Time Travel

[Martin Hash]

Sometimes what is accepted as hard science doesn’t pass the WTF test. I've read in reputable scientific journals that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity allows for time travel and that astronauts would come back to earth without aging as much as those they left behind - Poppycock. Even a spurious review of the facts doesn’t support such an outlandish claim. There is no such thing as time travel!

The scientific argument goes: two atomic clocks separated by even a small distance (we're talking a meter) have a different time. Immediately, "scientists" jump to the conclusion that time has changed. At great distances, presumably the two clocks could be years/lifetimes/millenniums different in time. There are similar "scientific" arguments that the speed of an object changes its time. Rather than suspect that the measuring devices are affected by mass or velocity, or that the PERCEPTION of the measuring devices is different due to the lack of simultaneity (because the speed of light is not instantaneous), we are told that time travel (they call it "time dilation") has occurred. It’s a kind of intellectual masturbation that people who fancy their navel might engage in.

Taking the theory to its ultimate conclusion, the time travel folks expect that at the speed of light, time stops entirely so that a talking person who leaves earth at lightspeed would arrive mid-word at Alpha Centauri not even experiencing an instant of hesitation, yet 4 lightyears would have passed. I call bullshit! First, light, like all electromagnetic waves, travels at a constant speed. Let’s consider old-fashioned analog television broadcasts because they act like light but are more comprehensible to mere earthlings. Aliens on a far away planet would be watching the original run of “I Dream of Genie” because it takes so long for radio waves to get to them but they would NOT be experiencing our past any more than we do when we watch reruns. And a spaceship traveling at the speed of radio waves would be watching the same frame of “I Dream of Genie” forever but that does NOT mean that time is standing still. Finally, as a spaceship comes home at the speed of radio waves, “I Dream of Genie” would be on fast-forward but the astronauts are NOT traveling into the future.

The whole time travel paradigm rests on the confusion of the image of time verses experiencing time itself. Like Speed Limit signs have no connection with how fast cars can go, the speed of light has no connection with time. Stuff like this gives science a bad name.

[Haven]

From the Special Theory of Relativity: http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/

from § 4:

"From this there ensues the following peculiar consequence. If at the points A and B of K there are stationary clocks which, viewed in the stationary system, are synchronous; and if the clock at A is moved with the velocity v along the line AB to B, then on its arrival at B the two clocks no longer synchronize, but the clock moved from A to B lags behind the other which has remained at B"

If that doesn't clearly enough demonstrate the claim for Time Dilation, perhaps it could be restated as follows:

"If we placed a living organism in a box ... one could arrange that the organism, after any arbitrary lengthy flight, could be returned to its original spot in a scarcely altered condition, while corresponding organisms which had remained in their original positions had already long since given way to new generations. For the moving organism, the lengthy time of the journey was a mere instant, provided the motion took place with approximately the speed of light."

but that's not just kind of what Einstein said, that's a quote from him in 1911.

Does Einstein give science a bad name?

[Martin Hash]

Don't you find it suspicious that if v = speed-of-light, whether Clock A actually moved along line AB or not, the time that Clock B sees on A's face is the same?! Perhaps a time travel coincidence? Applying the "I Dream of Genie" test: does it seem reasonable that a TV show that started when an astronaut left is now in season 4 back home but the astronaut is still watching season 1 - one aging and the other not yet both sharing the same experience? When did logic become optional?