A Time Travel Dialogue E-Book

John W. Carroll

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Is time travel just a confusing plot device deployed by science fiction authors and Hollywood filmmakers to amaze and amuse? Or might empirical data prompt a scientific hypothesis of time travel? Structured on a fascinating dialogue involving a distinguished physicist, Dr. Rufus, a physics graduate student and a computer scientist this book probes an experimentally supported hypothesis of backwards time travel – and in so doing addresses key metaphysical issues, such as causation, identity over time and free will. The setting is the Jefferson National Laboratory during a period of five days in 2010. Dr. Rufus’s experimental search for the psi-lepton and the resulting intractable data spurs the discussion on time travel. She and her two colleagues are pushed by their observations to address the grandfather paradox and other puzzles about backwards causation, with attention also given to causal loops, multi-dimensional time, and the prospect that only the present exists. Sensible solutions to the main puzzles emerge, ultimately advancing the case for time travel really being possible. A Time Travel Dialogue addresses the possibility of time travel, approaching familiar paradoxes in a rigorous, engaging, and fun manner. It follows in the long philosophical tradition of using dialogue to present philosophical ideas and arguments, but is ground breaking in its use of the dialogue format to introduce readers to the metaphysics of time travel, and is also distinctive in its use of lab results to drive philosophical analysis. The discussion of data that might decide whether time is one-dimensional (one timeline) or multi-dimensional (branching time) is especially novel.

Leseprobe

A TIME TRAVEL DIALOGUE

A Time Travel Dialogue

John W. Carroll, et al.

http://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2014 John W. Carroll

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Carroll, John W., et al., A Time Travel Dialogue. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0043

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Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at: www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783740376#resources

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-037-6

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-038-3

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-039-0

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-040-6

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-041-3

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0043

Cover image: Bubble Chamber: Antiproton Annihilation © 1971 CERN, all rights reserved.

All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified.

Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Monday

2. Tuesday

3. Wednesday

4. Thursday

5. Friday

Notes

Credits and Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

This book contains animated graphs. If your device supports MP4 video files, please click on the image to trigger the animation. If you are reading a printed edition, or on a device that does not support videos, please visit www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783740376#resources to watch the animations.

1.1

The Unanticipated Results

1.2

The Anticipated Results

1.3

Backwards Causation?

2.1

A Time-Traveling Psi-Lepton?

2.2

Willie Slips Up

4.1

A Causal Loop?

4.2

The Really Weird Results

5.1

The Life of Tad

5.2

An Ordinary Psi-Lepton: No Time Travel

5.3

A Time-Traveling Psi-Lepton as seen from the Departure Branch?

5.4

The Disregarded Results

5.5

A Time-Traveling Psi-Lepton as seen from the Arrival Branch?

5.6

Trigger-On Departure, Trigger-Off Arrival, as seen from the Arrival Branch?

5.7

A Challenge for Tad’s Multi-Dimensional Hypothesis

Introduction

Any question of philosophy, […] which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it—if it should be treated at all—seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation.

—Pamphilus to Hermippus, from David Hume’s,Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Theoretical physicists take seriously the idea of time travel; some, including J. Richard Gott and Paul Davies, have published monographs, accessible to the layperson, describing the extraordinary work that has been done. Experimental physicists have on occasion even come face to face with the possibility that time travel to the past is real. This book is built on conversations set in 2010 at the Jefferson National Laboratory where unanticipated data led distinguished physicist Dr. Carlene Rufus to investigate a hypothesis of backwards time travel.

The conversations are of philosophical interest. In addition to Dr. Rufus, the other participants in the conversations are Tad Logan, a graduate student research assistant, and William Esquire, a philosophically inclined computer scientist. Their careful, and often humorous, thoughts wander from the experimental data, to science fiction cinema, and even to thoroughly abstract and metaphysical paradoxes about the permanence of the past, the privilege of the present, the nature of causation, and what one can or cannot do. The question of the possibility of time travel is a truly abstract and multifaceted one. So, it should be no surprise that philosophy, with its diverse subject matter, speculative powers, and its reverence for logic, so grounded as it is in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, should here rear its head. Indeed, it is Willie’s philosophical input that shapes both the planning and analysis of Dr. Rufus’s experiments.

At the beginning of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Pamphilus reports to Hermippus of having had the occasion to observe the insightful conversations of Cleanthes, Demea, and Philo. It is with similar good fortune that the conversations of Dr. Rufus, Tad, and Willie can now be made public. Thanks to detailed notes and well organized data, one week of our researchers’ scientific work and philosophical discussions is readily presentable, with tolerable accuracy, in the dialogue format long upheld by Plato, Berkeley, Hume and so many others. Enjoy!

1. Monday

It is 2:00 pm. Dr. Rufus and Tad welcome Willie to the control room and begin to explain why they have called on his computer expertise.

Carlene: Tad, would you mind showing William to the control console? Do you go by ‘Bill’?

Willie: ‘Willie’, actually. It looks like you’re running a pretty powerful system. You must have two dozen new HP-UXs in here.

Tad: Twenty, actually, with about eighty Motorola VMEs for input–output control. Coffee?

Willie: Thanks, but it’s a little late in the day for caffeine.

Tad [pouring another cup]: Suit yourself.

Willie [looking around]: Where does the funding for all this equipment come from?

Carlene: The Department of Energy, primarily, but NASA, the NSF, and a few research universities are interested in what we’re doing. We just might be on to something.

Willie: Something big?

Tad: Yes, well, no … something very, very tiny. We think we’ve found a new fundamental particle.

Willie: Wow, really? What is it?

Carlene: We’re trying to isolate the elusive psi-lepton. We’ve found something, but we’re not sure whether we’ve found it or some unanticipated cousin. The particle we’re observing was behaving exactly according to our theory, that is, until recently.