Could we ever be Time Lords?

by Brian on September 30, 2003

is the title of a not bad article in The Age today on time travel. They give too much credence to branching universe hypotheses for my tastes, but there’s some fun quotes from some leading thinkers, and a relatively straightforward description of Paul Davies’s time machine plan.

{ 7 comments }

1

Chun the Unavoidable 09.30.03 at 6:53 pm

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?

2

jhp 09.30.03 at 7:43 pm

(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.

3

Antoni Jaume 09.30.03 at 9:03 pm

“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

4

jhp 09.30.03 at 9:49 pm

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.

5

Matt McIrvin 10.01.03 at 1:55 am

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.

6

Reg 10.01.03 at 2:43 am

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

7

dsquared 10.01.03 at 4:31 pm

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.

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