Is the world going to end in 16 years

APPR0ACHING THE CURRENT MILLENNIUM Excitement and anxiety peaked on the first day of the new millennium — which technically arrived on January 1, 2001 and nobody cares about it any more (time is like that -- somewhat "relative")

So, do the past and the future exist - in a physical sense - before or beyond the "NOW"? Can be we get "there" other than by growing older...? Well, first you can look here at the winning lottery numbers as far as probability theory goes - that's obviously an important need in the real world!

To understand time one needs a working model... Ah! Nice model!!!

But I am afraid it's not what we need for this page specifically.

A mathematical model is just soooooo damn confusing - unless you're a full time rocket scientist.

   

Let's try for something more intuitive - assume the future to be pure, undisturbed and uniform.

The instantiation of the present or the "NOW" is the contact between our experience and the future.

In order to encapsulate the three-dimensional view of our everyday existence

try to visualize a screw being continuously turned into a block of wood - the present would be the point of contact. This is an excellent representative model, since life is so often one big screw-up, is ONLY possible for us when two people screw around -

and no matter what you do - you always seem to get...

SCREWED!

It's perfect!

Well actually not totally perfect..

The real story is a little more complicated --- since time is like most things best viewed as a "wave".

So by the way -- what is the "wavelength" of time you might ask yourself --- or better yet ask me --- since it's my webpage and I'm suppose to have some ridiculous IQ and might be able to think of an answer for that.

The "wavelength" of time would exactly separate each universe created -- or "hyperinflated" at the Big Bang (keep in mind they "hyperinflate" in the same physical space -- just in different Universes (theoretical physics occasionally requires some effort to understand) -- that's sort of like an inter-Universal boundary which separates a time quantum or distinct temporal dimensionality in quantum mechanical terms. Thus an entire and nearly identical universe could be thought to exist within each wavelength of time subsequently emerging before and AFTER the "Big Bang" -- remember the "Big Bang"? Well, perhaps it was a few Billion years before your time....

It wouldn't matter if we were in the "before" or "after" -- since both behave identically when viewed from within -- which is where we are. This point of view has other predicted effects in that time waves of Universes could under some circumstances interfere -- meaning that their crests, when coinciding, add to form a higher crest (constructive interference) or the crest of one and the trough of another when merging, produce no wave at all --- called destructive interference.

This inference can create highly nonintuitive effects if you expand the thinking to time. One would expect to find at the edge/boundry of the Universe that time waves would start to break up and intermingle like a temporal surf

Make sense so far....

Perhaps you should also keep in mind gravity is the result of mass and mass distorts space-time and bends light -- although it's not really the light that's bending -- it's better to think of it as the space itself.

BTW: Clairvoyant insights would be physically represented as a weaked or fractured boundary --- which would permit leakage of the "NOW"s of several to co-exist realitiess beyond the normal temporal experience -- like noise (distortion or damping like interference) which would upset or distort the experience of linear time.

Any questions...

IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE? ANSWER: Yes... going "forward" isn't too much of a problem - really! Someone with say, the resources of Bill Gates² (squared) would have more than a fair chance of pulling it off any day now. Let's just say you start out for one of the stars - say Alpha Centauri which is the closest star to our solar system at a distance of 4.3 light-years away in a spaceship running on fuel impulse power - capable of an acceleration of 1 g (normal earth gravity). After one "year" in ship time, the vehicle's speed would be very close to the speed of light - [(0.01km/second²) x (3 x (10 to the seventh) seconds) = 3 x 10 to the fifth km/sec]. This would allow a trip to Barnard's Star in about eight years. The ship could in fact reach the center of our Galaxy in only twenty-one years and the Andromeda Galaxy in twenty-eight years - "SHIP TIME".

The folks back home on earth would see things a bit differently. For example, that twenty-one year trip to the center of the Galaxy would appear to take about TEN CENTURIES.

Going "backward" is not quite so simple.
First of all there's the issue of paradox...I said paradox not pair of dots...

DOH!!! Wrong Wrong Wrong!
I don't mean a PAIR OF OX... even ones 17,000 years old!

PARADOX n1. a statement or proposition seemingly self-contradictory or absurd but in really expressing a possible truth.

There's nothing simple about backward time travel... The most common explanation of the time paradox problem is the thesis of traveling backward in time to prevent your own parents from meeting — thus preventing yourself from being conceived. One way around that significant "problem" is the theory that all possible "outcomes" of all possible events are simultaneously possible in an infinite set of spatial-temporal planes or dimensions -- those Universes I was talking about earlier. And the time machine... well my best guess for that would use the wave principle to effectively dampen the time wave though through selective interference, and if done properly it's at least theoretically possible to move through time just like walking through walls -- which of course once could also do simply by using the interference technology to deal with particle waves. (This isn't something I plan to try and build in the garage this weekend)

The problem here is "probability" or shall I say, the lack thereof... Take for example the case where a small drop of coloured dye is mixed into a cup of water. The "odds" of the collection of matter that is the dye molecules ever spontaneously unmixing itself from the water and returning to the exact form, color and structure in which it existed prior to meeting mister water is downright transinfininal — and that's damn unlikely.

If you think the odds are rather long on a drop of dye, try to imagine building an button for the whole UNIVERSE! (There's also a little matter of the Uncertainty Principle, but never mind about that — since I'm not certain we'll have time to deal with that here.)

Entropy always increases in forward time — this is the second law of thermodynamics, and this can be thought of as establishing a forward boundary condition for all normal experience. Dr Lawrence Schulman, of Clarkson University at Potsdam New York has produced a mathematical computer model of reverse time which shows that by assigning the appropriate boundary conditions to any matter — setting a reverse "time arrow" so to speak, there is no theoretical reason time cannot be reversed in a specific region.

A region of matter operating in reverse time coming into contact with a region of normal matter — in normal time simply produces noise, the time vector has been shown to be stable, not catastrophic, as many theorists had expected.

Time, or the experience thereof is inextricably linked to the speed of light — the one great constant in the physical world. An interesting situation comes to light when the speed of light is "reduced" — such as by a massive gravitational object like a Black Hole (collapsed stars so massive that even light cannot escape their incredible gravity). What happens to the experience of time? When light slows down and stops, all events should move toward a simultaneity — a temporal singularity.

Chances of finding one of these on the shelf of your local hardware store or supermarket is indeed rather slim!

In such a situation...everything can happen!

All at once. Forever.

Try this experiment: BUILD a "TIME CAGE"! Place 1 (one) Type "6B" Black Hole at each indices of a tesserac. Use the gyroscopic potential of the privileged reference frame within to move "inside"... —AND GOODBYE— H E Y ! If you build it — THEY WILL COME!!!

Suggested physical template: '36 Buick!

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