OhmBlog - Primer Won't Exit My Brain

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Primer Won't Exit My Brain

I woke up this morning with more questions about "box mechanics".

A weavil (sp?) spends one minute of wall-clock time (from the outside frame of reference) in the box, yet spends roughly 1330 minutes from its frame of reference inside the box.

Where does that time go? Relativity has time dilation, where an object traveling at relativistic speeds will experience time at a much slower rate and when they get back to a frame of reference that is relatively "at rest", they will find out that the original frame of reference has "aged" significantly longer. Thus, it is always possible to travel to the future, but not to go back to the past..

Say a similar principle applies, and the box exerts a similar influence to time dilation, except in the opposite direction - time restriction. This would match up well with the original experiment - the weavil actually experiences a significantly longer interval than the observers outside the box. That doesn't mean that the weavil had to move back in time - say the weavil decided to get out of the box midway through the interval (670 minutes) - the observers would just see it emerging 30 seconds into the "trip". The weavil has not traveled back in time - just experiences "alot more" time than the observers. That's at least the "occam's razor" explanation.

But let's allow for the prevalent "theory" that you actually DO travel back in time - that is, somehow you go back in time when you enter the boxes.

What I don't get is how the boxes now work for Aaron and Abe. The idea is that they enter the box in the afternoon (say 4:30pm, I forget the exact time) as the boxes are winding down, which somehow "shifts them back" to when the box was started. But presumably the weavil experiment results are still to be reckoned with. The weavil experiences time 1330 times "slower" than the folks outside the box. So presumably, in order to go back to about 8:45am the same day (roughly 8 hours = 480 minutes), Abe and Aaron would have to get into the box for less than 20 seconds. At some point in the movie they do allude to getting in "once you start turning off the box", so presumably you get in 20 seconds before the box has completed its shutdown, and once it's shut down you just get out. But here's the issue - every second equates to roughly 1330 seconds, which is roughly 22 minutes and change. If I miss by a bit, I have a very different time that I "emerge" from the other side. Abe and Aaron were very meticulous about everything, but didn't time themselves exactly when they entered the box. Hmm.

Another even bigger problem is that Abe and Aaron had to spend 15 minutes of "outside frame of reference" time inside the box, which would equate to 20000 minutes or 332 hours or nearly 14 days inside the box.

I guess they must have somehow found a way to "slow down" the effect, so that they don't have to spend so long inside the box to give their doubles time to leave.

I would love to hear any explanation of these effects that people have come up with...

I have to say, this movie has the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any that I ever recall seeing - every gesture in the 78 minutes of footage seems to hold some piece of information... I will have to watch it again (but in about a week)

BTW, another couple of great references are in this thread (and the second page of the thread as well).

Movies
Sunday, June 12, 2005 6:45:57 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

| Page rendered at Thursday, August 28, 2008 7:15:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Pick a theme:

Search

Navigation

Categories

Blogroll