zAdmin: ConsenCIS DotNet Home: Time:

Time Travel


   Topics
An American Experience 9:10:11 12/13/14Time Travel
Always a fun topic....the question remains, is it possible?

Every one of us travels through time every day. It always forward and always seems to be at the same rate as those around us. Or is it? As we age, time seems to pass faster. Psychologists explain that this is the effect of experience. An older person has experienced more, so each new experience adds less to his total life of experiences.

But this mundane stuff is not what we envision when we talk of time travel. The classic science fiction plot involves the protagonist who travels back in time, makes a small change then travels back to the present and perceives a big difference. Is this a realistic plot?

If you travel backward can you create a paradox? Say you travel back and kill your mother. You would never have been born, so you could not have killed your mother, so you would have been born, and so on. Branching time theories with parallel world lines (multiverse) try to deal with this conundrum.

Then there is the physics. Relativity suggests the speed of light somehow plays into the solution. Since you can't travel faster than the speed of light, what happens if you do? Special relativity offers up the twin paradox in which one member of the pair travels into space at near the speed of light for a period of only a few years to him. Upon his return he discovers that his brother has aged far more. However only the rates of time passage are affected by relativistic dilation, not the direction.

Modern physics examines black holes and considers what happens should you fall into one. If the hole is big enough you cross the event horizon and become disconnected from the universe. Where do you or your subatomic pulp emerge after entering Alice's Wonderland? What if you could create the same effect and avoid being compressed to photons? Wormholes were hypothesized as spinning gravity wells that might be traversed with some weird effects. Faster than light distance traversal and time travel are but two.

Then there are these odd particles that seem to propagate backwards through time. Is anti-matter just regular matter traversing time in reverse?

And then there is simultaneity. Just what does it mean for two events to happen at the same time. I thought I had this one solidly in mind, but the deeper you delve the more squiggly it gets and the more tied to the speed of light.

Ultimately you start questioning the fabric of space itself. Or space-time if you like to think in four or even more dimensions. Why shouldn't time have a couple more dimensions? Why shouldn't space. Just because we evolved in our little pocket of the universe and we are designed to see what we see doesn't mean other those dimensions are not there.

My favorite argument against the possibility of time travel was presented by Stephen Hawking. Rather than presenting a complicated series of equations and proofs, he argued simply that time travel into the past must not be possible because there are no temporal tourists among us.That makes me wonder if time travel requires both a sender device and a receiver? What if we just haven't discovered how to build a receiver?

This video has nothing obvious to do with time travel, but merely shows how something that seems complicated may actually be easy to understand when you view it from the right perspective.

  • Mundane Time Travel : Do we all experience time at the same rate? :: Continue reading...


  • An American Experience 9:10:11 12/13/14


    Created : 11/2/2007 8:51:44 AM Updated: 7/21/2010 3:23:03 PM

      f1 f3

    Web Application Byf3 ConsenCIS

     

    sitemap

    1042

     

    Notes regarding this page
    • Subnotes