Alarm Bells And Alarming Possibilities
Entry posted by caldrail
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The stifling warm spell seems to run its course. Last night was a blessed relief from lying there gasping for breath, a definite cooler feel to the air, and this morning was actually quite chilly. At last... A chance to get some real sleep....
But no. For some reason every alarm in the neighbourhood was going off. The abanonded office across the road made its usuall insistent bleeping. Car alarms went off one after the other in the streets behind my home. A burglar alarm sounded into the small hours. What is going on? A mass invasion of teenage thieves? I just want to sleeeeepppp......
A Question of Time
Here's something for the scientifically minded to ponder....
Our view of space time is effectively einsteinian. That is, we have three dimensions plus time, which Einstein recognised is linked to our mundane cosmos. Most people wouldn't go any further than that - it isn't a big real world issue. Now, most people would simply regard our three dimensions as all there is and that it's a simple rectilinear description of the volume of space we observe. There are theories that other dimensions exist, seperated from the ones we can perceive, and curled up so small they'd be invisible anyway. But our familiar three dimensions might not be so rectilinear. Einstien himself recognised that space-time is curved. A theory now describes the universe as 'crinkled'. In other words, although we see everything as sort of flat, it isn't, because light and other electromagnetic energies we use to observe the universe around us are simply following the curves, thus we don't see them.
Now we consider dark matter. A strange, mysterious substance that cannot be detected yet accounts for a bulk of the theoretical mass of the universes contents. It should be there, but we can't find it. A theory describes dark matter not as some exotic form of 'stuff', but as the gravitic footprint of ordinary matter like stars and planets that to us appear very, very far away, but that because of the folds in space -time are actually quite close.
Now consider time. Traditionally this is seen as a dimension of its own, like a river, or in some peoples imaginations, a container for all possibilities. Scientists are now coming around to the idea that time does not exist. There is only Now, this moment, flicking from one quantum state to the next at the rate of ten to the thirty four times a second. This means there is no past and no future, no co-existence of things happening in other time periods. So this means that time travel really is impossible.
But wait a minute. We know space-time is curved, We know time runs at different rates according to velocity of the observer and the gravity well of whatever mass is close by. We think electromagnetism follows the curvature of the universe, and that gravity doesn't. What if then, if it were possible to do the same as gravity - to cut across folds in space? Certainly that would make science fiction come true in that you could travel huge distances instantly, but because of the relative variations in time rate, you would also be travelling back and forth in time, because everything is relative to the observer.
Think about that the next time you see a blue 1960's police telephone box. Or not. Depending on how much time you have, how busy your social life is, or whether you give a monkeys 
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