Don’t Forget the Space in Spacetime

Me and the little ones watched half of a “documentary” on the Philadelphia Experiment last night over a couple of bowls of cheese macs. Legend has it that sometime early in World War II – 1943, I think – a navy ship docked in a Philadelphia port disappeared in front of various eyewitnesses. Seconds later it rematerialized in a naval yard in Virginia, only to promptly disappear again to re-rematerialize back in Philly. It was the result, some say, of a military experiment based on research into “the unified field theory” of Albert Einstein.

All well and good. I love this type of stuff. But, personally, I don’t believe it actually happened. For one, the technology involved is still something like a century or two away. Remember, we were still working out the kinks with radar in 1943. Also, I think it would be impossible to keep such theory and engineering under long-term wraps. It took like a year or two for the Soviets to steal our A-bomb technology. And really, if the military was able to make a ship dematerialize and return it, how come nothing has ever come of it? Even as a bizarre sort of weapon?

Advocates might say that the whole project was scrapped due to terrible unexpected consequences. Allegedly, sailors on the teleported ship fused with the metal bulkheads in horrible ways. Some physically survived but were returned insane. Others never even came back from the Wherever. There are even claims that surviving crewmen faded in and out of our reality long after the experiment was concluded. The filmmakers teased me at a commercial break saying that the ship may have even traveled in time.

Which got me thinking.

I don’t believe time travel is possible. Yes, we’re all traveling through time, one second per second in a certain direction, true. But I’m referring here to travel in a backward direction, into the past, or accelerated into the future. I don’t think backward travel is possible because of the paradoxes that crop up: what-if-I-killed-my-grandfather-type stuff. Or the old SF cliché where the guy goes back to the era of dinosaurs and squashes a bug. He comes back to his present only to find flying donuts and raining toasters (to butcher a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment).

Time travel into the future is problematic, too. Ever since I was a little kid and I saw the 1960’s version of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, one thing in particular bothered me. When we see the Time Traveler in his machine, as he watches the trees bloom and die around him, as he observes the buildings fall apart, as he sees time accelerating all around him, I always wondered, what the heck are all the people who see this frozen man in his machine thinking and doing? If there’s war being waged all about this museum exhibit, why don’t they try to use it for weaponry or something? Because if he’s watching time accelerate all around him, spectators will see this dude frozen in time as they come and go. You know what I’m saying?

Anyway, time travel is a huge subset of science fiction. In 99 point 9999999 percent of everything I’ve read or watched, one crucial piece of the time travel puzzle is left out. It has to do with the concept of spacetime.

Guess what it is?

When you travel forward in time, you also travel forward in space. In physics it’s known as your world line. The following example will hopefully illustrate what I’m talking about.

Say you have a time machine that will beam you one day into the future in one second of everyone else’s time. Great. But there’s only one problem. Unless you address the space part of spacetime, you’re dead. Know why? Because when you’re beamed 24 hours ahead in one second and rematerialize, you rematerialize in outer space, because the earth has moved away thousands of miles in its orbit, as has the sun in its orbit through the Milky Way ...

Yeah, it’s a fine point, but an interesting one, I must admit. I’ve only read one story, and it was a very good one, “Brown Robert” by Terry Carr, where this was taken into consideration.

So when I watched the show on the Philadelphia Experiment and they spoke in hushed reverent tones that the ship may – may – have been teleported through time, into the future and back, I almost choked on my cheese macs. I hope those eggheads working with Einstein remembered to take spacetime space into their calculations while they were doing all their magic on that poor little naval ship. Or else those sailors were definitely in for a lot of trouble in the cold, depressurized, airless void of outer space …