Dropping this here because I write Sci-Fi Fanfic. I write a lot of timey-wimey stories, and in a dream I had recently, there was a goldmine of interesting concepts to play with including concept like time as a wave, four distinct dimension of time, why going back in time wouldn't ever bring us back to the Big Bang, why physical time travel is impossible but transcendental time travel is highly plausible (and might be happening all the time), and more.
I honestly blame the benadryl I took before bed. I might have preferred a dream about gods and unicorns or whatever, but we take what we can get.
I'll bold the things I'm really keen to work into a story.
The setup of the dream was that I was, for some reason, attending a workshop put on by a Dutch mathematician and physicist. She was explaining that, even though we cannot perceive it, time is passing at a different rate now as compared to the rate at which it passed during earlier stages of the universe's development.
She explained it like this: the universe is expanding. Space is expanding, and we intuitively understand that if five meters becomes five kilometers, it takes more time and energy to traverse the new distance than the old one. That is what is happening to space. The very same thing is happening to time, because time and space are not separate.
The momentum from the initial explosion/expansion is what gives time its arrow, what propels us through time. There's no loss of energy, not exactly, because energy/matter can't be created or destroyed, but five years is literally longer than it used to be. The fire of time, entropy itself, doesn't move across the distance of five years in the way it used to at earlier stages in the universe's development. Put another way, entropy is less vigorous than it used to be.
Here is where it got wacky: She further explained that the energy propelling us across the dimension of time existed as a wave. We could conceptualize the effect as a sound decreasing in pitch, or light redshifting in color. "Or someone saying 'wom-wom-wom' and each 'wom' is a little slower in the coming than the one before it."
Of course, that time could have a rate, or a frequency, I pointed out, indicates multiple dimensions of time.
She was immediately excited that I said this, and asked me to paint a representation of this concept, to make sure I remembered it.
I added on to my painting, which depicted the loss of entropy as light becoming lower frequency over time, and fading into the color of the paper (I think I chose black paper, maybe because it looked like space) toward the top and the bottom. I labeled the up/down axis "truth/choice" and the ultra-violet to red horizontal axis "chronological time."
"The colors represent the momentum of time. The position refers to chronological time. The dimension of time by which the frequency of the wave is measured may or may not be separate from the perspective of the traveller." I said. I realized no one knew what I meant, so I asked if anyone in the classroom had a sewing kit.
"Ok, so, let's think about it in terms of, like, an episode of Doctor Who," I said. "Rose Tyler is travelling through time. Her most likely trajectory is working at a shop forever," I indicated the linear time axis, moving the needle and thread along it. "But then The Doctor decides to blow it up, so now we're in a timeline where that's less likely." I moved the needle up along the truth/choice axis. "But then she gets into the Tardis" I poked the needle through the paper drawing it through to the side they couldn't see. "She vanishes, and now we're in 1542" I poke the needle back through the paper to the visible side. "And they spend a week there before going back..." I poked the needle in again, further along in chronological time, "but when they return to Rose's native time, the past is different now." And I poked the needle it again. I flipped the paper over, showing the pattern of thread. "This is her personal time stream. The thread has a beginning and end, a past and future. But it's not the same past and future as chronological time. It's not the up and down of moving through possible realities. It's the path by which she navigated both."
"But time travel isn't possible," one of the students shot back. "Hawking proved it with his dinner party experiment."
"Not physically," I said. "A dimension of your physical body is the temporal context in which it exists. From the perspective of that third dimension, you exist simultaneously in your own past, present, and future. And let's not even talk about the fact that your continued metabolism, your ability to digest, to breathe, to even think depends upon entropy, which is time's arrow. One part of space time CAN be folded to touch another, I think, and I think that's how you make a wormhole. But even if you pulled it off, I think it might kill you. But information can travel through time. As much as scientists would like to tell you that precognition isn't real, it's still observed. You can't say that something we've observed hasn't really been observed just because you don't understand why, yet."
"But then wouldn't that cause a paradox by changing the past?"
"Yes! And it happens all the time! Determinism is the idea that, since everything was set in motion at the Big Bang, both agency and probability are an illusion. There appears to be a 1:6 change that you'll get a certain number on a six-sided die, but in reality, the percent chance that you'd get the exact result you got was always 100%. This one-outcome model depends upon a model that has only one dimension of time. Past to future. No choice. No left to right. Infinite universes, each different and discrete --- and I'm not saying you can just shift into a reality where you made a different choice in the past. You still have that momentum behind you, that gives time its arrow. You can't move to a reality with a different past than the one you lived. But as you choose, and act, you move across the countless possibilities."
And then the Dutch Mathematician said, "it's such a shame you're not read up on algorithms. I really think you'd love to be a mathematician. If you're willing to stay here, I'd be happy to teach you."
"No," I said sadly. "That sounds based, but I have to wake up and take care of small children now. But like, if I come back, we should talk about the set theory paradox, ok?"
