September 30, 2003

Could we ever be Time Lords?

Posted by Brian

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.

Posted on September 30, 2003 05:26 PM UTC
Comments

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?

Posted by Chun the Unavoidable · September 30, 2003 06:53 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.

Posted by jhp · September 30, 2003 07:43 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

Posted by Antoni Jaume · September 30, 2003 09:03 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.

Posted by jhp · September 30, 2003 09:49 PM

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.

Posted by Matt McIrvin · October 1, 2003 01:55 AM

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

Posted by Reg · October 1, 2003 02:43 AM

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.

Posted by dsquared · October 1, 2003 04:31 PM
Followups

→ Time Travel.
Excerpt: Via Crooked Timber, we learn that an Aussie newspaper has an article on Time Travel today. Sure, its not Scientific American level, but its a pretty good article....Read more at Blog, Jvstin Style
→ Could we ever be Time Lords?.
Excerpt: Via Crooked Timber, a link to an article in The Age on the physics of time travel. Most interesting for my purposes are the references to the Gwyneth Paltrow film, Sliding Doors, as an illustration of the "many universes" hypothesis,...Read more at the chutry experiment

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.