Prelude: Just because a story is feeble, the science is incomplete, the telling is weak, or the point is obscure, doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be told. Anyway, its my blog, so at least read the postlude at the end (for where else would it be?). Jared was aware that his date was about to end. He'd had a great time and so said "I wish we could time travel and do this again". She glanced at him as she slipped her arms into her coat, about to walk through the door, and said "Impossible". "Oh come on" Jared responded, "dream a little". She shrugged, "Sorry, but logic is logic, it's impossible." Desperately wanting to prolong the evening, if only for a few minutes more, and not realizing the incongruity that he was trying to slow down time, Jared tried "Well I'm not so sure about that. I mean, I know all about the time travel paradoxes - the killing your own grandfather sort of thing - but why are you so sure we won't time travel one day?" Jared didn't seem to realise his question contained the answer, but then there was lots of things Jared didn't realize. She felt a bit sorry for him, and thought for a moment before saying "Sigh, ok, well it's like this". (I'm sorry to say that she was one of those people who said the word "sigh" rather than actually sighing ... a shortcoming in her otherwise quite nice person). "You see, there are two ways to travel in time, one is to travel through time, going forwards or backwards. The other is to step out of time altogether and jump in again at another point. Both are appealing ideas, and both have been used in stories over and over again. And both are impossible. For example, say we want to travel through time - along the arrow of time. You've know about Einstein's relativity?" "Uh, yes, sort of" said Jared, beginning to feel he'd just made a terrible mistake. "Well, think about it, if you want to time travel forwards in time, that means everyone else needs to be moving faster through time than you so that when you join them again you're in their future - relatively speaking time must pass faster for them than it does for you. Now thanks to Einstein, we know that if you want that to happen, you need to change your relative velocities, you need to be moving in space much, much faster than they are." "Huh?" said Jared. He was thinking that this was not how a date should end. She continued, "Your experience of time doesn't change, but if you are moving a whole lot faster than everyone else, then when you match speeds again you'll have experienced a less amount of time than they have. Going 'forward' in time means you want to get into the future of others. That means that for awhile you have to be moving physically faster than everyone else so that your time passes more slowly. Its all quite simple, and the basis for all sorts of sci-fi stories; the young handsome boy or pretty girl heads off in a big space ship, goes very fast, and when they return home a little later they find a hundred years has passed for everyone else, all their friends have died of old age, and they end up marrying their now-dead friend's grandchild." Jared looked at her with a confused expression.. "Ok, so that's getting into everyone else's future. To go into their past ... well I'm sure you'd think it's simply a case of reversing roles" - Jared missed the sarcasm, he wasn't good at sarcasm - "and make everyone else go very fast so you'd age more than them, and when you met again they would be younger than you. But it's a little tricky, because what you will find is not your past, only their present. Thanks to Einstein all we have to play with is how relatively fast you and others are both going forward in time. So you can't get to your current past." She looked at him with some compassion as his internal brain friction seemed to be making his face flush. But, thinking that once begun, best to finish, she ploughed on. "Ok, so we can go forward in time, in a fashion, but not backward. Ok?" Jared hesitated, worried his next question was going to be stupid (he had every reason to be worried), but he thought he saw the solution. "If I go faster and faster so my time goes slower and slower compared to everyone else, then if I go even faster still, won't my time run backwards?" "Sigh" she said. "Nope, because there's this little thing called the speed of light. As you get closer and closer to the speed of light so your time slows relative to everyone else - of course it doesn't feel like that to you - and by the way, you gain mass - but the problem of going ever faster is that its asymptotic." "Asymwhatic?" said Jared. "Asymptotic" she said. "think about dividing the number 1 into ever smaller fractions. 1/2 = 0.5, 1/4 = 0.25, , 1/8 = 0.125, and so forth. You get closer and closer to zero, but never actually get to zero unless you divide 1/infinity. Then you get zero - sort of. So think about that in terms of going faster and faster so that your time is going slower and slower relative to everyone else. The closer you get to the speed of light the slower your passage of time relative to others - and the heavier you get. When you finally reach the speed of light, you're not getting any older compared to others, but you're infinitely heavy, and there's all sorts of problems with making that statement mean anything. But assuming you can get to that point - you can't - but if you could it would take more than an infinite force to make your infinite mass go faster than light, and as you don't have more than an infinite amount of force, you can't, so your relative time will never run backwards. You see?" This was really awkward. Jared had begun by wanting to prolong the evening. She, until recently, had wanted to end it quickly. Now it was Jared who hoped she would just go home, and she was getting into her stride thinking "surely he's got brain cells somewhere". "OK" she continued, "so let's give up on going forwards or backward through time. Let's just step off time and join it somewhere else. Can we do that? Not really, at least not so that we'd survive". Actually she had often wondered what 'survive' really meant. "Lets see, how about this as an analogy, and remember analogies are only poor simplifications that don't explain everything!" "Huh?" said Jared, not for the last time. "Let me tell you a story", she said. "Ah", said Jared, feeling on more secure grounds here. "Let's say you're in Rome, and want to get to New York for some reason, like you want a hotdog. The two cities are on about the same latitude, so what you could do is travel west along the surface of the planet until you reach New York. Ok? However, you could also get in a rocket and go up, neutralize the rotation velocity you had when you left the ground, and then wait until New York comes whizzing along underneath you so you can drop down, match velocities and step into Central Park for your much needed hotdog. That's an analogy ... you see it? It's also what an aeroplane actually does except it doesn't go directly west. Anyway, in the analogy ... the story, get it? ... stepping off the surface of the planet is the analogy for stepping off time. Then you wait there while the ground passes by - or for time to move along - and then you drop back onto the ground - or into time. Of course how you 'wait' when you've just stepped off time is one of those many little semantic details we'll ignore for the moment." "Yes" said Jared, deciding to simply ignore all the bits he failed to understand, "that's what I mean, so you can time travel if you just had the means to step out of time for awhile." "Well" she said patiently, "perhaps. But you do realize what happens when you step out of time?" "What?" "You have no time, you're off time, or dare I say you're specifically and exactly out of time. You ... the essence of who you are, only has any meaning in time. You think in time, you eat in time, you go to the toilet in time - mostly. Everything you are only exists in time. Take away time and you no longer have any existence. You can't think, because you have no time to think in, and so you don't exist." "uh .... " said Jared. "Good night" she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. "You're amusing". And with that she stepped into the night followed by Jared's glazed expression. In the days that followed Jared was never sure if it had been the drink, his overheated brain, or a trick of the street light on a misty night that made it seem as though she was suddenly moving very fast. Postlude: This is nominally a blog about living as a Christian, or about thinking about living as a Christian, or at the very least it employs some thinking. So the one thought I'd leave here is that God is not outside time, but that God encompasses time. So when we die, we don't step out of time, we step into something that encompasses time. How we're going to think in that state is an exciting thought, for as you can see, our semantics simply break down.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
|