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                            Issue #2 - Page 11 of 12 
        ³ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄij 


My Thoughts on Time 


It's late. Can't sleep. Incessant roar of machinery in my head churning out
thought after thought keeping me awake. Must empty mind. Sleep then. Yes, let
it spill. Commencing... 

Time is the passing of events. The only way time could cease to pass is if
nothing changed for a moment. NOTHING changed. If a single electron still
moved, time would not have stood still. Not just on Earth either. Absolute
zero would have to instantly envelope the entire universe. At this point, time
would stop completely forever. Since nothing could become active, there could
be no event to trigger the reactivation of the universe, of energy, of time. 

Some stories contain situations where time stops for everyone but one person
who is then free to run amok. This is not true time stoppage. As long as
something, somewhere is changing, time goes on. 

Maybe the amount of time passing is not steady, like the nature of clocks and 
seconds would suggest. Maybe it is relative to how much is occurring at any
one moment, at the same times. The less that is happening, the less time has
passed. I mean, if nothing has changed, how do we define the moment? 

The only way to travel backwards in time would be to reset every particle
back to the exact same position and condition as a previous moment, in the
entire universe. If even one particle was different, we would have failed;
instead we would have pushed even farther into the future, and our attempted
resetting of the universe would be the new past. It would be useless to go
into the past anyway, because the atoms would act in exactly the same way the
second time. Actually, this is questionable, as there is a certain amount of
randomness to thoughts, reactions, etc. 

To travel into the future, we would have to instantly move every molecule in
the entire universe into a new position. Because of this we would have to
completely design the future situation, allocating a space for every particle.
"Traveling" to the future would be more of a massive engineering feat than an
exploratory voyage. More the product of a hammer and nails than a telescope or
a sailboat. In effect, were it possible to shape the universe in such a way
and assuming we had the unrestricted knowledge and power of a supreme being,
we could redesign the entire universe from scratch, the only remaining rules
being those that are an essential part of the way atoms behave. 

Maybe it's just the insomnia talking. 
  


 
 
- skwert
skwert@cyberspace.org