A Theoretical About Time Freeze

[PsychicHeart]

Okay, so just say you achieved the marvelous ability of stopping time. Bam. You could click your fingers and, yeah. Time stoppage.
Now, just say you decide to use this for your own personal gain.
So you decide you'll rob the local convenience store.
Now, after being robbed at gunpoint many, many times before, the proprieter of this particular convenience store has decided to put CCTV cameras all over his business.

So you walk up to the store and, ding, time stops.
You walk in, casually take some money out of the till, and maybe some gum.

Now, here's where it gets interesting.
You unstop time, and the shop owner, curious, wonders why there's no money left in his till.

He checks his cameras.

What does he see?

Does your stopping of time make the CCTV cameras freeze too?

Ponder..

[InCreator]

If it would be total time freeze, the movement of air, and movement of LIGHT should be stopped too.

If light is frozen, photons wouldn't move, and not touch photosensitive area of CCTV camera. Therefore, camera wouldn't record anything. Also, electrons wouldn't move so camera wouldn't have electricity work. Or data to send to recorder. Also, light wouldn't bounce off from you, so you would be invisible to humans anyway.

I'm not sure what happens to the the air and light you collide with when walking. If it's not moving, air friction should be MUCH stronger, so you're somewhat swimming through air. Also, if you move at speed like this (momentarily?), friction on you feet, clothes and everything else would be extremely high. Which means you could generate smoke and get burns over your body. Of course, until you've far away with the money, smoke isn't still yet visible, it would appear after time starts going again. And what about energy movement, like heat? Would this be frozen too?

Taking money out of the till: How would this work? Imagine that you're pulling till open REALLY quickly - in normal life: what happens? It's metal and quite heavy, so gets extreme inertia and flies far away from your hand. If done quick enough, it even gets very hot. And you might be unable to hold it.

Now imagine it EVEN quicker- quicker than light, quicker than bullet, cannon shell... time? This example should say that stopped time is an eternity of some sort, you can't say how fast something happens. If you're pulling the till open, it goes faster than cannonball, so it should fly through shop wall, or maybe - since frozen time is unmeasurable and the speed of it would be cosmical, or rather unmeasurable also - it would fly through five city blocks and three mountains maybe? And, of course - through your hand.

But how could you see the till? Or where it is? The light isn't moving, the light rays reflected from till won't go into your eyes?!

In frozen time, you would be blind. Or when walking, seeing unexplainable mess from light that you're collecting with your eyes while walking through it.

Just like invisible man would be blind, if his eyes let light rays through them, he couldn't see. And if light would collide his pupils, everyone could see his eyes, so he wouldn't be totally invisible. Invisible man is a story Hollywood continuously sells to stupid people. It's a classic example.
Time freeze is quite similar.

It's hard to imagine someone moving while time is frozen. I somewhat don't believe it's possible. Our physics relies on time. Human isn't single entity but heavy mass of atoms.

Then again, I skipped most of my physics classes...

[Vince Twelve]

Ignoring the question about light still traveling into the camera, if the camera's internal mechanisms were still working while time was frozen, then you didn't freeze time, you just froze the people.  The world would still be spinning and flying through space, the people just wouldn't be conscious of it.  If you're writing a scifi story or something, you need to figure out exactly what the dude's power is.

I typed a long paragraph about how silly the question was outside the context of a scifi story, but Increator pretty much covered it.

[Stupot]

Lets just say that you didn't go blind and that the till opened normally.
The CCTV would see nothing out of the ordinary.  Unless the packet of gum was in the camera's path, then it would appear to disappear on the tape.

[lo_res_man]

heres another common hollywood 'power" that is always got wrong. What if you could walk through stuff? What's to stop you from falling through the floor? As well, would you be able to breath? Unless yoo could extend your power to your clothes, and carry along a scuba system.

[MillsJROSS]

I think, given the fact we're talking about the ability to freeze time, that we might as well forgo some of the harsh realities that stopping time would entail. The idea of stopping time has never sat well with me. I prefer to think of it as speeding up your own localized time. It's essentially the same thing, but I find it more difficult to believe someone has the ability to freeze all of time, the earth, solar system, etc...Either way, it's the same side affects. Gravity would probably be less, but by the same token everything around you would take a lot of energy to move. I'm not sure how you're body would regulate it's heat. However, I'm willing to suspend my belief of these things, because I'm allowing myself to believe a person can speed up his own time.

As far as the camera's concern. If you stop time completely, it shouldn't catch you in the act, though you'd have to be careful to be in the same position when you turned time back on. If you slowed down time, the CCTV could show a blurred version of you, depending on how much you slowed time down. I'd be more interested to see how a infrared camera would show everything.

-MillsJROSS   

[Obi]

[InCreator]

...because I'm allowing myself to believe a person can speed up his own time.

Isn't it believed that time relative to its observer?
How can we even know if your second is same as mine? Maybe your second lasts three of mine?
I don't mean physical time, but maybe the speed of brain and nerve processing? All people can run at about same speed and movement speed for humans is more or less the same, but not how we sense time.

We all know that human-relative time is a variable, playing a computer game for a hour feels heavily shorter than simply sitting and watching at the clock for same time... and when you're tired, 5 hours of sleep feel shorter than 5 seconds of being awake!  Maybe some of people live most of their life in "clock watching" mode and others in "game playing" mode, so 80 years of lifetime might actually feel ten times shorter for second person.

We cannot prove or measure it yet, anyway.
I believe that there's WAY too much things people cannot compare.

[Renal Shutdown]

*If* I suddenly gained the ability to stop time, which is impossible, but hypothetically speaking your original situation got me thinking.

Why would I rob some convenience store?  If I wanted to steal, I'd hit a place that had more money to make off with.

More importantly, if I could freeze time, I'd be far too busy putting people into various poses for comedic effect.  Or tying people shoelaces together.  Or giving burly men makeovers.

[SSH]

If all the atoms in the air around you stopped moving they would thus be at absolute zero temperature and you'd freeze to death.

[Ghost]

Thief of Time (by T. Pratchett) has some interesting notes on that matter. In the book there is a method called "slicing"- monks have learned to find "extra time" between all the seconds that are constantly rushing by, and thus can move faster than the average guy.

In sheer terms of math this makes (to me) more sense than a "time freeze". If time is numbers, time is infinite, and having a method to use all the infinite time "numbers" between the regular ones (seconds, minutes...) is at least some sort of fuzzy logic.

A time freeze would affect everyone and everything, if it isn't some sort of field that envelops you and creates the effect in a small space (and how could that work?). But making yourself much faster- that would somehow have some more logic.

And in that case, the camera would see nothing, because you would be too fast for the tape's recording speed.

[EldKatt]

In sheer terms of math this makes (to me) more sense than a "time freeze". If time is numbers, time is infinite, and having a method to use all the infinite time "numbers" between the regular ones (seconds, minutes...) is at least some sort of fuzzy logic.

This concept reminds me (if ever so slightly) of Zeno's paradoxes. The thought is appealing somehow, but really makes as little sense as these.

Just simply moving really fast (with no metaphysical trickery really necessary) is probably the closest you can get to stopping time around you. And you wouldn't really be doing that. I'm no theoretical physicist, but I doubt that there's a valid model of the world that allows time to be stopped in this sense, let alone predict what would happen, so any speculations about photons stopping and making you blind, or frozen molecules freezing you to death, are just... speculative General Discussion on an internet forum, with little connection to the real world.

Sorry to be a spoilsport, but there's just so much awesome or mindscrewy stuff that actually exists or is possible that pondering something as arbitrary and whimsical as this is of limited appeal to me.

[InCreator]

If all the atoms in the air around you stopped moving they would thus be at absolute zero temperature and you'd freeze to death.

No? Without atom movement your body won't LOSE heat, neither..? Makes somewhat sense to me...

P.S/offtopic

Does anyone know internet resources (not too difficult) to explore ideas like that? I'm really interested in nerves, and
specifically - nerve transfer. When stitching back someone's broken finger, surgeons - as much I've heard - also reconnect nerves. Is it even theoretically possible that we join nerves of TWO people, and make a connection? So I'd hammer my toe and guy next to me screams, or something?

Also, is size infinite? How much can we shrink something down, until it physically dissappears? I think that forever...

[Phemar]

I think it would be cool if someone wrote a book on debunking all the superpowers like Increator did.

[vict0r]

Totally honest... If I had the ability to stop time without all the science trouble, I would most likely sex as many women as possible...........

[Dualnames]

even if we could stop time we wouldn; be able to exclude ourselves from stopping. So we would all stop. For eternity.

[lo_res_man]

I believe that time ISN'T infinite, that time has a grain, a quanta. otherwise, how would it move? If time could be sliced infinitely, how do those infinitely small parts, or zeros, add up to the movement we see? Zero times any number you care to name is still zero. I wonder if each quantum moment is in fact a separate universe without time, like frames in a 2d cartoon.

[OneDollar]

You're missing another, slightly less scientific problem. Let's say that actually stopping time is impossible (you'd be breaking light speed and all sorts of physical laws), and so you'd have to do it by somehow speeding up your local time.

Let's also say that one hour in your local time is equal to one minute in the shopkeeper's (the world's) time, so take one minute to rob the shopkeeper and you'd only appear to have been there for one second.

When you slow your local time back down again, so you and the shopkeeper are operating at the same time, your body would have been living for 59 seconds longer than his. Every time you speed your local time up you'd age much faster than everyone else. You could go out to rob a bunch of banks and come back days or weeks older. Go out in the morning and come back a month older in the evening.

You'd have to be careful about staying in the same place for too long as well, otherwise you'd get seen or caught as a blur on a freeze-frame of a security camera. Extend this idea to your ‘time field'. Presumably you'd have to speed up the time of everything local to you to stop friction in your clothes or with the aforementioned atoms. In this case, what if you accidentally walked too close to a clock, or another person? Everywhere you walked things would speed up, brush some grass while you're walking and it would sway, slowing down again when you left it, but in a different position. If there's wind and you're moving outside (making your getaway), wherever you are the wind would blow at normal speed (compared to you), only slowing down again when you walked away from it again. Anything affected by wind close to where you are (trees, plants, dust) would also move at your speed. In other words any passers by would see all the plants and trees suddenly move to a different position where you walked, which is less than inconspicuous.

Oh, and you would find it hard to get more time to work on your AGS games, what with having to speed up the computer, electricity lines, power station and then having to explain a bill of several days electricity used in the space of a few hours…

[radiowaves]

Whole universe is based on movement. Strings move. Atoms are nothing but motion. If motion stops, there is emptiness. So, if we stop time and therefore motion stops, nothingness appears. Time IS movement, thats how its measured. And even hypothetically, if we leave the molecules out, while time is stopped, you can't move nothing, because movement -- traveling from place A to B, requires time. The ultimate question is, can teleportation be done without being in affection with time.

In this particular case in the first post, its not actual time stop, there are two possibilities, whether only motion of certain objects is stopped or there are two paraller timelines which only affect certain objects, in which case, one is stopped or just ignored.

[Stupot]

The way I look at it is that time isn't even a real thing.  That it's just a notion to help us understand the difference between 'then' and 'now' or two different 'thens'.  Based on this, you couldn't stop time... even if you could stop all the clocks, people, atoms, planets etc time would still go on on its constant flow... but of course this would be unmeasurable because all the clocks would have been frozen during this period.