Time as a Runaway System!

Interesting article from the Telegraph online:

Time is running out - literally, says scientist

By Tom Chivers

Last Updated: 6:01am GMT 18/12/2007

It's the end of the world - but not as we know it.

A Spanish scientist suggests that the universe's end will come not with a bang but standstill - that time is literally running out and will, one day, stop altogether. Hubble telescope photo of a supernova. Scientists use these to study distant galaxies Professor Jose Senovilla, of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, has put forward the theory as a rival to the idea of "dark energy" - the strange antigravitational force that is posited to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists. It was noticed ten years ago that distant stars - the ones on the very fringes of the universe - seemed to be moving faster than those nearer to the centre, suggesting that they were accelerating as they shot through space. Dark energy was suggested as a possible means of powering that acceleration. The problem is that no-one has any idea what it is or where it comes from. Professor Senovilla's theory does away altogether with dark energy. Instead, he says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock that needs winding. While the change would be infinitesimally slow from an ordinary human perspective, in the grander scales of cosmology - in which scientists study ancient light from suns billions of years dead - it could be easily measured. Astronomers are able to decipher the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called "red shift" technique. Light from stars that are moving towards the earth is of higher frequency than that from the same sort of stars moving away. The principle is the same as that of an ambulance siren which gets higher as it comes towards the listener but lower as it moves away. Similarly, a star moving away appears redder in colour. Scientists look for exploding stars, or supernovae, of certain types that provide a benchmark to work against. However, the accuracy of these measurements depend on time remaining constant throughout the universe, says Prof Senovilla. "Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," said Senovilla. He takes the basis for his idea from the superstring theory, which suggests that dimensions of time and space can move around and change places. His suggestion is that our solitary time dimension is slowly becoming a new space dimension. In some number of billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether - and everything will stop. "Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Prof Senovilla told New Scientist magazine. "Our planet will be long gone by then." While the theory is outlandish, it is not without support. Prof Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, believes the idea has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect," he said.

Quite a curveball perspective. So what happens after "time" stops? It makes me think that time is activity-dependent. Without change, there exists no need for markers of progress, which is what time essentially serves as. Or is there a bigger time outside of this time? A piece of art then, a living "photograph" of sorts (in that it interacts with a subject in a time frame different from that which it was born), can no longer transcend time in this eternal, infinite state of stagnancy. It seems like such a waste of material...who's going to look at this cosmic snapshot? The system of time and all of the subsystems that humans devise, all of which depend on time as an enclosure, as a tether (in order to freeze, in order to examine later; as proof of prior existence), would...vanish? This takes the idea that time exists only to those who can understand it outside of that person; the idea/system is no longer only in the control of its maker (which, strangely, exists as a subsystem within a system born out of itself), but takes on a life of its own, and perhaps, even comes back to control the destiny of that very maker.