Tag: time travel

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 18: The Time Travel Experiment

Holy shit!  Was that Stephen Hawking on my phone?  I played the message several times and it sure sounded like him. But why would he be calling me? What was going on? At that point, I really wanted to get moving and the traffic jam I was stuck in became even more annoying.

It took another hour to finally get home. When I entered my apartment ‘Einstein’ was sitting in front of my laptop with a silly smile on his face.

“Did you get mein mezage?” he asked.

“I got a message from somebody who sounded just like Stephen Hawking,” I said.

‘Einstein’ then typed something on my computer and the same voice I had heard on my phone repeated the message: “Raymond Young, you’re invited to look at my time travel experiment of 2009.”

“You know, zeze computers are amasing. I found zis vebzite zat reproduces vadeffer you vant to zay in ein Stephen Hawking imitazion. I zought zat vould get your attention,” he said smiling.

“You’re an asshole. You know that? And since when did you know how to use a computer? Never mind, I don’t want to know. Anyway, what’s that about a 2009 time travel experiment.”

“Zat year Hawking conducted ein experiment in vich he concluded zat time traffel vas impozible.”

While ‘Einstein’ talked I went over to my room and found the blue light wall gone.

“I zuggest you look it up,” Einstein said raising his voice so I could hear him in the bedroom.

“Hey, did you take down the information wall?” I asked while ambling back to the living room.

I got no answer; ‘Einstein’ was gone. I was really getting tired of his pop-in/pop-out routine.

Well, at least he didn’t take my computer. I made myself a cup of coffee, hurt my tongue blister again, cussed about it, and then started searching for information on Hawking’s experiment. I was expecting something fancy but instead found something so low tech, simple and downright silly that for a moment thought it was a joke.

In effect, in 2009 Dr. Stephen Hawking conducted an experiment in an attempt to prove whether time travel would exist in the future. He organized a party for time travelers and announced the time and location of the party after the event was over. The idea was that the only way to attend was to find out in the future and travel back in time to attend. Dr. Hawking concluded that time travel to the past was not possible because nobody showed up the day of the event.

After reading that I thought, “really? That was it?” But, hey, this was Dr. Hawking not some schmuck, so I checked my cynicism at the door and pondered his approach.

“If traveling outside of time is only possible in energy form,” I thought, “then the time travelers that made it to Dr. Hawking’s party could have only shown up as energy. Did anybody measured the energy level at the event? Was there any difference in the energy levels before and during the event? Would a time traveler disturb the energy level at its destination? What energy frequency should we be looking at?”

I started Googling different things until I found what I as looking for.

In his book Cosmic Evolution, Astrophysicist Eric J. Chaisson presented some interesting findings regarding our brain’s energy. According to his calculations our brain uses 75,000 times as much energy as the Sun.

The number was astonishing. That’s the amount of energy our brain uses, the organ that houses the energy universe that is our mind!

“With such an energy consumption associated to our mind,” I thought, “we should expect some type of energy signature to show up in a place where a time traveler has arrived. I mean, a ferret like Matthew seemingly perceived brain energy(1). Could that be what cats and dogs react to when there seems to be nothing there? Time travelers in energy form!”

Suddenly the absurdity of my previous doubts regarding traveling to the exclusively material past in energy form dawned on me. You may only travel in energy form but that form can exist in a material world just like all other types of energies. What can’t be done is travel to the past in material form, once you become energy you can go anywhere. I got up to get a glass of water and thought that maybe Dr. Hawking did get some guests to his party after all.

One conundrum solved, now, what about the past’s connection to dark matter?

 

(1) As seen back in Chapter 9: Hitting the Wall

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 19: Dark Past, Dark Future

.An abstract representation of the dark matter past, the present and the dark energy future

It was almost midnight and thanks to the embarrassing nap at Gina’s I was nowhere near to being sleepy. So, I started surfing the web for information regarding dark matter.

I found out the term refers to a hypothetical substance that scientists have never been able to detect but believe should exist to account for the gravitational forces prevalent in the universe. They estimate that 80% of the mass of the universe is composed of dark matter. In other words, for gravity to make sense across the universe we would need 80% more matter.

In the Timekeeper’s dream at Gina’s, he mentioned that once materialized, the past stays there for anyone to visit. Like a museum with every instant of existence frozen in an endless stream. “Its mass affecting the present from an unseen source.” And went on to postulate that the theoretical dark matter is in fact the mass of the past. Could this be possible? Can the mass of the past account for that 80% of missing matter in the universe? An image of Marty McFly in Back to the Future saying “Whoa, this is heavy Doc” came to my mind. I found myself smiling at the unintended pun.

Einstein’s theory of relativity stated, among other things, that gravity was so powerful that it could bend the fabric of the space-time continuum. This included bending light and in extreme cases, like in the equally theoretical black holes, not allowing it to escape the enormous forces of gravity present. My research took me to territory reserved for knowledgeable physicists and I started to get lost.

The bottom line was that everything regarding dark matter was hypothetical. Nothing has been found, and physicists’ opinions are split up with some of them feeling uncomfortable with the concept. They are divided in their visions of what accounts for the missing mass in the universe.

Some say it has to do with dim brown dwarfs, white dwarfs and neutrino stars. Others add the hypothetical supermassive black holes to that mix. And there are some who go fully theoretical with exotic particles such as WIMPS (I’m not making this up), an acronym for ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particle’. These have ten to a hundred times the mass of a proton, but have such weak interactions with “normal” matter that they are difficult, and so far impossible, to detect. For some, the foremost candidates are the neutralinos, massive hypothetical particles heavier and slower than neutrinos, although like all other hypothetical particles none have been spotted.

My feeling at the time was that for such a proof-based scientific community, they relied way too much on unproven concepts. I thought for a moment that if that was the case, then the hypothesis of the mass of the past accounting for the missing mass in the universe was as good a concept as all the others. And since some physicists have been able to both date the universe and calculate its overall mass then maybe it would be possible to determine the mass of the past.

Satisfied at the moment with the information on dark matter, I then switched my attention to the concept of dark energy. As was the case with dark matter, dark energy is a term used to describe an unknown force. One that causes the universe to increase its expansion rate. In layman’s terms, a mysterious force that makes the universe expand more rapidly. Physicists estimate that the universe is 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5% normal matter. In other words, everything we have observed on Earth and throughout the cosmos is only 5% of the universe. The nature of everything else is up for grabs.

The numbers caught my attention and I wondered… What if the 27% corresponding to dark matter was the mass of the past? Couldn’t the 68% of dark energy be the energy of the future? Energy that, as we sit here, is fueling the materializing process that is the present.

“Could that be what’s accelerating the expansion of the universe?  The ever increasing area of the present?” I said out loud. “The present is like a factory that keeps expanding, the more it creates the larger it becomes. The larger it becomes the more it produces. And the rate of expansion increases because the manufacturing footprint keeps on growing.”

“Zat’s a bold schtatement Ray.”

I jumped when I heard his voice.

“Don’t you ever knock? You scared the shit out of me.”

“Zorry, but I understand you’re now dealing vith ein specific topic fery dear to me.  I zought zat maybe I could be of help.”

“Are you going to stay around this time? Because you fled a while ago after directing me to Stephen Hawking’s time travel experiment. Which reminds me, did you take down the information wall?”

“It dizipaded becauze you nein longer needed it. It vas alvays meant to be zomething of ein vizual aid.  To help you master zee ability of accezing zee Akaschic records. You’re perfectly capable of doing zat on your own now.”

“I wish I shared your confidence in me,” I said and then proceeded to share with him my thoughts on dark matter and dark energy, and their relationship to the past, present and future.

“I must zay, I like zee vay you zink Raymond Young. A hypothezis like zis has countless ramifications.”

“I know! Just listening to myself telling you all this I realized a couple of those ramifications. For example, what if your wormholes were just points in the universe untouched by time? Places completely devoid of matter. Areas of pure energy through which one could instantaneously travel long distances outside of time. And at the other end of the spectrum, what if black holes were very old areas of the universe. Places where the mass of the past was such that its gravitational forces go off the scale?”

‘Einstein’ looked at me blankly and started talking in the language of physicists. This time I couldn’t understand a single word he was uttering, not because of his accent but because I had no idea what he was talking about. I heard terms I didn’t know existed in the English language, and names I had no idea how to spell. He was just thinking out loud but I felt like a little kid who had just told a grownup that he had learned to tie his shoes.

At one point he addressed me by name and just said:

“Ray, can I uze your compuder?”