{"id":2162,"date":"2010-07-28T07:10:46","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T11:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=2162"},"modified":"2010-07-26T12:42:20","modified_gmt":"2010-07-26T16:42:20","slug":"time-in-a-bottle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/07\/time-in-a-bottle.html","title":{"rendered":"Time in a Bottle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tardis\"<\/a>Time travel is one of those things that seems so simple until you think about it too much and then your brain just hurts. It isn’t so much the mechanics of traveling in time.\u00a0 It doesn’t really matter if you prefer to travel in a DeLorean, a phone booth, a TARDIS, or a starship slingshot around the sun.\u00a0 In a pinch you can even use an enchanted pocket watch or even the occasional hot tub.\u00a0 After all, while Einstein’s relativity predicts it should be possible, his equations didn’t specify the type of vehicle required.\u00a0 Yet it’s the mind bending implications of what happens once you do start hopping about on the timeline that are really interesting.<\/p>\n

The implications of being able to travel in time depend entirely on the assumptions you make about how time is woven together.\u00a0 And this is something humans currently don’t understand, which gives you a lot of latitude to be ridiculously creative.\u00a0 This is maybe why it is a frequent dinner table topic at my house.<\/p>\n

Most often in fiction, time is seen as a dependent tapestry of sorts.\u00a0 If you go back and make changes, then your future is disrupted.\u00a0 The most obvious problem here being the famed “grandfather paradox.”\u00a0 Suppose you went back in time and killed your grandfather before your father was ever born.\u00a0 Then you would not have been born.\u00a0 So you couldn’t have gone back in time to kill your grandfather.\u00a0 So he’s still alive, and you are born… except that you killed him.<\/p>\n

There are other silly implications of the tapestry model which Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure had great fun with, and Dr. Who inexplicably adopted for their most recent season finale.\u00a0 Assuming you have access to a time machine, you can effect instantaneous changes to the present by simply deciding that at some point in the future you’ll go back into the past and effect the change.\u00a0 Suppose you find yourself locked out of your house.\u00a0 You could decide that later today you’ll pop back to yesterday and hide the spare key under the plant on the porch.\u00a0 Voila!\u00a0 The key is now there when previously it wasn’t.\u00a0 So basically, as soon as you get your hands on a flux capacitor, you can perform magic.\u00a0 Cooler yet, you will have always been able to perform magic.\u00a0 And since you can’t, it means you never will.\u00a0 Another dream shot to hell.<\/p>\n

To get around this, some physicists have proposed a quantum model of time.\u00a0 Essentially it posits that time is not linear, but rather branches out at each instance to allow for all possible outcomes.\u00a0 So when you go back and make a change, it’s not really a change since both the reality with the change and without the change co-exist.\u00a0 Aside from the brain cramp induced by trying to conceive of a tree with infinite branches each in turn having infinite child branches and so on out until infinity, this creates the WTF paradox.\u00a0 In essence, any time you are confronted with a decision, it doesn’t matter what you do because the mere existence of the decision point means you made all available choices in one of the parallel universes.\u00a0 So why sweat the choice?\u00a0 I mean, WTF?\u00a0 Is your grandpa alive or dead?\u00a0 Well, yes.<\/p>\n

Along comes Seth Lloyd at MIT who has another model for all this timey-wimey stuff<\/a>.\u00a0 Since quantum outcomes are all probabilistic, Lloyd’s theory is that probabilities are altered to prevent paradoxes.\u00a0 That is, the universe actually enforces rules against time travel paradoxes by making paradox inducing actions improbable.\u00a0 This is all predicated on the existence of “closed timelike curves”.\u00a0 These structures are information pathways across space-time that link paradoxical events.\u00a0 In essence, should you try and go back and kill your grandfather, the chances of the bullet being a dud or the gun misfiring become a statistical certainty.\u00a0 Basically, the universe will simply not allow you to ruin your grandmother’s day.<\/p>\n

Einstein’s equations allow for these closed timelike curves, and Lloyd’s team has even done some experiments with photons demonstrating that quantum statistics are demonstrably altered when paradoxical possibilities are introduced.\u00a0 This is a far cry from proof about how time works, but it is one of the more promising steps I’ve seen, and so far it makes my brain hurt less than the other possibilities.\u00a0 And understanding the nature of time is somewhat of a prerequisite to doing a time-ship conversion on an old British police box.<\/p>\n

Pass the salad please?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time travel is one of those things that seems so simple until you think about it too much and then<\/p>\n

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