MadSci Network: Physics
Query:

Re: Is there any evidence that time is a thing that can be manipulated?

Date: Tue Aug 24 17:19:17 1999
Posted By: Layne Johnson, Undergraduate
Area of science: Physics
ID: 932009358.Ph
Message:

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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