If Time Stopped

Introduction

This is inspired by the current situation with Vocal Statistics on May 4th 2024. As I have used many songs about time for my stories I have decided to use AI to create a piece for this. It is a bit more upbeat than I expected but it is ok.

The illustration is my Vocal Statistics graph which I think is perfect to illustrate the stopping of time.

So Could Time Stop?

I see time as the state of things happening, so if a leaf falls from a tree then time passes, any movement is time passing.

We have seen many stories and productions that address time travel and the paradoxes that can be thrown up. Examples are "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells, "The Butterfly Effect", "Doctor Who" and "Back To The Future", all of which are great entertainment but possibly on the side of impossibility.

Time is often put forward as the fourth dimension and Einstein included it in much of his work.

Michele Besso and Einstein regularly discussed science and philosophy—including the nature of time. After one such discussion, Einstein came to a sudden realization: Time is not absolute. In other words, despite our common perception that a second is always a second everywhere in the universe, the rate at which time flows depends upon where you are and how fast you are travelling. Einstein thanked Besso in his first paper on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Michael Moorcock put forward the idea in one of his novels (possibly "The Condition of Muzak") that time was like a river consisting of chronons. The present was when the chronons became active, the future was made up of unused and unformed chronons and the past was made up of dead and unused chronons so time travel was an impossible fantasy.

Things can stop, and for them, time has effectively stopped, but because there is always something happening, I would say that time, as we know it cannot stop.

As I am writing this, I am processing ideas, and pressing keyboard keys as the first CD of Hawkwind's "Parallel Universe" is playing, so, for me, time is passing as normal.

Time will only stop when ever star in the universe grows cold and all planets stop their orbits of their stars, and by that time there will be no living things left.

If time did stop then time travel could not happen.

In fiction, we see two types of tales one where an individual or group carries on as normal while the rest of the world stops. They are often involved in some criminal pursuit, and often this can be recreated in the real world using distraction and sleight of hand.

Then there is the other type where individuals or groups travel back or forwards in time. While I love time travel stories, I wonder what the effect would be of something that should not exist suddenly coming into existence. If we think of the concept of the butterfly effect this could surely, ultimately end in disaster.

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

The current Stats and reads situation on Vocal is like for Vocal time as stopped while for the creators time goes on as normal.

Conclusion

I would love to hear your opinions on time, and how you see it and how it affects you.

I am currently watching two TV series, and enjoying both. They are both on Netflix and are "Dexter" and "Sex Education". Episodes are roughly the same length, but "Dexter" seems to pass more quickly than "Sex Education" implying that I am enjoying the former more. but I think it's because while "Dexter" has one main character driving it, "Sex Education" has many.

One more example of how time can change in different situations.

And this story has 666 words🌞.