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Time Warp and 4th Dimensional Frames of Reference


Delfino42

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Okay so I have a little bit of a theoretical physics question. I’m hoping to reach out to anyone who may be able to shed some light on it. I had a thought come up and I don’t exactly know how to talk about it but I’m going to try. You are sitting at your desk playing Ksp. You have a long wait time for a transfer window. You could wait the remaining time or use time warp. You choose to accelerate the simulation to the point in time where the transfer window exists. Here comes the fun part. For that time the simulation was under time warp, you and the simulation were in two different frames of reference. To you, not much time has passed, but for the Kerbal, it has been years. So here is the big question, given the kerbals reference frame, would the Kerbal be able to tell it was accelerating through time? From the kerbals point of view the outside observer has not aged one bit and yet it has been years for the Kerbal. I am ignoring the fact that kerbals don’t age as they experience movement through time by observing the motion of their solar system over time. Looking at the bigger picture, if we were the kerbals unknowingly accelerating through the 4th dimension, would we be able to tell? I don’t think we would because we would be in an accelerating reference frame with nothing to compare our passing though time against. I would love to get some response from anyone who could even remotely follow my thought process. I know the mods have to approve this and if you read this far could you try and push it please? That would be great thanks.

-August

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If a hypothetical god ran a space program on earth would we be able to tell if they are moving in a slower time-frame?
As a kerbal, to know the current 'time warp' you would have to measure god (the player) themselves as a reference.  
So can they measure the player? If yes then they can tell. If no then they would not even know there was a difference.  :0  

Though as a kerbal employee, it would be a weird sight to see new vessels created instantly. They might really suspect something was wrong with time at least. xD

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This should probably be in a different subform.

For the question, I think the kerbals would be able to tell. The reason is that our computer runs the simulation at a fixed rate relative to our time, but this rate can change relative to the kerbals' time. You can think of the simulation step as being similar to our universe's Planck time, which is the smallest step of time that reality can meaningfully progress in.

As the player forces the Kerbals into time warp, the time between their simulation steps remains the same for us, but changes for the Kerbals. At the highest levels of time warp, several seconds can pass between steps of reality. While Kerbals must have evolved to account for the ridiculously large base "Klanck time," I doubt that they wouldn't notice one that is 100,000 times longer. Reality would seem to stutter and jump, and all sensory inputs would get very confusing, as a lot of information must be received and processed within a step.

I am not sure we would notice if our time was accelerated by increasing Planck time relative to our normal experiences, but there is a chance that some chemical processes would change, because instead of happening over time, they would have to happen instantly based on a projection of their behavior that might not match up with reality. Hopefully those projections won't cause our ships to ignore encounters with planets :)

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57 minutes ago, t_v said:

This should probably be in a different subform.

For the question, I think the kerbals would be able to tell. The reason is that our computer runs the simulation at a fixed rate relative to our time, but this rate can change relative to the kerbals' time. You can think of the simulation step as being similar to our universe's Planck time, which is the smallest step of time that reality can meaningfully progress in.

As the player forces the Kerbals into time warp, the time between their simulation steps remains the same for us, but changes for the Kerbals. At the highest levels of time warp, several seconds can pass between steps of reality. While Kerbals must have evolved to account for the ridiculously large base "Klanck time," I doubt that they wouldn't notice one that is 100,000 times longer. Reality would seem to stutter and jump, and all sensory inputs would get very confusing, as a lot of information must be received and processed within a step.

I am not sure we would notice if our time was accelerated by increasing Planck time relative to our normal experiences, but there is a chance that some chemical processes would change, because instead of happening over time, they would have to happen instantly based on a projection of their behavior that might not match up with reality. Hopefully those projections won't cause our ships to ignore encounters with planets :)

This assumes that the kerbals’ own brains aren’t also governed by the same “klanck time”, and that their own stream of consciousness wouldn’t therefore stutter and jump in the same way. It feels like that would make the “jumpiness” invisible to them, but time would still seem to progress much faster than normal.

But it’s still just a game.

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22 minutes ago, joratto said:

This assumes that the kerbals’ own brains aren’t also governed by the same “klanck time”, and that their own stream of consciousness wouldn’t therefore stutter and jump in the same way. It feels like that would make the “jumpiness” invisible to them, but time would still seem to progress much faster than normal.

But it’s still just a game.

Oh yes, this is all for fun, as the silliness of the situation would negate any attempt at a serious answer. I don’t think that the stuttering would be invisible, because the kerbals do speed up when, for example, walking under time warp. If their consciousness slowed down to account for the time stretching, they would notice everything moving several times as fast, and their own actions such as walking would speed up as well. So some biological marvel is allowing them to either bypass Klanck time or make their brains do the same things on less cycles. 

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