It's time to talk about time.
First, some basic conventional physics background: First, time passes slower in a gravity well than in flat space. Second, time passes slower when in accelerating than in flat space. As we'll see, these two circumstances are very similar.
The major deviation from conventional physics here is more a simplification. In the Standard Model of physics, there is included a theory which attempts to explain electrical fields without electrical charge, called Kaluza-Klein. Kaluza-Klein, in effect, posits an additional dimension (that is, a direction) which has the unique property of being closed, which is to say, it is a loop. Travel some distance in that direction and you end up back where you started. You can think of it as a circle if that helps.
It is often called a "cylindrical dimension"; we can make sense of this by thinking in terms of a single dimension out of the three we move around in, and adding the closed dimension of Kaluza-Klein; the space created looks like a cylinder. You can move clockwise or counterclockwise, or backwards and forwards down the length; if you go far enough clockwise or counterclockwise, you arrive back at the same point.
The modification in this model is that "time", as we think of it in physics, is, in fact, this cylindrical dimension. Remember how I mentioned electrons would get more discussion in this chapter? Well, Kaluza-Klein explains electrical force as arising from rotation in this closed dimension, plus lots of math. People who understand the math say it works, so that's good enough for me. Electrons rotate around the circle in one direction - let's say counterclockwise - and protons rotate another - let's say clockwise. This both mathematically causes interesting things to happen - namely, electrical forces - and also helps explain both neutron behavior and electrons. Electrons, for their part, have two possible positions per orbit - this isn't merely opposing sides of the orbital sphere, as I described previously, but also opposing sides of the Kaluza-Klein closed dimension. Because all matter on the planet interacts with all other matter, we end up with two diametrically opposed positions in the circle, everything pushed or pulled by everything else into synchronization. And electrons have two possible positions; they can move from one position to the other, but it is energetically expensive, because they have to "push past" all the forces holding them in one of the two stable points. The energy is then freed up for other things to use, but it has to be there in the first place, so electrons resist being moved. Neutrons, meanwhile, are stuck; an electron on one end, a proton on the other, each trying to move in opposing directions, holding them mostly static in the Kaluza-Klein dimension, and thus electrically inert.
This isn't a stable configuration, however; the proton will eventually push the electron back out, unless there are enough other protons in the vicinity holding everything stable. (Sometimes, the electron might even be pushed in the opposite direction of it's desired direction, and become a positron.)
This is important because the Standard Model also has math that says antimatter goes backwards in time, and if you recall, I claimed electrons are antimatter. Once we have a closed dimension as time, suddenly this stops seeming so absurd, since forwards and backwards in time is the same thing.
Although maybe it still seems absurd, if you're having trouble getting past what the hell it means for time to be a closed dimension. It's a small closed dimension, too; a second would quite a few rotations worth of "distance".
Okay, that doesn't help. It may be more helpful if I say that "time" in this case may not be "time" as we humans think of it. See, we think of "time" as the thing that is full of history, and maybe even the future; this "time" isn't full of history or future, it is full of now. Think of it instead as a gear in a clock; the gear must rotate in order to cause the clock to move forward (or backward).
And if you are familiar with gears, you may be aware of an important quality of gears; if you have two gears, one large, and one small, attached to one another, the small gear rotates faster than the large gear. The circumferences - the outer edge of the gears - move at the same speed, but the smaller gear must make more rotations than the large gear, because it's circumference (the outer edge) is shorter.
This, I advance, is the cause of time in a gravity well, such as our planet, moving slower than time in flat space. Gravity, if you will recall, is just a higher density of space - or rather, a higher density of spacetime. Higher density in this case means more distance in less flat-space. In the case of our closed dimension, this translates to a greater distance, or a larger circle. The wave that is mass moves space around, and some of that moved space ends up in the Kaluza-Klein dimension.
Why does the number of rotations matter, in terms of perceived time by beings far larger in scale than we are considering? I'm not sure. This is one of the areas I am still thinking about. I have some ideas, but I don't understand them well enough to translate them into language yet.
None of this is, strictly speaking, all that interesting. Closed timelike curves are expected to arise around singularities; I think the Kaluza-Klein dimension is this closed curve, and the existence of it, if particles are all singularities or composites of singularities, isn't surprising.
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