|
-
Hivemind social net
-
News
- Features
- Blogs
- Events
Calendar
- Editorials
- Monthly
Zine
- Offworld
Report
- Our Daily
RSS Feed
- Google Toolbar scifi
- Movie/TV
Reviews
> Recent movies
> Movies by year
> Movies by title
- Book
Reviews
> Recent books
> Books by year
> Books by title
- Home
- Worlds
- Biography
- Bibliography
- Appearances
- Reviews
- Blog
- Community
- Press
- Links
Become
an Advertiser
- Web
Site Directory
- Search
the Net
- StephenHunt.net
- WoodenRocket.com
- Check
your E-mail
- Non Sci-Fi
News
|
Thoughts on time travel
01/10/2006 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Recently I watched the film The Time Machine again. That is one science fiction film that never ages. In part that is because none of it is set in the present. This film always sparked a disagreement between Evelyn and me about the nature of time travel. Assume the story were true. If today you went down into the cellar of the Time Traveller's house, would you see the Time Traveller there frozen like a statue or would you not see him there at all? Evelyn thought the former and I thought the latter. I am speaking about being in the world of the story, of course. And this is assuming that time travel is possible. I will get back to this discussion a little later, but let us look at some of the ways of thinking about time travel.
There is such a thing as effective time travel and real time travel. Most of us have experienced something very like effective time travel. I do some nights. I am lying in bed at night and the clock says midnight. I close my eyes for just a second, look at the clock again, and it says 2AM. I close my eyes again and when I look the clock says 4AM. One more time and the clock says 6AM. Effectively I have gone through the whole night in just a few blinks. But at any point if you dropped into my bedroom you would see me there, most likely asleep. That is effective time travel. The important point is that if I had a watch in my pocket, it would stay synchronized with my clock. I wake up eight hours older, not a few seconds. But this is very like what I see as Evelyn's concept.
We are talking here about sorts of suspended animation. This is ways of slowing down our personal clocks while the world runs on at its normal rate. In Evelyn's view the time machine becomes a sort of preserving machine. It is not so crude as the falling asleep and waking back up or even as suspended animation. But it is effectively creating a field in which things move slower and time goes faster. This is moving forward in time at a rate faster than one. That means that more than one second goes by for every second the time traveller feels going by. We all travel forward in time at rates very near one. How near depends on our acceleration at the moment, but we rarely feel much force of acceleration so are not accelerating much.
A rate of one is when one second of time in the real world goes by as one second of your time does. The suspended animation example has time going by at rates greater than one. Wells also wrote about people travelling forward in time at a rate less than one but greater than zero. This was not an entire novel but a short story entitled "The New Accelerator."
In that story people took a drug that speeded them up so that the world around them looked like it was moving much slower. One second in real time might have felt like (or even having been) one hour under the drug. Travelling forward in time at a rate of zero simply means the world is frozen around you. You see this in a lot of old "Twilight Zone" episodes. A stopwatch or something or other freezes time. Negative rates really mean going backward in time.
My gut feeling is that we mostly all travel forward in time at a rate of one, or very near one. I would contend that rates of greater than one have been accomplished, but not in the Wells manner. When you are accelerating you really are moving forward in time faster than people who are not accelerating. That is what the Twin Paradox in relativity is all about. Wells talked about time travel in which you move forward in time while staying in much the same place. Relativity implies you cannot stay in one place since it requires acceleration.
Negative rates I have always suspected are impossible. If we could go backward in time you run into the question what happens if you kill your grandfather before he had children. There are arguments that if you change history you just fork off into a parallel universe where you did not exist. But that buys into this entire theory of parallel nearly identical universes. That is a kludge and goes against Occam's Razor. I find it possible, but only just. It is not likely as far as I am concerned. That is better than theories that the universe somehow protects itself from tampering by time travellers from the future. It seems most likely that the way it does that is that it does not allow backward time travel.
But getting back to Evelyn's and my disagreement, I think she sees time travel as being a sort of stasis field in which time slows down for those people inside. That is possible. But that is not the sort of time travel I see in Wells. I see it as a sort of a limited existence at each point in time. Consider the town of Brigadoon from the play and film of the same name. It exists just one day a century according to the story.
If you live in Brigadoon you are essentially in a time machine in which each day when you wake up the world is a century ahead of where it was the day before. You experience just one day of every 36524 days. Then you skip the next 36523 days. But now speed things up. You experience just one microsecond of every 36524 microseconds. Then you skip the next 36523 microseconds. Now speed it up again and again. The limit is what I see as what happens in time travel. Inside the time machine looking out things seem very much speeded up indeed. Outside looking in you do not see the Time Traveller at all. The Time Traveller is travelling through the time, but he is flitting by too fast to be seen even subliminally. This is why the small model of the time machine is not visible at to moves forward in time.
Some have suggested that if you really had a time machine and went into the future the earth would have moved away from under you as you stay at the same spot. This is assuming that there is such a thing as the same spot. There is not. But it does not matter. Brigadoonians feel the force of gravity the whole time they are around and so the village of Brigadoon moves with the planet. So would the time machine, assuming that such a thing were possible.
Mark R. Leeper
(c) Mark R. Leeper 2006
|
|
