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David Wipperfurth

March 1, 2004

The Constructs of Time and Time Travel

Time Travel is a terminology used to denote a “shift” in Time affecting all but the

“traveling” party. You can’t talk of such a concept without talking about the concept of

time its self. Time is relatively simplistic, although there are massively misconstrued

notions about the topic. I would have liked to prove that Time Travel was impossible, but

alas I cannot. Upon inspection of Time itself, I have found that both traveling to the

future and past is possible: possible, but not exactly the same way in which you would

traditionally think Time Travel to be; and not at all probable.

First, Time must be defined, so as to clarify Time Travel, and more over, the

dogmatic misconceptions tied to the concept of Time. Time is a familiar pattern of

change. This definition is specific and should be taken literally. An instant in Time is a

theoretical point at which no change is occurring. Time is a progression of these

instances, thus any change shows the passage of Time. Time is a human invention; it’s a

concept which, without cognizance, wouldn’t exist. Not only because it is a concept, but

also because you can’t talk of change without knowing that something is different from

one “moment” to the next. This is partially why the term familiarity is implemented. As

humans, our nature is to look for patterns, and we use patterns to estimate our own

principal of Time. The change has to be familiar to utilize patterns of it, and the patterns

have to be familiar to extract values of Time. To determine the accuracy of time we rely

on the complexity of the pattern we use to measure with. This is an intrinsic nature of
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Time: the closer we get to including everything into the pattern, the closer we get to

producing a perfect Time measurement.

This definition, though useful, is imperfect. It uses the term ‘change’, which

could not be properly defined without using the concept of Time. So a fundamental

definition of Time needs to have no time references. Time is a rationalization of a

comparison of something to its self, not having a difference of zero. This supplemental

definition shows that Time is a perception, and also sheds light on an ironic quirk. To

rationalize or to compare takes Time, yet Time would not exist without these processes.

This definition may be confusing. To simplify, think of a newborn baby looking at an

object, the baby does not know of Time, but soon after that object is no longer what it

once was, the baby needs to make a rationalization of this change. Babies actually have a

very complex learning progression, but realize that most living things have some concept

of Time, so it is not a high level concept. It is nearly an instinctual concept, which is half

the problem with defining it. No one ever had to define Time for you; every living thing

invents the concept of time for themselves.

That is Time, simple and profound. But, for utility, this concept of Time has been

objectified. This objectification has skewed the idea by applying attributes to the concept

improperly, through similarity conglomeration. For example, Time and space appear to

be similar, and you can travel through space, so why not travel through Time? Time

Travel is a deceptive term, because it presupposes that manipulation of Time, if possible,

would be the equivalent of traveling through space, and holds the same characteristics.

Using our definition of Time, traveling to the past becomes a matter of semantics.

It is impossible to go back in time, because it is impossible to revert change. It is possible

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to simply make another change with an opposite affect, while nearly the same, a clear

distinction should be made. The new change is still a change and is still progression of

Time. If everything were changed to a prior point in Time, it would be some amount of

time in the future, just at a spatially identical reality as the prior Time.

Assuming you did change everything back to what it was at a previous Time,

events would then almost certainly occur as they had the first time presuming true

randomness does not exist, and no external forces affected reality’s progression. If you

did this but you were not an exception to this change, then reality would be stuck in a

loop for the rest of eternity, because you would inevitably reverse the changes at the same

stage every time. As long as you’re a reference for ‘Time Travel’, meaning you remain

un-affected by the changing of reality, you could do anything without creating any sort of

paradox or conundrum. It’d be not unlike setting up a chessboard after having played a

game of chess, it’s not the same game, it just looks that way, and this new game has no

affect on the old one. To refute a popular philosophic argument, it’s not a matter of can’t

or won’t, you could kill yourself because your former self has no impact on whether your

current self could make the ‘Time Conversion’ necessary to kill yourself. In fact, this

implies that there would be two of you. The only way there would be two of you is if you

created a second “you” to begin with.

To actually change everything back to a past Time, you would need a metaphoric

snapshot of the instance in reality. This memory of the past would have to be absolutely

pervasive, down past the quark, to the very base unit of structure, which is currently still

undetermined. Besides needing this memory of the instance, which you want to convert

to, you would need something that could then actually do the converting. This is a fairly
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hefty order and certainly improbable, mainly because no one would ever have a good

enough reason to devote the exorbitant amount of resources. When considering the

improbability of building a machine of this nature, the ideas of entropy and chaos come

to mind. Not only would such a machine have to overcome implausibility similar to one

hundred percent energy conservation, it would also literally have to over come one

hundred percent energy conservation.

The future hasn’t occurred yet, so to ‘travel’ to the future you couldn’t just

load a snapshot of a future Time, it couldn’t just be one change to that point. It would

have to be all the changes in between, like hitting fast forward on a VCR. Interesting side

note: it makes no difference whether everything goes faster, or you go slower, since there

are only two possible choices for perspective, either situation looks exactly the same.

Assume for a moment that when you press the metaphoric fast forward button, you, along

with everything else, start moving faster… How could you tell? In fact, I’d like to state

as fact, that Time doesn’t move at a constant rate, it fluctuates drastically, but the change

in Time is wide spread and affects everything exactly the same. I say this only because

it’s not possible to dissolve this argument. There is no possible point of reference outside

of everything to measure an affect like this from. We could easily be traveling to the

future faster now, then now, or now. To be precise this “fact” is un-falsifiable, and so

philosophically couldn’t be argued one way or the other. In addition, the mere idea that

Time would be occurring at different speeds is a precarious postulation. To explain the

nature of this concept it will be said that it’s akin to wind-chill; it’s not the actual

temperature, just what the temperature ‘feels like’. The quintessential example of this is

cryogenic stasis, and the easiest way to travel to the future “faster” than anyone else.
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To conclude; Time is nearly a synonym for change, ‘traveling’ to the past is

possible though not probable, ‘traveling’ to the future is a fairly normal occurrence, but it

goes faster if you go slower. Time, having no method of measure outside of everything,

is completely relative.