The Man Who Stopped Time-Travel

Time travel is much used in fiction, since H G Wells's excellent book about its possibilities. I suspect, when writers get a mental block or the budget is tight, it is rolled out as a way to kill an hour.

But does time does flow? Stephen Hawking thinks it does and invented imaginary time. The brief word on time is that it goes neither back nor forward. The elusive "atoms of time" don't exist. Time has no direction, and, since one can't determine a relative position of anything to anything at an instance in time, there is no such thing as an object accelerating or having velocity in the first place. Time is an interval, not an instance. It is the order of events that matter to us when we speak or consider or calculate time. Brilliant isn't it. So simple. Time someone came up with that explanation. Yes, its that man Lynds again. I wrote about Peter Lynds's work on time recently.

So, since time does not flow, one can't travel through it. Lynds stopped time-travel in its tracks.

Lynds' time is what passes when events transpire and, since what matters to us is the order of events, we perceive the illusion that time flows. When I rewind a VHS tape, it is like looking back through time. I am winding back through events, in reverse order. When I look at a photograph of past times, I am looking at what an order of events resulted in. Its about as close to time-travel I am going to get, if Lynds is right. It all stems from his notion that dynamic objects have no relative motion at any instance of time, only over an interval of time. Since instances of time for moving objects is undefined, time can't move forward or back, flow or vector at angles. It would be like dividing by zero.

Lynds says that it is fortunate that Nature choice continuity rather than certainty as the foundation of the Universe. Not knowing for certain where a dynamic object is, allows it to move in the first place. Einstein and Lynds would have some deep discussions about thought experiments, I think.

But back to Sci Fi and the loss of time-travel stories - no more Dr Who. But better stories in most films, I expect.

The excellent Battlestar Gallatica (TV) does not have risible aliens or time-travel stories. Just humans and satanic robots. Maybe that is why it is so good. It is not even set in the future; it is set in another galaxy at anytime.