Relativistic Time Dilation

Tag Area: Time-Related Situation
Novelette

Race through Time 1

A Race through Time


Evil Daniel kidnaps Ellen and takes her to the year 1,000,000 A.D. via metabolic speed-up! Not to worry. Good and compassionate Webster follows via relativistic time dilation! —Michael Main
What I’ve done is to build a time-space traveler, working by atomic energy. Even as long ago as 1913, you know, Rutherford succeeded in partly breaking down the hydrogen atom. By 1933, others succeeded in partially breaking down atoms with high voltages of electricity. But they used up far more energy than they got back, or released. I’ve simply perfected the method to a point where, with an initial bombardment of fifty volts, I can break down one atom and get back thousands of times the energy I put in. There’s nothing strange or wonderful or miraculous about it. I don’t create energy of power from nothing. I simply liberate energy that already exists. Part of the power I use to break down another atom, and so on, while the rest is diverted to propel the torpedo by discharging through tubes—like a rocket. I’ve made one short experimental trip.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Short Story

a Haertel Complex story

Common Time

  • by James Blish
  • in Shadow of Tomorrow, edited by Frederik Pohl (Permabooks, July 1953)

Spaceman Garrard is the third pilot to attempt the trip to the binary star system of Alpha Centauri using the FTL drive invented by Dolph Haertel (the next Einstein!) The Haertel Complex stories provide little in the way of actual time travel, but this one does have minor relativistic time dilation and more significant differing time rates. —Michael Main
Figuring backward brought him quickly to the equivalence he wanted: one second in ship time was two hours in Garrard time.
Illustration of a rocketship and three astronauts on the moon with a full Earth
                in an orange sky.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Short Story

Hainish series

The Dowry of Angyar


No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Feature Film

Flight of the Navigator


Twelve-year-old David Freeman stumbles down a ravine and wakes up eight years later without having aged. The explanation is that David was taken on a quick trip to the planet Phaelon, taking 2.2 hours for him while eight years passed on Earth. Relativistic time dilation, right? That’s the explanation, but it doesn’t scan because Phaelon is a full 560 light years from Earth, so at least 1120 years would have passed on Earth unless the aliens truly did have some form of time travel. The clincher comes at the end when David explicitly travels through time. Conclusion: alien time travel technology. —Michael Main
This is totally rad. You’re like my big little brother.
Joey Cramer (as young David Freeman) sits alert in an electronic command chair
                of the Trimaxion Drone Ship.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: Families
  • Definite Time Travel
Early Chapter Book

The Magic Tree House 16

Hour of the Olympics


Jack and Annie meet Plato and learn about the treatment of women in ancient Greece, while also rescuing a fourth lost book from history for Morgan’s library —Michael Main
At that moment, Plato returned. With him was a young woman dressed in a long tunic with a colored border. She was holding a scroll.
Dressed in ancient Greek garb, young Jack and Annie drive a horse and chariot
                down a dusy street.
  • Fantasy
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Nonfiction Book

L’ordine del tempo

  • The order of time
  • The Order of Time
  • by Carlo Rovelli
  • (Adelphi, May 2017)

Although Rovelli’s book touches on time travel only lightly, every sober scholar of time should till have this volume on their shelf. —Michael Main
La struttura dei coni può arrivare a far sì che, andando sempre verso il futuro, si ritorni allo stesso punto dello spaziotempo[. . .].
translate The structure of the cones can even be such that, advancing always toward the future, one can return to the same point in spacetime[. . .].
Nine green polyhedra float in adjoining bubbles on a red background.
  • Nonfiction
  • Time Phenomena
Nonfiction Book

Paradoxes of Time Travel


Ryan Wasserman’s philosophical book is one of two books* that need to live on your nonfiction shelf. One by one and with complete reference to the past literature, he presents all the major paradoxes of time travel along with different models of time travel and arguments against time travel even being possible. Just get it and read it cover-to-cover. As a bonus, Professor Wasserman, who is on the Philosophy faculty at Western Washington State University, will cheerfully have discussions about time travel issues via e-mail with those of us up in the nearby ITTDB Citadel.

* The other, of course, is Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction, Second Edition. —Michael Main
Each of the foregoing cases involves a self-defeating act—an act such that, if it were performed, it wold not be. Self-defeating acts are obviously impossible, since the performance of such an act would imply a contradiction. Yet time travel seems to make such acts possible. This suggests the following line of argument against backward time travel:

(P1) If backward time travel were possible, it would be possible to perform a self-defeating act.

(P2) It is impossible to perform a self-defeating act.

(C) Backward time travel is impossible.
A descending spiral of Roman numerals in the style of a clockface.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Nonfiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Film

Aether

  • written and directed by Jerry Brown, Jr.
  • (Youtube: SuperEpic Channel, 2 April 2018)

At the moment when the speedometer on the Aether spaceship clicked over from .999999c to 1.00000c, a collective cheer erupted up in the ITTDB Citadel. Was it a jaw-dropping dramatic moment? Seems unlikely, but we were looking for something to cheer for in this cryptic story of three men who headed to the future via relativistic time travel, only to find themselves trapped in post-apocalyptic outer space and quantum technobabble. —Michael Main
It nullifies Gödel’s theorem.
Drawing of three astronauts with an abstract background of clouds, outspace,
                and the word "Aether" in a red, star-filled circle.
  • Science Fiction
  • Debatable Time Travel
Essay

Mindscape #124

How Time Travel Could and Should Work

  • by Sean Carroll
  • from Mindscape 124 [podcast], 23 November 2020

Alas, Sean Carroll doesn’t pull any punches in his realistic assessment of the kinds of time travel that are or may be possible under the laws of physics as we know them in our universe. Or, as Professor Carroll himself puts it: “. . . podcasting isn’t for the squeamish.” In my layman’s understand of his most excellent explication, time travel aficionados have two physical phenomena on which to hang their Hat Things:
  1. Time Dilation: Under the laws of Einstein’s special relativity, a fast traveler who leaves the Earth, zooming around for a while at near light speed before returning, will experience less passage of time than those who stay in the more-or-less fixed reference frame of Earth. How cool is that? Yes, you can travel as far into the future as you like, so long as you have a means of zooming up to a high enough speed and returning. (And according to general relativity, time dilation also occurs inside a high gravitational field, although I didn’t notice a discussion of this sort of time dilation in the podcast.)
  2. Closed Timelike Curves: The second hope for time travelers are certain distributions of matter that (according to Einstein’s equations of general relativity) result in directed paths through spacetime in which a traveler along the path is always moving forward through time—and yet completing a full circuit of the path returns the traveler to the starting point in both space and time. That’s the good news. The bad news is that such paths, called closed timelike curves, might only be possible in the presense of infinitely long rotating cylinders or other physical conditions that may be impossible to engineer.
Up in the ITTDB Citadel, many of us found ourselves in a disquieted state at this point in Professor Carroll’s podcast (roughly the two-hour mark). Some went to bed early in a kind of daze; others decided it was time for a long walk through the lonely ice paths that surround the Citdel. But for those with the fortitude to keep their ears glued to the pod, there was a great reward. Carroll had already waded through the swift, waist-high currents of causality, predeterminism, free will, the A Theory of Time, the B Theory of time, and more. But now he was ready to dive into deep, uncharted waters. Yes, now he was ready to leave known physics behind, to talk about branching time that went beyond the Everettian Many Worlds of Schrödinger’s equation, and to consider what kind of a world would be needed to allow stories such as Back to the Future and Looper to consistently hold together. With this in mind, he devices a four-pronged theory that concludes with what he calls Narrative Time. For me, narrative time shares some features with the time model of Asimov’s The End of Eternity (a model that we call Hypertime in our story-tagging system), but it goes far beyond that.

Suffice it to say that when all the Librarians up in the Citadel woke from their sleeps and returned from their treks, we had a celebration that was strident enough to raise Lazurus Long himself from the dead (if he is dead, that is). —Michael Main
I think that if we really try hard, we can make sense of this. But there’s a rule in physics or whatever that the more surprising and weird the phenomenon is, the more you’re gonna have to work to introduce some weird elements into your theory to explain it. That’s not surprising, right? So we’re gonna need some leaps of faith here, but I think I can come up with the scheme that involves four ingredients on the basis of which we can actually make sense of Back to the Future, Looper, and other similar movies.
A brain below a lit incandescant light bulb.
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Nonfiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Animated Feature Film

Lightyear


Despite having relativistic time dilation, actual time travel, and a nice treatment of various time travel tropes, the story of Buzz Lightyear (the movie character) who was the basis for Buzz Lightyear (the toy) fell far short of infinity in terms of plot and fun. —Michael Main
Time dilation is quite simple. As you approached hyperspeed, your time slowed relative to our own, so during your mission, you aged only minutes, while the rest of us have aged years. Simply put, the faster you fly—
Closeup of the animated movie character Buzz Lightyear (not the toy) in his
                clear-helmeted spacesuit.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: Families
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Timekeepers’ Symphony


Sometime after the era of mass migrations off Earth, the author ponders time and celestial clockworks across the galaxy. —Michael Main
The smaller the flickers in our perception, the more details we notice and the longer time seems to last.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Experimental
  • Time Phenomena
Novella

The Tinker and the Timestream


The long-lost Taghrib colony knows their days are numbered because of the deadly flares from their unstable star. So when alien starhoppers hop in for a visit, three colony members (including Aarfa, the dog) leave with them to search for a nearby inhabitable planet where the colony can migrate to.

No actual time travel, but there is a boatload of Yodaspeak about time dilation, which may or may not be familiar relativistic effects of velocity or gravity. —Michael Main
A dynamic landscape is timespace today.
Three aliens, a young woman, and a young man examine a myriad of stars
                through a round window on the floor.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena