by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 1 November 2009 @ 18:38 UCT
WEAVERVILLE, NC – I have always been fascinated with the prospect of traveling back or forward in time. From an early childhood, I often imagined what it would be like to travel back in time to visit my relatives, for instance, before I was born, visit loved ones before they had died, visit individuals with whom I had never met, or better yet, to change the present by altering past events. Even more exciting for me was entertaining the possibility of traveling into the future to get a glimpse of what might happen to me or to the world in which I lived. What technologies might exist in my future that I or others have yet to even comtemplate? Could these technologies be brought back into my present time so that it could be used for some human good, such as a cure for cancer or a solution to world hunger, for example? Are these simply fantasies conjured up in the mind of a young adolescent boy or is it possible to transcend the boundaries of time and space in order to achieve time travel? These are the very questions that we will explore in this article.
Before we can begin to look at time travel and investigate whether it is possible to achieve such a feat, we must first look at defining exactly what time is and how we perceive it. If time were absolute, then there would be no past, no present, and no future. For someone living in absolute time, the past, present, and future would be meaningless. There would be no yesterday, no today, or no tomorrow, only now. However, there is the possibility that one must consider that absolute time might have a past, present, and a future, but that they would all coexist simultaneously rather than exist separately. But, if we lived in absolute time, how would it be measured? Would it be measured at all? Would we be born or would we die? For us, the concept of absolute time is somewhat incomprehensible. And, for this reason alone, we will not consider it. Rather, we will investigate what we can comprehend more fully, which is that time, for us, is relative.
What do we mean when we speak of our time as being relative? We are fascinated with measuring time. Our day is broken down into hours, minutes, and seconds. The 24-hour day, which is determined by the rotation of the Earth about its axis in relation to our Sun, dictates how we live, work and play. The movement of our moon in orbit about our planet marks the course of our months on the calendar and affect our biological makeup. Our annual cycle is determined by the orbit of our planet about the Sun, and so forth. However, we are no longer satisfied that we can mark our time merely in years, months, weeks, days, hours, or even seconds, but we have chosen to break each second into millions and billions of parts so that we can harness the power of our modern computers which make millions and even billions of calculations per second or CPU clock cycle. (more…)
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