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125CHAPTER 24 Parmenides or Heraclitus? FOREINSTEIN , TIME PARTIALLY TRANSFORMS into space, and vice versa, by switching to another Galilean reference in the ST. Therefore, time loses its absolute status and becomes depend-ent on dynamics. In other words, the faster a clock moves, the moreslowly it will tick. Time dilates. This is called the “elasticity of time.”Such a deceleration is observed in unstable elementary particles.Muons — heavy electrons — are a good example. They exist in thehigh atmosphere thanks to cosmic rays, but also in high-energy colli-sions. The faster they go, the longer they last. It is interesting to see inthis example that, whereas they are born and die in the same location,their lifespan is 2.2 microseconds and increases with motion. Theimportance of this remark lies in the idea that in the absence of space(the absence of motion), the temporal dilation — when muons disap-pear — could be much larger, but they must unfold in space for us tosee time dilation from our three-dimensional spatial point of view. This seems to contradict special relativity, but if we consider that the “measured” energy comes from the spatial structure unfolding,stretching out a higher time density than that of the reference frame (it“sucks in” new time quanta), the real energy may be much greater inthe case of seeming immobility. A new vision of time then inevitablyimposes itself. As space dilates, through motion for instance, we per-ceive the unfolding of time, because we belong to a space-time fractalwhere the time quanta are moved apart. As a consequence, historyand therefore temporal irreversibility are made of increasingly largertime steps as the considered space grows larger. Causality thusbecomes conditional for it depends on the quantity of time in a givenvolume of space.