Time Travel:
When I was 8 or 9 I was given a mock up of the cabin of the spaceship from a TV show I watched. My favorite part of its dashboard was the Time Travel lever. It set the year you wanted to travel to. Nothing was more exciting then to daydream about then the future. What type of space travel and TV and cars would there be in the future? What sites would we see in the far future?
One day I came home and my spaceship was goneL It was so big it had been set up in the family room and my mother had gotten rid of it. Like she would my pet dog and pet turtle, with no warning and a story that even an 8 year old found lacking.
It was Einstein, who’s general theory of relativity showed Time Travel into the past was not possible in this Universe. Some years ago Hawking calculated that quantum mechanics made Time Travel into the past theoretically possible but with only a 10^-30 chance did you would not get crushed in the quantum wormhole. This year he changed his mind and come out for Time Travel into the past being theoretically impossible on the quantum level. And if there are some of you out there that would only believe a woman on this, see L. Randall’s book ‘Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.’
As seen on TV or in the movies, travel into the past can change the present (i.e., Star Trek, Back to the Future, Star Gate SG-1, Eureka, Quantum Leap, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Distant Thunder, Terminator).
Many Time Travel pundits have pointed out that paradoxes involved in changing the past. There is the “If you kill your grandfather before a parent of yours was conceived, how could you be born? Or the “If in 2063 you travel back to Dallas on 11/22/1963 and kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he shots JFK, how will you know in 2063 that you need to go back into the past to prevent JFKs assignation? There is the more subtle “when I have changed the past and return to the present how am I reintegrated with my new self?
If you want to travel in time but stay in the same terrestrial location you have a problem. We all know that Earth is spinning on its axis at 1000 mph and the Earth is orbiting the Sun and 84,000 mph. But did you know that the Sun is orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxies at speed of 530,000 mph? An to top it off the Milky Way Galaxy is moving 960,000 mph relative to the Big Bang microwave background. So if you only wanted to travel an hour in time from your basement, you basement, relative to the local Universe will have moved over a million miles!
And finally the biggest and insurmountable problem is that the past no longer exist, and the future is yet to exist. There is nowhere in time to travel to!
So don’t try to travel into the past to save JFK or keep a lost love from marrying someone else, as travel into the past is impossibleL
Monday, August 2, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Plus and Minus Eternity
Last time I blogged about the nature of Infinity. For example, no matter how fast and how long you count the number of integers (1, 2, 3 …) you can never count them all. This counting process would go on forever and last an Eternity.
To me an Eternity means time never ending or time going on for forever. However, “cutting hairs” people make a distinction between an infinite temporal existence and a timeless existence altogether outside time. For these types of people an eternal being exists outside time; while by contrast, a sempiternal being exists throughout an infinite time.
In a slight digression, this reminds me of a statement in the first issue of Psychology Today. “There are two types of people in the world. Those who believe there are two types of people in the world, and those who don’t.”
I believe most people have no problem with the concept of lasting for an Eternity. However, I don’t believe very many people do not have a problem with the concept of having already existed for eternity. Biologically our lives start at a point in time (birth) and end at a point in time (death). For example we can “put our arms around” the concept of immortal vampires, but what about vampires that have always existed? I think it goes against our birth-death biology to be comfortable with the concept of having always existed. On the other hand, our souls help us to be comfortable with the concept of an eternal afterlife.
The non-biological sciences like Astronomy and Physics teach that stars, galaxies and even the Universe have not always existed. On the other hand, my top two physicist, Newton and Einstein believed that God exist for a plus and minus Eternity.
To me an Eternity means time never ending or time going on for forever. However, “cutting hairs” people make a distinction between an infinite temporal existence and a timeless existence altogether outside time. For these types of people an eternal being exists outside time; while by contrast, a sempiternal being exists throughout an infinite time.
In a slight digression, this reminds me of a statement in the first issue of Psychology Today. “There are two types of people in the world. Those who believe there are two types of people in the world, and those who don’t.”
I believe most people have no problem with the concept of lasting for an Eternity. However, I don’t believe very many people do not have a problem with the concept of having already existed for eternity. Biologically our lives start at a point in time (birth) and end at a point in time (death). For example we can “put our arms around” the concept of immortal vampires, but what about vampires that have always existed? I think it goes against our birth-death biology to be comfortable with the concept of having always existed. On the other hand, our souls help us to be comfortable with the concept of an eternal afterlife.
The non-biological sciences like Astronomy and Physics teach that stars, galaxies and even the Universe have not always existed. On the other hand, my top two physicist, Newton and Einstein believed that God exist for a plus and minus Eternity.
Monday, July 5, 2010
To Infinity and Below?
Does Buzz Lightyear’s statement "To infinity ... and beyond!" make any sense?
In order to answer this question we need to what is infinity. Infinity is something so big or large or long that it is beyond the ability of any human, besides Chuck Norris, to count to, or reach, or measure.
Then the next question is, “are there different sizes of infinity. The answer is yes, and there are three sizes. The smallest is the number of integers. The middle size is the number of decimals numbers larger than zero but smaller one. And the largest is number of irrational numbers. This comes from the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918). He used his German intellect to put infinity on a firm logical foundation and described a way to do arithmetic with infinite quantities useful to mathematics. His basic definition was simple: a collection is infinite, if some of its parts are as big as the whole.
So there you go Buzz, you can travel beyond infinity if you know your decimals!
Bye the way, if there were “things” that were infinitely long or large, it would require an infinite amount of time to measure them so they would fall out of the realm of physics and into metaphysics
In order to answer this question we need to what is infinity. Infinity is something so big or large or long that it is beyond the ability of any human, besides Chuck Norris, to count to, or reach, or measure.
Then the next question is, “are there different sizes of infinity. The answer is yes, and there are three sizes. The smallest is the number of integers. The middle size is the number of decimals numbers larger than zero but smaller one. And the largest is number of irrational numbers. This comes from the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918). He used his German intellect to put infinity on a firm logical foundation and described a way to do arithmetic with infinite quantities useful to mathematics. His basic definition was simple: a collection is infinite, if some of its parts are as big as the whole.
So there you go Buzz, you can travel beyond infinity if you know your decimals!
Bye the way, if there were “things” that were infinitely long or large, it would require an infinite amount of time to measure them so they would fall out of the realm of physics and into metaphysics
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