Here's what I posted over at Tim W, I was so pleased with it that I'll repeat it here:
"There was something in 'A brief history of time' where Stephen Hawking reckons that maybe these sub-atomic particles DO travel through time.
It is observed that sometimes a negative and a postive particle appear from nowhere, and sometimes they collide and disappear.
He likens this to an observer in a helicopter flying uphill above a zig-zag road up a mountain. The cars going uphill seem to disappear and turn into cars travelling in the opposite direction (i.e. turn from positive into negative) at the ends of the curve.
Compare the left/right zig-zag with a forwards/backwards through time zig-zag. What appears to be a negative particle flying off to the left and a positive particle flying off to the right is in fact the same positive particle, moving constantly to the right, only the first part of its journey it is travelling backwards through time, so it APPEARS to be negative and APPEARS to be flying to the left.
The point (in space and time) when the two particles appear is just the point (in space) that the particle has reached (at the point in our time) when it goes from travelling backwards through (our) time to travelling forwards.
It's probably bollocks though."
Friday 10 August 2007
Time travel
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2 comments:
I love asking dumb questions about this stuff.
You say the road zig-zags up the hill, I imagine Santorini. You say the helicopter is moving uphill but the particle is moving to the right. As the hill, necessarily, peaks the particle must be following the viewed path of a diminishing helix and the helicopter, therefore is on a starboard rising trajectory.
Sometimes it is best to be infantile: why doesn't the helicopter fly more efficiently straight up, Daaad?
Or is this just more Stephen Hawkingesque bollocks?
STB.
No what he meant was, the observer in the helicopter is going in a straight line up the hill, above the zig zags, he sees a car travelling to the right passing under him, but the next time he sees the car it is travelling to the left. i.e. a "positive" car turns into a "negative" car travelling in the other direction. At the apex, the positive car disappears and turns into a negative car.
The hill is not important, it's the zig-zags.
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