When I say time travel, I'm not talking about the "movie version" of time travel. As far as I know, time travel to the past is impossible. (although I think that there is a minority in the scientific community that is still holding out hope...) But as far as time travel to the future goes, all you have to do is move fast.
Almost everyone has heard of Einstein's theory of relativity, but not many people understand what it means. What is the theory of relativity? In a nutshell, it states that the faster you move, the slower time moves for you. In other words, time is relative!
The speed limit of the universe is the speed of light, abbreviated c. This is the fastest speed possible. According to the theory of relativity, if you could somehow move that fast, time would stand still for you (relative to the rest of the universe) But you don't necessarily need to move at the speed of light to time travel. Time slows for you in proportion to how fast you move. As an example, I will use the famous "twin paradox."
Suppose you have a set of twins. One of them stays on earth and goes about his daily life, the other gets in a space ship and flies to Alpha Centauri and back at speeds approaching the speed of light. (say, .9c for example)
I'll spare you the equations, (because I have forgotten them and I'm too lazy to look them up) but the conclusion is: The twin who stayed on Earth would age about 10 years, while the twin in the space ship would only age about 5 years.
The twin in the space ship has just time traveled!
What this means then, is that any moving body is technically time traveling. If I go out and ride in my car for an hour (at like .000000001c) while you sit at home, I would only age an hour, whereas you would age 1.000000000000000000000000000001 hours.
Something similar to this has been done to experimentally verify the theory of relativity. I forget all the details, but it went something like this: 2 atomic clocks (or whatever the most accurate clocks we have) were perfectly synchronized. One was sent into orbit for a few years, while the other remained stationary, buried underground. When the orbiting clock was brought back, it differed from the Earth clock by a second or two. (which is a huge difference when you're talking about atomic clocks!)
3 comments:
Much appreciated! This was a good post; I liked it.
I think I understand what you're saying, although the aging thing still blows my mind.
This is EXACTLY what "Lost" is dealing with right now. They have established that the island has mystical powers. One is that you can't die until you've met your fate or until the island wants you to (or something). The OTHER part is that time moves more slowly on the island. People have to time travel to get on/off the island. When one of them leaves, he suffers consequences because he has been exposed to high levels of electromagnetivity. He keeps jumping around between two periods in time and can't control it. He eventually controls it by finding his "constant" - a person he speaks to in both periods of time.
Again, I think you would love this show :)
Of course nobody can die until they've met their fate. That's the definition of fate.
And I don't know about "exactly." The jumping between two time periods sounds like he can travel backwards in time.
I don't know why I never got into "Lost." Maybe someday I'll rent the first season and give it another shot.
Post a Comment