Comments on: Could we ever be Time Lords?

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 16:31:52 +0000

Bit of a grammatical in the first sentence, I think; Stephen Hawking may be a famous physicist who is disabled, but to describe him as “famously disabled” sort of implies he had his leg chopped off by Lady Diana or something.

By: Reg

Reg — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 02:43:31 +0000

I’m surprised nobody has made a Wesley Clark joke here yet.

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 01:55:07 +0000

Two remarks: The time machine design is Kip Thorne’s. (The article does say this.) There’s a bit of confusion in there about the mechanisms of time dilation in relativity. The warping of space-time happens in general relativity, and is related to gravity. The time dilation due to high speeds exists even in special relativity and happens even in flat space-time.

By: jhp

jhp — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 21:49:19 +0000

Notice that I didn’t say who was doing the measuring. Assume that the measurer and measuree are one and the same, and my joke both remains both silly and technically accurate.

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 21:03:35 +0000

“Indeed, it has been measured as occurring at the rate of one second per second.” Only if you keep quiet. If you move, then you go faster into the future the faster you move. At lightspeed, time does not affect you, so you can go at any time in the future in 0 second. Now if you find a way to go that fast, NASA would like to know… DSW

By: jhp

jhp — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 19:43:02 +0000

(Not entirely on-topic.) From the article: Furthermore, time travel into the future, in small amounts, is already commonplace. Indeed, it has been measured as occurring at the rate of one second per second.

By: Chun the Unavoidable

Chun the Unavoidable — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 18:53:32 +0000

Is there a good reason for thinking, parsimony principles notwithstanding, that what we find difficult to understand should have any bearing on how things are?