Jumping the Timestream: A Note from 07.20.2011

I’m writing today one year into the future because I can’t stand not knowing what’s going to happen in the next few hours.  (Strange, I realize, but I can’t just publicly ask my future self in a few hours due to contract obligations relating to the answer… so I have to send this far enough out to not cause any legal troubles.)

In short – I’ve got a phone meeting in a few hours that may result in my getting offered to participate in a TV show, and I have no idea what will happen and/or what I should do(!).  The show relates to my paper on xenoarchaeology – it triggered interest in a show on investigating suspected UFO crash sites from an archaeological perspective…  If there is an offer, accepting might stretch my scientific credibility – not to mention that my pregnant wife may object to my leaving to perform fieldwork for weeks at a time with a newborn at home.

What to do?  What to do?

So, future self: What happened?  What the heck happened?  What did you do?  Was whatever you decided to do a good idea?

Out of my mind with anticipation,

Ben

July 20, 2011.

July 20, 2011. 12:54pm.

Timestream Post: A note from 04.29.2011

So, who are you?

I’m referring to you, my offspring, who as I type this is not yet half way toward growing into a self-sustaining future person.  Jordan (my wife) and I have decided to wait to see what you are, so I don’t know yet if I’m addressing my future son or daughter…  But I can’t wait to meet you!  (-And what more perfect vehicle is there to project my question into the future than my Timestream Project?)

Whose traits will you share?  Whose aptitudes?  Likes and dislikes?  -And I’m dying for an answer to the epic pregnancy question: Blue eyes like me or green eyes like Jordan?  (Or a different color entirely?)  There are so many things I can’t wait to share and explore with you – it’s been a long time coming, but I’m quite excited to be a dad. =)

We’ve got a couple of names at the top of the list, Rowan if you’re a girl and Grayson if you’re a boy.   Though these are top-secret at the present time and may not stay at the top of the list, I feel safe sending them into the future when the point will most likely be moot!  So, maybe-Rowan or maybe-Grayson, welcome to the McGee clan!  (I suppose that’s technically redundant, but whatever.)

I’m sending this forward only a few months, (I’m impatient,) to the projected date of your birth.   By this point, we think it’ll be about Election Day, 2011.  How was the pregnancy?  The delivery?  I can’t wait!

So, best wishes to Jordan for a speedy and uneventful pregnancy, and welcome to Earth, young McGee!

Writing anxiously from the past and with love,

Ben

April 29, 2011.

04_29_2011, 02:28pm.

Time travel physics in flux

Something is rotten with the state of time travel/lightspeed physics.

To “c” (the symbolic designation for the speed of light), or not to “c”? 

-That is the question plaguing physicists in a number of recent studies with apparently conflicting results.

The "Flux Capacitor," a fictional device enabling instantaneous, bi-directional time travel. (Credit: Universal)

Traditionally, the speed of light is viewed as a barrier to physical movement.  According to conventional interpretations of Special Relativity, due to the time-slowing effect physical matter experiences as the speed of light is approached, movement through time is believed to stop at the very moment something hits “c.” 

As a result, lightspeed appears to be a barrier to movement, (see: lightspeed barrier,) and many have come to speculate based on certain geometric and philosophical arguments that moving faster than light might equate to backwards travel through time.

So, here’s where things get interesting. 

This summer, scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology announced that in a meticulous data transfer experiment, they verified that photons don’t break the lightspeed barrier, and their effects don’t appear to even slightly precede their cause.  Hence, lightspeed is a barrier and causality is confirmed, thus ruling out backwards time travel.  (On a side note, Stephen Hawking has also endorsed this view.)

However, research published just last month by researchers from the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy appears to demonstrate that neutrinos do travel faster than light, throwing everything else into question.  In the study, scientists analyzed the speed of neutrinos being emitted from the particle accelerators at CERN and discovered them arriving faster than “c” by 60 nonoseconds(!) 

While fractionally small, this is a definitely measurable quantity of time with today’s instruments.

The Time Machine, from the movie of the same name. (Credit: Warner Bros/Dreamworks)

So, it appears that lightspeed might be traversable after all.  What is currently most unclear is whether or not these findings mean that backwards time travel is possible or simply that objects may continue to move faster through space than speed c.

(Note: I fall on the latter side of the fence, predicting allowable faster-than-light movement in my 2006 Kronoscope article.  This is due to what I believe is a Newtonian conceptual parasite infecting modern Relativity interpretations.)

In any case, it’s a very exciting time for time physics – the discovery of conflicting results at the margins often heralds the imminence of a new discovery!

Digital Time Capsule note from 2010

With the ubiquity of our digital infrastructure, it occurs to me that one possible means of transmitting information across vast stretches of time may, in fact, be to simply schedule it for much-delayed delivery.

How far will this work in principle?  I feel confident I can trust WordPress’s existence for six months.  One year?  Still feels reasonable.  Ten years?  Fifty years?

So, with that in mind, I am writing this note on Sunday morning, July 18th, 2010 and sending it exactly one year into the future.  As for events occurring in my time, BP (formerly British Petroleum) has just put a new, advanced cap on the now-infamous leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.  The polarizing topic of the day seems to be how to deal with illegal immigration on our country’s southern border.  Temperatures are high here in the Las Vegas desert, pushing into the “eleventy-hot” zone during the late afternoon.  Yesterday, I planted a new flowering fruitless plum tree in the front yard, which I hope will survive the heat.

Now, I have a few questions for you.  Does 2011 appear, like years before, not much different than 2010?  I suspect as much.  Does this message find me, my readers, and those I care about in good spirits and health?  I sincerely hope so.  Did the tree I just planted survive its first summer and winter?

Even if I can’t bodily travel through time, at least right now my information can.  Let’s see how many of these time capsules make it to the future.  =)

Remember, when in doubt, make the choice you’ll least regret.

This is Ben McGee, from July 18, 2010, signing off.

July 18, 2010; 09:32am local time.

Timestream Post: A Note from 10.7.2010

10/07/2010; 09:04am

It’s October 7th, and in a few moments I’m heading out to the National Archives in Chicago in search of NERVA (the joint NASA-Atomic Energy Commission program to develop nuclear thermal rockets) material and program files.

As this is another of my digital time-travel experiment messages, I’m sending this far enough out to encompass a time-span necessary to answer my questions…  (As I see it, anyway.  My Nuclear Rocket Program term paper is due in early December.)

What will I find?  Archivists tell me I’m the first to have seriously requested access to these records in nearly three decades.

I’m terribly excited! – the anticipation!

Will I find the photos of phoebus reactors I’m looking for?  Do I unearth management information for my space studies class term paper?  Any surprises in store?

I can’t wait!  =)

Timestream Post: A Note from 10.21.2010

Almost time...

-Just a short-range temporal pot-shot this evening, and one I imagine (won’t know for certain until we get there) will be the first of these digital time travel experiment messages to actually land in the future.

The date is October 21st, 2010.  Honestly, I’m really hoping to be where you are, intrepid reader: The future.

I’m just about to proctor a geology 101 practical midterm on mineral and rock identification at the community college, and this is only the beginning of what I expect will be one of the longest, most sleep-deprived weeks of my life so far.  Due to an unfortunate coincidence of schedule shifts, I now have three midterms of my own to take within the next week-and-a-half, in addition to two rather hefty papers to write, and a radiation physics problem set sprinkled on top to complete within the next week.  (This is in addition to finding time to grade and submit the midterms I’m going to be giving here in a few minutes.)  All after work, of course.

That, and I’m staring the final hours of my 20s in the face.  Daunting is the word of the hour.

So, I’m very curious and a bit apprehensive:  Will my 30s begin with a bang or a whimper?  Can I still pull college-style, all-nighter-cram-sessions?  Do these next weeks all pan out with positive results?  Let me know!

Hopeful about the future on 10/21/2010, 5:35pm

Another Time Traveler found in 1928 film?

Chatty time traveler in 1928 movie scene background?

Just as with this 21st-Century hipster discovered at a Canadian bridge dedication in the 1940s, another historical anachronism has been spotted, this time in the 1928 Charlie Chaplin film, The Circus.  As reported by the U.K. Daily Mail, a Chaplin film expert discovered an older woman walking alone across the background of a scene in The Circus, and she is talking toward an object she is holding to her ear.

For all the world, she appears to be using a mobile phone.  (I highly recommend checking out the Daily Mail link, which includes an embedded video.)

Excitingly, this is the second high-profile anachronistic discovery within the last year, and if “time tourism” really does come into being, we can expect to discover more as the common body of historical material becomes digitized and universally search-able/accessible.

Without any compelling alternative explanations for what it is the woman is doing, it is tempting to leap to the conclusion that this is an legitimate “find.”  -And, if we take a moment to deconstruct the logic of such a scenario, interesting issues and implications arise:

• Taking the position that the object is a phone in the hands of a genuine time-traveler, this could not possibly be a standard “cellular” phone.  The transmission network to process a signal from modern-day phones wouldn’t come to exist for nearly another 70 years.  (So, at the very least, to be useful at that time the device would have to work more like a 2-way radio.)  So, is it a “phone” …?  Probably not.  A communication device?  -Plausible.

• Who is she talking to?  -Can we now infer that time-travelers, (like all good field explorers,) employ the buddy system?

• Time travel cannot be very physically-demanding, as this woman (appears) to be in relatively ordinary physical condition.  (i.e., unlike the time-traveler in the 1940s image, she’s not a young, fit “field” type, and she has evidently made the trip.)

• What are the odds of catching this on film?  Would a time traveler be unaware of the filming of a Charlie Chaplin film and be careless enough, (presuming leaving evidence of temporal tinkering is considered to be a bad thing,) to walk in front of the camera?  Does this imply an incredible coincidence?  -Or are time-travelers ubiquitous in history?

All in all, a very interesting development.  -Keep your eyes peeled next time you’re in the local library or museum.

Time Experiment: Digital Time Travel

Scientia in Posterus. (Credit: Ben McGee)

In the interest of exploring some of the more intriguing implications of our ubiquitous Cyberverse, I’ve decided to attempt to use WordPress as something of a digital time machine.

You see, there’s a “Schedule” feature for blog posts that I realized should work as long as WordPress and the Internet are around, and through it, we may be able to send information across immense spans of time.  (Sure, this feature is intended to make it easy to spread out posts over the course of days or weeks, but why not send messages a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium out?)

-So, presuming the digital infrastructure is going to exist for a while, I’m going to send messages from the present into the future at regular intervals, and each message will be sent to an exponentially-more-distant temporal location.  (E.g., one month, 6 months, 1 year, 10 years, etc.)

Then, when I receive a message from my past self, I’ll post an honest reply as though I were having a real-time conversation with myself in the past.  The conversation might be light or very revealing, depending on what mood it is that’s prompted me to talk to the future – and I’ll do my best to answer in kind.  In this way, we’ll see if I can’t engage in a bizarre, superchronistic conversation across the very fabric of linear time.

(For the interested, I’ve created a new post category called, “Digital Time Travel,” which will chronicle the experiment.)

…And, the kicker here is that to my surprise, I’ve already started the experiment.  As it would turn out, I had a similar idea months ago and already sent a message into the future.  However, at the time I thought it’d be a one-time deal – a single digital time capsule.  Now, I think it’d be better-suited as a long-term experiment; An exchange that breaks the timestream.

Anyway, I thought I’d put the experiment out there so that when messages from the past start showing up on my blog in the present, everyone won’t assume I’ve finally gone all the way around the bend.

(Man, in the spirit of the experiment, I can’t wait to tell my past self what he involuntarily started when that original “time capsule” message finally arrives…)

Time flies, and I hope to invoke some turbulence.

Hawking promotes forward-only Time Travel

Eminent physicist and cosmologist Dr. Stephen Hawking has recently come out to say that he no longer fears ridicule and endorses the possibility of time travel.  While this might seem like a revelation, his actual endorsement is not.  Let me explain.

Einstein’s Special Relativity has shown for nearly the last century that objects appear to move through time more slowly the faster they move through space.  This phenomenon has been measured, though the effect is so slight in everyday experience that physicists ignore it.  However, if astronauts were to travel in a spaceship very close to the speed of light, (a version of the Twin Paradox,) the effect would be very pronounced (see: Time Dilation), and our intrepid explorers would zoom forward in time – in a few years time spent away for the astronauts, the Earth and everyone on it will have aged centuries.

This is the only sort of time travel Dr. Hawking has come out to endorse – forward time travel as a result of moving quickly - which, as I mentioned above, has been a known effect for nearly a hundred years.  Backward time travel in Dr. Hawking’s view is still impossible because it would allow violations of causality, which bother him.  (Endorsing that kind of time travel would have truly been a revelation!)

So, nothing new here.  However, anything that gets the physics of Relativity and time travel into public media is okay in my book!

…and being that Dr. Hawking is so clever, maybe that was his intent all along.

The First Frontier, part 1. (Time update)

This blog was created to document two things, and so far, I’ve only mentioned the first.  The second of these two objectives is the creation of a Time Machine.

As for this post’s title, I’ve taken to calling Time the First Frontier.  This is for the following reason: Since serious philosophical and (proto)scientific inquiry began into the nature of things thousands of years ago, before we were even aware of outer space and the universe at large, the nature of Time has been given serious and constant attention.  And, unlike the nature of thought, belief, medicine, life, physics, geology, and astronomy, there has been little (if any) progress toward a greater understanding of Time since Aristotle.  Hence, I feel like Time has position.  Plus, could any concept exist without first considering Time?  (What is a tree?  Or more to the point, when is a tree a tree?  A seed?  After one year of growth as a sapling?  After 10-years of growth?  100-years?)

Also, I recognize that the distance between time travel and space exploration may appear great, so one may be given to wonder why I’m pursuing both.  However, the divide is not so wide as it seems.  Given the insurmountable distances involved with the prospect of traveling between even the nearest stars, what is a practical starship but a time machine that moves?  …Something to think about.

In any event, since I’ve made a bit of progress on this front as well, (at least in a theoretical sense,) I figured I’d recap my work to date.

Back in High School, I was deep into familiarizing myself with Einstein’s Relativity.  Trolling the university library on the weekends, (when I wasn’t out hiking in Red Rock Canyon,) I found that Special Relativity held specific interest to me because it defined every apparent impossible operation of the universe:  Light always travels the same speed even to different obververs moving at different speeds.  Time slows down as you approach the speed of light.  Light speed is a barrier to all movement.  The sequence of events in the universe can be variable.

These were profound and confounding statements which no one seemed either to question or to fully understand.  Even into college, so-called “relativistic effects” were swept away as oddities experienced at extreme speed with no practical application to physics or our general understanding.  Something in my gut made me feel as though they couldn’t have been more wrong.

The most “advanced” academics in theoretical physics typically have said that Time does not, in effect, actually exist.  It’s an illusion, as are ideas of Doc Brown jumping into a nuclear-powered time-traveling automobile to change the past or future.  The past no longer exists, and the future doesn’t yet exist.  There is just the now.  They have a point – it makes sense that time is just another measurement tool, like an inch or a pound.  I can’t hand you an inch or a pound, but we use them frequently.  Time, then, is the same, but instead of measuring length or weight, time measures causality.  It’s just something we invented to help quanitfy and measure the change that is ubiquitous in the Universe.

But there’s a problem.

I realized with clarity for the first time in the year 2000 that if the time experienced by something could change based upon how it moves, (as Relativity predicted and we subsequently measured,) then some part of time must exist.  In so many words, because Relativity works, Time cannot be completely illusory.

Thus I began the earliest stages of developing a new language of physics reordered with respect to Time.  I would come to call it Temporal Mechanics in a paper published 6 years later, where I would claim (prove?) that physical Time does exist and in doing so turn interpretations of Special Relativity and the Twin Paradox on their heads.

To be continued…