MadSci Network: Physics |
Hello, Aaron! It's nice to get a question from a fellow Utahn. First, let me say that thus far, none of the claims pertaining to time manipulation have withstood scientific scrutiny. For years rumors have circulated about the Philadelphia Experiment, a U.S. Navy attempt in 1943 to make a battleship invisible to radar by generating a high frequency electro-magnetic field around the ship. Some claim that the field not only distorted radar signatures, but it altered space-time surrounding the ship and temporarily sent it into the future. It's a fascinating story, but it isn't accepted science. I recommend it to you - not because I endorse it, but because I endorse studying many different viewpoints. And although I do not believe it, I cannot state it is not true. When I was in my early 20's, I worked out the following hypothesis. Remember, what you are about to read is not science. It's just an idea of mine. My intuition tells me this is the way things could be, but it's merely speculation. Imagine a chalkboard with a horizontal line drawn on it. The line represents time. A point on the line represents now. Everything left of the point is the past, and everything right of the point is the future. In history class, we called this a TIME LINE. But the surface of our chalkboard is two dimensional. It has a vertical aspect as well as a horizontal one. Imagine each decision we make as a fork in the time line. Choice #1 takes us along one reality, and choice #2 takes us along another one. These parallel universes, or alternate realities, or life as it would have been if we had chosen differently, are represented by lines parallel to the time line. We are filling our two dimensional chalkboard with multiple TIME LINES within a TIME PLANE. Suppose we want to travel to a parallel time line and see how things would be if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. In a TIME LINE this is impossible. Within a TIME PLANE it is also impossible. But in TIME SPACE we could pull the chalk away from the chalkboard and place it on another time line within the time plane, so long as we placed it at the same time. In other words, alternate realities share the same time as we do. If it's Tuesday afternoon in Utah in this reality, then it's Tuesday afternoon in Utah in all the other realities. Same time, different reality. The everyday world we live in includes the three spatial dimensions plus time. So far, the chalkboard hypothesis has only used the three spacial dimensions. TIME TIME allows us not only to move the chalk vertically from one time line to another within the same time plane, it also allows us to move it horizontally. Different time, same or different reality. That is how I see it. How to manipulate it - how to travel on a time plane, or through time space, or time time, instead of just down the time line, I have no idea. One last thing. Massive gravitational distortions, such as those near black holes, and extreme velocities, such as those encountered as an object approaches the speed of light, most certainly do affect time. These phenomena are natural consequences of gravity and velocity, just as gravity is a natural consequence of matter. There are no scientific efforts to harness these consequences that I'm aware of, but there are scientific explanations of their existence. Layne Johnson
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