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IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE?



by Miles Mathis

Those who have read my others papers closely will predict the short answer here: no. Time travel, strictly defined, is not possible, and I will stick to that conclusion here. However, if we study the problem a bit closer, we find a more interesting analysis, one that implies that time travel, of a sort, IS possible.

I will gloss my short answer before getting into the variant answer. My readers should predict the short answer “no” because I have shown that the twin paradox is false. All or most current time travel is based on the twin paradox, and on a certain interpretation of Einstein's time transformation equations. But I have shown that interpretation is false. It relies on bad math. Specifically, it relies on treating velocity as a directionless vector. It relies on applying the given transforms to all objects, ignoring whether they are approaching or receding.

I have shown that although time dilation is true, and although Einstein's time transforms are nearly correct in many situations, they are misapplied when it comes to the twin paradox. This is because in the twin paradox, we must keep track of direction. The velocity always has direction, since velocity is a vector and a vector includes a direction. Once we remember that, the transforms don't show any “paradox” other than the one I will talk about at length below. The transforms certainly don't show or imply any traveling into the past or future. To see all the math for this, you will have to go to the other paper, since I won't repeat it here.

Even with the historical and current interpretation of the twin paradox, no travel into the past was ever implied. The current interpretation implies that time passes more slowly for some events, but it never implies that time stops or turns back. Neither twin sees himself or his twin going backwards in time, he only sees a faster or slower aging. By the current interpretation, this is seen as a traveling into the future by the faster twin, but even that is interpretation is fudged, as I will show.

The twin paradox is actually a poorly chosen visualization or thought problem, since it is overly abstract. Once you have astronauts zooming out into space, you have left the confines of most peoples' reason. In space, most people will accept anything, as we see with black holes, the big bang, and other fairy tales. It is better to keep our thought problems closer to home. What allowed me to analyze the problem further was watching an old episode of Star Trek. You will say we are still in space there, but the episode was not one of time travel. It all took place onboard the Enterprise, and no long journeys were part of the script. In fact, no one “went” anywhere, which is why it is so pertinent to this paper.



The crew begin hearing a high whining noise, like that of invisible insects. It turns out the Enterprise has been invaded by a group of people who are speeded up. They move so fast they are invisible. So we have “twins” here, but the twins, although going at very different speeds, never leave the immediate area. In one very important scene, Kirk is speeded up by one of Bones' potions, so that he can talk to the fast people. He then sees the fast people going at his own rate, but he sees Spock and the others still in the room as going very very slowly, almost stopped.

All this is quite fascinating, as Spock would say, because it gives us another way of looking at the twin paradox. Let us say that one twin is the speeded up Kirk, and the other is Spock. Kirk immediately “gets ahead” of Spock, simply by going faster. Kirk is doing a lot of things and Spock is doing almost nothing. By one way of looking at it, we would say that Kirk has stepped into the future, since he may be doing things Spock hasn't done yet. Spock is left in the past. However, if we study it more closely, we see this isn't strictly true. By stepping into that “future”, Kirk cannot thereby see or definitely influence Spock's future. He has NOT stepped into Spock's future. We can prove this just by synching up their “nows”. Since Kirk can see Spock, he knows where Spock is. Their two “nows” can always be determined, and they are always the same. No one has gotten ahead of the other. The two can even touch. You cannot touch someone in the future or past, by definition. They are both in the same room, and they are both at “now.”

In fact, this is just an extreme example of the hummingbird. The hummingbird lives a life faster in all ways than yours. He does not move fast enough to be invisible, but his wings move fast enough to be nearly invisible. And yet he creates no paradox. He does not move into the future. As he flits back and forth, he remains in the now, as you do. He sees you and you see him, so no one is in the future.

The Star Trek thought problem simply speeds up the hummingbird. But no matter how fast he goes, he cannot move into the future. You can see him and he can see you, so you are both at now. Strictly speaking, you cannot move into the future, and velocity has nothing to do with it.

My opponents will say, “That's all as maybe, but that isn't what the twin paradox is about anyway. The twin paradox states that twin2 traveling away from a point at very high speed will experience time dilation, or a slowing of time. When twin2 returns to that point, twin1 living at that point will have aged more than him. He will return into the future in that sense.” Yes, I realize that is what the twin paradox says, but even that is false. Those who can't sort through the math should study the Star Trek example more closely, and that is why I am presenting it to them, as a gift. The current interpretation of time dilation, as taken straight from Einstein, says that direction doesn't make any difference. You can be going toward or away from your twin, and you will experience dilation in both directions. If that is true, then twin2 shouldn't need to go a great distance away. Twin2 can circle twin 1 at high speed, never leaving the room, in which case we are back to the Star Trek example. The twins could be touching the whole time. Twin1 could have twin2 on a string, whirling him. In that case, it is clear that no one could have moved into anyone's future. If twin2 stayed in the room the whole time, he could see the room clock the whole time. What future has he moved into?

I will be told that twin2's own clock (in his pocket, say) would be way behind the room clock, and that once he stopped, he would be younger than twin1. And I have to ask, “By what possible mechanism?” Relativity was invented or discovered to explain the finite speed of light's influence upon all measurement and all data. That is the historical fact. But if twin1 is whirling twin2 on a string, our light separation here is just a few feet. Light traveling from one twin to the other, skewing the data, will not be able to skew it much. Light traveling at c, instead of at infinitiy, is the mechanism of all the transforms, including the time transform. So how can that mechanism cause an aging difference at a distance of a few feet? The current interpretation, to create a mechanism, must assume that light moving from twin2 to twin1 must circle with twin2 for some indefinite amount of time before it moves to twin1. Otherwise we can't get enough time separation to make a difference. Unfortunately, light doesn't work that way, according to all the accepted laws of physics. There is no reason light moving between twin2 and twin 1 cannot move in a straight line between them, in which case our time separation is both negligible and constant. We cannot manufacture a transform in this case, even according to Einstein's own equations.

Most will be shocked to discover that Einstein did not propose or confirm the twin paradox. He was asked about it by Karl Popper in the 1940's, after he had decades to think about it. He basically said, “I don't know.” Despite this, we are told that Paul Langevin and Max von Laue proved the twin paradox, as if these guys were incapable of error. Unfortunately, if you study their proofs, you see the errors very quickly. You can spot the errors just from the Wiki gloss of them. Langevin fudged his proof by trying to tell us that "all velocity, all acceleration, has an absolute meaning." That is false, and contradicts the first postulate of Relativity in the most flagrant manner possible. It contradicts Einstein's most explicit axiom: velocity is relative, NOT ABSOLUTE, meaning you cannot tell which object is at rest. Check Einstein's actual papers on Relativity. That is at the top of page 1! And that applies to acceleration as well. Since all accelerations are composed of velocities, you cannot tell if I am accelerating relative to you or you are accelerating relative to me. Einstein's own equivalence principle, which was accepted by Langevin and is still accepted, is the first example of this. It is impossible to tell if the elevator car is accelerating up or if gravity is accelerating it down. Which is another way of saying that it is impossible to tell, from inertial frames alone, whether the Earth is accelerating at me or I am accelerating at the Earth. The mainstream proves this itself whenever it flips the acceleration vector of the Earth in order to solve blueshift problems, as with the current and accepted math of the Pound-Rebka experiment. In a paper on that, I showed exactly how the vector reversal is done in the math, and Richard Feynman does it even more explicitly in his famous Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, where he basically reruns the Pound-Rebka experiment in his head, mirroring its math. In this math, motion vectors are reversable, a la Einstein. Reversible = relative. But reversible does not equal absolute. Physicists cannot reverse vectors and at the same time claim that "velocity has an absolute meaning." Despite the obviousness of that, mainstream physicists proudly trumpet rules like the relativity of motion when it suits them, but ignore it the next month when it suits them better. They are extravagantly inconsistent, even while trumpeting consistency as a foundation of science.

But, as it turns out, we don't even need to talk about acceleration in the twin paradox, since the twin paradox comes out of the equations of time dilation, and time dilation comes out of Special Relativity, not General Relativity. According to the current interpretation and math, you should be able to get a twin paradox with twin2 NEVER accelerating. All he has to do is go out and back, at constant velocity. Historically, acceleration was brought in simply to muddy the waters, as another diversion in the argument. They needed more equations and more blather to confuse you. But we don't need acceleration to create all the current paradoxes. Einstein's own interpretation of Special Relativity, still accepted, as causing time dilation regardless of direction, was enough to create any number of paradoxes, since it is a contradiction itself. The theory is a theory of motion, motion is a vector, and yet Einstein denies that relative motion has a direction. His transforms are not really vector equations, since direction does not matter. If direction does not matter, you don't have vectors. Calling it vector math doesn't make it vector math.

Because acceleration is unnecessary, my point is even sharper. Einstein says explicitly on page 1 of his theory that velocity is relative. That is what the whole theory is about, for heaven's sake! And then Langevin comes along, claiming he is extending Einstein, and he leads by telling us all velocity has an absolute meaning. AND NO ONE CALLS HIM ON IT FOR 100 YEARS! Wikipedia leads with it, and no one notices or cares!

Von Laue's proof is equally laughable in its egregious inconsistency. According to him, the aging difference is caused not by velocity or acceleration, but by inertial frame asymmetry. The traveling twin is in two inertial frames (up and back) while the resting twin is in one. Unfortunately, that is just as inconsistent as Langevin's math. It conflicts with the time transforms Einstein and von Laue are using, since the transforms explicitly deny that direction is a factor. According to the given interpretation, time dilation is supposed to happen whether twin2 is receding or approaching, since there is no way to insert direction into the transforms. And yet von Laue ignores that, and proposes the opposite (while keeping the given transforms!). The transforms show no directional dependence, but he claims the inertial frames do! He has somehow separated his math from his systems, his equations from his logic. Since the math is supposed to be an expression of the logic, von Laue must flog both, claiming that opposite is equal.

But enough of that. I wrote this paper in order to show you a way that time travel could be said to be real, and the Star Trek example is what enabled me to do that. We see Kirk “working from the future” in the episode. Kirk needs to get some information to Spock, so while Spock is moving like molasses, Kirk finds a computer card with the important info on it and slips it into the slot near Spock. Once we return to Spock's speed, we see Spock notice the card, and he reads it on the computer. In this way, a faster moving person can get ahead of a slower moving person, influencing him from the future. If we proposed that gods were fast moving beings, they might influence our future in such a way. And, if they could predict our movements, they could influence into the distant future.

That said, we can see that this is still a rough interpretation of time travel. It isn't really time travel, strictly, since it relies on a guess. Spock might not have noticed the computer card, in which case he would have missed that future. Kirk was never in his future, really, he only set up a confluence by a guess. Since Kirk and Spock can always meet, touch, or see one another in the present, neither one can truly be in the future.

But this loose interpretation of time travel does give us more to think about, at least. The faster moving beings experience many more events over the same time (if we take time as a room clock on the Enterprise), so to the slower moving beings, the faster ones seem to move quickly from the past into the future. They come from a past longer and richer in events and move into a future longer and richer in events, and these exponential events allow for an exponential influence. While the slow beings are moving like molasses, the fast beings can do an extraordinary number of things, and all these things done will seem to be done in the future (as we saw with Spock's computer card).

By the same token, the fast beings will see the slow ones mostly living in the past. They will do things the faster beings have already done, so their actions will be immediately antiqued. The only action of the slow beings that the fast ones will notice are novel actions, and since the fast beings will have to “go back” to the slower ones, either by actually circling back or by “looking back” figuratively, these actions will seem to come from the past. We can see this most clearly if we make the fast beings travel in a line. If they travel in a line, they can only meet up with the slow beings by going back. Remember, the fast beings on Star Trek keep in contact only by circling. If they do not circle, they immediately leave the vicinity, and by doing so seem to move into one of the Enterprise's possible futures.

This mechanism and this interpretation is the only way we can logically accept the proposal of time travel. The current interpretation is not more esoteric, more novel, or more inventive, it is simply bad vector math.


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