Potential Problem With Stopping Time

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I just realized something.

Imagine if you had the ability to stop time like in the movie Clockstoppers.

Think about what causes heat. Heat exists because microscopic particles are moving very fast.

If you stopped time using a magical stopwatch, everything would be zero Kelvin. You would freeze to death instantly.

Well ... another pseudoscientific fantasy is now dead.

Also:

— you wouldn't be able to move as you'd be trapped in a you-shaped bubble of air; the air couldn't flow around you as you passed through it.

— you wouldn't be able to hear, since sound waves couldn't propagate through frozen air.

— you wouldn't be able to see as the photons would all be stopped motionless in the air.

— Logically, you wouldn't even be able to think, since that requires electrons to fire across the synapses in your brain, but I assume that the time-stop in Clockstoppers is similar to other versions of the basic idea, such as The Girl, The Gold Watch, And Everything or the Uncle Scrooge adventure "On Stolen Time" (one of my favourite implementations of the idea), the individual(s) initiating the time-stop are unaffected, so we can probably ignore this one.

so basically nothing would happen and movies are telling huge lies as usual.



news at 11 i guess.

So long as you ignore a bunch of physics — which a lot of wish-fulfillment ideas do — lots of cool things can happen. And the point of most stories is exploring the implications and consequences of those cool things.

I mean the comic Sex Criminals features a couple who discover they have the ability to freeze time whenever they have sex with each other, and how they decide to use that power to rob a bank. Not what I would do in those circumstances, but the point is to see what they would do, how they go about it, and what happens as a result. Quibbles about physics would just get in the way.

Does Time stop in a Black Hole?

very good question, it is warped quite a bit but time elapses in some manner in any 3D object in this universe at least. I remember the first time I stopped time [after a fashion], was in 1975 when I was watching the first videocassette recorder [sony Betamax] i'd seen, in a seattle Uwajimayas department store, it was showing a Japanese cooking program originally shown on their national broadcaster NHK. I hit the pause button out of curiosity, and time on the video stopped on a dime [albeit warped at bit as this was before full-frame memory or 4 heads and such], which, decades later, gave me a bit of a quasi-Einsteinian lightbulb-in-head Eureka! moment, which told me that time can be stopped or altered as long as we are in a higher dimension of reality and we are hitting the pause button on a lower dimension of reality being projected from our higher dimension of reality. YMMV.

I think you would have more problems than that, depending on the imposed conditions. If you were not frozen in time and managed to stay alive but everything around you was, including the air molecules, and somehow things did not actually collapse on themselves into determined states, and heat is a transfer of kinetic energy from one thing to another, then where, exactly, would that heat go, if the surrounding molecules could not absorb any of the energy? How would it even dissipate through radiation if the photon could not exist in the time frozen regions? I think you would actually overheat. You would be a closed system from which energy could not escape. It would also be dark.

However I would be interested to hear Stephen Hawking's take on this or someone who is familiar with physics in the region of discontinuous boundaries.

Reminds of the train of thought I had back in the early 80's when mom and I stopped to look at an automatically playing display thing in Woodward and Lothrop for the then new technology of twelve inch laser discs for movies ( they became a consumer thing briefly after that before they became outmoded by five inch DVD discs which did the same thing on a smaller format).

Dial back even earlier: to grade school in the Sixties. The kids running the projector of the educational movie the teacher was showing in the class couldn't stop the film from jamming in the projector. The film stopped on one frame, and the film just burned up (we could see the pic on screen stopping and then shriveling up and melting before our eyes.

Dial back forward again to the 80s and to the Woodies store. The display showed how these new laser discs could double as eitherbeing for movies, or as storage for still pictures. You could just stop at each frame and look at each frame. So you could use the disc to store a copy of each painting in the National Gallery of art or the Louvre or whatever. It occurred to me then that "this thing could enable your player to double as both a movie projector and a slide projector". It would be as if each frame on a movie reel were intended to be used a separate slide to be projected as a still pic (but it wouldn't burn up like it did in Mrs Harrison's class back in school).

Very cool.

yes, by then full frame memories on a chip had been invented thus allowing for the clear still frames on those laserdiscs.

Not even sure it involved a chip.

Laserdiscs work pretty much the same that way as both DVDs and CDs ( and Bluray discs) work which is ...the same way that vinyl records work- except its not the same way vinyl records work.

A vinyl record has one long continuous groove that starts outside the disc and spirals inward to the center of the record. The diamond stylus moves down the groove capturing the continuous analog signal.

CDs have digital data that is captured by a laser beam that acts like the diamond stylus, but instead of a continuous groove its a series of pits burnt into the plastic the form a trace...that goes in sequence that goes in an equivalent spiral to the center of the spinning disc (except that CDs go the opposite way that vinyl records go- CDs go from the inside out rather then from the outside in). Each pit contains a "sample" of the music frozen (kinda like a still picture). In a DVD it IS a still picture (a frame from the movie). Either way (music or movie) it flashes so fast that it creates the illusion of smooth continuity rather than being stoccato. So (as I understand it) if you could stop a DVD player at just one of the burnt pits you would see one frame of the movie in perfect clarity as if it were a slide being shown in an old fashioned analog slide projector. No memory chip needed. But I could be wrong.

By the way: that thing I learned in radio class about how CDs go the opposite way from vinyl records is very useful when deejaying at parties. If you're playing the latest hottest dance craze song (like the Electric Slide, or the Booty Call) and the CD starts to skip, and the Bride gets angry while you temporarily seque to another song while you try to fix it- its useful to know. If the song doing the skipping is the third track on a 12 song album, and you're used to vinyl records, you expect to see the speck of dust one quarter of the way IN ward from the outer edge of the disk. But if know that CDs go the opposite way you know to place your eye at one quarter of the way OUT ward from the hole at the center of the disc. And sure enough- there it always is...that big fat speck of dust you need to brush off- so that the bridal party can finnish doing the "Booty Call" dance, or the "Cha Cha Slide" or whatver! Lol!