Starships

Been researching an appropriate "starship", using facts and figures from the Apollo 10, an American rocket. As my novel is set just slightly into the future, the RX-8 Atlantis as mine will be known, will have to travel at the subluminal speed of more than 25,000 miles an hour. (It would have to travel 2,000 times faster to travel at FTL or superluminal speed.)
And speaking of superluminal speed or faster than light, a classical rule of the Universe that Einstein thought could not be broken, once more the experiment at the Italian Apennines to the Gran Sasso lab proved to produce speeds in excess of the speed of light, a mind boggling fact. I think Einstein will be spinning in his grave!

The Fabric of Reality

The fabric of reality: Thinking of uni-verse versus multi-verse has invaded my thought processes to the point that last night's dream was of an Earth that had hidden layers beneath it's "carpet" of five inch foam, with another, brighter universe layered beneath it. Like the PBS special on Quantum Mechanics, by Brian Greene, the universe was portrayed as curled up (almost in a sphere) and yet infinite! Like Earth's mirror image or a split-universe.
Began writing before five am this morning and got a two hour bit of writing in. It was a love scene so I started off my day in a happy frame of mind! I highly recommend writing about romance, good for the spirit.

Wouldn't you love to change the past

My interest in time travel has come about because what if you could change the past? Save someone you loved? What kind of events would that set in motion for others. My scenario revolves around a plane crash and the idea of who's on standby to travel next, if the first person is kept from getting on. Who will die?

On an entirely different note: Watched a great special last evening on Quantum mechanics on Nova. Brian Greene really knows his stuff! Note to self, buy his book.

Macrocosm

My new heroine, Jazlyn Martin or Jaz to her friends, has as much an interest in time travel as I do! She works as a scientist for Macrocosm, a company that is researching possible theories for time travel. Very dedicated and hard working like most any scientist, Jaz is immediately captivated by the idea of travelling back in time to change an event for the better. But will the scientists' intervention to change the past actually succeed in doing that, or will it create a host of other problems for others? Only time will tell. . .

What an Amazing Journey!!!

What an amazing journey! The last three weeks spent on research is paying off big time. The story, based a few years into the future, poured out of me beginning at five AM each morning. I was able to connect many of the dots for writing proper science fiction in the time travel area, thanks to the scientists that take the idea seriously.
The rocket that takes one of my characters to the wormhole on the dark side of the moon (fortuitously mapped in February of this year), the RX-8 Atlantis, had already been invented before the incident in the past happened that is the basis for my story. This avoids one important paradox.
Now, the scientists in the novel are busy discussing ways to have this time travel to the past, 18 months before, happen. This will help my hoped-for-readers understand the ideas and concerns behind this amazing concept: time travel to the past!

NOVA

Seems every where I look of late there is a program on Nova or PBS about space and time travel. It is a fortuitous beginning for my adventure into plausible, past time travel possibilities. A character in my novel, The Time Key, wants to go back and fix the past. The only way imaginable I can gleam from all the ideas researched, is if he does this he will create a split in the universe due to his actions and create a second time track that he will be forever trapped on. But what about the fact that someone on the original time track will be deeply affected by this change? Will the original track change as well or does it have to stay the same right to the time we make a change by travelling back to the past?

"Splitting" Time...

One of my characters will be "splitting" time when he goes back to try to change the past, consequently causing much havoc to other's lives. This separate time-track will split space and change the present and the past and create a closed time loop. This brings up all kinds of issues that I look forward to working on shortly!

I have discovered that it is much harder to time travel to the past then to the future. So many more issues are involved. You begin to worry about such things as Time Police; that some unknown force will stop the passage as it is not allowed by the natural rules of our universe.
You begin to understand that space time in not intuitive--that most things that seem logical on Earth are not 'logical' in our galaxy. It's like learning to 'think' all over again and I could not be more fascinated. . .

Diagram for a wormhole

It seems that any naturally occurring transversable Kerr wormhole would most likely connect two different times. If an advanced civilization has discovered such a unique wormhole that could be utilized for our story, than the need arises to send that information back to the present to allow the use of it (again). Perhaps a diagram in a pyramid or an etching on rock during the Mayan civilization if times is a closed loop to that point, than the past may have already happened and the information could be made available to us. Certainly food for thought!

Avoiding the dreaded grandfather paradox

I was once again up at five am this morning refreshed and ready to get at it! Contemplating time travel is quite exhilarating and the best thing I've done for myself in months. I've established that one of my characters wants to revisit the past to change an event that ruined his life. Going back in time creates all kinds of challenges for writers that I am looking forward to addressing this daily for however long it takes. I think the best choice at the moment for my time travel novel with be using the "paper" time travel method of transversable wormholes with a resulting splitting of universes that creates a different time track for both causalities. If it is a pre-existing one used by another civilization to travel back further than our hero needs to, then it will work and avoid the grandfather paradox that plagues us!

Mayan or not?

If we see time as a closed time loop to allow for time travel, then I need to find a distant past advanced civilization that will be able to give the characters in my book the coordinates in the fourth dimension (using a World time-line) of the transversable wormhole that has been previously used, thereby making it a plausible route back to the past. I'm thinking perhaps Mayan? Fascinating conundrum, which civilization to choose.

Dilemma

Dilemma: You cannot take your "present mind" back to the past! Meaning, all that you know and all that you have learned since that time will not be applicable when you go back to where you were on a specific point in time in the past. Therefore, how do you change the past if you go back and are unaware of what it is you want or need to change? You will probably need to take some token or touchstone with you to make you do what is required to make the positive/negative change. Intriguing idea!

Einstein's theories

Inspired to write all weekend! Up at five this morning to put in an hour before preparing for my day work of teaching in our local high school.

Okay, we have established that there is nothing to suggest in Einstein's general theory of relativity that time travel to the past cannot happen.

That said, there are “rules” you need to follow according to the brilliant minds of twenty-first century physicists: you can affect the past in a closed time loop, but not change it or if the past is to be changed, you must introduce multiple time tracks, such as splitting or parallel universes. I think choosing a "fork" in time when a new event is introduced in the past would be an effective way to create a closed time loop.

What do you think?

Wormholes

Okay, I established yesterday that you need to find a pre-existing space ship because you can only travel back to the time it was built. A naturally occurring wormhole would work well with both its "mouths" in our galaxy with one effected by a neutron star for example, that would cause time dilation by making one mouth younger than the other. Then you could travel back in time.

Must now consider the time slip: That is how much time will pass on each trip through the wormhole, considering you can figure a way to keep it stable. More tomorrow!

Plausible Time Travel makes one really think...

Thinking about all the possibilities involved with plausible time travel is so invigorating! My mind is awash with ideas and plots and characters that would create the best possible first story in this brand new genre (to me that is). I am thrilled to be thinking about the cosmos, and Einstein's theory about general reality and ways to achieve my objective of going back into the past. Wormholes, Cosmic Strings, Black Holes and Kerr Rings...

In particular, thinking about "causality" today, the relationship between a first event (cause) and a second event (effect) as it relates to my favorite subject this spring, time travel. Looks like to avoid paradoxes into the past, I'll need to have the time machine invented before the time in the past it is needed to "fix" an event, with a character, for example. Definitely affects how the story will unfold, but I really want the story to be seen well by hard science people as well as churn up the imagination of all my hoped for readers! Wish me luck.

Happy St. Paddy's Day and hello to Time Travel

While PLANET is germinating I will blog for now about a novel that is flowering for me titled: The Time Key.

On my journey to discover a way to send one of my characters back to the past in The Time Key, I have been doing an incredible amount of research to facilitate the trip using known (hard) science possiblities. These next blogs will concentrate on that incredible journey of discovery.

The Time Key:

A new door has opened on my writing journey with time travel being the glorious package revealed. It’s been like Christmas for a month around our house as I have spent every waking moment (and many sleeping judging by my dreams) unraveling this package layer-by-layer. I have had the luxury of contemplating such amazing ideas as the following plausible choices (just a few of them listed here) for building a “Time Machine” in 2011, according to some noted physicists and engineers that have spent time pursuing the possibilities:

(1) The most popular choice tends to be traversable wormhole like the one featured in the novel Contact by Carl Sagan. The hardest part—getting your hands on one! It would take a very advanced civilization to pull off the feat of selecting a wormhole out of the quantum foam and enlarging it to classical size. Then, it has to be stabilized with exotic (negative) energy against collapse by “threading” it with the equivalent of converting a planet the size of Jupiter into pure energy! (E=mcˆ2 to be specific.) Then, this is the most important part, if an advanced civilization had created it that civilization would have had to live before the time it was discovered to use in my story to allow backward (to the past) time travel.

(2) An intriguing choice I am also pursuing is Cosmic Strings. Discovered in 1991 by Gott, cosmic strings are thought to have been around since the Big Bang. They stretch the length of our universe and have a diameter millions of times smaller than that of the smallest atom. They too can warp space-time to the extent that closed timelike curves can be created. Perhaps a character can be accidently swept away by a cosmic string like an avalanche sweeps away a mountain climber? But not controllable enough for my story where I need my character to travel back to an exact place and time, a world-line to be specific.

(3) Rotating Cylinders (thanks to Frank Tippler) can create a time machine if we can construct a sufficiently large one that appears infinite at the center. (piece of cake, right!) However, keep in mind that you cannot travel further back than the creation date of the cylinder and it’s travel to the past I’m most interested in. (I want to have one of my characters “fix” their past. Sounds easy, right! Well, it’s not going to be easy to pull that out of my hat.)

(4) Rotating Black Holes or Kerr Holes has a ring singularity through it which a time traveler can theoretically pass to enter other universes and/or to time travel in ours. Means there are past or future versions of our universe. Now, those portals are the doors into time machines! Okay, there are lots of objections to this idea that a writer has to speak to in their work to show they understand the implications, but then, that is true of any time machine conjecture, this essential need for technical verisimilitude.

And, if that’s not enough, here are other issues one needs to delve into and confront in writing a novel that hopefully will stand up to the scrutiny of most intellectuals: paradoxes, world-time lines, slip-time, causality, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as well as his Special Theory, split universes, time tracks, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Mechanics and the unknown granddaddy of them all, The Theory of Everything!

This has been but a tiny snapshot of the wonders of pursing the concept of time travel.
Thanks for travelling a small part of the way with me.

Prologue to PLANET

One nation without boundaries: As human beings stretch skyward on highest tippy toe to swing for the brass ring of the second tier of the third level of the Kardashev scale for categorizing civilization, this dream has been finally realized for all peoples of Planet Earth. With disaster about to strike in the form of the Comet Titan, a massive ice-ball from the Kuiper belt, a zone just beyond Neptune that has sent a steady rain of comets eastward for thousands of years, all inhabitants are preparing to evacuate their home planet just behind an army of unleashed von Neumann probes, those self-replicating robots that are “seeding” the galaxy with terraform, that is, changing the new chosen planet’s surface and climate to be like Earths, for the Titan is coming. . .

PLANET

March 15, 2012

And so it begins anew. A brand new book, a familiar genre (hard sci-fi), and lots of great new research to do. I wonder, at times, where all the ideas come from. But as soon as the idea takes hold I feel that familiar exhilarating addiction coming on that means I get to create a brand-new journey for myself (and others).
Lately, a new book means choosing a brand new realm to explore. This one, PLANET, came about because I was watching the series, Game of Thrones, in its entirety the weekend of March 10, 2012. The concept of creating a previously unknown world mesmerized this tenuous writer and my mind was immediately off and running with the stupendous thoughts the idea created for me. The what, where, when, who and how questions immediately surfaced and enlivened my feverish brain with numerous scenarios. Some will be put aside for future books, but one stood out for now. And PLANET is born.