Plausibility of Time Travel

This might seem like a subject of Science Fiction, but it encourages a lot of thought in matters both physical and philosophical. A recent paper in Scientific American discussed whether time travel is indeed feasible and why current physical and philosophical objections don’t preclude the possibility of time travel. I’ll attempt to describe how they deal with the objections here and explore the plausibility of time travel. First, relativity allows for time travel into the future: as I mentioned in a previous missive, journey at a very high acceleration and you’ll return to earth years into the future, aging only slightly. This, of course, ignores the fact that we can’t travel at such high speeds as of now; this issue will be addressed later. There is a […] Read More

Time and its Discontents

By John Zerzan Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #39, Winter ’94. The dimension of time seems to be attracting great notice, to judge from the number of recent movies that focus on it, such as Back to the Future, Terminator, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1989) was a best-seller and became, even more surprisingly, a popular film. Remarkable, in addition to the number of books that deal with time, are the larger number which don’t, really, but which feature the word in their titles nonetheless, such as Virginia Spate’s The Color of Time: Claude Monet (1992). Such references have to do, albeit indirectly, with the sudden, panicky awareness of time, the frightening sense of our being tied to it. Time is increasingly […] Read More