by Dietmar Wehr
What bothered me about the paradox had to do with what physicists call the Arrow of Time. When scientists pondered the question of whether time can go in more than one direction, they looked at interactions such as particles (or billiard balls) bumping into each other. When they filmed the billiard ball collisions and ran the film backward, it was difficult to tell which way time was moving because it looked the same going backwards as it did going forwards. So some scientists speculated that time could go backwards and maybe when the universe stopped expanding and started to shrink, time would go backwards and the effect would precede the cause. Now if you think about that, you might visualize a dropped egg that suddenly pulls itself back together and leaps up to wherever it fell from. It may theoretically be possible but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen. But the particle interaction thing intrigued me.
What if you looked at the time paradox example described above but from the point of view of the atomic level instead of the macro level. So we have a collection of atoms, that can walk, talk, think, create and do a bunch of other things, that travels back in time and does something to another collection of atoms that now can no longer walk, talk, think, create or procreate but the second batch of atoms is still there. What about the first batch? Well, in terms of what our bodies are made of, we are what we eat. If the grandfather doesn’t have a son and that son doesn’t have a son, then all the food that the grandson would have eaten, would probably be eaten by someone else and those atoms would still exist in the future. But how would the atoms making up the body of the time traveler know that they’re supposed to be somewhere else in the future? If the Arrow of Time really is one way, then it seems to me that the time traveler would cease to exist in the future but would continue to exist in the past. That means that on the atomic level, there would be two copies of the same atoms in the past. One copy in the time traveler’s body and the other copy spread out among plants, other animals or just part of the soil. How does the universe tolerate that? Well, maybe the universe can tolerate it for a little while. Here’s how that might work. Einstein said that space and time were just subsets of something that combined both which he called the spacetime continuum (sound familiar?) and that time is really just a special kind of spacial dimension. Think of it this way. If you have a three dimensional object that exists in zero time, what have you really got? Nothing. So suppose a time machine creates a permanent detour in time for the atoms that are being transported back in time (including the atoms that make up the time machine itself). That would mean that the landscape of the spacetime continuum has now been changed.
So getting back to our time traveling paradox situation, the atoms that would normally end up in the time travelers body move forward in time and even if they end up in someone else’s body, when they hit the detour in the spacetime continuum, they move back into the past and arrive together to form the time traveler’s body. If that’s a little difficult to visualize how about this?
Visualize the spacetime continuum as a hill with a gentle slope and a river flowing down the hill. The river represents all the atoms in the universe. Now let’s visualize that the time machine cuts a path in the spacetime continuum hill so that some of the water in the river is diverted and is somehow forced back up the hill a little way until it merges back with the river again. Keeping in mind that we’re talking atoms moving through spacetime instead of water molecules and you’ll see that for a short length, the same atoms exist twice. Once one set of atoms are diverted back up the spacetime continuum hill, then from that point on you only have one set of atoms left. Another way to visualize it is to take a strip of paper and create a loop with it. If you let your finger follow the path along one side of the strip, it will come back around and resume travelling in the same direction as it started. For a short distance, there’ll be two strips side by side but eventually it’ll go back to one strip.
So in my series, when I talk about how the future will rearrange itself into a new timeline as a result of changes in the past, when people (like Shiloh’s and Kelly’s baby) or objects (like Valkyrie’s brain case) cease to exist in the future, what that really means is that those atoms are now part of something else. The atoms still exist, they’re just in a different place. That means that all the atoms that make up things that travelled back into the past, will temporarily (temporally?) coexist with identical atoms. But eventually the detour in the continuum will force the first set of atoms back in time, leaving the second set to continue on. That’s my view of how time travel might work. I’m not claiming to be the first one to think of this concept. I probably read it somewhere but I can’t remember where.
Now let’s talk about longitudinal waves. L-waves as I’ll refer to them from now on, are funny things. I haven’t found a really good description of what they are but I have come across some interesting ways of describing them. L-waves are not like EM waves which include light, radio, radar, x-rays, gamma rays, etc. All those phenomenon act the same way. They’re emitted at the atomic level and as waves they travel in all directions. Light travels as discrete lumps of energy called photons each of which travels in one direction but that’s the exception. Since EM waves travel in all directions, they lose energy along the way. A useful analogy is when two people hold the ends of a rope between them. Suppose one person rapidly whips the rope end up and down. That oscillation travels along the rope and loses energy as it does so. The height of the wave at the end is lower than at the beginning. Travelling along the rope also takes time. If the rope was long enough, and the waves were carrying a message, there would be a delay between when the sender sends the message and when the receiver gets it. Now let’s assume those same two people are holding the ends of a pole. If one person lifts and drops his end of the pole, the other person may or may not feel it but if the first person pulls or pushes on the pole, the other person will feel it instantly and with the same intensity. L-waves are like the pole while EM waves are like the rope. I’ve also heard someone describe L-waves as gravity waves but I’m not sure if that’s accurate. There is some experimental evidence that L-waves can travel faster than light.
L-waves are also referred to as scalar waves and they have a dark side. Lt. Col. (ret.) Tom Bearden has a Ph.d in physics and has written books that describe how scalar waves could be used as a weapon more powerful and destructive than a thousand hydrogen bombs. He claims, and seems to know what he’s talking about, that if the right kind of scalar ways intersect from two directions, the combined effect could range from extreme heat (think center of the sun) to extreme cold. He has also predicted that unrestrained use of weaponized scalar waves could set up a resonance wave in the Earth that could cause the planet to blow apart (think tuning fork that shatters glass). Scary stuff. Too scary for me to use in my books.
On a final note, those of you who have read Joseph P. Farrell’s books about the Nazi Bell project, will recognize the similarity between how the Bell supposedly operated and how the Friendlies’ time tunnel device and the timeship’s temporal device operate. I have no idea if this is scientifically accurate but it sounded like a cool way for a time machine to work.
Plans for my next book are up in the air but there’s a very good chance that it will include at least one galactic empire, space battles and an interesting character or two…or three… Preliminary plans are for publication somewhere around October of this year but don’t hold me to that.
Until then…Long Live Space Opera!
D.A.W.
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