A. Merlocks's Blog: Time for Fantasy, page 2

Time Travel... the Fun Side

Are there any references about time travel in academic literature? Here you have a rather incomplete compilation of research articles with unusual (perhaps even funny) titles (remember, not everything is what it seems and these are not works of fiction):

Temporal Anomaly Detection in Business Processes

Before and After: Temporal Anomalies in Legal Doctrine

Mental time travel in animals?

Evolutionary economics of mental time travel?

Involuntary (spontaneous) mental time travel into the past and future

Time travel with Oliver Twist

On emotionally intelligent time travel: Individual differences in affective forecasting ability

Making decisions with the future in mind: Developmental and comparative identification of mental time travel

Temporal anomalies in immunological gene expression in a time series of wild mice: signature of an epidemic?

Do apparent temporal anomalies require nonclassical explanation

Temporal Anomalies of Consciousness

Achieving sustainable mobility: everyday and leisure-time travel in the EU

Enriching network security analysis with time travel

Presentists should believe in time-travel

Mental time travel in animals: a challenging question

Virtual machine time travel using continuous data protection and checkpointing

Steering programs via time travel

Bananas enough for time travel?

In spite of the titles, most of these works are rather deep and cryptic; only the titles are funny. Enjoy!

Time Travel... Still Possible

In 1932, Enrico Fermi (physicist and Nobel Prize winner) pointed out that Time Travel (at the atomic level, at least) was impossible. But in January 1994, his calculations were found to be in error. Was it the beginning of theoretical (not just literary) Time Travel? No,... not yet. The actual technology capable of such a feat remains to be discovered, its details still elusive. More on this controversy:


Nature, News and Views (10 February 1994)

Causality problems for Fermi’s two-atom system, original paper proving Fermi wrong.

Time machines still over horizon by John Maddox.

Gerhard C. Hegerfeldt, the physicist who proved Fermi wrong.

Trap Doors in Time and Space: Teleportation, Time Travel, and Escape from Black Holes, current status of the question.

A Multiplicity of Universes: Fact or Fiction

A multiplicity of universes, the multiverse, is a fashionable concept that has become increasingly popular in connection with the fictional world of superheroes. There is however a physical (as in Physics) base to it. Arguably, it all started in 1957 with the publication of Hugh Everett's thesis "Theory of the Universal Wavefunction" (check out Many-worlds Interpretations and also The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family). Some links about this work:

Parallel worlds, parallel lives

Interview: Parallel lives can never touch

Hugh Everett: New film tackles "many worlds" theory of quantum mechanics

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH of HUGH EVERETT, III

Are we closer to a 'theory of everything'?

Mathematically speaking, the idea is connected to Hilbert Spaces (see, for example, Hilbert Spaces With Applications, Introduction to Hilbert Spaces with Applications or Hilbert Spaces, Wavelets, Generalised Functions and Modern Quantum Mechanics). Universes can split but they cannot merge. The entire concept is not time-symmetric and it is linked to quantum gravity (see, for example, Euclidean Quantum Gravity, Foundations of Quantum Gravity or Knots and Quantum Gravity). It also contradicts Special Relativity (see, for example, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory or Introduction to Special Relativity). Very speculative work indeed, but... hard to prove wrong! The stuff of Science Fiction. Do we live in a multiverse?