The First Frontier, part 1. (Time update)

2 03 2010

This blog was created to document two things, and so far, I’ve only mentioned the first.  The second of these two objectives is the creation of a Time Machine.

As for this post’s title, I’ve taken to calling Time the First Frontier.  This is for the following reason: Since serious philosophical and (proto)scientific inquiry began into the nature of things thousands of years ago, before we were even aware of outer space and the universe at large, the nature of Time has been given serious and constant attention.  And, unlike the nature of thought, belief, medicine, life, physics, geology, and astronomy, there has been little (if any) progress toward a greater understanding of Time since Aristotle.  Hence, I feel like Time has position.  Plus, could any concept exist without first considering Time?  (What is a tree?  Or more to the point, when is a tree a tree?  A seed?  After one year of growth as a sapling?  After 10-years of growth?  100-years?)

Also, I recognize that the distance between time travel and space exploration may appear great, so one may be given to wonder why I’m pursuing both.  However, the divide is not so wide as it seems.  Given the insurmountable distances involved with the prospect of traveling between even the nearest stars, what is a practical starship but a time machine that moves?  …Something to think about.

In any event, since I’ve made a bit of progress on this front as well, (at least in a theoretical sense,) I figured I’d recap my work to date.

Back in High School, I was deep into familiarizing myself with Einstein’s Relativity.  Trolling the university library on the weekends, (when I wasn’t out hiking in Red Rock Canyon,) I found that Special Relativity held specific interest to me because it defined every apparent impossible operation of the universe:  Light always travels the same speed even to different obververs moving at different speeds.  Time slows down as you approach the speed of light.  Light speed is a barrier to all movement.  The sequence of events in the universe can be variable.

These were profound and confounding statements which no one seemed either to question or to fully understand.  Even into college, so-called “relativistic effects” were swept away as oddities experienced at extreme speed with no practical application to physics or our general understanding.  Something in my gut made me feel as though they couldn’t have been more wrong.

The most “advanced” academics in theoretical physics typically have said that Time does not, in effect, actually exist.  It’s an illusion, as are ideas of Doc Brown jumping into a nuclear-powered time-traveling automobile to change the past or future.  The past no longer exists, and the future doesn’t yet exist.  There is just the now.  They have a point – it makes sense that time is just another measurement tool, like an inch or a pound.  I can’t hand you an inch or a pound, but we use them frequently.  Time, then, is the same, but instead of measuring length or weight, time measures causality.  It’s just something we invented to help quanitfy and measure the change that is ubiquitous in the Universe.

But there’s a problem.

I realized with clarity for the first time in the year 2000 that if the time experienced by something could change based upon how it moves, (as Relativity predicted and we subsequently measured,) then some part of time must exist.  In so many words, because Relativity works, Time cannot be completely illusory.

Thus I began the earliest stages of developing a new language of physics reordered with respect to Time.  I would come to call it Temporal Mechanics in a paper published 6 years later, where I would claim (prove?) that physical Time does exist and in doing so turn interpretations of Special Relativity and the Twin Paradox on their heads.

To be continued…




One response

4 09 2010
Temporal Mechanics (Time update part 2) « Astrowright

[…] we last left our time discussion with an apparent contradiction: Most of theoretical physics leads us to consider that time is an […]

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