy can be slowed."

Well, that's not really a key right? Events can be slowed, which merely prolongs the effect of probabilistic distribution. That's like saying you can slow down the drawing of the jack of hearts by drawing cards slower. Anyways, entropy would be slowed to the same degree as our counting, and consequently our perception of time, such that entropy would not be slower relative to our perception of time. In that sense, of what use is it? =P

How about reverse temporal displacement whilst using a tick-inhibitor?

How about a time-travel themed varient of diplomacy? How would that work?

@KaptinKool: Lol...however, since there isn't patent no. 1 for this, then nobody has time traveled to a previous point in our own universe and done that

@Draugnar: I certainly hope you realize there was almost no semblance of any real science anywhere in your post xD

@PCChris: haha fair enough:

US Patent X1 - Time Machine.

sorry for double post...but there was a momentary reverse time locality that brought me back to when there was only one page in this thread, and thus that is to what I was replying. Unfortunately, the reply was created after the reverse time locality resumed normal flow. Is there any way to undo what I have done here?

Wasn't trying for any science per se, just pointing out that we can slow the rate of entropy as a localized phenomenon by accelarating the mass in question to radical speeds such that it falls out of sync with the rest of the universe, i.e. the theory of relativity at work.

Now if you want bad/no science, look to Trek's time travel by slingshotting around the sun. They make it as though it can send you both ways. Did the writers of ST IV think somehow something magical happens that time reverses if you somehow manage to exceed C? I mean, the way they slingshot around the sun, they surely had friction which means they had a terminal velocity, so acheiving C would be impossible, much less exceeding it.

Draugnar, I don't understand why that would be special. Accelerating the mass to radical speeds clearly increases entropy outside of the system, and if your goal is slowing the rate of entropy in a local system then I have to point out that this is extremely easy and doesn't require near light speeds. In fact, your body is designed to preserve it's own order against the forces of entropy by taking in energy from your environment. Hell, every time anyone makes something, or cleans their room, or solves a jigsaw puzzle, they've actually reversed the local entropy, not merely slowed it. They've just increased the entropy elsewhere to do so.

I hate to rag on you so much but the friction in space is probably the lesser barrier to light speed travel which is simply that the energy required to accelerate a mass to light speed approaches infinity the closer you get to light speed. e = mc^2 yeah? =)

In space, true, but they were essentially flying through the corona of the sun. This would have much greater mass (think atmospheric) than the near vacuum of space. But yes, even in space the energy required to move the mass of even a small capsult with basic life support and a person to near C is massive.

And cleaning up your room reduces entropy? Entropy is best described as the change within matter, not the piles of t-shirts in the corner and the half eaten pizza slice on the nightstand. That's just being messy. The entropy is the decay that changes that pizza slice into a pile of goo wherever it is located.

I'm thinking firing engines full bore straight at the center of a blackhole might get enough acceleration up to allow you to move rapidly forward in time up until you were destroyed by the gravitational forces pulling your ship and your body into it's individual quarks.

Entropy is a very general term. I'm not sure what you mean by change within matter, as though t-shirts and pizza and the air between were not matter. I suppose what I really meant was disorder in general. There are far more arrangements that produce a room which we would call messy than one we'd call clean and disorder probabilistically increases over time. Rooms certainly do not spontaneously get cleaner over time, and without the periodical concerted effort to reduce the local disorder of the room (cleaning), it would get more disorderly over time. It's just a matter of probability.

If you shake up a jigsaw puzzle box and look in, you might find a couple pieces stuck together but the chances of you shaking it into the correct arrangement (assuming it could fit into the configuration in the box) would be miniscule. If you watched a video of someone having an unsolved jigsaw puzzle in a box and shaking it to produce a full solved jigsaw puzzle, you would likely infer correctly that they have shown you the video in reverse because your directional sense of time relies on the increasing disorder.