Time To Question Time: Part Two

Time is the most mysterious concept that you are likely to think about. You know exactly what time is, unless you actually have to explain it and then things bog down. If you admit that time is pure puzzlement, well you’re not alone as the nature of time has been endlessly debated by thinkers, good, bad and average, ever since humans had the ability to think. Okay, I’m a thinker, so here are my thoughts in Q & A form about time.  

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Q. Is time travel to the future possible?

A. Time travel to the future is easy – you’re doing it right now at the rate of one second per second – boring – or when you fall asleep (or pass out drunk), next thing you know you are in the future, ahead by several hours. You’ve skipped or jumped over some interval of time. That’s what one usually means by travel to the future. It is jumping over some significant interval of time without having to experience or live through it, like say going from 2013 to 2015 and avoiding 2014 entirely. Of course when you arrive in the ‘future’, be it the following morning or by skipping 2014, it’s no longer the future but the present – the ‘now’. It’s actually impossible to be in or to exist in the future, it’s only possible to head towards the future, which you do anyway at the rate of one minute per minute. 

I guess you could construct a philosophical argument that relative to your point of view of yesterday, if you say skipped a day and landed in tomorrow, you are now in the future, but such convolutions don’t get us very far since the you that existed yesterday no longer has any existence or meaning either today or tomorrow or post tomorrow. In fact, the person you call “you” that existed one second ago has now come and gone and passed away into history. The only you that has any reality is the person you call “you” that exists right now.

Apart from your normal modes of time travel into the future, you can accelerate the process. There’s also Einstein’s Relativity twin paradox whereby relative to an outside observer, time, as in rate of change, slows down for someone who is travelling at velocities that are approaching some goodly fraction of the speed of light. So, a twin who heads off at a rapid rate of knots and boldly goes, when returning to meet and greet her stay-at-home twin, will find that though twins they might be, their ages are now different. The stay-at-home twin has aged more quickly, or the boldly going twin has aged more slowly depending on your ‘relativity’ point of view, which isn’t really a paradox, rather the consequences of what happens when you travel at a very rapid rate of knots relative to someone who doesn’t.

However, the same philosophy or argument from those several paragraphs above applies in that you, in this case the you that’s the boldly going twin, is never in the future, only in the now or existing in what passes for the present (along with your stay-at-home twin). That applies even if that present is tens of thousands of years after you were born, which is possible (and thus your stay-at-home twin has long since died and returned to dust). No matter which way you slice and dice things, you only have reality in the present that you find yourself in. 

Q. And what do you conclude about the viability of time travel to the future from the above?

A. Ultimately, to my way of thinking, time travel, even to the future (by skipping over periods of time), is impossible since again time is a concept and not a thing, like a road or a river you have to travel continuously on, up and down on. If time is just a concept, then time travel is illogical.

Q. Is there any other likely impediment to time travel?

A. Yes there is. When you visualise standard time travel stories or films to the past or to the future, your time machine or device keeps you firmly attached to the same set of terrestrial coordinates from which you started, so if you say start in New York City (2013) and go plus or minus say 200 years either to the future (2213) or to the past (1813), you’ll end up in the New York City of that time. That’s bonkers! In that 200 years, either way, Planet Earth on which New York City is attached, but you are not, has moved. Planet Earth is attached to the Sun (gravitationally) and the Sun is in orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy, which itself is moving in space, so when you materialize 200 years in the past or future, the odds are extremely likely that you will materialize into the depths of outer space! Even if you ignore all that, the Earth will not make an exact number of solar orbits and axis revolutions over 200 years to bring you back into exact alignment with the terrestrial coordinates you started out from. So, you just might materialize smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Oops! What one really needs is a time and space machine like the Doctor’s TARDIS where you can also set spatial coordinates. 

Q. Have all billionaires been time travellers to the past?

A. Maybe! It’s easy to imagine looking up say all the long shot horses who won their races in say over one particular year. Now travel back in time to that year and start placing reasonable bets on each ‘long shot’ (that proved a sure thing), make a super-bundle of loot, and hop back to your own era; your own present day and start living the good life. Of course there are many, many variations on this go-back-in-time and get-rich-quick schemes.

Q. We spend our entire lives in the “now” moment, and eternal “now”, yet each “now” moment lasts way less than a nanosecond before the “now” you vanishes into the limbo-land of the past only to be replaced by the future you that was just a theoretical probability that now becomes reality, for just a nanosecond before that you too slips away into the unreachable past. That’s confusing!

A. There’s no real mystery here. There are many examples from daily life of the difference between the continuum and the part of the continuum.

You’re driving along the road in your car. Your car is the continuum since you’re always in your car for the duration (that eternal “now”); the specific section of road you are travelling over is your nanosecond “now” which changes from nanosecond to nanosecond.

You’re swimming with the current in a river. The surrounding water is your eternal “now”; the section of riverbed you’re passing over is your nanosecond “now”. Or, you can reverse the scenario. If you swim exactly against the speed of the river current or flow, the part of the riverbed you are stationary over is now your eternal “now”, while the patch of water around you is ever changing and thus becomes your nanosecond “now”.

If you walk across the stage with the spotlight on you, the light is your eternal “now” but your place on the stage is constantly shifting – your nanosecond “now”.

If you lie in bed all day (and night), the bed is your eternal “now”, but the ticking of the clock, even if only via the changing position of the sun (in the day) and the stars (in the night), or that change from sunrise to sunrise, is your nanosecond “now”.

Note that all of the examples involve motion. Motion is change and change is what the concept of time is all about.  

Q. Does God exist within time or outside of time?

A. There is no God (or gods) so the question is immaterial, irrelevant and has no bearing on the proceedings. But if there is a God(s) they would exist inside of time since to exist is to undergo change and time is nothing but a measure of change. 

Q. When do I exist?

A. Now, and only now. The “you” that existed an hour, even a minute ago is no longer. That past you, actually all those entities you called you (plural) that existed in the past have been consigned to the history books. The “you” that (probably) will exist an hour or even a minute from now, actually all those entities you will call you (plural) that will exist in the future do not yet have reality of any substance.

Q. So again, what is time?

A. One heck of a metaphysical mess!

Time To Question Time: Part One

Time is the most mysterious concept that you are likely to think about. You know exactly what time is, unless you actually have to explain it and then things bog down. If you admit that time is pure puzzlement, well you’re not alone as the nature of time has been endlessly debated by thinkers, good, bad and average, ever since humans had the ability to think. Okay, I’m a thinker, so here are my thoughts in Q & A form about time.  

Are you confused about time? If so, join the crowd. I’m part of that crowd, and I’m confused, but I’ll try to work through my befuddlement via this hypothetical question and answer session which hopefully will enlighten me and you too. 

Q. What is time?

A. Time is a concept, like Wednesday is a concept.

Q. A concept of what?

A. Change. Without change the concept of time is meaningless.

Q. What properties does time have?

A. Time has no properties, just like Wednesday has no properties. Time has no structure or substance; no mass or energy, no colour or spin or charge, it has no associated field, and it exerts no force and has no fundamental particles associated with it. 

Q. Does time have a beginning? Will time ever end?

A. No. Time is eternal. An eternal time removes those nasty philosophical questions of what came before; what comes after?

Q. Can time be created?

A. The concept of time can be created, but only by the mind blessed with some degree of sophistication, but that does not give substance and structure to time itself, any more than the JFK concept of ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade’ in and of itself made it so. The concept of a lunar landing is not a real lunar landing. Time itself cannot be created like a soufflé since there are no ingredients that collectively comprise time.

Q. Can time be destroyed?

A. Since time cannot be created, time cannot be destroyed. While that is similar to existing conservation laws, there is no conservation law in existence for time like there is for matter and energy since, unlike matter and energy, time cannot be altered from one form to another, since time is not a thing.

Q. Was the Big Bang event 13.7 billion years ago the start of time?

A. No. Since time cannot be created, the Big Bang banged in existing time which means there was a before the Big Bang. Something had to cause the Big Bang (a change) and that something could only have been an earlier event which happened in already existing time, since an event, a change, defines what time is.

Q. Where does time exist?

A. The concept of time exists only where change exists, and change only exists within that ongoing, yet ever paper-thin slice that we can the “now”. Change neither exists anymore in the past nor does it exist yet in the future.

Q. Are time’s related terms also concepts?

A. Absolutely. None of the following can be placed on the lab’s slab; none of the following are ‘things’, just mental concepts and conventions: past, present, and future; when, now and then; before and after; second, minute, hour, day, week, month, seasons, year, decade, century, millennia, and eon; any of the named days of the week; any of the names of the seasons; any digit that represents a year (i.e. – 2013); any date; yesterday, today and tomorrow; birthday, anniversary and holiday; weekend and weekday; noon and midnight.  A clock or calendar or metronome can be put on the lab’s slab, but a clock, etc. isn’t time, just like a thermometer isn’t temperature, and a Geiger counter isn’t radioactivity.

Q. Is time travel to the past possible?

A. Yes and no.

Einstein’s concepts of General and Special Relativity allow for time travel to the past (and the future), the usual scenario is via a rapidly rotating massive object that can twist space-time around in a loop where the starting point that joins up with itself to form the loop, like a snake swallowing its tail, isn’t any longer at the same point in time. However, the flaw I find with all of that is that this requires space and time, or space-time, to be a thing, which IMHO it is not. Space-time is a concept without substance and structure because both space and time are concepts without substance and structure. Be that as it may.  

The basic argument against going back in time is the creation of a paradox, something along the lines of killing your mother when she was a young girl thus preventing your very existence which means you couldn’t have gone back in time and murdered your mother, etc. Hells, bells, why not just do the suicide properly and go back in time a few months and kill your own self! But any trip back in time will create conditions back then that did not originally exist, and however minor, not only will they become an established part of history, but have that butterfly or ripple effect on down the line – chaos theory. If those new conditions, thanks to your time travelling presence, did not originally exist and now they do, that’s also a paradox as something cannot be and yet be at the same time, and that contradiction extends on down the line as history unfolds differently.

Further, you MUST go back in time (no free will in the matter) to ever create and ensure the conditions that came to pass back when, new conditions that you initially caused – only you never initially caused them since there’s an infinitely recycling causality loop here. You went back in time which caused a certain set of conditions which become a part of established history which means at some point in your life you are required to go back in time to create that certain set of conditions which become a part of established history, all to be endlessly repeated for all eternity. Presumably you couldn’t even commit suicide before you travelled back in time and thus break the cycle.

Of course if the past were somehow changed, then presumably you’d never know it since all records, including those of your memory, would be altered accordingly. But things would be messy if millions of people each travelled back in time and altered this, that and the next thing. History textbooks and other records would be rewritten and altered to conform to all those alterations every second. Then too, what if someone went back in time and altered history to the extent that mankind went extinct as a result – that’s the ultimate going back in time and killing your mother as a young girl!

Here’s a novel concept. Say it is the 10^th of the month. Go back in time to the 1^st of the month and meet and greet yourself. The both of you now wait until the 10^th of the month and then go back in time to the 2^nd of the month where you both can now meet and greet and join up with the other two of you that existed then. Then the four of you wait until the 10^th of the month and the four of you travel back in time to say the 3^rd of the month where the four of you link up with the four of you that existed on the 3^rd. The eight of you now wait until the 10^th of the month and then travel back in time to the 4^th of the month where you group together as a crowd of sixteen. Wait until the 10^th of the month and the sixteen of you travel back to the 5^th and join up with the other sixteen to form a mob of thirty-two, and so on and so on. Starting with just you, you could create an entire army of you!

Q. Where’s the paradox in creating an army just out of you?

A. The paradox here is that you are getting something for nothing, in this case extra copies of you. Where in fact does the extra matter and energy come from that creates that you army?

Q. Anything else?

A. Another reason time travel to the past is suss is that we don’t see any time travellers from our future paying us a visit. Though Einstein’s Special and General Relativity allows time travel to the past, and although the laws of physics are time invariant (they are valid from past to future and future to past), no visitors. Either our descendents don’t have any interest in us, or perhaps there aren’t any – descendents that is – if we go extinct or go back to the Dark Ages sooner rather than later. Or, perhaps time travel just isn’t possible after all or is in the too hard basket.

Q. You lie! What about the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

A. Ah yes, what about the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is held responsible for time’s arrow or the arrow of time (i.e. – things proceed from past (which you remember) to future (which you don’t remember). But the Second Law of Thermodynamics is misnamed since the second ‘law’ isn’t really a ‘law’, just a statement of probability, albeit extremely high probability. When things happen in a statistically probable way (eggs break or scramble; eggs don’t un-break or unscramble) that’s the arrow of time that we perceive. Put in a more thermodynamic context, a boiled egg cools off and heats up the kitchen until both are at the same temperature; the kitchen doesn’t cool down and transfer that energy to the raw egg and cook it.

Q. Anything else?

A. Yes, another postulate has it that one cannot travel further back in time than the time the time machine was constructed. So if our descendents come up with a first ever time machine in the year 2113, they couldn’t come visit us in 2013, though those living in the year 2213 could go back to 2113 (but no farther back).

The way out of that is what about an advanced extraterrestrial civilization’s time machine, say built in 2013 BCE, or over 4000 years ago. Say, what about those pesky UFOs? Instead of ET coming here from out there in their and our present, they come here from there in our present but from their future! The only problem with that is that UFO events and flaps are not clustered around what we would call historically important events, like say the Trinity A-Bomb test in 1945 or the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969 or the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912. Of course, that they are conspicuous by their absence, well that just maybe our parochialism coming to the fore. Time travelling aliens may have a differing agenda. 

Aliens aside, you could easily imagine a time travelling Travel Agency existing several hundred years from now conducting guided tours to important historical events of their (and our) past, say tours in groups of one hundred per. After several thousand such tours, say to the battle of the Alamo or to Custer’s last stand at the Little Big Horn, things would be getting a mite crowded since each tour has to show up at the same place and date!

Q. And what do you conclude about the viability of time travel to the past from the above?

A. Ultimately, to my way of thinking, time travel, at least to the past, is impossible since time is a concept and not a thing, like a road or a river you can travel up and down on. You can travel in a car, but not in the concept of an automobile.

To be continued…

Baby Universes & Black Holes

There are numerous ways of theoretically generating a collection of separate and apart universes, commonly called a Multiverse. One such novel approach uses two accepted entities, a universe and a Black Hole to generate each other in turn in either a linear or a cyclic fashion. While the linear approach runs out of puff, the cyclic version doesn’t, but only if you postulate a form of time travel!

You exist somewhere on Planet Earth, which orbits a rather average star we call the Sun, which in turn orbits around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy which is but one of billions and billions of galaxies within our observable Universe. That’s what you’d include in any description of your reality.

However, perhaps the observable Universe itself exists within a Black Hole. That’s an alternative reality, or at least an extension of your reality. Just what rationale might lead one to suggest that our observable Universe and a Black Hole could be in parallel?

Since you cannot escape from the prison we call the Universe; and since you could not escape from the inside of a Black Hole – another type prison – perhaps they are one and the same sort of prison. Perhaps not only do Black Holes exist inside our Universe but the Universe itself resides inside a Black Hole with perhaps no end of the inside-the-inside-the-inside in either direction. In a manner of speaking, that’s a Multiverse!

Actually you can in theory escape this Universe by hopping down into a Black Hole, but if, and it’s a very big ‘but if’, you survive, you’ve just traded in one maximum security prison for another.

Let’s explore this concept a little further and see where, if anywhere, it leads us.

Our Universe and Black Holes certainly share some things in common.

A Black Hole can expand and surprisingly contract (due to Hawking radiation; the technicalities need not concern us here). Our Universe is expanding, but in theory could also contract if there was enough stuff, matter, hence gravity to slow down the expansion to an eventual halt hence reverse direction and start to shrink.

A Black Hole has temperature (that Hawking radiation); our Universe has a temperature (the cosmic background microwave radiation).

A Black Hole has mass (hence gravity); our Universe has mass (hence gravity).

A Black Hole could have a net charge; our Universe could have an excess of one kind of charge over another, but to the best of our knowledge our Universe is electrically neutral, and we suspect, so might an average Black Hole be too.

A Black Hole may be spinning; our Universe maybe rotating but the only way of knowing if you are rotating is if something else in your line of sight isn’t rotating or rotating at a different rate. If everything in our Universe is rotating together at the same rate, then there’s no way of telling since there isn’t anything else to relate that rotation to. 

Now the question arises was there a prime cause; a first universe inside a Black Hole  that gave birth to millions more Black Holes each of which generated an interior universe each of which spawned million more Black Holes hence interior universes and so on and so on and so on. It’s all very circular in that Black Holes generate universes which generate more Black Holes which generate more universes, etc. But that is something circular in a very linear sort of way for what you end up with is like an ongoing (maybe infinite) series of funnels. Sooner or later all the stuff that existed in the first cause Black Hole universe will funnel down into the first generation of Black Hole universes and all the stuff there eventually finds its way down into the second generation of Black Hole universes, hence funnelled down to the third, and fourth and down unto infinity. Now the point here is that there was only a finite amount of stuff (matter/energy) in that first cause Black Hole universe. All that stuff is constantly being diluted as one passes from one generation to the next generation. The stuff of the prime cause first Black Hole universe is dispersed unto millions and eventually billions of later universes. Eventually every baby universe in some umpteenth generation of universes would be so dilute no further Black Holes could form and that’s then the end of that.

But, what if things were cyclic or really circular? All of these universes do not exist in separate and apart timeframes, just like great grandpa; grandpa; father and son do not of necessity exist in separate and apart timeframes but can co-exist at the same time. When you talk of Black Holes, you can also go the one yard further and talk wormholes, which I guess is really that passageway from a Black Hole to the baby universe it generated. But if that first Black Hole universe generates say a million Black Holes each generating a baby universe, what’s to say that a Black Hole created in that baby universe might not funnel back stuff, not to a newer next generation, but dump their contents back to the original first cause Black Hole universe. Wormholes can, in theory, under the right conditions, serve as time machines. So it’s almost akin as if the son travelled back in time and fathered what would ultimately become his great grandpa. Cyclic! If cyclic, the amount of stuff (matter/energy) is still fixed (that which existed in the original Black Hole universe), but never gets diluted enough to bring things to a halt. Now about those quasars, gamma ray bursts and related ultra-energetic astronomical enigmas – White Holes perhaps; the exit of the Black Hole entrance – impregnations by those baby universe Black Holes?  

Where actually do these new (and improved?) baby universes reside? I doubt that a Black Hole opens up a portal and creates a never-before-in-existence arena of space-time where stuff pouring into a Black Hole, hence exiting this portal, finds a ready made newly constructed house to live and evolve in. Rather, the baby universe IS the interior of a Black Hole. A Black Hole forms, a new baby universe forms inside that Black Hole, and that universe in turn produces new Black Holes that form new baby universes, etc. But everything takes place, generation after generation, inside that first Black Hole (which just might be our Universe). The baby universes spawned inside say Black Hole generation #3 in turn creates Black Hole generation #4 which also exist within the earlier Black Hole generation #3 as do the generation #4 baby universes. So instead of a series of dolls sitting all-in-a-row on a long shelf, it’s more akin to those Russian dolls, one inside the other inside the other inside the other. But, as suggested above, one of the smaller dolls can ultimately funnel stuff back up into one of the larger dolls. 

Aside #1: Now you may feel that any baby universe inside a Black Hole in our Universe is going to be a pretty small universe indeed. Well I’m not aware that the definition of a universe comes attached with a one size fits all clause. Universes might well come is small, medium, large and extra-large sizes. Maybe a baby universe inside a Black Hole is like Dr. Who’s TARDIS – bigger on the inside than on the outside. Truth is, nobody, and I do mean nobody has a clue what’s inside the event horizon of a Black Hole. Once inside the event horizon all the laws, principles and relationships of physics break down. Nobody and no measuring instrument have ever been inside to have a look at what’s what and report back. It’s akin to those maritime charts of the ancient seafarers – here be dragons! It’s the greatest of the great unknowns. If space is the final frontier, the inside of a Black Hole is the Absolutely Final Frontier. Now there’s no reason of necessity why any of these baby universes need be inhabited. Extraterrestrial intelligence isn’t part of the definition of a universe either. A universe is really a self-contained space where matter and energy interact; where things happen; where there is change from moment to moment. The interior of a Black Hole is self-contained. There’s matter and energy but whether there’s activity or not, well IMHO the answer is affirmative since the Black Hole isn’t static. It’s either expanding as matter and energy enters and passes the event horizon or contracting thanks to the abovementioned Hawking radiation. Actually both incoming and outgoing are going on simultaneously.

Aside #2: Something about this entire concept reminds me of the old sci-fi pulp magazine era. It was a staple plot of shrinking down to the atomic level only to discover a civilization on a ‘planetary’ electron orbiting a ‘stellar’ nucleus.

Aside #3: A Black Hole that might spew out another universe might have that universe stillborn in that that universe may not in turn be able to give rise to internally created Black Holes and thus another generation of baby universes. Not all universes will of necessity have the same physics, physics that allow the creation of Black Holes, and so some universes will be eternal bachelors or spinsters.

Aside #4: Yet another interesting question is what happens to the two baby universes when and if their parent Black Holes merge, as most certainly can happen. That would seem to be a rather nasty scenario for inhabitants of either of the baby universes!

Now clearly this is all speculation, but then speculation, that “what if” scenario, is the bread-and-butter staple of science fiction, and how often has science fiction evolved into science fact? It’s an oft quoted saying, attributed to J. B. S. Haldane (1924) that “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Reality: Mother Nature Is A Bitch

Coming to terms with your reality is hard enough under ordinary circumstances, but Mother Nature’s a bitch and likes to baffle us with one hand in the observed reality this-is-nuts cookie jar while giving us with the other hand her middle finger by ignoring a more theoretical alternate reality common sense cookie jar, just to make life difficult and hard to understand for us mere mortals.

There are seemingly zillions of things that are theoretically proposed yet which makes no sense in our reality. The classic modern example is String Theory which requires six additional spatial dimensions apart from latitude (north-south), longitude (east-west or left-right) and altitude (up-down) you are familiar with. But there’s also a whole pot-load full of observations and experimental reality which equally makes no sense.

Some parts of reality have been demonstrated to death as reality yet as Mr. Spock would have it, are illogical.

For example, there is a trilogy of generations of the elementary particles. For example, there’s the electron, the heavier muon (father or son to the electron) and the even heavier tau (the electron’s grandfather or grandson). Now you’d think their relative masses would bear some sort of logical relationship like 1,2,3 units or 1,2,4 units or 1,3,9 units. But no, it’s all ad hoc like numbers determined by three spins of the roulette wheel though with vastly more numbers. Now this wouldn’t be too bad if the muon and the tau particle actually did anything. They can be created, but they decay and go ‘poof’ so quickly that they play no active role in any reality dealing with life, the universe and everything. This is the first impossible reality, or an alternate reality, you need to accept before being served breakfast.

There’s matter or mass that interacts with electromagnetism, the sort of stuff we know and deal with every day. You are that sort of matter. But, reality also has it that there is matter or mass that does NOT interact with electromagnetism, like light. You can’t see this matter. It’s invisible matter. It’s called Dark Matter. If you had a ‘basketball’ made out of Dark Matter and it was a foot in front of your face, you couldn’t see it even in a brightly lit room. That’s nuts. This is the second impossible reality, another alternate reality, you need to accept before being served breakfast.

Dark Matter makes up roughly 23% of our universe, but that doesn’t mean that 77% of the universe is composed of I’m-made-of-that normal matter. In fact only 4% of the universe is normal stuff. The remaining 73% of the universe’s stuff is Dark Energy. You can’t see Dark Energy either, but then again you can’t see most forms of normal energy either so that in itself does make Dark Energy any sort of an alternative non-intuitive reality. Why Dark Energy belongs in the realm of alternate reality is that it’s a ‘free lunch’; it’s something-from-nothing. That’s because although the Universe is expanding, its volume is getting bigger, the density of Dark Energy remains the same. Translated, as time goes by, the Universe contains more and more of Dark Energy. Where does it come from? Apparently it originates out of even less than thin air. This is the third impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

When you look around your room at all of the familiar objects contained therein, you pretty much think of stability. The objects don’t pop in and out of existence willy-nilly; all of the bits and pieces that make up the objects equally don’t pop in and out of existence willy-nilly. If you put one of your knick-knacks on a weighing scale, the weight stays constant. That’s reality. Alas, at the micro level, the quantum level, bits and pieces do just that – they pop in and out of existence seeming at random. They’re called ‘virtual particles’ since they don’t stick around long enough to contribute anything to your nick-knacks. They originate from the vacuum energy; the quantum jitters. The guts of the phenomena are that all space is permutated by energy. There’s no such thing as an absolutely pure vacuum. Energy can be converted to mass. When that happens, two virtual particles are created, equal and opposite – one matter, the other its antimatter counterpart. They quickly recombine, go poof, and return the energy borrowed to create them in the first place back to the vacuum energy bank vault. So, you have solid reality – you have nebulous virtual reality. This is the fourth impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

  

The observed value for the vacuum energy, confirmed by experiment, and the predicted or theoretical value for the vacuum energy differ by 120 orders of magnitude, so real reality and theoretical reality are on near opposite sides of the universe! Mother Nature has a sense of humour. This discrepancy is the fifth impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

Matter-Antimatter is one of those reality symmetries beloved by physicists. Theory predicts, indeed demands that at the moment of creation (that Big Bang event) matter and antimatter would be formed in equal amounts. Unfortunately for physicists, but fortunately for you, other life, the universe and everything, there’s not a heck of a lot of antimatter around. Why? Who knows? It’s the case of the missing antimatter: whodunit? It’s like tossing a balanced coin a zillion times and coming up with a zillion matter heads and no antimatter tails - Something’s screwy somewhere. This is the sixth impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

Gravity reality and quantum reality exist as two separate and apart realities. There’s no doubting the reality of each. However, as both are part and parcel of our natural Universe, you’d think that there would have to be some reality connection between the two. There’s not. To unify the two is the Holy Grail of physics; a Nobel Prize is a certainty for accomplishing it. Alas, it appears that flapping your arms and flying to the Moon is a more realistic objective. This is the seventh impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

Wave-particle duality is one of those quantum realities that quantum physicists tear their hair out about because it just doesn’t jive with real reality where bullets don’t wave all over the place and sound waves don’t behave like bowling balls. To make a very long story short, little fundamental particle bullets, like electrons, when fired at a target with a barrier but also with an opening in front pass through the opening and impact the target in just one place: so far, so good. However, when these little electron bullets are fired at the same target, with the same barrier in front, only now with two openings, the impacted target shows a smear of  areas of high impacts (plural) alternating with areas of near zero impacts – a classic wave interference pattern. This also happens when the electron bullets are fired at the double set of holes in front of the target one at a time! It’s like the electrons ‘know’ when there’s just one hole, or two holes in front of the target, and change their behavior from bullets to waves accordingly. Thus, the description of wave-particle duality since particles behave like waves and waves can behave like particles.  This is the eighth impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

The observed speed of light is constant – 186,000 miles per second. That in itself isn’t so bad, except the speed of light is REALLY constant and that is counter intuitive based on everyday experiences where velocities can be added and subtracted. If a train is moving eastwards at 100 miles per hour, and someone on the train throws a baseball at 100 miles per hour in an eastwards direction, an observer on the outside railway platform will clock the baseball as moving at a velocity of 200 miles per hour in an eastwards direction. If the baseball is thrown westward at 100 miles per hour, the outside observer will see the baseball apparently standing still and floating in midair as the train thunders past. If you now substitute a light beam for the baseball, when beamed eastwards you’d think the beam’s velocity would be 186,000 miles per second plus the 100 miles per hour of the train, and if pointed westwards the velocity would be 186,000 miles per second minus the 100 miles per hour of the train as viewed by that person on the railway platform. Negative! The beam of light viewed from inside the train, outside the train, or from a jet plane in the distance will be 186,000 miles per second. Now that’s a constant! Unfortunately, the counterintuitive aspects don’t stop there. To accommodate that quirk, something else has to bend, and that something is actually a trilogy: to an external observer, as you increase your velocity your mass increases; as you increase your velocity your length shrinks; as you increase your velocity time (rate of change) slows down. So, if you could travel at the speed of light, your mass would be infinite; your length would be zero; and time would stop for you. That’s why you can’t travel at the speed of light. All of this has been absolutely verified by experiment, but still, it’s the ninth impossible reality you need to accept before getting your breakfast.   

The Twin Paradox: Following on from the above, say you have a twin sister. Say you decide to boldly go and take an interstellar voyage to some stellar system thousands of light years away, travelling at velocities some considerable fraction of the speed of light. Your twin sister stays put on Terra Firma. Because you’re going closer to light speed than your stay-at-home twin, time passes at a slower rate for you. So by the time you return home, though you still are relatively young, say still of childbearing age, your twin sister might now be a great grandmother!  It’s a form of time travel to the future at a faster rate than just getting there the usual way, at one second per second. And so it’s the tenth (and for now last) impossible reality you need to accept before getting your breakfast.   

The Physics and Philosophy of Time: Part One

“What is time?” That is a question that has been pondered and debated for probably thousands of years by some of the finest philosophical and scientific minds ever produced, without any definitive resolution. So, I’m NOT going to pretend that this is THE ANSWER – the be all and end all to the question. It’s some of my thoughts, which hopefully are as valid as anyone else’s!

What Is Time? It has been said that time is just Nature’s way of preventing everything from happening at once! But the word ‘happening’ is significant because if something happens, something changes. To my way of thinking, time is synonymous with change; time is a measurement of change; change gives the concept of time tangible meaning. If nothing ever changed, if nothing ever happened, it would be meaningless to talk about time. Time is just our informal perception or more formal measurement of rate-of-change. Rates-of-change vary depending on how fast you travel relative to some other frame of reference (the General Theory of Relativity) so the time intervals that measure that rate-of-change vary accordingly. I also can’t help but wonder whether, speaking of things relative, whether one could insist on a constant rate-of-change that’s made constant because your rate-of-time varies, or the more common view from day-to-day experience that rate-of-time is constant but rate-of-change varies.

It’s not difficult to understand why you are not aware of time passing when you sleep. It’s because you’re not aware or cognoscente of anything changing while you’re asleep. In fact, sleep is a way of achieving time travel. You go to sleep at 11 pm. Next thing you know its 7 am and you’ve traveled eight hours into the future seemingly instantly!

Thusly, I conclude that time doesn’t have a separate reality. I mean you can’t weigh time, it has no mass, it has no charge or energy, it isn’t a force and has no particle associated with it, you can’t put time to any physical use, nor can you manipulate time. You certainly can’t bottle and sell it! It’s about as intangible a something as the Universe allows.

Did time exist before there was anyone around to put a label to it? I mean in a pre-life era, change certainly took place – rocks eroded, the tides ebbed and flowed. But was there time? I suggest the answer is ‘no’ in that it takes a certain level of intellect to recognize change or rate-of-change. A rock doesn’t perceive time, nor does the beach upon which the tides act. The changes are physically real enough, but it takes something as complex as a living organism (not of necessity just a human organism) to perceive and understand change, and rate-of-change, which – human beings – for lack of a better word, we call it all happening (i.e. rate-of-change) as a concept called ‘time’.

By analogy, there is the oft quoted puzzle of there being this tree in a forest which falls. Does the falling/fallen tree produce any sound if no one (meaning humans) is around to hear it? (Of course there would be animals like bears, deer, possums, birds, etc. that would hear the sound, but let’s suppose that the forest contains just plants which I assume we can agree on, can’t hear. Now regardless of whether any animals are around or not, the falling tree will produce vibrations in the air (usually air, but vibrations can be equally transmitted in a liquid or solid medium). But vibrating air isn’t by itself sound. Sound is the perception (and possible interpretation) of those vibrations, and that takes a detection device and software (ears and a brain). So, there is no sound without ears and a brain, although the vibrating air is quite real regardless.

Time too, by way of my analogy, is akin to sound; change or rate-of-change is akin to the vibrating air. The former two (time and sound) are perceptions of physical events; the latter two (change and vibrating air) are the real physical events.

You’d think that therefore time wouldn’t exist in a vacuum or at a temperature of absolute zero, as how could anything change in a vacuum which contains nothing or at absolute zero when all motion ceases? Ah, enter the weird and wonderful world of quantum physics and discover that quantum activity, happenings, change, motion, etc. exists even in an apparent perfect vacuum and even at as close to absolute zero as makes no odds. In quantum physics, there’s no possibility of a perfect vacuum; absolute zero is only abstract and can’t ever be actually achieved. Therefore, time always exists as well. There seems to be no way to ever shut down quantum activity and achieving a perfect vacuum and/or absolute zero, so we’re in no danger of ever having our perception of time cease.

The shortest (quantum) unit of time possible is just that interval below which no possible change can happen. In other words, even the quickest ever possible change one can imagine takes an absolute minimum amount of time.

Change also implies there must be causality – there must be a cause that produces an effect, or in other words, something is affected by something else that occurred previously. Going from cause to effect implies a change and a time interval must have taken place into which that change fits. This introduces the commonly used phrase ‘arrow of time’. If time is our perception of change, then what is the ‘arrow of time’? Methinks it’s the reality that on the macro scale at least change happens only in one direction – cause precedes effect; effect follows cause, and that’s change. Examples of such one way cause and effect change include dropping the china cup and it breaks. A broken cup does assemble itself and then leap off the floor into your hand. Humans tend to be conceived, get born, grow up and age. Hair turns gray (or falls out), you get wrinkles and liver spots, and you die. You don’t rise from the grave, re-animate, and age backwards towards childhood and pop back into the womb! A hot cup of coffee cools off to room temperature. A cold cup of coffee doesn’t heat up by itself; even if there’s potential energy enough in the environment (air molecules flying around) to theoretically heat it up.  In other words, you can’t unscramble (or un-boil) an egg. 

Present Time: The Concept of ‘Now’: Does the present actually exist? We speak of it was if it does. But does it? Now I’m sure there’s no debating that there is a past, and that there will be a future. I’m sure there’s no debating that what we’d call five years ago exists in the past; five years on from when you read this is clearly the future. What about five months ago, or ahead?  What about five days or five hours or five seconds? Is half a second ago the past? Is half a second hence the future? Of course it is. In fact, I suggest you can split units of time ever shorter and shorter, but still admit that ‘ago’ means past; hence means future, even if 0.000005 of a second ago really is past, and 0.000005 of a second hence is the future. So where comes the ‘now’ or the present?

While there is a past, and will be a future, there really does exist a present. There apparently is such a thing as the shortest interval of time and nothing shorter can exist in reality. That shortest interval of time is known as Planck-Wheeler time, below which time as we know it ceases to exist. It’s about 10 to the minus 43^rd of a second. That’s how long your present lasts for! One Planck-Wheeler time unit behind you is now forever locked in as part of your unalterable past. One Planck-Wheeler time unit ahead, is still part of your malleable (free will?) future.

Even without resorting to quite such a tiny present, physics logic suggests that you really are an isolated individual that cannot share the present with the rest of the world. Lets imagine this couple, say we call them Clive and Jane, sitting down for their evening meal. Clive says to Jane, “pass the salt please darling”. Now Clive utters that phrase in his present and Jane hears it in her present. But both presents aren’t simultaneous. When Jane hears it in her present, it’s simultaneously Clive’s past because it takes time for sound to travel from voice to ear (and light from mouth to eye). Actually, when Jane hears the word “salt”, “pass the” is already in her past while “please darling” is still in her future. In other words, Clive and Jane can’t ever share the same present even though both pass through identical simultaneously now’s.

Here’s a form of time travel. When Jane looks in a mirror, the image she sees in her present is actually of herself from her past – an ever so slightly younger version of herself because it takes an interval of time for the light to be reflected off Jane, onto the mirror, reflected off that, and back to Jane’s eyes.

In summary, nothing you see or hear has the exact same reality that you perceive in your present because there has been a time lag and things change over time – even incredibly short intervals of time. A common example is looking at a distant star. The star you see in you’re here and now isn’t the same star that exists in that same here and now. You’re looking at a star, which, for all you know, just may no longer exist!

Of course you do live your entire life in the actual ‘now’ – you certainly don’t literally live in any part of your past, nor your future. Your life, your lifetime of ‘now’, is a string of Planck-Wheeler time units.

It’s About Time – For a Change: Part Two

Introduction: The real nature of what we call ‘time’ is one of the Big Questions. It’s been debated ever since humans evolved thought and language. That puzzlement remains true to the average person today, although ‘time’ has become the professional subject or province of philosophers, metaphysicists, and theoretical physicists, not to forget many a science fiction author! Here’s my two cents worth – ‘time’ is an illusion!

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Travel through Time? The question remains despite my earlier negation; can you revisit and experience a past event? Can there be an instant (or not so instant) replay? Take the example of the now dispersed ink in the bowl of water. If all the ink bits (particles) were to exactly retrace their movements (that’s just so highly improbable that you’d wait longer than the age of our Universe to actually see it), they would eventually come together as an ink drop. If they now retrace those retraced movements (ditto on the statistical improbability) you get back to the exact same configuration of dispersed ink bits in the bowl of water. You will have witnessed an instant (or not so instant) replay of a past event. You would have in a sense travelled back in time to ‘record’ an event that had already happened. Of course you would have ‘time’ travelled with respect to that specific event and only that event.

Ah, that word ‘record’. Of course you could have filmed the original ink drop to dispersed ink event then watched the film at a later date, but that’s cheating a bit, don’t you think?

Assuming for a moment that time is actually something tangible and that travel through it is possible (that’s in agreement with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity). Einstein’s Relativity aside, I’d maintain that travel backwards in time is probably nonsense.

If you go back in time with a view to either preventing something from happening or inaugurating something and you succeed, then when you return to your own present time the original motive to go back in time in the first place has ceased to exist. That’s because in your now altered present, there’s nothing motivating you to go back in time and so you don’t, but if you don’t then you couldn’t have changed the past in the first place. That actually suggests that your actions have split the Universe and generated two timelines (or universes), one in which you go back to fix something, and one in which you don’t because there’s nothing that needs fixing.

If you don’t succeed, if you can’t tamper with the past* then it’s all an exercise in futility and so there’s no point being a damn fool about it. If at first you don’t succeed, give up!

If you go back in time just to observe (as historian, scientist or even tourist), your very presence in the past has introduced a change that didn’t previously exist, and any change has a ripple effect which will change, even if only slightly, your own present, in you’re your before-the-fact time travelling present was different to your after-the-fact time travelling present, which could, as we’ll see, generate a paradox. You may not care about the alteration, but other people may not be so happy and laid back with your inadvertent meddling.

But wait a second. Those other people probably wouldn’t know or be aware that anything had altered. Having reset the clock when you went back in time, the ripples would have become part and parcel of their world view, so only you, upon your return (having bypassed all the rippling) would notice the change.

But what if you go back in time only to materialize in front of a speeding train and are killed. Of course that doesn’t affect your ancestors so presumably they still meet and marry and breed and ultimately your born – again – only to go back in time and get hit by that train!  

Or, you materialize back in time and so startling someone of that era into failing to notice that train and gets killed. Now say that someone was your father-to-be; your father before he met your mother. Now you have two universes – timelines – again. One timeline is where you went back in time and presumably returned; one in which you were never born.

That’s one of many variations on the ‘grandfather paradox’ which in general has as a plot where you go back in time and somehow prevent your own birth by say, killing your grandfather before he met your grandmother, or in a less gruesome way, prevented them from ever meeting. When I was a teenager I remember writing a short story (never published) where a group of scientists travelled back in time some four billion years to just after the Earth formed and solidified and cooled. One of the scientists was a pipe smoker, and after finishing his smoke, tapped out the pipe ashes into a small puddle of water. Of course that puddle was the very puddle that was to have given rise to that first proto-cell, but the pipe ash polluted the puddle and so that origin of life event never happened, and so back in what would have been the 20^th Century, the sun shone down on a sterile planet! The only trouble with the story was that four billion years ago, there was no oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere so one couldn’t smoke. Still, it was the mother of all grandfather paradoxes!   

Here’s another time travelling curve ball coming your way. You have a set of coordinates with respect to Planet Earth – latitude, longitude, and altitude. But you also have a set of coordinates with respect to the Moon – lunar latitude, longitude and altitude. You have a set of coordinates with respect to the Sun (solar latitude, longitude and altitude). Ditto Mars, and ditto the nearest star and ditto the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, etc. In fact, although they change from moment because of relative motions of all the bodies concerned (that also applies to you and Planet Earth since you move around), you have a set of coordinates with respect to every bit of matter in the Universe. The question is, when you time travel, what set of coordinates do you take with you? Where exactly do you end up? It’s taken for granted in works of fiction that its Earth’s coordinates, but is it necessarily so? What if you retain your exact position (relative to where exactly is a mystery) but travel in time. Then presumably when you materialize else-when, the Earth will have moved far away, and there you are flailing around in empty space, breathing a deep vacuum!

So we see that while time travel stories are a staple of the sci-fi authors’ bag-of-tricks – they stir up those little grey cells – there doesn’t appear to be much chance of time travel in any physical reality we know of. Time travel is only a reality in the imagination. We in fact have a version of the Fermi Paradox here. While the Fermi Paradox referred to aliens that should be knocking on our collective doors (“where is everybody?”), if time travel were possible, as astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has so absolutely pointed out, then where are all those gawking time travelling tourists and historians from our future?

*Akin to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture which states that there is as yet some undiscovered principle in physics which will make it impossible to travel back in time and thus make the Universe safe for historians.

Further recommended readings about time and time travel:

Carroll, Sean; From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time; Dutton, New York; 2010:

Davies, Paul; About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution; Penguin Books, London; 1995:

Gott, J. Richard; Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time; Phoenix, London; 2002:

Hawking, Stephen & Penrose, Roger; The Nature of Space and Time; Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; 1996:

Hawking, Stephen W. et al.; The Future of Spacetime; W.W. Norton and Company, N.Y.; 2002:

Le Poidevin, Robin; Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time; Oxford University Press, Oxford; 2003:

Lockwood, Michael; The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe; Oxford University Press, Oxford; 2005:

Mahid, Shahn (Editor); On Space and Time; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 2008:

Randles, Jenny; Breaking the Time Barrier: The Race to Build the First Time Machine; Paraview Pocket Books, New York; 2005:

Toomey, David; The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics; W.W. Norton & Company, New York; 2007:

It’s About Time – For a Change: Part One

Introduction: The real nature of what we call ‘time’ is one of the Big Questions. It’s been debated ever since humans evolved thought and language. That puzzlement remains true to the average person today, although ‘time’ has become the professional subject or province of philosophers, metaphysicists, and theoretical physicists, not to forget many a science fiction author! Here’s my two cents worth – ‘time’ is an illusion!

What Is Time? Time is, IMHO, an illusion. Time has no real independent existence – it can’t stand by itself. If you removed all the matter and energy from the Universe, would there be left anything we could address as time? Time is just our way of keeping track of, and measuring rate of change in matter and/or energy. If nothing ever changed it would be nonsense to talk about time. The flow of time; the arrow of time; is just the flow of macro things changing. If everything were somehow ‘frozen in time’ – like a single frame from a film – then there is no actual time that can be discussed or measured. So we don’t in any sense measure something that is time, we measure rate of change and call that time.

Actually you measure rate of change by another rate of change. For example, the rate of change from birth to death is usually measured by the rate of change in position of the Earth orbiting the Sun (years and fractions of years) and rate of change of position of the Earth rotating around on its axis (days and fractions of days). Another example: The rate of change between the beginning of your lunch hour and the ending of your lunch hour is usually measured by the rate of change of the hands of a clock (sixty 360 degree sweeps of the minute hand or a 30 degrees clockwise change in the hour hand) or the rate of change in the numbers on your digital watch, say from 1:00 to 2:00. Translated, a variable or uncertain rate of change (lifespan; length of a lunch ‘hour’) is usually measured by a standard, invariable, predictable rate of change.

Now rate of change is affected by gravity – a function of mass – the greater the mass the greater the gravity and the slower things change from A to B in that gravitational field, but that slowness is only relative to someone else also measuring A to B but who is in a lesser gravitational field. A clock at the top of a tall building (lesser gravity being further from Earth’s centre) ticks at a faster rate than an identical clock at street level (which has higher gravity due to being closer to Earth’s centre). Rate of change is also affected by velocity. The faster you go, the slower things change from A to B, again however it’s relative to someone else also measuring A to B but who is moving at a lower velocity relative to you. That’s why it’s the theory of relativity! The standard example is the twin paradox – if your identical twin zooms off in a spaceship at extreme velocities to the distant stars, stops, reverses direction, and returns at that high rate of speed to Planet Earth, and to you, you’ll find your twin has aged to a far lesser degree than you. You now have grey hair and wrinkles; your interstellar travelling twin is still in her youthful prime of life.

Time vs. Time Travel: I’ll poor water on this fire at the outset by stating again that time is but an illusion. Time doesn’t exist; therefore time travel isn’t possible. Time is but a label, like your own name is but a label, and has no more reality than the label ‘Wednesday’. We just arbitrarily call every 7^th ‘day’ Wednesday, but you can no more hold Wednesday in your hands and you can time. Time, repeating myself, has no independent reality. You can’t assign any physical properties to the concept. I mean time isn’t a solid, it isn’t a liquid, and it isn’t a gas. Time has no size, weight, colour, texture, density, it doesn’t vibrate or have a wavelength, ditto no odour or flavour, it has no temperature or pressure, it doesn’t consist of any known combination of known forces and/or elementary particles, it corresponds to no known element or compound. You can’t pour time into a bottle and store it; you can’t confine time in a force field or in a prison cell or trap it on a piece of sticky fly paper. Therefore, if time has no substance, one can not actually travel through time.

What we perceive as ‘time’ is, again repeating myself, nothing but change – change in our environment; in our natural world; in our mechanical devices; and even in ourselves and associated companions (animal and human). Repeat – time is but an illusion. Change is real (cause and effect) since it involves forces and particles; energy and matter, the sorts of things that when you kick them, they kick back. We measure ‘time’ by the rate things change; rate of change is what we call ‘time’. Repeat - it’s the change (in something) that is real. 

Now on the macro scale, that is scales we interact with on a day-to-day basis, change appears to all intents and purposes to go one way (usually from a state or high order to a state of disorder) and so we view time as flowing from past to present to future – in one direction; order to disorder – past to present to future. But change in just one direction (order to disorder – past to present to future) is ultimately a function of numbers and probability. The simple illustration is to introduce a drop of ink into a bowl of water. That’s a high order situation. Now left to itself, there will be a change. The ink will disperse throughout the bowl of water. That’s a state of disorder. If a disordered uniform mix of ink and water separated all by itself into a drop of pure ink and a bowl of pure water (high order), that too is change, but we would interpret or view such an event as going backwards in time. If you viewed such a happening on film, you’d immediately conclude the film was being run backwards.

There’s a far greater probability for individual ink particles to spread out throughout a large volume than to come together in a small space. There’s lots of pathways to spread out; far fewer pathways to come together. But at the micro level, the level at which those individual ink particles do their thing, they don’t care where in the bowl of water they are. They are just as ‘happy’ to be all together as a drop of ink, as dispersed and diluted. If they do come together as a drop of ink from a dispersed/diluted state, that’s statistically unlikely, but such an event violates no laws of physics. It would be going from a state of maximum disorder to a highly ordered state; or, from an apparent future to present to past ordering. Such a change would appear for all practical purposes as apparent time travel – going backwards in time.

The catch – there’s always a catch – is while all those ink particles are defying statistical probability and undergoing apparent time-reversal, the rest of the cosmos is acting in a statistically normal way – going forward in ‘time’. So, perhaps we have a Universe where for 99.9999% of the time, 99.9999% of events within the Universe march to the beat of the standard past – present – future ordering of things. That is, in terms of change happening in a statistically probable way. While now and again tiny pockets of the Universe reverse direction, they do so at least just temporarily.  One can only defy statistically probability for only so long. So the ink particles come back together again as a drop of ink within a bowl of water – then what? They no doubt reverse direction again and proceed normally.

An analogy might be that while some individuals are winners while playing the slot machines (high order), the club still rakes in the profits from the vastly greater majority of (disordered) losers, and that no doubt the few highly ordered winners will eventually descend into a state of disorder and contribute ultimately to the club’s profit margin! It’s more statistically likely for a winner to become a loser than for a loser to become a winner.

Consider electrons. On average, any given electron has a very high probability of participating in a changing set of circumstances consistent with statistically probability. That is, the electron is moving forward in ‘time’. But if in those rare (loser to winner) occasions the changing set of circumstances goes against the grain of statistically probability, then we would view that electron as moving backwards in ‘time’. But there ultimately is no backwards or forwards in time, just change which statistically goes or moves in one general direction (order to disorder), but which can now and again, albeit briefly, go the reverse direction (disorder to order).

To belabour the point, what we call the past is change which has already happened; the present is change which is happening; the future is change that will happen.

To be continued…

A Unified Theory of Time Travel: Part Two

The work of Albert Einstein and the ideas of Stephen Hawking differ when it comes to the even theoretical possibilities of time travel to the past. However, both points of view can be accommodated by invoking the concept of parallel worlds. It’s a case then of having your time travel cake and eating it too but without fear of creating a paradox tummy ache.  

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

What’s to prevent those from a parallel universe meddling and altering our time stream? It’s not enough for them to have a Prime Directive against that – we all know Prime Directives are meant to be broken! So, it looks like Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture must apply to those visitors from parallel universes to our Universe as well. I mean what difference does it make to your existence whether you travel back in time within your own universe and kill your mother before you were conceived, or some serial killer escaping from a parallel universe to our Universe who kills your mother before you were conceived – even though in the latter case there’s no paradox, you still wouldn’t have been conceived of here in anyone’s philosophy!

OK, so relativity allows time travel back in time, but only to parallel universes. The Hawking Chronology Protection Conjecture not only prevents time travel paradoxes in general, but it also prevents parallel universe time travellers meddling and altering our timeline; ditto we humans time travelling to someone else’s parallel universe. But how would the Hawking Chronology Protection Conjecture actually accomplish this? My best guess is that parallel universes aren’t in phase – they aren’t polarized or synchronized in-phase like a laser beam, or the light that passes through your polarized sunglasses – otherwise we’d have some rather hard evidence of them; certainly way more than we do now.

So, if we go to parallel universe B or those from parallel universe B visits us, we’ll, or they’d be respectively out of phase with respect to the universe they are now in. Translated, they, or we, could look, but not touch for all practical purposes. I say for all practical purposes as now and again what’s out of phase (high probability – the usual state of affairs) will sync into phase (that’s rare). But the in-phase times are so few and far between, and last for such a brief duration that it’s unlikely to result in any inadvertent or deliberate timeline alterations. That’s my rendering of the Hawking Chronology Protection Conjecture – he could well have other ways and means in mind.

So another way of putting this is that time travellers would be spectral or ghostlike in their host universe, and maybe that’s where our traditions of ghosts and other things that go bump in the night come from! This is much like the parallel universe ghost or shadow photons that are conjectured to explain some highly mysterious aspects or phenomena contained within the famous quantum double slit* experiment. Now an obvious question is how do all the parallel universe ghost photons get into our physics labs where double slit experiments are carried out? I mean there are no local macro Black Hole or wormhole exits present – are there? Yes in fact there are! Not a macro wormhole, but a micro wormhole – actually wormholes. Theoretically, micro wormholes should exist all around you. It’s just that they are at quantum levels – incredible tiny; way subatomic in size. And they exist for just nanoseconds before collapsing.  They are just part of the quantum foam** reality at super microscopic levels, a reality at the level where all things exhibit the quantum jitters or quantum fluctuations. Thus, every second of every day, everywhere, there are little quantum gateways – quantum sized wormholes connections between universes which quantum sized particles – like photons – can traverse! From the standpoint of the double slit experiment, it doesn’t matter whether the parallel universe’s ghost photons came from the past, future or present – just as long as they are, indeed, present!

Now you may think it would be easy to detect these ghostly photons. Just put a photon detector in a totally dark and sealed room. Well, not quite so easy. Some photons can pass through ‘solid’ matter. X-Ray photons anyone? Radio wave photons pass through the walls of your home. If you look at a bright light, you’ll still see light even if you close your eyes. So, your photon detector in your dark and sealed room could easily detect our local variety.

The ghostly bits aside, parallel universe time travelers (or even ordinary time travelers from within our Universe assuming Hawking is wrong)) might explain the sometimes uncanny, often incredible look-a-likes that we all seem to have. A long shot to be sure, but something interesting to ponder.

There’s still one more problem on the horizon. Just because a macro Black Hole or wormhole plunks you into a parallel universe (and of course you’ve got to be able to survive the trip itself which might be problematical), doesn’t mean you’re going to be with spitting distance of your ultimate destination(s) – say a parallel Earth(s). So, time travelers might also need more conventional transport – like Flying Saucers (okay, forget the saucers – like spaceships with fins and rocket motors). But then what’s really there to distinguish a visiting time traveler from a parallel universe from say a  run-of-the-mill extraterrestrial from within our own Universe? Maybe you could just put out the welcome mat for both options!

One final thought. Could there be a Clayton’s time travel? - Time travel without traveling in time? At the risk of making Einstein turn over in his grave; I’m going to propose a universal NOW across all universes. Now I know that NOW, when it comes to observers, is a relative thing. An observer in Martian orbit sees Mars’ NOW somewhat before you on Planet Earth sees the same Mars’ NOW because the speed of light is finite. And relative motions and velocities complicate what is NOW. But, I propose (a thought experiment remember) to instantaneously freeze-frame the entire collection of universes’ NOW. Everyone and everything everywhere comes to an instant standstill. Right! We now have a universal NOW that we can study at our leisure (the freeze doesn’t apply to you and me – we’re outside the space-time continuum).

Let’s focus on that subset of all parallel universes – all parallel Earths and time travel between them. Now there’s no reason to assume that all parallel Earths are identical in all aspects. Indeed, some parallel universes may not even contain a parallel Earth! There maybe some parallel Earths identical or so close to identical to our Planet Earth as makes no odds – abodes you’d feel right at home in. Other Earths would differ in various ways, some minor, some major. Still others might be really weird and alien, as in having evolved a dinosaur society, civilization and technology. There was no parallel asteroid impact 65 million years ago; thus no human beings around the traps 65 millions later.

Your subset of parallel Earths would show near infinite diversity in infinite combinations. I say ‘near’ because you can only stretch the term ‘Earth’ or ‘Earth-like’ so far and no farther, before it’s not Earth or Earth-like. A 100% oceanic world is not Earth. If a parallel ‘Earth’ has Venus-like temperatures, it is not Earth-like. If it has a density approaching that of a neutron star, it is not Earth-like. If it has no life on it, even though in all other respects it is a near carbon copy of our Earth, it is not Earth-like. 

Now it’s back to the NOW subset of parallel Earths and Earth-like abodes. There’s no reason to assume that evolutionary development; that evolutionary development rates would proceed in each and every case in an identical fashion. Some parallel Earths would still be in the dinosaur era (if they had dinosaurs of course). In some parallel Earths, cavemen and sabre tooth tigers rule. In others, it’s Biblical times, or Medieval times or the era when Britannia ruled the waves. Others in our absolute NOW, on yet other parallel Earths, or parallel earthlings, might have just invented the wireless or landed on their Moon (if they have one). On some parallel Earths it may already be what to us will be the 23^rd or 24^th Century with interstellar warp drive capabilities at hand – and even way beyond that. So, you could seemingly travel to the past and future while actually remaining in our NOW. You’ve travelled in time without really travelling in time, or, time travel without the paradoxes – but maybe that spoils all the intellectual fun of contemplating time travel in the first place!

*The problem solved here is how can you get a classic wave interference pattern behind two slits you fire photons through; even when you fire the photons at say a rate of one per hour? Who you gonna call – ghost photons of course to the rescue.

**Quantum foam – the world may look pretty smooth from a distance, but as you keep magnifying the finer details, the micro world gets ever so slightly bumpier. Close in some more and things get rougher still, until at quantum level everything is a seething cauldron of tumultuous activity. It’s like the sea that looks perfectly smooth and tranquil from Earth orbit, but at rowboat level, you’re terrified as that 50 foot wave comes crashing down on you.

Further recommended readings about time travel:

Gott, J. Richard; Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time; Phoenix, London; 2002:

Hawking, Stephen W. et al.; The Future of Spacetime; W.W. Norton and Company, N.Y.; 2002:

Randles, Jenny; Breaking the Time Barrier: The Race to Build the First Time Machine; Paraview Pocket Books, New York; 2005:

Toomey, David; The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics; W.W. Norton & Company, New York; 2007: