Time Travel

Let me be ruthlessly honest on this point.  I believe in time travel.  Now I know the dreamers out there are saying, “Yea! The maestro has validated the basis of our philosophy.”  While the pragmatists (those are people steeped, or mired depending on your point of view, Swee’Pea, in reality) are recoiling from this blatant example of scientific blasphemy.

Let me return the Universe to its normal state.  I believe we all travel through time as the mechanics of the Universe require that we occupy a discrete place within it at any particular instant and that place vis-à-vis other places in the Universe is constantly changing relative to any perceived fixed point of reference, of which there is in reality none.

I must pause here to share my pride in the previous sentence which is a superlative example of the progress I have made in my attempt to construct the most rambling of run-ons while still meeting the requirement that it be cogent. No, it really does make sense… read it over until it does. Okay, are you ready to go on?

Let’s discuss time for just a bit.  I firmly believe that time (as we define it) is a human construct.  We use it to measure our lives against the inevitable, death.  If we didn’t know that we were destined to die, would we have been motivated, as individuals or members of society, to attempt betterment of our condition?  It is proffered by the community of anthropologists that the chimpanzee is our closest living evolutionary relative.  I have observed the behavior of people and compared it to what I have witnessed on trips to the zoo.  I believe there are some gaps in current evolutionary theory that are in need of the application of heavy spackle!  But I digress.

Chimpanzees spend the day lolling in trees, eating leaves and sniffing the air for any indication that a female of the clan has come into season.  They do not enact laws, build cathedrals or write poetry (interestingly enough though, they do engage in combat over territory, something we might recognize as war); still more digression.

People engage in productive behavior because of the pressures of time (and an innate ability to imagine an alternative reality… but that is a subject for another day). 

I do not believe it is, or ever will be, possible for a person (insert own definition here, I’m not going to get sucked into that controversy) to experience the passage of time at a rate different from the natural evolution of the physical universe. We are caught in the stream.

Travel into the future is a ridiculous concept as it hasn’t yet happened.  It would be like trying to paddle a canoe down a river before the glacial ice has melted.  You can only proceed as fast as the river is long.  Give it some time and thought and I promise that last sentence will make sense.  If not, well you are getting this for free.

Travel into the past is a more attractive daydream.  But think about it for just a second.  The Universe is a finite (albeit, really big) physical entity.  If you displaced the matter of just one person, and maybe his time-travelling machine, by moving from now to then, wouldn’t you leave a big hole in the space-time we know as now?  And wouldn’t that time we know as then be suddenly stressed by the addition of unexplained material?  Does this make sense to anybody out there?

Remember, energy is neither created nor destroyed; it merely changes from higher to lower states over time.  And scientists are trying very hard to convince us, via research funds spent on such useful tools as the Large Hadron Collider, that matter is just energy at a very, very (really, really very) low frequency. All energy present in the Universe today was present at the moment the alleged singularity released it.  All changes from that point on can be attributed to the evolution of energy from higher states to lower.  For those of you struggling with this paragraph: The gas in your car’s fuel tank is converted into motion by the release of potential energy within the molecules of the gas. For any volume of gas burned, the car will travel a calculable distance (but not as far as the government’s EPA estimates brag), by which time the energy released by that burning will have been expended.  To move the car further, you must burn more gasoline.  But once the gasoline has been burned and the car moved, you can’t go backwards and un-burn the gasoline and return the car back to its original location (place in space-time, as it were).  To move the car back to its starting point, you must burn additional gasoline.  And all the while, the rest of the Universe is winding its way merrily along the stream of time.  You can’t go home again, unless you have the gas money.

If, by this time I have not convinced you of the impossibility of time travel, then take it up when we meet on the street.  As I am probably bigger and meaner than you, I will pound you into intellectual submission with my fists.  If, by chance you are bigger and meaner than I, you just go ahead and believe what you want.  I am a strict adherent to the constructionist interpretation of the Constitution and therefore recognize and defend your right to believe as your conscience dictates.  Thank you for your kind attention.