Pockets in Time

I'm writing this entire post in 13 minutes, FYI.

Having a very busy week; no time to put together a proper post. So, instead, I’m going to treat you to some ramblings.

Say you could freeze people in time; even yourself, if you like. What happens? See as all of our activities are accomplished in time, it is plausible to say that we (or whoever trapped in the bubble) could do nothing whatsoever while thus frozen. Nothing could be done to you, either, seeing as nothing is capable of changing without occupying some period of time. To borrow HG Wells’ term, you can’t have an ‘instanteneous cube’.

If you’ve ever been confused by the definition of time as the ‘fourth dimension’, this mental exercise I feel is a good way to wrap your head around it. You can’t lack ‘time’ anymore than you can truly lack width, depth, or height. To do so ‘breaks’ the world. It violates the rules of existence as we understand them.

Of course, the ‘as we understand them’ part is the real kicker. Maybe there is a way, somehow, to ‘delete’ some dimension of existence. We could become two-dimensional people, if you like. Even more interestingly, perhaps we could change these dimensions–create bubbles of slow-time, fold space to reduce distances, and so on. There is some evidence to suggest that such things become possible on the quantum level, and the dialation of time is widely supported as a result of travelling closer and closer to the speed of light. What we do with this, well, who knows?

All I know is that I could use a gadget that lets me do it. I could use an extra hour here or there, lately.

About aahabershaw

Writer, teacher, gaming enthusiast, and storyteller. I write stories, novels, and occasional rants.

Posted on March 15, 2012, in Critiques, Theories, and Random Thoughts and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.

  1. Vernor Vinge, _The Peace War_ and _Marooned in Realtime_. 🙂

    • Thanks. I’m reading some Vinge now (Rainbow’s End). Not loving it, but it’s well written. I’ll give him another try.

      • Yeah, imo _Rainbows End_ (the missing apostrophe is intentional) is not at all his best work. Either _Marooned in Realtime_ or his unrelated _A Deepness in the Sky_ is that. The former is about the far, far, far future of humanity, and the latter is a first-contact story with an unusual setup. People also seem to like _A Fire Upon the Deep_, which is ambiguously set in the same universe as _Deepness_ and features a race of aliens that have multiple bodies, but coming from a computer-science background as I do, I found it more predictable than the masses seem to. 🙂

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