I know it isn't very significant but i have been thinking about it and want to know if i am right.

In tv shows and movies, when someone stops time, i have noticed that when the walk around they still make shadows. i was thinking that surely their shadow would stay where it was and not move as the light would stop as well. Also, if everything has stopped then whenever the person moves they couldn't be sen as we can only see things by light reflecting off them.

My question is, does freezing time not stop light also?

Damn, nice thought there.

Let me think...hmmmm....


Maybe it has something to do with the relaitivity theory.. and light is special, so it won't be affected by the freezing time?

Thats right, they would have no shadow and they would be unable to see, and they would be unable to breath or move because there would be air and other things frozen in time around them that would prevent them from moving, and that is if they had managed to stop everything else but not themselves in time. And even if they had a magic suit that would let them move, changes done whiles't time beeing stopped would be catastrofic once you get everything back rolling again. And with this suit, everything they touch would parhaps just shatter into million bits of atoms.

Note: Even the force of gravity would be frozen so they would not have the aid of the whole Earths gravity to keep their feets on the ground, they would be weightless and forced to swim to move along.

Dont take movies and tv shows seriously, they are for entertainment purposes only.

Yeah, i know but i just think about things like that too much.

Jesus christ. If you stopped time, YOU would not be able to move either... meaning your shadow problem is solved before ever becoming a problem.

Jesus Christ. You can't "stop time". What does "stop time" even mean? Why do people pay more attention to the TV than in school?

Good grief. The OP raises an interesting question - they're not actually trying to stop time!

Perhaps there is a small bubble of anti-time-stopness around the person who is still moving where the air and light is still functioning normally?

If time stopped it would be impossible to move, Air is quite heavy. Things would get blurry and the friction between you and the Air would burn you up.

Time is relativistic. If someone were to fall into a black hole for example, the person falling in would experience their death rather quickly. However, to someone observing that person it would appear as though they had frozen in time.

Outside of that, I know of no other way in which time would appear to stop.

I'm not sure how it would all work if it was possible, considering time is just a measurement of how we perceive change around us. On that note, TV and movies do what they see as an appropriate representation of time being stopped. They make sure it's clear to the viewers that they are portraying time to be stopped, and perhaps they didn't consider light particles "freezing" in place.

What they could have done to avoid the shadow is matte out the floor and composite two different clips of footage. A young Norwegian videographer named Lasse Gjertsen has some videos posted on youtube. He uses effects such as this to make some interesting shorts. In one called "Us", he is standing next to a building when suddenly his shadow runs off around the corner. He chases his shadow through a neighborhood until it gets hit by a car. It's really quite comical. You see the shadow frozen on the pavement, stretched out dead. The next shot is him at a cemetary, kneeling over the shadow of a tombstone.

Some cool effects can be achieved with a balance of imagination and technology. The thing I respect this film maker for is he did most of this stuff on his own while living at his parents house using some creative and innovative editting techniques.

Basically what I guess I'm trying to say is, as far as we know it's not possible to stop time. What you described seeing on TV was just a representation of what it might be like.

Interesting.... But if you stopped time then moved, there would just be a black silohuette where you used to be because there would be no light there, but then you'd be walking through light which isn't moving, but since you can't reflect it, would you walk right THROUGH the light, or push it away maybe?

You are assuming that there is a break in the flow of time. The phenomena may involve other physical causes/ reasons. If time stops. does it stop for the observers or for the person who is moving?

Ie it is not so much time, as movement, which comes into play . If, in the common time line no time has occured, then the individual has moved very fast. This brings into play problems like inertia and friction. People would break bones and burn up if they accelerated and moved that fast.

If the individual is moving at the true relative time, then everyone else has slowed down, and they could indeed die from suffocation if the rules of the individuals time line applied to them .
Thus, in fiction, the problem is overcome by being ignored, and the two sets of people move independently of each other, in differnet time sequences.This begs the question, how could they then interact with each other?

I just read a very interesting sf book which hypothesised that in the far future, as well as the ability to self heal to the point where they were virtuallty immortal, all humans had the ability to self regulate the pace at which they lived. They could go from virtual hibernation, where they took a year to live one minute or they could do a years activities in one minute. They tended to live with like timed individuals to minimise the problems caused by different life speeds.

Ah, Mr Walker, you got me thinking again.

I have a fondness for scifi, and the instances of this that I recall most easily are the ones where the observer is simply moving very fast compared to others.

This leads to interesting plot developments (something terrible will happen in a few moments of ordinary time, and the hero needs to work to prevent it, but there is a time limit even for him or her) or incidents (the hero stands still long enough to be fleetingly visible to the others as "something in the corner of their eyes").

There are of course other scifi instances where no claim is made about what is going on, and so no explanation arises. "Time stopped" is simply descriptive of how things appear, not an explanation. (And if it happens on Star Trek, an imbalance in the antimatter flow regulators will cause chronotons to flood the Jeffreys tubes, which will do nicely until "no explanation" shows up.)

Note that phrases like "time stood still" are in the ordinary language as descriptions, a bit exaggerated of course, of emotional crises, reactions to emergencies, and even athletic performances (The baseball player Ted Williams, I believe, claimed that he could see a fastball pitched to him slowed down enough that he would watch the stitching rotate as the ball spun while it flew towards him through the air. The ball in question might be moving at 140 km/hour.).

And finally, subjective time manipulation in the present day is a feature of Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island. Schoolchildren presented with a difficult math problem are taught to step out of time, so to speak, work on it, and then drop back in with the answer.

How can they undergo the process of suffocation if they are frozen in time? Or did I misunderstand your statement?

Which brings me to the next paradox: light always traveling at c, regardless of reference frame.

Ok let's just say that you can stop time and move about through the particles like it was nothing. I think things would not actually get blurry, but you would get a kind of tunnel vision. Since vision is caused by light particles entering the pupil of the eye and getting transmitted into a 'video display', you would have to take a step, or at least bend forward to see what's in front of you. But as soon as you started moving, everything to your sides would either disappear entirely, or blur together into mass collections of color. As you move forward, the particles that came from your peripherals would no longer apply to the new position in space.
Also, if you were to take a few steps forward and look behind you, you would see only a black space where your body has pushed away the light particles that were once in that space. You could still walk through that spot, but wouldn't be able to see anything in front of you until you walked beyond the point that you first started. Likewise, if you were to stop and look left, you would see nothing/blur, but as soon as you leaned forward to collect those light particles into your eye to be processed, you could see everything that was in that direction.
As for the people around, once time was resumed, they would likely see a black streak of wherever the time stopper had moved to while he had stopped time. There would probably be a fairly loud pop of the air in the room flying back into the empty space of where the person had moved. The force of this air 'refill' could also potentially pull any object directly next to the empty space to be pulled in as well. In which case the friction of all those are particles could strip it down to nothing.

That's just my little theory on how that would work.

As for the "you can't move the particles" situation:
No one would suffocate because they're bodies are in a perfect form of preservation. Their lungs aren't working to breath in air, but neither is any other part of the body that says, "I need air". By stopping time the entire body would "shut down" during the whole process. But of course if a person were able to freeze time and not move through the particles of air that surrounds them, then they would simply be stuck, unable to move, themselves likely wanting to breath but can't since the particles of the air aren't being sucked into the lungs. This part only affecting the person who stopped time itself. The rest of the world would still be in that perfect preservation state.


Just a little thought from me on the subject. I'll check back on this topic to see where else it goes.

-C

if time has to stop light will still moving with the same speed
am i right?
and if your body would shutdown then it means that you can not be able to move

anyway if the time really stops then what would be the speed of the observer/stopper?
-a number over 1 sec
-is it infinite over 1 sec
-a number over 0 sec (which is undefined)
-infinite over 0 sec (also undefined)

It is a bit difficult to explain because it is an unreal situation, but suppose you have two people. One is moving really fast and one almost stopped or frozen in time. In a real world scenario, either the one moving faster has stepped outside normal time and will break bones and burn up as he tries to accelerate/ move through the rest of the world which is existing in normal time

OR the one who is almost stopped will run out of oxygen, as the normal flow of time passes him by. His lungs will not be moving and his heart will not be beating. Of course this does not matter if he is truly "frozen" in time, but i was talking about people who might be living at a much slower rate than the world around them. They would be still thinking, and maintaining an interaction with the world around them.

Could their body actually maintain life, when all the molecules and "metabolism" of the universe were going on around them at a "normal" rate? Would it be like people on a high mountain where the oxygen density is not enough to breathe? (Because all the molecules out side the person would be moving/existing at a different rate to those within him)

The answer to this probably only lie in our perception, because in practice it is impossible.