*** This essay is under construction, I hope to have it finished before the end of April, 2023.
Introduction
When I was 16 I pretty much hated life, and this is typical of many teenagers. I had many “escape plans”, all equally infeasible. I settled on a whimsical idea – to travel through time, but how? In 2012, I documented this crazy idea, never expecting to revisit it.
I would like to state, in order to save time, that traveling forward in time is uncontroversial. It’s not to say I am 100% on board with relativity theory, but even if I doubted relativity, I could still see how suspended animation or hyper-sleep could behave in a similar fashion, especially if you remove yourself from the causal framework – like going into some chamber, in a cave, and then waking up 100 years later. So forward in time? – we already do that at “normal speed”, it’s just a question of whether we can go faster OR skip portions of time without impacting the events beyond being conspicuously absent.
Backwards in time is the real question – how?
One of the ideas I came across, 30 years ago, was developed by a mathematical physicist named Tipler. The Tipler Cylinder was a hypothetical heavy cylinder, that you would build in outer space. Because of conservation of energy in low to zero friction systems (like the vacuum of space far away from any other celestial object), you could, theoretically, spin the cylinder at incredible speeds. Because of the nature of rotation, there would be regions of the cylinder surface that would exhibit relativistic effects – and, according to this model, if you can go faster than light, then you would be able to “arrive before you left” so to speak. But this is very much based upon relativity theory. Just about every time-travel scheme either involves relativity directly or indirectly using a wormhole.
Stephen Hawking has proposed his own “time machine” with restrictions, and I’ll leave you to research this – but it involves using wormholes. I will tell you that the estimates of negative energy required are so extreme, as to make the creation of a wormhole nearly impossible without access to technology thousands of years more advanced than today.
When I was looking at the problem, I viewed time in terms of entropy or change. It seemed to me that entropy was the engine behind time, and that without entropy time itself was a meaningless concept. I think I was close to the right answer, back then in 1986, but I still had a ways to go.
A) What is time?
B) What is the current thinking regarding super-position?
C) Is time travel possible?
D) Could you destroy the universe by increasing causal noise?
E) Might quantum computers be disrupting the past, given that they are calculating on the NOW and generating dilation of the present – creating what is called the Mandela Effect? Quantum computers might be “causality disrupters”, capable of generating enough causal-entropy to dilate the NOW, into the past, far enough, to create repercussions and anomalies, and this might be an unknown side effect.