Monday 20 June 2022

Moving Very Fast

To occupy points A and B and all intermediate points successively is to move from A to B whereas to occupy these points simultaneously is to extend from A to B so is extension identical with motion at infinite speed?

"'...we'd go simultaneous: we'd be everywhere at once along a great circle of the universe.'"
-Larry Niven, "One Face" IN Niven, Convergent Series (New York, 1979), pp. 25-54 AT p. 30.

To travel even faster would be to go backward in time.

"'The time effect was the by-product of a search for a means of instantaneous transportation...'"
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 2, p. 9.

The Time Patrol Academy instructor explains that instantaneous transportation and travel into the past are mathematically similar. The civilization in which time travel is discovered sounds as if it already had faster than light interstellar travel.

In Anderson's There Will Be Time, the characters start with time travel and possibly go from there to FTL:

"'Physicists talk about a mathematical equivalence between traveling into the past and flying faster than light.'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), XV, p. 174.

But, even in an STL ship, time travellers can reach the destination in hours or minutes.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I had to think a bit before I understood the last sentence of this blog piece. Because at first it did not seem to make sense. Time travelers like Jack Havig can time hop into the future, inside the STL ship, until it reached its destination. The mutant time travelers would only need minutes or hours to traverse interstellar distances, not decades or generations.

Ad astra! Sean