Thoughts on Time Travel
Time Travel holds a special place in my heart. It’s perilously close to being something that I just don’t believe in and yet something I want to believe in. And of course I’ve written about it (check out The Break-In published by Dreamspinner Press).
Scientifically, we can look into the past right this moment and see things happening decades, centuries, millennia ago. Just look up at the stars. That light had to travel all the way across the galaxy to get to us and it originated a while ago.
We also have photo, video, and fossil records to tell us about the past. All of those things can allow us to travel back in time in our imagination.
But what about the future? We only have predictions and science fiction for that. There’s no real way to travel forwards in time right now or physically backwards. And if we did, would we somehow be able to kill our own grandfather and then negate our own existence? Or would we split off from our original timeline and create a new one, one where our grandfather wasn’t really our grandfather, and yet we were still born?
My favorite theory of time travel involves wormholes (fun fact–my favorite form of space travel is also by wormhole). Since a wormhole can connect two very specific places in spacetime, theoretically, you could pick both the place and the time that you arrive at–instant time travel.
Of course then you have the whole noodle effect (or spaghettification) that you have to go through to pass into and back out of a wormhole. Due to the gravity inside the wormhole, you’ll be stretched out like a long spaghetti noodle by the time you arrive. But you know, if I’m taller, I’ll be able to reach the shelves at the top of the cabinet.
Okay [rubs hands together] who’s up for Italian?