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A time traveler's tale |
| I’m still sitting around in the Pleistocene waiting for Haakon to show up. All this wating has at least one advantage. It gives me time to think. Did I mention I found a library hidden here in the refuge? It’s not got books and journals in the normal sense. They’re all here in electronic form, in readable files on the refuge mainframe. Apparently, these e-books are common in the future timeline that built this place. They give me a chance to study the physics of the future that built this. Back in my Iowa, I was a physics graduate student. I’d even built a time machine of sorts. I was able to send a stream of electrons so that they arrived at a receiver before they were sent. The effect preceded the cause. That’s a big deal, since all the physics I knew depended on local realism. That’s what the books from the alternative future that built this refuge calls it. They even have something called Bell’s Inequality that proves that local realism is wrong, or at least lets them construct experiments to prove that it can’t be true. Personally, I agree with Einstein. The moon is still there even when no one is looking at it. Anyway, the math for this Bell theorem/inequality is beyond what I learned in my timeline. But I don’t need to do the math or devise fancy experiments. I’ve got my personal experience with time travel. And that experience alone tells me what I learned was wrong. Here’s the thing. Everything moves. The solar system is moving in an orbit about the galactic core. In fact, it's moving pretty fast: about 515,000 miles per hour. This means that from 1066 to 1963, the solar system moved 0.73 light years. Thus, when Charlotte Corbet kidnapped me and we jumped from 1963 to 1066, we not only "instantly" traveled in time, in order to stay "on earth," we must have also "instantly" traveled that same distance in space, 0.73 light years. Of course, what "instantly" means in a universe of time travel is a question in and of itself. On the other hand, relativity pretty much erases the notion of simultaneity, so time travel or not, we know time doesn't follow intuitive rules. But it gets worse. I mean, I’ve been jumping back and forth between here, 1.4 million years in the past, and my friend Max’s place in 2022. Every time I make that trip, I’m not just traveling in time. I’m travelling over 1000 light years from where Earth is now, in the Pleistocene, to where it will be in 2022. It follows that a time machine is also a faster-than-light drive. That started me thinking about the energy required to make those jumps. In addition to the movement around the galactic core, Earth rotates. That imparts angular momentum on me, the traveler. So, when I jumped from London to New Mexico, I should have flown off into the atmosphere and burned up. Somehow the timepiece adjusted for the angular momentum, too. Then there’s the whole issue of multiple timelines. I mean, those are implicit in quantum mechanics, at least in my timeline. We called it the “multiple worlds” explanation of quantum mechanics. But the timepieces seem to keep track of that, too, and take you forward along the timestream where they originated. So, either these little gizmos bank a lot more power in them than seems possible, or something else is going on. Maybe they dig a furrow through spacetime when we jump to the past, and that opens a least-energy path when we jump back to the future. I know that Corbet also told me that her future and mine both existed, but we could only see each other in the past that we shared, before they split apart. Apparently, that split happened sometime in 1933, in the Bloomsbury district of London. I don’t recall anything critical in my world from that time and place, so it must have been something that happened in hers. Thing is, something happened, maybe the same something, in Haakon’s timeline then, too. That means that we can meet in the past, before 1933, but afterwards, our worlds are split apart. The only reason I met Haakon in the first place, in my 2018, was that his timepiece had been damaged when a Viking lance struck it back in 1066. But that’s another story. Before this all started, I thought I’d figured out time travel by measuring nanosecond differences in electron transmission and reception times. Turns out, I was wrong. I didn’t understand time travel at all. I’ve been waiting for Haakon for about six months now. I hope Charlotte didn’t sent me on a wild chicken chase. I’ll have to think about that. Sometimes, time to think is better than other times. |
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