The Synchronicity War Part 4 (39 page)

What if you looked at the time paradox
example described above but from the point of view of the atomic level instead
of the macro level. So we have a collection of atoms, that can walk, talk,
think, create and do a bunch of other things, that travels back in time and
does something to another collection of atoms that now can no longer walk,
talk, think, create or procreate but the second batch of atoms is still there.
What about the first batch? Well, in terms of what our bodies are made of, we
are what we eat. If the grandfather doesn’t have a son and that son doesn’t
have a son, then all the food that the grandson would have eaten, would
probably be eaten by someone else and those atoms would still exist in the
future. But how would the atoms making up the body of the time traveler know
that they’re supposed to be somewhere else in the future? If the Arrow of Time
really is one way, then it seems to me that the time traveler would cease to
exist in the future but would continue to exist in the past. That means that on
the atomic level, there would be two copies of the same atoms in the past. One
copy in the time traveler’s body and the other copy spread out among plants,
other animals or just part of the soil. How does the universe tolerate that?
Well, maybe the universe can tolerate it for a little while. Here’s how that
might work. Einstein said that space and time were just subsets of something
that combined both which he called the spacetime continuum (sound familiar?)
and that time is really just a special kind of spacial dimension. Think of it
this way. If you have a three dimensional object that exists in zero time, what
have you really got? Nothing. So suppose a time machine creates a permanent
detour in time for the atoms that are being transported back in time (including
the atoms that make up the time machine itself). That would mean that the
landscape of the spacetime continuum has now been changed.

So getting back to our time traveling
paradox situation, the atoms that would normally end up in the time travelers
body move forward in time and even if they end up in someone else’s body, when
they hit the detour in the spacetime continuum, they move back into the past
and arrive together to form the time traveler’s body. If that’s a little
difficult to visualize how about this?

Visualize the spacetime continuum as a hill
with a gentle slope and a river flowing down the hill. The river represents all
the atoms in the universe. Now let’s visualize that the time machine cuts a
path in the spacetime continuum hill so that some of the water in the river is
diverted and is somehow forced back up the hill a little way until it merges
back with the river again. Keeping in mind that we’re talking atoms moving
through spacetime instead of water molecules and you’ll see that for a short
length, the same atoms exist twice. Once one set of atoms are diverted back up
the spacetime continuum hill, then from that point on you only have one set of
atoms left. Another way to visualize it is to take a strip of paper and create
a loop with it. If you let your finger follow the path along one side of the
strip, it will come back around and resume travelling in the same direction as
it started. For a short distance, there’ll be two strips side by side but
eventually it’ll go back to one strip.

So in my series, when I talk about how the
future will rearrange itself into a new timeline as a result of changes in the
past, when people (like Shiloh’s and Kelly’s baby) or objects (like Valkyrie’s
brain case) cease to exist in the future, what that really means is that those
atoms are now part of something else. The atoms still exist, they’re just in a
different place. That means that all the atoms that make up things that
travelled back into the past, will temporarily (temporally?) coexist with
identical atoms. But eventually the detour in the continuum will force the
first set of atoms back in time, leaving the second set to continue on. That’s
my view of how time travel might work. I’m not claiming to be the first one to
think of this concept. I probably read it somewhere but I can’t remember where.

Now let’s talk about longitudinal waves.
L-waves as I’ll refer to them from now on, are funny things. I haven’t found a
really good description of what they are but I have come across some
interesting ways of describing them. L-waves are not like EM waves which
include light, radio, radar, x-rays, gamma rays, etc. All those phenomenon act
the same way. They’re emitted at the atomic level and as waves they travel in
all directions. Light  travels as discrete lumps of energy called photons each
of which travels in one direction but that’s the exception. Since EM waves
travel in all directions, they lose energy along the way. A useful analogy is
when two people hold the ends of a rope between them. Suppose one person
rapidly whips the rope end up and down. That oscillation travels along the rope
and loses energy as it does so. The height of the wave at the end is lower than
at the beginning. Travelling along the rope also takes time. If the rope was
long enough, and the waves were carrying a message, there would be a delay
between when the sender sends the message and when the receiver gets it. Now
let’s assume those same two people are holding the ends of a pole. If one
person lifts and drops his end of the pole, the other person may or may not
feel it but if the first person pulls or pushes on the pole, the other person
will feel it instantly and with the same intensity. L-waves are like the pole
while EM waves are like the rope. I’ve also heard someone describe L-waves as
gravity waves but I’m not sure if that’s accurate. There is some experimental
evidence that L-waves can travel faster than light.

L-waves are also referred to as scalar
waves and they have a dark side. Lt. Col. (ret.) Tom Bearden has a Ph.d in
physics and has written books that describe how scalar waves could be used as a
weapon more powerful and destructive than a thousand hydrogen bombs. He claims,
and seems to know what he’s talking about, that if the right kind of scalar
ways intersect from two directions, the combined effect could range from
extreme heat (think center of the sun) to extreme cold. He has also predicted
that unrestrained use of weaponized scalar waves could set up a resonance wave
in the Earth that could cause the planet to blow apart (think tuning fork that
shatters glass). Scary stuff. Too scary for me to use in my books.

On a final note, those of you who have read
Joseph P. Farrell’s books about the Nazi Bell project, will recognize the
similarity between how the Bell supposedly operated and how the Friendlies’
time tunnel device and the timeship’s temporal device operate. I have no idea
if this is scientifically accurate but it sounded like a cool way for a time
machine to work.

Plans for my next book are up in the air
but there’s a very good chance that it will include at least one galactic
empire, space battles and an interesting character or two…or three… Preliminary
plans are for publication somewhere around October of this year but don’t hold
me to that.

Until then…Long Live Space Opera!

D.A.W.