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This is my journal of experiences, thoughts, ideas, and experiments; it is erratic, sometimes fruitless, sometimes profound (at least for me). I don't advertise it, but I don't mind the occasional cyber-wanderer taking a gander at it. I tend to meander when I write, to jump to new topics without transition, and some things I say are tied to things I've talked about before, so feel free to hop around and just read what pops out at you.

Thinking out Time Travel

Posted: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by Sir Lancealot in
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I'm developing an argument for my final project in communications, to argue that time travel is more likely than we think and as such we should do what we can to limit experiments to make it happen.  


One of my points is traveling through wormholes, which are rifts in space that you can go through on a far shorter path than if you were to go the normal route through space.  Kip Thorne argues in an interview with PBS' NOVA ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2612time.html )

"KIP THORNE: There are several different ways to turn a wormhole into a time machine if you are a clever and infinitely advanced civilization. By an infinitely advanced civilization I mean, somebody who can do anything their heart desires except they can't violate the fundamental laws.

NARRATOR: What they could do is take advantage of the twins paradox and send one mouth of a wormhole on a voyage into outer space. As the wormhole mouth approaches the speed of light, time slows down relative to the wormhole mouth that remains on earth.

At the end of its high speed voyage, the traveling wormhole mouth returns to earth where it can be picked up by its owner. Just like the twins paradox, less time has passed for this mouth of the wormhole than for the other end that stayed behind on earth. The wormhole is now a tunnel with each mouth located in a different time."


Yet in the twins paradox, time has only progressed differently in the perception of the individual.  They still end at the same point in time, next to each other.  If you have traveled through time, the experience of growing as an individual changes, yes, but when you come to an unperishable object, a pattern of movement--the wormhole--and send it through the same process, it will have experienced the same rippling and process of time, but it still ends in the same point in time and space.  

I posit that the wormhole would be immune to differences in time.  It sends you to an exact complementary portal at the other end a specific amount of time later.  Because if you go on that adventure, then return home and observe both ends simultaneously, as someone goes through it they will just come out the other end as usual!  Right?

But let's go with Kip's theory.  If you send a wormhole out to space and it ages slower through time, and returns to its original position attached to a more aged portal right next to it, shouldn't it still send you to the portal right next to you in the same amount of time?!  I severely want to believe his theory, I mean heck its the foundation of my thesis! But it just doesn't follow logically for me.  Any thoughts to help reconcile?

Perhaps it is next to the same exit portal, yet when you go through it, it is not attached to this version but instead a younger version back in time?  Would that change the "twin paradox" implications?


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