this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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Imagine if your one of the thousands of people who would likely happen to have the sun in their eyes at the instant of freezing.
Depending on the exact moment you might assume you died and the ecstasy you were feeling was an afterlife.
Good thing is that since time has stopped, you won't get your eyes burnt since light stopped travelling as well.
As an aside, if light stopped too, wouldn’t that mean that the world would be plunged into darkness?
Photons of light reflect off of objects, and into our eyes before being converted into electrical signals by the brain and translated into visuals that we see. But to do this, photons and electrical signals need to be able to move through time and space. So if time is stopped, and light is stopped with it, none of that other stuff happens, and we all would effectively be blind. No?
Yes, see my other answer.
Photons would still exist, they'd just be frozen in a cloud. You could "see" things by moving towards photon sources, but you'd leave a black fog behind you, and would never be able to see the samething twice.
Does this mean everything would be dark?
The scenario doesn't really make sense as the electro-chemical activity in your brain would be stopped as well, so you couldn't be conscious.
But if we suspend disbelief, you could say that you're stuck with the image that got to your retina when time stopped. Which means that you couldn't see the protagonist moving!
Also, realistically, he couldn't even move as he'd be against a barrier of unmovable air.
I think a more reasonable interpretation is for time o have been slowed to an extreme extent: a factor of 10^6 would mean the 6 months of protagonist time would've been experienced as 15 seconds of bystander time, and light would be slowed down to about 1000 km/h, still substantially faster than a human can move unaided to avoid Cherenkov radiation.
To avoid friction fires, we have an Alcubierre (warp) bubble of fast space out around the protag. Let's say about 6 inches for reasons, and with a smooth gradient between protag time and slowed time. This is also necessary to prevent shear forces from tearing up everything the protag touches.
This should handle most situations well: the protagonist can manipulate and interact with typical objects with their hands and other body parts without instantly exploding them or shearing them in half. However, humans that the protag directly interacts with will end up experiencing much more clock-time during the interaction, potentially even within the human reaction time of 250ms given a dedicated amount of attention.
Okay but assuming the other laws of the universe remain in play, if light has been slowed down 186 times, then you won't be walking 3 miles an hour you will be walking 3,000 miles an hour, and anything you do to people will be unbelievably violent.
Like if you walk into the shower room where girls are showering and play with their breasts, after time unfreezes they're probably all going to die very quickly or at the very least suffer horrendous damage.
If you slap the kid that picked on you in 6th grade, his head may fly off or his spine may snap at his neck but one way or the other he's most likely going to die.
And even after you revert time to its normal flow, everywhere you have gone is going to suffer multiple shock waves as the air your body has displaced and the vacuums you have left behind in your trail collapse back together.
Doors that you've opened will fly off hinges. Windows you have closed will shatter.
But thank God you chose only 1/1000th speed. If you had chosen 1/100,000th, you might have destroyed the entire planet.
hence the Alcubierre bubble! everything you directly interact with is sped up to your time speed so that you're only ever interacting with normal-paced matter, and then as you leave the area everything gradually slows back down to near-stop
but where do we keep the multiple stars worth of energy necessary for the Alcubierre drive? Something like −10^64^ kg converted to energy, I mean, I got pockets in my pants but I don't think they'll hold that
Since FTL breaks casualuty, it can just be along any spacelike curve!
I like it.
if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it.
Does that mean that when photons stop moving, nobody can see them?