Time Travel! Could it be?
A few years back I read a web article, which is no longer available on the net. The topic of this article was Time Travel. Included within this article was a little story, which had the sound of an urban legend, and very probably was just that. However, I didn't find anything about it at the Snopes urban legend site. Of course, Snopes wouldn't be likely to have this story, anyway.
According to this timely tale the U.S. government recently funded a secret research project called the Temporal Transmission Research Project. TTRP; darn, how disappointing, it doesn't spell anything, like it would if the name was something cool like, Temporal Research Institution Project, which would be TRIP, or Temporal Insertion Manipulation Enveloper, TIME; or maybe even Probability Looping Oscillation Procedure, PLOP. Well, maybe not PLOP.
Anyway, as the story goes, an object could be placed within a hollow aluminum tube. This tube was then subjected to a high frequency electromagnetic field, which inexplicably traveled faster than the speed of light. Personally, I wasn't aware that high frequency electromagnetic fields could do that, but then I used to enjoy the company of a Furby.
As the legend continues, this aluminum tube and its contents could be sent back in time, depending on the intensity of this faster than light high frequency electromagnetic field. The legend goes on to say that one of the scientists working on this project, volunteered to ride this temporal tube all the way back to the year 1918 of the Common Era. The plan was for him to remain in that time zone for about twenty-five minutes, then return to the present day lab. I was immediately curious, about just how he planned to achieve this return trip, but the writer of the original tale neglected to provide that particular detail. They exposed the tube to the field, the scientist disappeared, but after the scheduled twenty-five minute interval, he failed to return. I know, I wasn't especially surprised about that. Yet the temporal physicists, who didn't ride the time tube did indeed seem to be taken by surprise. It was at that point that some of the other project scientists devoted themselves to dig into old records of the local area, for the period of 1918 CE. In old newspapers, and any publications from the time, they looked for clues that might shed some light on the fate of their missing colleague. After a lengthy search, they uncovered a microfiche of an old police journal. This journal contained an odd article, with a photograph showing what appeared to be a metal tube about two feet long. According to the article, it contained the crushed remains of a man. Additionally, in the photo, lying on the ground near this morbid scene was said to be a small object looking like a cellular phone. I strongly suspect this story to be the product of someone's active imagination. It has many of the ear mark signs of an urban legend with a bit of a Science Fiction flare.
But when I was digging through some old files I came across it again, and wondered if any Gatherers have ever heard this story, or ever seen this legendary photograph?
Many legends have a basis. Could there be something behind this story?
Or is it just a fun temporal fantasy?
Time will tell.
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Comments: 36
Of course there is the famous time travel paradox, too. And many creative works dedicated to this fascinating topic, from HG Wells' classic The Time Machine to the more recent (and less filling) bestseller, The Time Traveler's Wife.
Fun story, though. Was the scientist's name Justin Time?
Perhaps you'd like to consider the grandfather paradox that has been used to argue that backwards time travel must be impossible.
It basically involves a plot where if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you wouldn't exist and therefore couldn't go back in time to kill your grandfather, in the first place.
This kind of logic should also be part of your exploration of time travel because it's equally important to discuss these issues if we're going to "glide" from an era to another, as soon as technology enables us to do so.
You can start exploring here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox
however that child grew up, and became.....
Adolph Hitler.
The inventors of the time machine were so ashamed that they destroyed all records.
Except for a series of clues hidden within cartoon television shows of the 1980s, such as He-Man and Thundercats. Only one man has been brave enough to try to decode this mystery, and only time will tell if he will be able to solve it before the Scientific Establishment destroys all traces of the evidence, forever!
Many a science fiction writer has dealt with the consequences of paradox.
But, interestingly, paradox may have been recently solved by cosmologists. As a consequence of Membrane Theory, it may be likely that reality is suffuse with alternate temporal branching. If this is true, then traveling back in time to alter your personal family history, will not disrupt your originally native time line, but rather create a new time branch, or alternate reality. Of course, another likely consequence of this would be that you probably couldn't get back to your own native time line.
Thanks for the link, Claude, I'll check it out.
I remember reading this story in high school. I should have known it was Ray Bradbury - what a terrific Sci Fi author.
So, what you're saying is that the tube was the actual time machine, itself. Well, that explains some elements of the story. Oh, and I must say, the idea of hiding clues in a sub-plot of He-Man and the Thundercats is sheer genius. I know, I sure never would have thought to look in such a hiding place. If the objective is for this temporal information to remain hidden, I can think of no better place to hide it.
I'm afraid I missed that Simpsons parody.
I've seen the movie, Millennium. For a fairly low budget film, that was a pretty good one. As I recall they included the idea of a paradox quake. A little dramatic, but it had a cool premise, retrieving people from the past, who were about to die anyway. This way they avoided paradox as much as possible. But, in spite of all their efforts little paradoxical mess-ups came up, anyway.
~ Soren Kierkegaard
I can't tell you how many scifi shows say that something is emitting "electromagnetic radiation" as if its something mysterious and unknown. Electromagnetic radiation is light, people. Its gamma rays, and x rays and radio waves. This is not something unknown, this is something that has been studied extensively.
Saying something is emitting electromagnetic radiation is a bit like saying "Help, I'm being attacked by carbon-based lifeforms!" It sounds cool, but doesn't really reveal much information.
As for time travel, I would consider time travel within our own universe to be unlikely, due to causality. The energy required to spontaneously create an object let alone a man exactly similar to one that exists at some point in the future has to come from somwhere. At the very least, I think you could only go back in time as long as a time machine existed back at the time you wanted to go to. Then you have the problem of how the two machines communicate, which requires the existence of particles that go back in time instead of forward, which probably don't exist. Theoreticaly Tachyons (faster than light particles) could exist, but there's no reason to think that just because something is going faster than light that it will go back in time.
To me the best chance of going back in time is to find a way to cross into alternate universes. Conceivably there could be an infinite number of universes and so conceivable there could be one that's exactly like this one, except its shifted so many years to the past or future. We could go over there and meet our grandfathers and kill them without worrying, because they wouldn't be our grandfathers really, but exact duplicates.
Its not for sure of course whether there even are alternate universes so that scenario seems pretty bleak as well.
I'm still miffed about there not being any flying cars.
anyway good and interesting reading. thanks for sharing that
The aforementioned Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffeneggar, or some strange name, was the novel's author) had a time-travel wrinkle that I'd never seen before. In a brief scene, she had her time traveler return to age 14 (or so), meet his original 14-year-old self, and have sex -- knowing it was without consequence because they "knew" each other and just needed a safe outlet for their libido (each would grow up to lead heterosexual lives). How's that for a time-traveling masturbation metaphor run amok...?
In Stephen Hawking's book, "A Brief History of Time", in chapter 9, "The Arrow of Time" he says, "When one tried to unify gravity with quantum mechanics, one had to introduce the idea of "imaginary" time. Imaginary time is indistinguishable from directions in space. If one can go north, one can turn around and head south; equally, if one can go forward in imaginary time, one ought to be able to turn round and go backward. This means that there can be no important difference between the forward and backward directions of imaginary time. On the other hand, when one looks at "real" time, there's a very big difference between the forward and backward directions, as we all know. Why do we remember the past but not the future?"
Hawking makes a distinction between real and imaginary time. The numbers suggest that time travel should be equally possible in either direction, forward or backward, yet observable reality seems to only travel forward.
Perhaps if we could achieve a technology that harnessed the forces of a black hole, we could find a way to reverse the flow of time in a limited zone. But what would achieving this ultimately gain us, in the end?
By the way, I totally recommend "A Brief History of Time". It's a major thought provoker, and exceptionally well written.
Thank you for interjecting such an apt Kierkegaard quote. So, backward time travel is possible, even necessary, in our minds. Backward reflection is a primary component of our forward march through time.
Some of my favorite works by the science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein often dealt with time travel in this way. No matter the efforts of our protagonist, History will win out, and in-fact the very thing sought to be prevented or caused, will backfire. The old sci-fi television series, "Time Tunnel" pretty much took this approach, too. Like the episode in which they tried to prevent President Lincoln's assassination, but just ended up facilitating it, instead. It was meant to be, and any attempt to prevent it would be doomed to failure. {At least, that's the message I got from this story.}
There is an interesting consequence to believing that all attempts at time travel meddling, will fail, and help bring about known history. Fate, or moreover, unshakable predestination is that consequence. Free will, goes out the door. It says that, no matter how much we might desire to have our own way, our fates are sealed even before we are born. Our illusion of free will, is just that an illusion. If time travel can not alter the past, then fate is inviolate, and free will non-existent.
Yeah, I want my flying car, too. And if it can travel in time, as well; I'll take that, too.
I recently saw a way cool documentary about "Membrane Theory". I mentioned it earlier to Claude. Membrane Theory, is the child of Multi-String Theory, when certain cosmologists realized there were too many string theories. There theories depended on the universe having 10 dimensions, but by added just 1 more dimension, an 11 dimension universe brings all the many string theories elegantly together into one theory, Membrane Theory.
As defined in 11 dimensions, the universe is the result of a collision of quantum oscillating membranes. If this theory actually does have relevance to our reality, then a Membrane universe would be suffuse with alternate temporal branching. If this is true, then alternate realities are not just a neat concept, but a natural consequence of colliding quantum membranes. If Membrane Theory has validity, and an increasing number of physicists are looking and nodding, then alternate parallel realities not just a possibility, but are likely.
Develop a technology that can travel between membranes, and you can slide back in time, further forward in time, to the side of time, or even to any of a variety of alternate times. In effect, you become Dr. Who.
Glad you find this an interesting read. And thank you for sharing the time door story.
I gotta say, I'm at a lose for words, to adequately respond. That particular "metaphor run amok", does have to be about the most unique time-travel wrinkle I've ever heard of.
As for transporters, as time travel devise, Scotty in his Star Trek Next Generation episode is an interesting example of traveling into the future, locked in a transporter buffer waiting to be re-materialized. He jumped more than 70 years into his relative future, that way.
Thanks for the info on John Titor. If one accepts he is anything other than a pretender, then he would be from an alternate future time line. So, what he says about the future, is not our future. I say this because of something he said in an interview I read, after your prompting.
After a question about the year 2012, John Titor said, "In my 2012, I was 14 years old spending most of my time living, running and hiding in the woods and rivers of central Florida. The civil war was in its 7th year…".
Now if this civil war had been going for 7 years, then it would have started in 2005. We now live in 2006, and while we may be a country politically divided, I'm not aware of us having a civil war. I think if we were having a civil war, right now, I'd be aware of it.
Once we get down past the level of the quark, and even some time before then, the science becomes guesswork. We're pretty sure there is a particle called the graviton for instance, that causes gravity to occur, but we've never actually detected a graviton.
String theory is one attempt to bring everything together and it has many problems. Primarily though, it is a mathematical theoretical model and really only a small amount of it is based on reality. Literally some incredibly intelligent guy just asked "well what if there were a bunch of dimensions and they were kind of curved tightly around each other so they were hard to detect..." and from there worked out a slew of equations to see how that system would work.
In the end string theory and membrane theory and the newest theory I've heard where our universe is like a ribbon of seaweed amongst other such universes on the ocean floor of reality (this was in Nature) are only marginally better than the idea that the universe might be held up by four extra-dimensional elephants on the back of an extra-dimensional tortoise.
Doesn't mean they aren't true, just that they're mere conjecture until we can devise an experiment to test them.
One of the ways we can test any theory though, is by reviewing what we know. We can't prove that Causality is always upheld, but we know it works in every single experiment we've ever devised. Also, as Stephen Hawkings has pointed out, we don't see any people from the future.
On a quantum level things become more interesting. The Heisenburg uncertainty principle means they're can't be exactly zero particles in any given space, so particles are constantly being created and destroyed in the spaces in the void (hey that rhymed). But even here there is cause and effect. The uncertainty in the energy multiplied by the uncertainty in time has to be greater than or equal to h bar divided by two. So if you operate in a one dimensional space with only two particles and you seperate those particles farther and farther apart, you'll generated a bunch of little particles between them.
I could be wrong, but I tend to think Causality simply cannot be broken. I don't think any alternate universe could be going backwards in time either. They may go faster or slower in time, and they may be shifted some amount of time backward or forward, but my feeling is they cannot go backward in time.
Yes, so we return to parallel universes or at least multiple time lines. I thought it funny that his "time machine" was a car!
Remember what Don said earlier in this conversation, "…Except for a series of clues hidden within cartoon television shows of the 1980s, such as He-Man and Thundercats. Only one man has been brave enough to try to decode this mystery, and only time will tell if he will be able to solve it before the Scientific Establishment destroys all traces of the evidence, forever!"
If Don has something there, and I approach it with as much caution as John Titor, then whether it be a Time Traveler on a Forum, or hiding clues in a sub-plot of He-Man and the Thundercats, or some other obscure yet in plain sight type place, sometimes it is the very unlikelihood that gives these clues a reverse psychology sting. Oddly enough, it is precisely because most people will not take such silly things seriously, that these may be great places to hide in the open that which sheds true light on the mystery of time itself.
I neither embrace nor do I discount these stories out of hand. I listen. At best I may learn something at worst I am entertained.
Not every apparent member of the lunatic fringe is necessarily a lunatic. I wonder what their contemporaries would have thought of Leonardo or Gallileo.
As I said above, it is because most people will see these examples as silly, that these may be ideal places to hide something real.
An entire article could be devoted to a discussion of Free Will. I'd be surprised if there weren't already a few, here at Gather. I might tackle a presentation on that topic, myself. In the mean time, I'll say that I do especially like your stream analogy. However, history is filled with folks who have made their names by thinking outside of the box. These are folks who had the courage to climb out of the main stream, and blaze their own trails, or cut their own canals, to extend your analogy. Perhaps there is hubris in that kind of independent spirit, but that is precisely the kind of hubris that keeps the march of human progression going. I believe in free will, but I also believe in destiny. Each of us have a destiny, but it is due to our free will that we may or may not fulfill that destiny. I can fight my own destiny and struggle my way through that stream until I die, no doubt feeling rather unfulfilled in the end, or I can ride my destiny smoothly accepting it, as life goes by. The choice is mine, not some overriding force of fate.
light! And second if time travel does work how can we go back and furth. Without changing the past and altering the future? And third once we alter the past then what we know now could be changed?
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976772497