How Einstein Built a Time Machine
Einstein built a time machine before he started his Special theory of relativity. He grew up in a very religious family and he was interested in religion as a possible career. When he got interested in science he was confronted by a struggle to believe in the church or in science. You could say that time got in the way.
Young Albert imagined what it would be like riding on a beam of light.
This idea of time and light festered in his mind so much that his fellow students thought of him as an outcast and he had no real friends in school.
He had his imagination and time to himself. This was his process of daydreaming about light and time.
He was fascinated by the speed of light and if there was a way to change time.
In university he felt like a loner and had difficulty following the lectures given by his professors. He preferred to skip class and study on his own terms.
The Time Machine
This was the beginning of his time machine. He saved time by not going to class and used this time to study and learn more than his professors were teaching.
After graduating from university he was outcast as a renegade and no one offered him a job.
His father finally got him a job in a patent office where he learned how to submit ideas for publication.
Einstein was able to finish his tasks in the patent office in a fast time and he used this free time to imagine what was time to a beam of light.
He was able to imagine that time was not absolute but time was relative to each observer.
Albert started to build a time machine from riding a beam of light…
We know the result of his imaginings and his Special relativity but what about his time machine?
Well, before we get into some weird stuff he was able to prove that time was invariant to every observer and that the laws of science work the same way everywhere in the universe.
What do we know about SR? He said the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the universe.
He said light is massless and invariant in every frame of reference.
Also that nothing can travel at the speed of light because it would take an infinite amount of energy to move an object having a mass to the speed of light.
And that the object would experience time and length shortening (also known as time dilation)
Einstein’s Time Machine
Albert was fascinated by time and he started to work on his idea of a time machine.
Secretly he imagined a spaceship chasing a light beam.
He knew that travelling at the speed of light would change time for the rider compared to someone on Earth.
His plan was to get a rocket ship to travel near light speed for one year and then return to Earth which would be in the future.
Namely, he would arrive 10 years into the future upon his return and find out if he won the Noble prize in physics.
The reason, that this idea should work is because time slows down for a person who is moving almost at the speed of light.
Obviously he didn’t get the chance to build his rocket ship because of world War 2 but the real problem was rocket fuel and engineering.
His idea is still alive in the science media and science fiction genre. People on Quora especially, talk about it several times a week.
Time Travel Logistics
My goal is to write about Einstein’s theories by examining them from a different angle to see if there is another way to understand relativity.
Let’s look at the time dilation theory of travel into the future.
Theoretically, his plan might work but there are a lot of problems with it.
First, the rocket fuel problem. To get up to the speed of light requires an abundance of fuel.
Where would the ship get enough fuel for the rocket ship?
Next, the force of acceleration will cause the mass of the ship to increase the faster the ship moves.
The increase of mass causes time to slow down by the effects of gravity.
What that really means is that the enormous energy needed to accelerate the ship is converted into mass, by the mass-energy equivalent theory of E=mc2.
The large mass will slow down the energy of motion that we call time. But it will also slow down the molecular frequency of matter.
The truth is that it takes too much energy to power the ship and if it was possible the increase in mass and slowing of vibrations would be disastrous.
A person wouldn’t survive the forces of gravity and the slowing of biological molecular processes.
Einstein’s Time Dilation
I am more than curious about time dilation and the idea of time travel to the future.
To me it seems that time isn’t as real as we think. Time is a measurement of motion such as the frequency of atoms and the speed of light.
If time dilation happens does motion change or slow down? The energy of frequency motion changes due to the gravitational force matter experiences.
During time dilation the frequency of matter slows and the time on a clock shows this change.
However, the speed of light doesn’t change therefore, does time change or only the clock’s movement of motion?
We have measured this time dilation with the GPS satellites. It seems that the effect of acceleration causes the force of gravity to alter the atomic clock’s ticking.
During the slow speed that satellites travel compared to the speed of light, I will say that the motion or frequency of a cesium-133 atom slows down showing that time slowed down.
But it’s only a measurement of a clock that slows and it doesn’t make the satellite any younger, on the contrary, the stress on the satellite is greater making it older.
My conclusion is that time doesn’t slow down and using a rocket ship to travel to the future doesn’t work. In fact, it would kill you for sure.
I am starting to write a book about Einstein’s theories and possible blunders, stay tuned.
Follow my blog at https://lovinthings.com and share this with your friends.
Thank you for your time and as always be well.