The bad news about going back in time.

The bad news is; you can’t. Now at this moment, you are thinking “phil, you are a product of the Louisiana school system and are an idiot. How could you possibly have even a shred of knowledge about something as complex as time travel?”. Good point. The secret to being smart is simple; Have smart FRIENDS. Getting text message answers from your brilliant friends under the table will make you the brain of the dinner party. People will be floored by your amazing knowledge and you will probably walk out the door with the most attractive girl/dude at the party. But let’s get back to time travel. Here is some information from my friend Dave who is a razor sharp physicist, and an all around good guy who unfortunately suffers from lactose intolerance. In this exchange of information, Dave is trying to explain the universe and time travel to me.

dave,
I am dissatisfied with your answer about what is on the other side
of the universe. Personally, I think it is another universe, opposite of
ours, where Rocky loses and Apollo Creed wins.

Phil,


The current big bang thinking is that the universe started potentially
as a quantum fluctuation of a multi-dimensional (I've heard 10, 11, 26,
etc. - blame the string theorists) vacuum. A massive (that is,
mass-energy of the whole universe!) particle popped into existence and
then decayed rather violently into everything we see today. If the
universe is open, gravitationally speaking (and it probably is), then
there is nothing on the 'outside' of the universe except 11 or so
dimensions of nothing. (Of course, in physics nothing is not quite what
you think it is. A lot of somethings are allowed to exist in a nothing
as long as they don't exist for too long or get observed.) If the U is
closed, then that means the fluctuation that started it all was so large
in mass-energy that it caused the local space-time to become so curved
that it became a closed, self-contained geometry. That means there is
no way to ever find out what is on the 'outside' of the universe, since
we are on the 'inside' of a curved metric. Think of it like this - you
are on a boat. You can't fly, you can't swim. You can't look up, you
can't look down. How would you describe what things are like above or
below the surface? We're just like ants on a balloon that's being
inflated, according to Hubble et al.
Dave.

... And more, here is my reply and further info from dave...

Dave, i'm having trouble visualizing a 10 dimensional vacuum that you 
describe on the other side of the universe. also, how does a "massive 
particle" just "pop into existence"?
what made it decide to pop? where did it come from?
i bet even the string guys can't answer this one!! hahahaha!!!!
also, do you have knowledge about time travel? can you only go 
backwards?


I can answer your question, actually, about what makes a massive
particle pop into existence. Answer: there is NO STOPPING IT! It's in
the equations, it happens randomly for no reason, and it cannot be
disallowed in current physics theories. I know, I just answered 'why?'
with 'why not?'. By the way, this is what irritated Einstein so much
about quantum mechanics, with the whole God and playing dice thing. Who
are we to tell God what can and cannot be done with the universe?
The only way I know to travel through time is the mundane way - forward,
one instant at a time at a rate of one second = one second in your rest
frame. Other frames moving relative to your rest frame may experience
different results. Direction is still forward, but 1 second in frame A
<> 1 second in frame B.

Simple huh?

Here’s the deal. The only way to change the time/space relationship is to move. The faster you move, the slower your relative “clock” moves IN RELATION TO THE CLOCK OF PEOPLE NOT MOVING. So lets take an impossible case of going the speed of light (183,000 miles per second. Not per hour, per second). If you did this for a while, I have no idea how long, but a pretty long time, and then went back to earth, you would be “younger’ than other people. You would not go back, you would still be at the present, but your clock would be behind. What this really means is that the people who were not moving have gone FORWARD in time compared to you. This is all explained by Einstein’s general relativity theorem, which is so far beyond me that it is laughable.

Oh by the way, why did I say going the speed of light is impossible? Because a side effect of going fast is that you become heavier. All the more reason to relax when you are on a diet to get the most out of that tofu salad.

As you start to approach the speed of light, you become so heavy that you cannot generate enough energy to continue moving forward, so your speed becomes constant at some value well below the speed of light. We’ll never be able to test this theory because our best rocket ships are pretty lame. It will take us a year to get to mars, which is not very far away (35 million miles at it’s closest point). At the speed of light, it would take 1.3 seconds when it is at it’s furthest point away from us (250 million miles). As you can see, we have a long way to go in rocket engine design. I propose we take this ridiculous 2 trillion dollar “bailout plan” and use it instead to create a kick-ass engine.

FLASH!!! Just in from my brother Robert:

I read some more of your blog - funny stuff. I didn't read the whole thing on time travel, but thought I'd correct a minor point (I know, I know, your math and dates are "approximate"). It takes a lot longer than 1.3 seconds to get to Mars at the speed of light. It's more like 4 minutes. Gregg Ledford, Stephen Pittman and I figured this out when we were in the 5th grade, CONVINCED that we were going to build a spaceship (nay, a Flying Saucer, just like the Jupiter II in Lost in Space!) and go there. I remember we told one of the girls in our class (who we'd promised a ride) that it was going to take us about 2 seconds to get to the moon, but Mars would be a bit longer, more like 4 minutes. We had already decided our ship would travel at the speed of light. We didn't know how - that was a trivial detail to be worked out later. I remember seeing some inflatable seat cushions in a catalog that looked a lot like the seat Dr. Smith stowed away in, and thinking "yeah, those would be perfect for the seats in our spaceship!"