The closer a person travels to the speed of light the slower that time passes for them, while time flows normally for everything else. . . .
Let's say you're in a ship and you blast off from Earth and start going very fast. And let's say that in the ship you could see a specific clock on Earth whose hands read 2:20. The light bounces off of the clockface and chases your ship at the speed of light. The closer you come to the speed of light means the light from the clockface will take longer to reach you, and if you hit lightspeed it never will. Time stops for you.

There's also the concept of Black Holes, where gravity is so intense that light itself cannot escape. If a person were to be dragged into one, time would practically stop for them while time would pass normally for the rest of the universe.

Interesting stuff, Shadow! I watched an excellent dramatized program on PBS once about E=MC2 [squared ]. I loved it, especially the part that showed Einstein's fascination with light.

Have you compared any of this to the later chapters of VDT, where the ship seems to be traveling faster and yet the people on the ship don't feel like they're moving? Where are they headed? Aslan's Country ... light. And have you compared this to LB, when Aslan calls "TIME!" ?

And what about being with Christ the Light of the World? I'm wondering if traveling to heaven or being in heaven is like the speed of light. We know eventually time will cease to exist.

Black holes ... hell?

That was a good nutshell version of Einstein's theory Shadow. And while no-one has as yet been able to demonstrate that particles exist which actually travel faster than the speed of light. There may be other ways to appear to travel faster than light and thus through time. It has been demonstrated that particles such as photons, when split prismatically can instantaneously communicate with each other across time and space, no matter how far apart.

I found an interesting article online which discusses this topic and this quote is particularly relevant:

Einstein didn't like quantum theory, especially one aspect of it he ridiculed as "spooky action at a distance" because it seemed to require subatomic particles interacting faster than the speed of light.

However, experimental evidence has continued to pile up demonstrating the spooky action. Two subatomic particles split from a single particle do somehow instantaneously communicate no matter how far apart they get in space and time. The phenomenon is described as "entanglement" and "non-local communication."

For example, one high-energy photon split by a prism into two lower-energy photons could travel into space and separate by many light years. If one of the photons is somehow forced up, the other photon -- even if impossibly distant -- will instantly tilt down to compensate and balance out both trajectories.

As the evidence for this has accumulated, several fairly contorted and unsatisfying efforts have been aimed at solving the puzzle. Cramer has proposed an explanation that doesn't violate the speed of light but does kind of mess with the traditional concept of time.

The rest of the article can be found here:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/319367_timeguy12.html?source=rss

GB

Have you compared any of this to the later chapters of VDT, where the ship seems to be traveling faster and yet the people on the ship don't feel like they're moving? Where are they headed? Aslan's Country ... light. And have you compared this to LB, when Aslan calls "TIME!" ?

Actually...the increased speed of the Dawn Treader was attributed to its being pushed by some undersea current (literally...it's in the book). The crew actually worries that they won't be able to get home but later on discover that the current is very localized and they simply sidestep it and then easily sail on back to Narnia.

And what about being with Christ the Light of the World? I'm wondering if traveling to heaven or being in heaven is like the speed of light. We know eventually time will cease to exist.

Actually...time does exist in Heaven, and there are a number of verses which indicate this. It will probably still exist in the New Earth as well, although I doubt it will be nearly as important to us as it is here on our Earth. That's it....I really need to see if the mods will open up a SF on Heaven by Randy Alcorn. I most definitely want to talk about it and I know others probably do as well.

Black holes ... hell?

I've actually thought of this before. I'm not a dedicated scientist...I just like reading about this stuff in my spare time, but my understanding that as big and bad as a Black Hole is it is not permanent. Eventually the thing will collapse and fizzle out and expel all of the stuff it sucked in. It just takes a very long time to do so. So the theory says. That said I think this makes it a very viable candidate for the "Bottomless Pit" which Satan is put in for 1,000 years. Ever falling but never hitting ground, and no way to escape (only God could overpower a Black Hole).

But this is all waaaay off topic so I'll push it back in the direction which it was meant to go lest I get yelled at.

I always had a soft spot for the George Pal version of The Time Machine starring Rod Taylor and Alan Young. The special effects, old as they are, still hold up surprisingly well today. The newer movie pays a heaping pile of homage to the first film in many places and even features a cameo by Alan Young early in the film, who played Filby in the original. Love those old George Pal productions...good stuff.

Actually General, most physicists have come around to the point of view that not only is Time Travel possible, but that the quantum behaviour of some particles demonstrates that it occurs already. And when they discover how certain particles do it, they will eventually be able to engineer a real Time Travel device.
GB

I don't mean going the speed of light or anything, I know that theoretically that slows time, I meant like going back whole centuries.

Shadowlander, do you know of any verses off the top of your head? About there being time in heaven.

Shadowlander, do you know of any verses off the top of your head? About there being time in heaven.

You would ask me this 5 minutes after I wake up. The one that comes immediately to mind is a verse in Revelation (I'm pretty sure it's Revelation), just before God sends a massive earthquake to Earth. It states that there was silence in Heaven for the space of a half hour. There are others, but this is the first one that jumped at me, and like I said, I just woke up.

Yeah General, I wasn't actually referring to the speed of light, but the "spooky action at a distance" which is referred to in the article I quoted from in my above post.

When it is discovered precisely how it works, we may indeed be able to Time Travel through the centuries.

GB

Shadow, when you said there were references to time in heaven, my first thought was "what?!" But you're right about

The one that comes immediately to mind is a verse in Revelation (I'm pretty sure it's Revelation), just before God sends a massive earthquake to Earth. It states that there was silence in Heaven for the space of a half hour.

Here's the verse [8:1, KJV]: "And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." People wrongly think the seventh seal = silence. Actually the seventh seal = seven trumpets. It's a 7 within a 7.

I could be wrong, but I still think after heaven and earth have passed away that time will be no more. I'll have to re-read Revelation. Thanks for the mental exercises!

If memory serves, Stephen Hawking is among those scientists who've discussed the theory regarding dissipation of black holes. I really must get caught up on my technical journals.

There's also the concept of Black Holes, where gravity is so intense that light itself cannot escape. If a person were to be dragged into one, time would practically stop for them while time would pass normally for the rest of the universe.

True, but (movies like The Black Hole to the contrary, and barring some incredible breakthroughs in technology) passing through a black hole's event horizon would rip you (and your ship) to shreds. But that reminds me of a short story I read once, about a married couple who was linked telepathically, with distance not being an issue. One of them goes on a mission to explore a black hole, but the ship is caught in the gravity well. His last call to her is an anguished cry of love and farewell, and for him, it lasts but an instant as they cross the event horizon. But for her, it's essentially eternal, due to the time dilation. It's not time travel, but still was quite poignant.

...Let's say there's a skyscraper that's 70 stories high. A person who works each day on the top floor will have the slightest (and I mean infintesimally small) degree of less gravity than one who works on the 1st floor. So the person who works on the 70th floor will experience a day which goes faster, even if it is by a thousandth of a millisecond...

This also holds for air flights. A 1971 experiment demonstrated that atomic clocks flying east (with the earth's rotation) give different readings compared with those flying west (against it), again, only minutely.

This, like the spaceship traveling at near-light speeds, is a consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity. I'm reminded of the original book Planet of the Apes in which the astronauts travel to Betelgeuse to find a planet much like earth except apes are the intelligent species and humans are equivalent to apes here. Their trip is only 2 years long, but they return to earth, where over 700 years have passed thanks to relativity, to find

If I may return to time travel stories a moment, another excellent movie is Deja Vu with Denzel Washington - though it too suffers the paradox issues GB has mentioned.

Another, more obscure Trek tale is the Deep Space Nine sixth-season episode "Time's Orphan," in which 8-year-old Molly O'Brien stumbles into an ancient time portal while on a picnic with her family.

oh ok, well, I've given up trying to understand revelation

Ooh Time Travel. I read a series that was a trilogy called the time trilogy series, it was really good. If I could time travel I would see what it was like during the 1800's.

oh ok, well, I've given up trying to understand revelation.

I'm beginning to really and truly believe that Revelation isn't going to fully make sense until the events it describes are already happening. I mean a TV Guide is going to make perfect sense to you and I, but if you were to show one to someone from the 11th century I cannot fathom what they'd make of it, although their speculations would probably be hilarious.

If memory serves, Stephen Hawking is among those scientists who've discussed the theory regarding dissipation of black holes. I really must get caught up on my technical journals.

A Brief History of Time is a great read, written largely in layman's terms so that dumbheads like me can grasp at the otherwise very technical concepts. I can't recall if Hawking believes that there's a quantum singularity in the center of a black hole, but there are other schools of thought that say that if one (theoretically...like you said anything going into the event horizon is going to be dismantled on a molecular basis) were to pass into one that inside the black hole normal time would resume and then they would pass out of the other end and that just about the same time the black hole would turn into a white hole. I think...this is heavy stuff and to be honest I really only have a basic understanding of it.

I read a short story several years ago about a man whose job it was to send people who had travelled from the past to live on the moon, away from all other people. He did this because the time travelers carried diseases that the people in the future had not been exposed to for centuries and therefore had no immunities built up. After I read it I was a little turned off at the idea of time travel. What if you traveled back centuries in time to hang out in the middle ages and then got bubonic plague? That would put a damper on the whole trip.

I really enjoyed The Dark Tower but I don't like that it was left unfinished.

I quite agree. I think Lewis had written himself into a corner and didn't know how to move the plot forward - or how to solve the problem he had put his characters in.

Varnafinde: do you mean Tolkien? I haven't read The Dark Tower so I can't comment on it.

Tolkien? No, Lewis wrote The Dark Tower. Stephen King also wrote The Dark Tower series, but that's a story for another time.