Always Different and the Same
July 11, 2011 in Blogs
We continue the Examiner temporal anomalies series with another problem posed by waves of change which move through time, and that is their ubiquity–the fact that anything which travels through time at a rate other than the speed of time must exist in every moment of time through which it passes, and thus that once it reaches us in our time it must be something we have always known, always experienced all our lives. Thus A Sound of Thunder part 13: ubiquity brings us a touch closer to the end of the series.
As is often the case, though, I am becoming concerned about future articles. The next series, that happens to be the Next series, is ready to go, but I’ve been stymied in the middle of the one after that, and that one is not going to run long. But hopefully I will get that in order.
As previously reported, our car is back, tenuously, on the road; Baxter’s car is off, probably for a few days, and thus I am back to transporting him to and from work, a much too early morning and a late afternoon interruption. Meanwhile, the individual who was injured is hoping that tomorrow’s medical appointment will give permission to return to work, which will put that back on my chores list but relieve some of the financial worries.
The spanner in the works of my schedule has me a bit uncertain of what I am doing, that is, I keep forgetting things; but what I just remembered having just forgotten is that Eric Ashley has again submitted two more articles to the Gaming Outpost vault, which I read on previous visits. Practise Bits: House gives a glimpse at a type of game world we don’t see very often, but which fits the character nicely, as he gets to experience the American Suburbia Dream (one of several American Dreams). For others, that would be a horror setting. Meanwhile, Practise Bits: Roles is a slightly different suburbia, perhaps a bit more upscale, with coaching kids’ soccer and attending art exhibits with backbiting colleagues–a scene I don’t recall seeing in game to this point, but then, Eric has run a lot of games I have not seen.
I have some to run myself; hopefully I can keep alert long enough to do so.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on July 13, 2011
Here’s a time travel film you should analyze. Superman The Movie. “John, that’s not a time travel film!!” On the contrary, Superdude spins the earth backwards, reversing time 10 minutes to save Lois Lane from the earthquake. Shouldn’t take more than a couple articles to explain why Superdude just created a 10 minute infinity loop, but it could be an interesting filler series. Just a suggestion.
M. J. Young said on July 13, 2011
I knew that; you suggested I did not.
Eh. Maybe. It’s a messy anomaly by any standard, including the foolishness that reversing the rotation of the earth would make time go backwards (which looks like the way he did it in the comic but isn’t, and the way he did it in the comic doesn’t work, either). But you’re right that it might be good for a quick filler. On the other hand, I’d have to get a copy and watch it again and analyze it.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on July 13, 2011
I knew that; you suggested I did not.
Well, you don’t really think of it as a time travel film. That’s not the focus of the movie, at any rate.
JohnA1nut said on July 14, 2011
including the foolishness that reversing the rotation of the earth would make time go backwards
How do you know it wouldn’t? Has the earth ever spun backwards? That’s more a joke. My physics teacher said what would actually happen is everything would keep moving the same direction. Newton’s Law of Motion. Superdude would have just thrown everything on the planet surface forward. Good one Superdude. You just caused a worldwide earthquake in your attempt to stop one confined to a single area.
M. J. Young said on July 14, 2011
Yeah, well, the movie is entirely inconsistent with itself on all those points, but then, in the original comics he would go backwards in time by orbiting the planet rapidly in an eastward direction (so that it would be an hour earlier for every fifteen degrees he traveled) at some incredible speed (perhaps faster than light?), and then when he wanted to come forward in time again he would orbit the planet westward so it would become later at the same rate. It’s kind of like the foolish notion in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home http://www.mjyoung.net/time/stvoyage.html in which you can fly around the sun really really fast to go back in time, and then you can come forward again by flying around the sun in the opposite direction. It ought to snap our disbelief suspenders pretty quickly. (I love that movie, but the way they travel to the past is just silly. They were much better off with Star Trek: First Contact http://www.mjyoung.net/time/stcontac.html when they simply admitted that time travel was accomplished by an alien technology they did not understand.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on July 14, 2011
It’s kind of like the foolish notion in Star Trek IV:
Foolish notion? The problem I have with that statement is simple. Prove it wouldn’t work. Can you build and fly a ship around the sun at thousands of times faster than the speed of light? Then how can you be absolutely certain it wouldn’t work? I let my disbelief suspenders hold. Until and unless someone actually tries it, who is to say whether or not it would work?
M. J. Young said on July 14, 2011
John, I can’t build a ship and fly at at thousands of times the speed of light because relativity has predicted, and experimental evidence has demonstrated, that as you approach the speed of light you experience a slowing of time and an increase in mass, such that once you reach light speed, two things are true: 1) time has come to a standstill for you, so your velocity can no longer be changed, and 2) you have reached infinite mass, so no amount of energy can change your velocity.
Warp drive doesn’t even really work like faster-than-light travel.
The problem isn’t that achieving those velocities is impossible with present technology; achieving them is impossible per se.
I’m having trouble coming up with a comparable example.
“Prove that if I morphed into a verb I couldn’t fly.” Well, you can’t morph into a bird, but that’s not as impossible as this.
“Prove that I can’t lose enough weight that I would float off the surface of the planet.” Well, at least on this planet, your body can never by less dense than the atmosphere around it, but that’s not as impossible as this.
“Prove that if I traveled back in time I couldn’t kill my grandfather.” There are some who claim that that’s impossible; I’m not one of them. That’s not as impossible as this, though.
There really is nothing as impossible as exceeding the speed of light.
It’s kind of like saying that you can increase the temperature of water to five hundred degrees and keep it in liquid form: you can, if you can keep it in a pressurized tank that won’t burst, because if it cannot expand it cannot become gaseous. Thus two hundred twelve degrees is not really the limit for how hot liquid water can be.
Ah: what would happen if you made something colder than zero degrees Kelvin? That is as impossible. We have never achieved zero degrees Kelvin, but that temperature is the complete absence of any energy at all, and it is not possible to have less than zero energy.
In something of the same way, one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second–the speed of light–is the absolute maximum velocity for anything in the universe, and the only objects that can achieve that velocity are photons. It cannot be exceeded.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on July 14, 2011
“Prove that I can’t lose enough weight that I would float off the surface of the planet.” Well, at least on this planet, your body can never by less dense than the atmosphere around it, but that’s not as impossible as this.
Lose enough weight, you die. You die, you decompose into dust. Dust most certainly can float in the air. So this at least is not only possible, happens quite frequently.
MJ, on your time travel page, you frequently say “I try to give the movies the benefit of every doubt.” Since it is technologically impossible to fly at warp speeds around the sun, a doubt exists to whether or not that method of time travel would actually work. Therefore, by your own admission, you have to give it the benefit of the doubt that it would work.
Really, that’s all I was saying.