Sunday, June 14, 2009

Rules of Time Travel



This is fun. Discover Magazine lays out the rules of time travel, with the new Star Trek reboot in mind.

So,this is a bit of a spoiler.  If you haven't seen the movie, you might not want to read rule number five:

5. Black holes are not time machines.

Sadly, if you fell into a black hole, it would not spit you out at some other time. It wouldn’t spit you out at all — it would gobble you up and grow slightly more corpulent in the process. If the black hole were big enough, you might not even notice when you crossed the point of no return defined by the event horizon. But once you got close to the center of the hole, tidal forces would tug at you — gently at first, but eventually tearing you apart. The technical term is spaghettification. Not a recommended strategy for would-be time adventurers.

Something about the notion of blithely and unknowingly crossing the event horizon and being doomed to be sucked into black hole is very, very awful to me. I wonder if I have metaphorically crossed some invisible line like this in my life. Like, I just turned 40, but unbeknownst to me, I crossed the event horizon back at 23, and I'm headed toward some black hole of oblivion and that's that. Keep smiling, but abandon all hope. I guess I crossed the line by being born, really. Oh, why bother thinking about it?

2 comments:

JPX said...

I Love The Big Bang Theory! The episode where they acquire the Time Machine is priceless.

Octopunk said...

Love that old Victorian machinery! Never heard of that show.

As for the article, I was more amused with the Six conflicting time travel theories presented in Star Trek that he links to. I guess because it had more pictures. Of Spock.

Malevolent

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