Choose Your Time Loops
Time Traveler’s Choice of Looping Mechanism. Time Stands Still While You Peruse This Article.
The Padding. Time travel is the pinnacle of the fascination for decades, scientists ponder on it, hobbyists fantasize about it, filmmakers make movie sequels with it. It never fails to amplify the imagination of those who wish and dream. That is perhaps enough, to fuel sufficient curiosity that one day, some prodigy in some corner of the world will finally invent the working time machine and spring on a whole new generation of time-faring travelers, setting humanity on a new path of time exploration. Space is no longer the frontier, TIME is.
But before that happens, we can only satiate ourselves with good thoughts, livelier imaginations, and wildest fascinations. We roll back a good old film like the Primer, dilate time while sitting on the toilet, doodle away on stall walls as we try to understand its intricate time jumping mechanisms.
WHAT IF. What if I could travel back to the past and undo the regrets? what if I could travel forward into the future and glimpse what’s to come? Questions like these had motivated scientists, fictional writers, philosophers, daydreamers, temporal mechanics hobbyists, the poor fella who wishes he didn’t forget his wife’s birthday… to explore its possibility with moderate rigor but boundless wonders.
The first person to mention time travel was H.G. Wells’s and in his novel “The Time Machine”, this term was brought to life. He was the first to merge these two seemingly ordinary words into something extraordinary.
As a science-fiction enthusiast, I am always intrigued by the creative formulation of time traveling mechanisms delivered through creative science fiction films and TV series. Given the choice, I rather build a time machine myself. But without the genius and capital to fund such an ambition, I am resorting to letting my mind drift and wander. And the following are thoughts and notions taken from movies as well as scientists on the subject.
“The faster I traveled, the slower my clock would tick relative to clocks on Earth. And if I made the trip at the speed of light, I would return as if I had been frozen in time. So, what if we were to travel faster than light, would time run backward as science fiction has taught us?” — Steven hawking
The notion of time travel used to only exist inside the domains of science fiction, yet it is currently venturing into theoretical physics with researchers all around the world searching for a possible means to augment human existence. It has always been an astounding topic from prehistoric to the modern-day era.
At first, the idea of time was thought as immutable with the single linear flow “that time is an arrow which is continuously flowing with no end” — Carlo Rovelli,
The Premise. The Possibility Bubble. But then the profound discoveries by physicist Albert Einstein in his book Special and General Theory of Relativity postulated that space and time are interwoven into a single continuum known as space-time and the time passes faster, the further away an object is from its gravity as it experiences a weaker gravitational force. Time dilates as the object reaches the speed of light or if the object is in a strong gravitational well. This suggests that time isn’t uniform or absolute, it is relative and affected by the fabric of the physical space. And events that occur at the same time for one observer could occur at different times for another. Time doesn’t have a direction. One way to travel through space and time is then by the ways of wormholes. The wormhole theories were first theorized by Ludwig Flamm. Mathematically, the presence of these spatial phenomena was anticipated in Einstein’s hypothesis, and it has since gained traction from observations such as the one in 2006 when a gamma beam burst indicative of wormhole existence was detected, wildly giving hope to the possible practicalization of such theory. From the current limitation of moving at the speed of light to naturally-occurring wormhole bypasses wrapping around the space and time continuum, humankind is poised to convince itself within its lucid dreams of the possibility of racing against time.
Constant Linear Time Dilation with Speed and Gravity
Your Planet is SO FAT. Let’s start with one of my favorite films — the Interstellar movie by Christopher Nolan. Fast forward to the scene where the astronauts had to land on a planet near a supermassive black hole “the Gargantua” weighing 100 million solar masses. This gravitational pull causes extreme time dilation that turns a few minutes spent on the planet into years on earth. As a result, those who were on the Gargantua planet, in a way traveled into the future of the earth.
Life On the Fast Lane. The concept of time travel through the speed of light was used in movies like the Enders Game by Orson Scott where the main characters experienced dilation of time as they moved near the speed of light, permitting only a couple of days or months to pass for those voyaging while a long-time elapsed on different planets. This idea creates a single trajectory of time without splitting reality into any multiverses or timelines. It keeps the motion in one universal pattern without giving rise to any paradoxes. The same concept was used in the movie The Planet of the Apes, in which the astronauts experienced outrageous time dilation and crashed on an odd planet ruled by primates that turned out to be the future Earth.
The Infinite Time Loop: The Do-Over
A major distinctive element in fictional time travel mechanisms is the consistency of time travelers themselves during temporal looping, in another word, is there a self-consistency when traveling to the past? During the first initial time travel, will the time-traveling form of you consistently be there in any case, or does the actual looping in time of traveling to the past change that occurrence? Does the universe set the traveling you onto an alternate direction of history from the one you encountered preceding the voyage?
The second distinctive element is the concept of free will, who has free will when one time travels? Whose activities are permitted to move history onto an alternate reality? Elegantly portraited in the movie The Edge of Tomorrow, the protagonist relives each day with a never-ending time loop until he figures out the exact set of choices to make, all while having the memories of the previous timelines. Similar to the mechanism used by Dr. Strange who traps Dormammu in repeating the infinite loop of time, forcing him to live the same timeline over and over again.
The Multi-Realm Hypothesis
There is also the time travel notion of a grander scale by creating additional universes or realms of existence. Audacious movies that explored this concept create other multiverse or branches of reality by the sets of choices the person makes while traveling back in time. Conceivably bringing about different renditions of oneself for a causality point of view, in which anything you do in the past, even only the act of traveling the second time into the past diverts the course of history onto another timeline from the first trajectory. In films such as Back to the Future, Star Trek, Looper, Primer, Predestination, etc. there is time travel within the time-traveling characters interacting with each time-traveling version of themselves. As for the time machine, the time-travel you cannot return to a period before the time machine was first invented (thus the ultimate answer to the famous question posed by Alexander Hartdegen in the “The Time Machine” film — why can’t we change the past? Because one simply can’t travel beyond the machine’s inventive past).
Obviously, the machine must be invented first in order for you to time travel into the past for the first time. If that initial trigger never occurred, the time machine wouldn’t have been invented in the first place. This has a nice defining logic of consistency.
But this logical consistency also gives birth to a paradox if you ponder deeper. Think of the famous Grandfather Paradox. A person traveling back in time say kills his/her grandfather, and then consequently results in him never being conceived. He has basically finished his entire existence and consequently never would’ve turned back the clock to kill his grandfather in the first place. This inconsistent causal time loop gave the idea of a broader culture of paradoxes or for that matter, any logical or casual conundrum, the potential irrevocability of narrative frames within a time travel story which still imparts to the readers of an unusual and subversive novelty, even though it defies the natural laws of physics like the law of causality. Since a cause from the past cannot be used to predict the event of the future as it could be an event from the future which causes the event in the past.
Trajectory Without Linear Timeline Alteration but With A Logical Consistency
Say that you could go back in time to interact with the past characters including yourself without branching new realities per your interaction or actions, this involves those actions you make to be part of the past self while the future remains as it is. In this given time frame, both the past self and future self-co-exist in one timeline, as it is portraited in the film Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban in which Harry traveled back in time and saved his own self from the dementors, thus suggesting the notion that the traveler might not have a free will during this period of time because the actions were already done in the past. This manages to be logically consistent than other time-traveling theories because it produces the least inconsistent time loop paradox.
Chronology Protection Conjecture: The Timeline Protection Theory
Stephen Hawking published his Chronology Protection Conjecture Theory that the universe prevents actions from altering the timeline that would otherwise disrupt it. Therefore, you would never be able to kill your grandfather (as in Grandfather Paradox), i.e. the gun might not work or someone might save the grandfather, etc. It’s also shown in the “WHAT IF” show of MARVEL when Dr. Strange tries to save his wife in the past from getting killed but somehow she manages to die every time, just as the universe tends to restore itself, rather than branching into a new reality through multiples timelines. This contends against traveling through time. Steven Hawking also pondered that time travel may be conceivable at a microscopic level and that the laws of the universe would still prevent all-time travel, assuming time travel was possible.
The Illusion of Time Travel Through Reverse Entropy
Entropy is the amount of disorder in a system, the measure of the distribution of the atoms’ energy. Defined by the 2nd law of thermodynamics which was published by Clausius in 1854, the total entropy of an isolated system (the thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work) can never decrease. Universally, the entropy always increases, i.e. the shattering of glass. The probability weighs so heavily in favor of shattering the glass into pieces that diminishes the chances of reforming so greatly that you will never see a shattered glass reconstitute itself. This gives an illusion of the arrow of time, the flow of time. Entropy gives us a natural conception of time intuitively. And that concept is used in the movie TENET by Christopher Nolan, in which it revolves around reversing the entropy of things and people, resulting in time reversibility that gives the perception of motion and time going backward. This is scientifically inaccurate because reversing entropy doesn’t reverse time.
Time travel is a complex concept that tests our logic and yet questions our understanding of the very laws of physics on which this universe is built upon. Most would agree that the defining obstruction to human time travel in space-time is the speed of light, and speculation should be made in overcoming this hindrance so more mechanical headways into building a working time machine can happen. Regardless of how that marvelous traveling near or at the speed of light is denied by the laws of science due to the demand of an infinite mass.
Did I just waste your time? Check out my other articles instead, they are less thought scrambling as time made this one to be. lol.
