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Archive for September, 2011

Time travel has fascinated people for millennia, beginning with old folk stories and myths, and continuing on into the 21st century in the form of novels, television shows, and motion pictures. Every Christmas in English speaking countries we are treated to two perennial movies which feature time travel. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, spirits take Ebenezer Scrooge into both the past and the future. In It’s a Wonderful Life, an angel conducts George Bailey on a trip into the past and future-a past and future that would have occurred had there been no George Bailey.

Like these examples, time travel in fiction was long accomplished either through supernatural means or through mysterious and unknown means. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, the protagonist is transported instantly from 19th century Connecticut into 6th century England by a blow on the head from a crowbar wielded by an angry employee. How did he return? After being stabbed while attending to the wounded on a battlefield, the sorcerer Merlin cast a spell on the traveler so that he will sleep for 1300 years before waking up. In the 1889 novel, Mark Twain used a literary device often employed in time travel stories since-physical evidence of the trip-proof (at least to the protagonist) that the journey had not been an illusion. In Twain’s book, that physical evidence was a bullet hole in a suit of medieval armor in a museum. A hole that the time traveler himself had made 13 centuries before with a revolver that he had fashioned using his knowledge of 19th century technology. In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, published six years later, Wells used the same device, in this case two withered white flowers the time traveler had absently brought back from the year 802701. Two flowers unlike any known in the 19th century.

Wells was the first novelist to have his protagonist use a machine, therefore moving time travel from the fantasy to science fiction genre. It’s awfully hard for a reader-even of what is represented as fiction-to believe that time travel can be effected by a blow on the head with a crowbar. That requires a whole lot of the suspension of disbelief. But travel by means of a machine is much easier to believe. The device described in The Time Machine had only two controls, both small levers that the traveler could unscrew and put in his pocket to prevent an unauthorized person from using the machine. One lever sent the machine forward in time; the other backward in time. Wells’ time traveler said that it took him two years to construct the fabulous machine, but never said what its power source was or anything about the principles of physics involved. There are two reasons why none of this vagueness detracts from Wells’ book. First, the book was published well over a century ago, when the only air travel was accomplished via an occasional hot air balloon, land travel was by horse or rail, and the telegraph was the most advanced form of communications. Even had Wells formulated a scientifically plausible and detailed explanation of how such a machine might be constructed and powered, it would have been lost on the reading public of 1895. Second, there are the matters of Well’s magnificent imagination and his prodigious skill as a writer. Few writers of any generation can match those.

For those of us writing today more effort and attention to detail is necessary. We can’t get by with a blow from a crowbar or with the simple bare sketch of the device described by Wells. Our readers don’t live in the 19th century, but in the 21st. One of the very things that made Star Trek such a wildly popular television series with spinoffs galore was its attention to scientific detail. Of course some of the physics involved was far out, but it was always plausible, always built on a solid base of the real physics which its fans had learned in high school or college or through reading about NASA’s latest projects or in many other ways. This made the series more believable, more satisfying and pleasurable. There is a lesson in this. If in the science fiction we write, we offer the reader 85 or 90 percent solid physics and make sure that the remaining 10 or 15 percent is plausible, we’re on the right road.

Jesus’ disciples were traveling in a boat on the lake of Galilee and a strong wind was blowing. Suddenly in the middle of the night, they saw Jesus coming to them walking on water and about to pass them. They thought it was a ghost and screamed out but Jesus told them that it was Him.

Peter then asked Jesus to command him to come and when Jesus did, peter stepped out and started to walk on water. Out on the water, peter notice the wind, became afraid and started to sink. Immediately he cried out and Jesus reached out and grabbed him up

Although the disciples were used to walking on solid ground, they believed also that the only way to travel on water was in a boat that was why they thought Jesus was a ghost because they never knew it was possible to walk on water. Jesus was able to show them another faster and smoother way of traveling on water. Up until that point, they never knew that there was another was of traveling on water and even when they saw Jesus do it, only peter was willing to step out and try the new although initially risky looking meaning of traveling. The others preferred their safe old but slower means of traveling in a boat and did not step out.

In life, despite the fact that whatever you are doing is giving you results, you must realize that there is always a faster, smoother and better way of doing it. In fact there are people already doing it in a better more efficient way and for you to step up in life, you must be willing to step out of your comfort zone and try the unfamiliar but better way of doing what you are doing.

Most people, although they see the result the new method can deliver, will never step out to try it. Like the other disciples, the will rather stay in the familiar but slower method of sea traveling by boat. So always seek for that new method of doing whatever you are doing because it exists and it’s the only way you can step up in life to achieve a better, less stressful and more rewarding result.

Secondly, you must realize that you cannot operate the new method with your old mind set or like peter you will begin to sink. You must also have someone who is practicing the better method around you so that when you want to sink from trying to operate the better method with your old mindset, he can grab you back to the new mindset and help restore your confidence in the better method.

Exploring the possibilities of time travel including: Time paradoxes, worm holes, 4 dimensional space, atomic clocks and NTP servers.

Time travel has always been a much loved concept for science fiction writers. From HG Wells’ Time Machine to Back to the Future, travelling forwards or backwards in time has captivated audiences for centuries. However, thanks to the work of modern thinkers like Einstein, it appears that time travel is much a possibility of science fact as it is fiction.

Time travel is not only possible but we do it all the time. Every second that passes is a second further into the future so we are all travelling forward in time. However we think if time travel we imagine a machine that transports individuals hundreds or thousands of years in to the future or past so is that possible.

Well, thanks to Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, time ravel is certainly possible. We know thanks to the development of atomic clocks that Einstein’s theories about speed and gravity affecting the passage of time is correct. Einstein suggested that gravity would warp space-time (the term he gave to four dimensional space that includes directions plus time) and this has been tested. In fact modern atomic clocks can pick out the minute differences in the passage of time every subsequent inch above the earth’s surface as time speeds up as the effect of the earth’ s gravity weakens.

Einstein predicted speed too would affect time in what he described as time dilation. For any observer travelling close to the speed of light a journey that to an outsider may have taken thousands of years would have passed within seconds. Time dilation means that travelling hundreds of years into the future in a matter of seconds is certainly possible. However, would it be possible to get back again?

This is where many scientists are divided. Strictly speaking theoretical properties of space time do allow for this, although for any travelling back in time a worm hole would have to be created or found. A worm hole is a theoretical link between two parts of space where a traveller could enter one end and appear somewhere completely different at the other end this may be another part of the universe or indeed another point in time.

However, critics of the possibility of time travel point out that because travellers from the future have never visited us that probably means that time travel will never be possible. They also point out the any travelling backwards in time could create paradoxes (what would happen to you if you were mean enough to go back in time and kill your grandparents).

However, time paradoxes exist now. Many computer networks are not synchronised which can lead to errors, loss of data or paradoxes like emails being sent before they were received. To avoid any time crisis it is important for all computer networks to be perfectly synchronised. The best and most accurate method of doing this is to use a NTP time server that receives the time from an atomic clock.