Thursday, January 01, 2015

Time travel the non-scientific explanation (aka common sense)

People are always intrigued by the idea of time travel. Is it even remotely possible? The following is an effort to try to see the possibility of it in a lay man's way.

First the 'time' element must be explored. What actually is 'time'? Early humans observed the rising and setting of the sun. They also observed the seasonal cycle. Therefore they call the cycle concept 'time'. Time is therefore a concept not a physical property.


As technology improves, people want to have a more precise definition of 'time' cycle. The therefore invented the thing called clock. Clock is supposed to be a machine that measures 'time'. It does resembles the cycle that man observes earlier. But does that actually make 'time' a physical property? It does represents a instrument to define cycles of its motion from the moment it starts to the moment it reaches back to the same position. We probably can call it a cycle of motion. But that does not equates to the 'dimension' (length, breath, and height) that we can measure physically. Generally, time is referred to as the fourth dimension. It is at best man's effort to quantify a measurement of a concept. There are a lot of theories about the space-time (4 dimensions).


With the clock, they invented another concept called 'speed'. The definition of 'speed' is distance divided by time. Its the beginning of mixing physical property with a concept. Obviously people will not regard 'time' as a concept now as they can now 'measure' it. Lets just leave the argument alone as it is not the topic of discussion. 

With the avent of 'speed', peoole start to measure all kind of things. The speed of light is thus derived. The next thing come into mind is that if one could travel faster than the speed of light, one could end up in the future . Thus the concept of time travel comes into being. The next obvious question is whether we could go back in time.


Going back in time already happening right now. The sunlight we see now is actually 8 minutes and 20 sec ago when it happened. We can actually see cosmic activities that happened billion years ago. The real question is going back to our own past. Now if we travel away from the place where we started at 300000 KM per sec (speed of light). We can only see the moment when we started (assuming the speed is 300000 KM in one sec). To see the moment before that, we have to travel much faster than that. At twice the speed of light we barely see the moment one second before hand.


Hold on. Now that we are 0.6 million KM away. How big is the picture that we can see? If you use a standard 50 mm camera (see the image the same size as real one) to take a picture of the starting position, you can practically see nothing. We actually need a huge telescope to see the starting point. How big is the telescope? I let you do the calculation yourself. Did I mention that it takes a few seconds to focus properly?

On the other hand, since the light has not reach us from the cosmic event, we are actually in their 'future' right? So if we travel fast enough towards it, can we reach it at the state in the past? It is equivalent to say that if you fires a gun at me but then I travel fast enough I can reach you before you do it. That is a interesting question. Can you reach a physical event before it happens? Common sense will tell you that it is not possible. No matter how fast we travel, we take time to do it. By the time we reach the object, the event is already gone. Seeing an event is not equal to be in the same physical event. That's why I say 'time' is a concept.

Let us now focus on the idea of travelling forward to the future. Well, before the light start to move, it does not exist. Just like before you switch on the light, you see no light. It is as simple as that. So, even when we tried to travel faster than speed, it still does not exist. 

Obviously some one will argue that what we are seeing now is actually in the past. It will remain an unknown at best.

We see in motion pictures that people travel to the past/future and interacts with the events in the past. Well, that remains only in fiction stories. Remember my very first message that 'time' is a concept? It is not real and cannot coexist with the present.

My concept of time is therefore 'a measure of event that occurred by comparing it with a device that has a constant cycle". It is not a physical property. We use time to predict what is the physical condition after a certain cycle that occurred. Like for example, I travel at 15 KPH for one hour. I can predict where am I after the cycle is completed. 

Time travel is therefore purely imagination. It should remain a flawed science fiction.




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