About Time Machines

Have you ever enjoyed a time machine movie?

Image by the Author with the aid of NightCafe

Why did you enjoy it? Was it the thought of something you’d change in your own past? Some event in history you’d like to observe passively? Or is human greed or practical need suggesting you should examine stock prices a month or so in the future?

Movies have used this fascinating device to explore love connections, perhaps we could call that the “love is eternal” connection? Others have explored adventures with dinosaurs, spying on past wars, and in trying to find future disasters (hoping to avoid them). Still others seem obsessed with the conundrum of encountering one’s self, or a relative, and causing the universe itself to crash from a temporal short circuit!

There seems to be a common element here, that if such a machine existed, we could absolutely trust the information we obtained from it! If we peeked back to the dinosaur age we would see the exact creatures that became part of the oil reserves from which we just fueled our car. Or by viewing the future we would observe something in politics, finance, business, world events, or some adventure that would be an absolute bit of information guaranteed to take place, and thus make our current-time bet/investment worthwhile.

If you reflect on such premises, the concept assumes that the past or future has a concrete existence, just sitting around frozen in time, waiting for our visit to renew the spooling out of time in event after event with us balanced on the wave of interwoven temporal realities. Many stories revolve about the discrepancies that our inappropriate presence there would introduce if we changed something, even the most inconsequential things, like stepping on a bug or dropping one’s pocket watch while riding a bicycle in the park.

Image by the Author with the aid of NightCafe

There is likely some solid and very real physics involved in the reason we can’t travel in time, though the Sci-Fi stories invented are often entertaining. The most reasonable concept and physical principle that has been suggested to help understand time, is that time is somehow a process that is continually unfolding such that we only find an infinite NOW…