Time Flies

                                                                    

So there you are in your rocket ship, strapped in and ready to go. You know. The one with the rear-view mirror. It's standing on the ground and in the mirror you see your best friend (Speedy Gonzalesⁱ) taking out a Hershey bar (with almondsⁱⁱ) from his backpack. Just as he starts to unwrap it, you take off. Fortunately the mirror continues to be aimed at him and, because of some enviable optics, his size never changesⁱⁱⁱ no matter how far from him you go.

You blast off and you accelerate. Twenty-five thousand miles an hour. Your speed is enough to break loose of gravity, and you head “out.” Where to? Straight ahead, and Speedy stays in the rear-view mirror. And, magically, his size still doesn't change. Look! He just dropped the outer candy-wrapper on the ground. Litterbug.^iv And now he's taking the first bite. Unfortunately you forgot to take any candy with you, and it will be a long time until you have any.

“Switch to 'High speed drive' at this time.” That's what the message on your control screen reads, so you push the red button, and you can feel the acceleration. 100,000 miles per hour. And there's your friend eating his candy. And we're clocking 1,000,000 miles per hour. 10,000,000 miles an hour – that's like almost 2,800 miles a second. Wow. We're really moving.

“Switch to 'overdrive' immediately.” Now what? Alright. I'll push the green overdrive button. Whoosh. We were just crawling before. Now it's 100,000,000 miles an hour; two, three, 500,000,000 miles an hour. And Speedy's just finishing. Looks like he'll drop the inside wrapper on the ground. There it goes. 670,000,000 miles an hour. We're really moving.

“You ain't seen nothin' yet. Push silver button for 'turbo warp' and you'll have a real blast.” Boy, is this exciting. (What's that bell?)

Wait. Something's screwy. Speedy's there, but the wrapper's back in his hand. And so's the candy. It's getting bigger too. Everything's going backwards. And there must be something wrong with the speedometer. It says a little over 800,000,000 million miles an hour. That's faster than the speed of light.^v (That must have been what the bell was.) But that's impossible.^vi Or, at least, that's what I was taught..

Faster than the speed of light.^vii That means time appears to have slowed down, stopped, and is now going backward. Until now you had seen “frames” of light delivered as fast as they were happening but now you're going faster than the frames and catching up to previous ones – images of what happened in the past.

Seeing the past is not anything new. We do it all the time. When we “see” the sun we're actually seeing what it looked like over 8 minutes earlier. As for the stars it's thousands, of years earlier.^viii In those cases, though, the time you see time is going forward, not backward.

What about “you?” Are you getting younger?^ix As you see the past, are you entering it, or is it only in your rear view mirror? Well your clock is going forward – even if it might be doing so at a different rate from “time” outside your ship. So you'll get older. And while you'll return to an earth that has gone through a faster passage of time than you've seen in your mirror, (and, consequently, time has passed faster there than in your speeding space ship) it has gone forward just as it has for you – whatever you may have seen.

Great theory, but I won't hold my breath^x in eager anticipation of it's arrival. A day at a time. That's all I can manage at the moment. We're told that time is uni-directional, and, at least for the moment, that's all we have, whatever our fantasies. Perhaps some day people^xi will be able to go back in time and take me forward to the future. But I'll go kicking and screaming. I'm a product of the twentieth century, and even the present is moving too fast for me.^xii So I'm not eager to see a future which I'm unlikely to understand. Especially if I can't have my Hershey bar.^xiii

Next episode: “Do I What?” – I suppose I do.

 

 

 

i        Yes. This is a Looney Tune.

ii       No other variety is worth the time and calories.

iii     It's always small.

iv     I gotta' talk to him about that. Or someone has to.

v      186,282 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum. It's a little slower (but not much) in air.

vi     Not really. According to the Inflation Theory (Guth presented the theory in 1981, but he was preceded by several others – among them de Sitter and Starobinsky – who paved the way) the universe, starting at the size of a proton, expanded to the size of a ten centimeters. Not very big, but it did so in 15 x 10^-34 seconds. According to my calculations, that's 1 septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times the speed of light. I admit to being a little math challenged, but even if I'm off by a few zeros, that's ripping around at a pretty impressive speed.

vii    Much faster than a speeding bullet.

viii  That's without the aid of telescopes or other detector systems (including magical rear-view mirrors).

ix     Please.

x      There's nothing I can do about my breadth. I like food too much. Sometimes I think I'm inflating at an alarming speed, but it's more comic than cosmic.

xi     Or whatever descends from them.

xii    More on that sometime soon.

xiii  With almonds.