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Showing posts from June, 2010

Time Travel (Part 1)

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What time machines look like without production designers (although they went to town on the interior). (If you're reading the FB version, you may not see the picture.) The thing about time travel and time machine stories is that the reality is actually much more interesting than the fiction. The reality of time, that is. You don't 'travel' in time, because there is no such thing as time in the first place. There's nothing to travel 'in'. The 'in' is very interesting though, because it's a spatial term - we nearly always describe time in terms of space, and space in terms of time. More on that in a bit. One of our measures of time is days and nights. Our days and nights pass us by, we think. It's one of the main ways we think of time. But you don't need to have done much science at all to know that days and nights themselves are mostly caused by the Earth spinning on its axis. If you stopped the Earth spinning and orbiting, you'd have