TIME TRAVELERS BALL ORIENTATION

Contents

  1. Intro
  2. How this event will play with Time Travel
  3. How people can participate in this event
  4. Alchemical Time Travel - a basic overview
  5. Quantum Time Travel - a basic overview
  6. Questions and Answers - in which we address the most often asked questions about this and all of our events

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5) QUANTUM TIME TRAVEL - A BASIC OVERVIEW

What is Time? In 1895, H.G. Wells wrote, "There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space, except that our consciousness moves along it." Ten years later, Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. In this paradigm shifting statement, Einstein described Time as a Fourth Dimension, independent of the X, Y, and Z dimensions (height, depth, width) used to describe Space. In his equations, Time and Space hold equal footing.

Much to his own dismay, Sir Isaac Newton first described that there is no Absolute Position in Space because there is no Absolute Rest. [Newton was heavily criticized for being irrational, refusing to believe what his own theories proved as they conflicted with his notion of an Absolute God.] Einstein's theories laid to rest the concept of Absolute Time. Time, when measure from different positions (think really cosmically large scale), is all Relative to the Position of the Observer.

It seems in order to travel through Time, one would need to reach the speed of light. Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, shows that energy and mass are equivalent so that, as an object approaches the speed of light, the energy of the object in motion gets applied to the object's mass, making it harder and harder to increase its speed. As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite and it would require an infinite amount of energy to get it there. Light waves can travel at this speed because they have no intrinsic mass. His theories, when pushed to the limit, do not prohibit travel at the speed of light, they just say it would be Really, REALLY Hard.

One promising avenue seems to lie in the natural phenomena of Black Holes. Black holes are collapsed starts whose gravitational pull is so strong, not even light can escape it! At the center of a black hole lies a Singularity where space and time cease to exist and all matter is crushed into infinity. It has been proposed that if a black hole is rotating, the spin causes the singularity to form in a ring. Theoretically, one could pass through this ring to pop out in another space and time. The challenges lie in controlling when and where you come out as well as how to keep the fragile ring from collapsing due to the forces applied as you, or your vessel, approach it. One could even picture two separate black holes connected by some kind of inter-cosmic wiring. This has been called a Wormhole. Since Space and Time are treated on equal footings, not only could such a wormhole transport one to another place, but also to another time. Again, keeping the Wormhole open is the challenge.

There have been many depictions of Time Machines throughout literature and film. Some take advantage of harnessing existing black holes or wormholes. Others try to create their own rip in the "fabric of time." All of these tales inevitably run into some of the perplexing paradoxes that continue to challenge curious minds. Some have proposed one would be able, with the aid of a Time Machine, to travel forward into the future, and back only to the point of the invention of the time machine. This would explain why we are not currently surrounded by time-travelers, as the time machine has not yet been successfully invented.

Many have asked what would happen if you were to travel back in time and alter the past? The classic "Grandfather Paradox" explores what would happen if you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather when he was still a child? Your parent, and thus you, would never be born,��.so how could you have gone back to kill him anyway? There are two proposed solutions to the Paradox. In one belief, the past is totally defined. Everything that has happened must happen, the past cannot be altered, and the Universe will prevent anything from happening to the contrary. The time traveler would experience endless "mishaps" in trying to kill his grandparent, never achieving the murder and keeping the course of time intact.

The other solution draws from one interpretation of quantum physics describing an alternate reality created for every possible solution of every possible experiment or decision. The time traveler kills his grandfather and is blipped out of existence in one Reality, while in the other Reality, he lives and time move on. This would be the Parallel Worlds depicted in many works of science fiction. While this may sound totally ridiculous, this notion is believed by many leading scientists, and if nothing else, is not prohibited by the laws of physics.

And what of travel into the future? One school of astrophysics holds that the Future is the Direction of Time in which galaxies are further apart, as the universe continues to expand from the momentum of the Big Bang. Time travels in a single direction. A vase falls, it breaks. It never reassembles. We have reason to believe the expanding nature of the universe as initially propelled by the Big Bang may someday reverse and things will be drawn back towards in a Big Crunch. Will time travel backwards in this direction as well? Will all broken vases reassemble? General consensus seems to be in the time-asymmetric conclusion that even if the universe starts to contract, time will continue in a progressive fashion. Is it really unidirectional, though? Is there any difference between the past and the future? Is there such a thing as forward or backward causation? What if the present is really the Eternal Now, all events occur simultaneously and all points are the same point surrounded by infinity?

Must it be that the past creates the present, and the present the future? What if we take our Vision of how the future appears to us, and then let it influence how we will live and interact from this moment on. Living tomorrow's dream today! And perhaps all that is needed to change the past is to see it as unreal, a phantom of the mind. Perhaps the Eternal Now is all that exists, the past only memories and the future potential. How do you travel through the Now?

For more info on this subject you can turn to the following books:
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
About Time by Paul Davies
The Soul of Time by Joseph Needleman
In Search of Shrodinger's Cat by John Gribben
Time Travel in Einstein's Universe by J. Richard Gott