The Time Travel Conundrum|The Time Travel Conundrum|Forum|Forum: Apocalypse & Armageddon

Dawson forwarded this to me, but as he is having trouble posting it with links included he asked me to post this for him as he thinks you may enjoy those links. So Relativity speaking, take some "Time" and enjoy the "Space."

The Time Travel Conundrum:

"The non-mathematician is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of "four-dimensional" things, by feeling not unlike that awakened by thoughts of the occult. And yet there is no more common-place statement than that the world in which we live is a four-dimensional space-time continuum."----Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity, chapter 17, Minkowski's Four-Dimensional Space

Whenever you have a Guest or (open lines) caller that thinks worm holes and folded (like a sheet of paper 2 dimensional) space make for convenient "Time-travel," try this little exercise.

Take a finger on your right hand and hold it upright out in front of your chest, over by your left shoulder, and then move it slowly across in front of you to your right side. Now move your righthand finger back even with your left shoulder and do this slowly again, but this time while circling it with a finger from your left hand all the way across your chest to your right side again. Next time drop away your righthand and just allow your lefthand finger to travel spiraling in front of you from your left side to your right side repeating its spiraling progress through space, and according to your watch through time.

The first righthand finger moving across your chest represents the Sun moving through 4-D space-time through our rotating galaxy (and we all just got older in time and aged as you moved your fingers and read this).

The lefthand finger spiraling across your chest represents the Earth--as the Earth does not circle the Sun as Copernicus suggests nor in a Kepler ellipse--but is describing a spiral as it gravitationally follows its Star (the Sun) through Minkowski space-time, the mathematical model in which Einstein's theory of Special Relativity ( chapter 17) is most conveniently formulated, named after German mathematician Herman Minkowski. It is Minkowski 4-D space-time in which airport electronics system RaDAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging) theory operates that keeps your holiday jets safe from running into each other.

Now if your right side shoulder represents where the Earth is in space-time today, and your left side shoulder represents where the Earth was in space-time at, say, Jesus' birth, then in order to travel backwards in space-time from right shoulder to left shoulder would require all the energy to move the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, all the Planets, heck even the entire Milky Way and every other galaxy in the whole Universe back to where they were when the Earth was in space-time when Jesus was born.

This would actually take more energy than the sum total of all the energy moving everything in the ambient background motion of the Universe at this very moment (as you read this and age) in Minkowski space-time.

Going forward ahead in "time travel" faster than the ambient background motion of the Universe presents the same energy problem so that whenever real working physicists (and not just teaching professors with good marketing book publishers, or TV celebrity "physicists" ) see "time machines" popping up in their equations they realize there is an error somewhere.

If you were to look upon the Sun from a point above the ecliptic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.....lar_System ), as the Sun moved with the rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy, you could view it as if you took your righthand finger in front of you at nose level and moved it slowly downward toward your bellybutton. Now do this down motion from right in front of your nose, slowly again, with circling the "Sun" finger with your lefthand "Earth/planet" finger. Do it again slowly with all the fingers of your lefthand extended wide open fingers like other planets and you start to perceive the Sun as a Giant Gravity Juggler juggling all the planets, asteroids and comets and the entire Solar System in its ambient background motion through the rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy through Minkowski space-time. All of this planet juggling will sometimes cause the Earth to have an eccentric orbit which we have to then take into our mathematical models about Climate Change ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.....turbations ).

Time is not some mysterious "fourth dimension," it is the very 1st magnitude of measurement in space (time) upon which the next 3 magnitudes of one massless point is measured to another massless point in width, height and depth as coordinate points projected upon a time-continuum to describe space-time (and to measure any of this, or read any of this, we all just got older in time and space and just aged again) and to describe a Volume of space-time such as the room where you are sitting in, since you began reading this monitor, and every breath you take moving your chest through time and the space of your room.

Stand up and walk through space-time to the bathroom, note the reflection of light from your face to the mirror and back to your eyes that just traveled at the velocity of the speed of light across space-time, and then walk back to your computer and re-read this four (4) times, while the Milky Way Galaxy and the Universe has kept moving in their ambient background motion(s) through Minkowski space-time carrying your room with it. It takes "time" to move through "space" to go to the bathroom; and when you go backwards through the "same space coordinates" "back" to your monitor you did not go "back" in "time," as we all just aged forward in the fourth-dimension volume of Minkowski space-time.

If the world in which you live was only three-dimensional we would all be frozen in place like marble statues. The idea that we live in a three-dimensional world does not come from physics, but comes from Art Class' perspective drawing on a two-dimensional canvas. Blame that on Brunelleschi's mirror ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.....erspective ).

One last Finger Exercise: Pretend you are in a spaceship that has a motor that can accelerate your craft to the speed of light, and pretend your monitor has a "button" that you have to push to give you that last little bit of acceleration to go from 99.999% of the speed of light, to the full speed of light. So reach over to the monitor and push that "light speed engaged button" on your monitor and accelerate your spaceship to the full speed of light.

The problem becomes once you reach the full speed of light, you become light. So since both the deceleration button on your monitor to push to slow you down from the full speed of light, at the end of your trip, is traveling at the speed of light, and your finger needed to reach over to your monitor is also traveling at the full speed of light, your finger can never go faster than the speed of light to reach across the space inside your spaceship to reach the "deceleration from the speed of light button" on your monitor also traveling at the full speed of light, just maybe traveling 12 inches ahead of your finger in space-time. You have become forever frozen as light until, because of light's electromagnetic Inverse-square law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.....square_law ) some of your dispersed photons are absorbed by a telescope by an astronomer somewhere in a Galaxy Far Far Away.

Also note: The slowing time dilation inside a spacecraft traveling faster and faster nearing the speed of light is only experienced within the mathematical model relativity of the craft itself, and it is not experienced by the normal ambient background motion of the rest of the Universe which remains constant outside the craft.