My fiancee recently made the statement, "All traveling is time travel." Her uncle proceeded to comment on it, saying that surely not all of travel was time travel. His argument didn't make much sense to either of us, but it still got me thinking about the nature of the fourth dimension.
I read The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, a bit over a year ago. In this book, Wells puts forth the idea of time as the fourth dimension, in addition to length, width, and height. Many people have a hard time conceptualizing time, so this is the easiest way to do it, in my opinion. To move across one dimension, you go left and right. To move across two dimensions, you go forward and backward. To move across three dimensions, you go up and down. And to move across four, you go through your day. Every moment that passes pushes you along that dimension into the future.
This is why it's easy to see that anything you do automatically moves you across that dimension. Even sitting still does, since time is still passing. And, as many people fail to realize, the Earth is constantly in motion, so you really can't escape movement unless you're out in the void of space and are able to stop yourself from moving. Even then you're going through time: you might not be moving as a whole body, but processes are still taking place inside of you.
The only way to stop movement along that axis would be to "freeze" time. But how would that really work? Reaching absolute zero? That stops all movement, after all. But does the cessation of movement really mean the cessation of movement along the fourth dimension? Well, think about it: does it end movement along the other dimensions? Sure, you can't move left, right, back, forth, up, or down...but those dimensions still exist, creating the landscape of the frozen universe. Hmm...but it has stopped movement. I'm not convinced, however, that time itself would stop. Everything would be frozen at a particular point in its four-dimensional travel, but that doesn't stop things from moving along that axis.
The difference, of course, is that movement across four dimensions works without conscious effort. So I guess this would be a fatalistic way of looking at it, but...just as our first three dimensions are constantly present, so is our fourth. Our life can be seen as a block, and the passage of time is just our observation of the measurement of time. An example that would make this clearer is Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The Tralfamadorians, an advanced alien race, are able to see all of time. They describe the human observation of time as rolling down an incline while looking at a mountain range through a tube (I am paraphrasing. If you haven't read the book, you should; it's a masterpiece). It's all there, but we can't see the entirety of it. We just see one bit of it at a time.
(Hmm...now that I think about it, this could possibly disprove the idea of all travel being time travel. After all, if every instance of your life is always there, all that's really changing is which part of it you're viewing. Then the only time travel that could occur would be through a time machine. Of course, that's only if you're taking the fatalistic "block" conception of time to that extent...and besides, it's not like our consciousness is outside of time, looking in. So never mind. Just what I thought was a setback... Your consciousness is part of your transformation through time, since its nature can change through the passage of time, and thus it time travels. There.)
The only way to be outside of time would be to use a device that stops time, like the one in that episode of The Twilight Zone where the guy stops time and then breaks the stopwatch, ending up stuck like that forever. But even then, you are working by your own subjective fourth dimension. That's the whole point, after all. When he freezes time, he doesn't freeze himself. He goes out and steals money. Though I guess the real problem with this is that something like that shouldn't be possible. Air would freeze, the tools he would need to get the money would freeze, his clothes would freeze, etc. He shouldn't be able to move at all. I guess that's what comes of not thinking through all the implications of such a thing... Anyway, such a device would freeze all time completely. And perhaps that would be the end point of the four-dimensional axis. The only way to avoid time travel is to avoid the possibility of travel--namely, by stopping time itself.
This whole conversation got met thinking about time travel movies, since I am taking a science fiction film class at the moment. The second review we have to write is for a time travel movie, and I was mad to see that Source Code was on the list of recommendations. I guess that every movie, technically, is a time travel movie, since all movement is time travel as I have described it above. So I would change the criteria for "time travel" from "movement through time" to a more specific definition. From now on, when I talk of time travel, I mean, "unnatural movement across the fourth dimension, esp. by use of a time machine." This excludes the normal workings of life, but includes such things as cryogenics, stasis, slingshotting around the sun, and other methods outside of the natural flow across our fourth dimension.
Source Code purports to be a time travel movie in the sense I have just revised it. But in the end, it fails at all the science it attempts. The basic point behind the plot is that Colter Stevens is sent back into a dead guy's memories to relive the bombing of a train and find out who was responsible. This is a ridiculous premise, worse than Looper. If such a technology existed, there is no way he could do anything other than what the man already did. As such, he cannot learn things that the person didn't learn the first time through. He can't go places the person didn't go, or make conversations that the person didn't make. Otherwise it would cease to be that person's memory.
But the filmmakers go a step further, and completely ruin all credibility by adding the time travel aspect to it. Colter decides that if he changes things on the train, he can change the future. Which is the dumbest idea ever. I emphatically agreed with the people in the movie telling him he was crazy for thinking it would work. Because, logically, changing what happened in someone's memories, in a computer simulation of those memories, does not constitute going back in time and changing real events. All he would've done is changed how those 8 minutes turned out, which he shouldn't be able to do anyway. The simulation should have shut off, leaving no alternate universe. The only possible way this new alternate universe could exist is as a fantasy in Colter's mind similar to that in the short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", by Ambrose Bierce. And that is how I choose to interpret that movie, because I'm really serious about time travel.
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