So my parents are in Australia today…and for the next 3 months. They flew from LAX to Australia last night, and I wondered what it would be like to travel, effectively, back in time.
When I was younger, I thought that one might be able to fly at the speed of light (should such a method exist) in a West to East direction, and effectively go forward in time…or from East to West, and go backward. Afterall, if you fly on a jet plan, and go from NY to LA, less the time of the flight, you have effectively gone back 3 4 timezones, thus, 4 hours in time, relative to your previous location.
But now that I’m older, it’s not that simple. The definition of time itself is now more of a novelty than a dimension. Time is relative to your position on the earth with respect to the sun, earth’s rotation, and earth’s revolution around the sun. Regardless of whether you move from one time zone to the next, you’re still in the same dimension, you just have a different value for your time variable, which is merely correlated to your position on earth.
It makes me think that there is a lot more to the theory of time travel than moving positions…and the story of the twins (one stays on earth, aging normal; and the other is shooting around the galaxy at the speed of light, aging less) is a falacity.
To bend time in the sense that you would for the hyperdrive that the government is considering, is not really bending time at all. It’s generating a magnetic push that propells you faster than the speed of light. The gravitational force is strong enough to pull the fabric of space-time towards it, effectively causing a ripple for you to travel across. This does not alter the speed of light, only the perception of your speed.
So, your speed is not sped up, it’s simply that your distance to travel is shorter. But if you calculate it out, you traveled, say 1,000,000 miles in 3 hours, where was it would normally take you several days. That ratio would convert to x-factors of light speed when that constant is enumerated for comparision.
So all of this leads me to think that there is no such thing as time travel….it’s merely your location, the distance traversed, and the time it takes to travel that distance.
Sure to someone standing on earth watching the person skip the ripple of spacetime it would look as if the spaceship rocketed off in above-light speeds. The person on board the space craft would arrive to where they are in 3 normal hours. The distance they appear to be traveling is 1 million miles. The distance they really physically travel is a fraction of that because they’re riding crest-to-crest of the space-time ripple the gravitational field generates. And to compare their distance/time ratio (for that’s the forumla to calculate speed) to the speed of light, it would appear they are flying in at multiples of C.
Interesting thought.
