The speed of light
In order to go back in time, one must first be able to reach the speed of light. Impossible?
In the older days im sure they thought reaching the speed of sound was a feat never to be accomplished.
Imagine reaching the speed of light. Would you actually be walking around normally while everything around you is ‘frozen’ in time? The funny thing is you could never actually stop it, it would still be floating around and stories would continue unravelling. And then theres the grandfather paradox, that suggests even if we could go back in time we couldnt change the past anyways. Since I have no idea where its from, Ill quote Nolan.
“Here is why it is impossible to go back in time and change the past: Say you go back in time to kill your grandfather, thus your dad would not exist and neither would you… fairly simple right? But if you did not exist then your grandfather would still be alive and in turn, your dad and you. So it is not possible to go back in time and change anything. Unless of course there are parallel universes. Where any event has happened in any way that it is possible for it to happen.”
Does time indeed go in a circle? Because my past exists is it still happening, a me 2 minutes ago twitching at the introduction of a horrible song, an Einstein countless days ago consulting schematics? Im sure if you went back in time there would be no people at all, theyre all in the present of course. Youd come across run down artifacts and forgotten memories perhaps. Maybe when you die you stay in that time moment, amongst the dusty streets, and people move ahead while you stay stationary. Of course you’d have the company of the people who died at the exact same moment as you, each moment being a separate segment on time’s scroll.
In a sense you can carry time along with you and uproot the old moments. They leak through the cracks in the system and you smell them, and old feelings rush back.
If you were going back in time would you stop aging? Living forever would mean thinking, remembering forever. It would fill up your brain with a murky mess wearing it away and giving you the eternal conciousness of an eventual mad-man.
If there was no space for time to exist in, it wouldnt exist.
Maybe memory is the secret to unlocking time. After all, we arent entirely sure what it really is, all we have to represent it is it’s shadow impressed on a peice of whirring machinery.
well done, im confused as shit
sorry that was me, nolan that wrote that last one
This reminds me of one of those unanswerable questions. It’s something like, What would happen if you were travelling at the speed of light and turned on a flashlight?
-Ben N.