Rectilinear or serpentine?
What? What now, Nois?
OK, OK, back to time travel in a minute... First we have to talk about snakes, and worms. They have various modes of locomotion, including Rectilinear and Serpentine. Actually, several of the other modes are just variations of these. Think of the last fishing worm, or night crawler you saw... not too bad a memory I hope... remember how they seemed to stretch their head out in front of them, then they latched on up front and started to move the center part of their body up by the head, then they brought the tail end up to the rest of the body... repeat. Snakes can also do that, and they also bend their bodies into S shapes and propagate that S along their bodies, which propells them forward in serpentine mode.
OK, so why, the biology lesson? Well, If our rib-slice-worms (RSWs) are going to travel in time, they need to have a mode of locomotion - right? I have thought quite a bit about these two modes and would like to explore each of them a bit. Much like the Worm metaphore for 4D existance, I am not proposing this as a practical method, but rather as a means to visualize a system where one can visualize something that is nearly impossible to visualize normally. Let's see if it helps us visualize time travel without accidentally killing grandma...
Lets talk about serpentine locomotion first. From the perspective of classic syfy, this is time travel via the RSW metaphore. If you think about "Back to the future" Michael's RSW would need to bend back on itself so that his worm could go back below the "now" surface. To get a grasp of this, think about our Flatland friend's worm. What would happen as we watched him if his slice-time worm bent enough that he made an S curve instead of just going straight up and if part of that S went below the surface of the water. Would you expect that to damage him in any way? Nope. Well, we would have to assume that he was flexible enough to stretch that far and that it does not rip him away from future "fixed points" that had to happen. Of course, we also need to allow him to move in the "past" as we discussed last post. In the current metaphore, we said that the "worm" was only self aware at the surface of the water. If, so, then we could end up in a situation at the current surface, where there would actually be 3 instances of a conscious self - up, down, up! However, with those rules, the time traveler would not be consious when he was back visiting grandma! Not exactly what I had in mind! The time traveling worm would not bother grandma a bit and would not cause any significant trouble in the past, because he already clearly exists in the present and future... eh? If the worm stays bent like that then eventually the "now" surface cones up to the top of the S, then that stream of consiousness would suddenly end and the second "up" going self-aware would sort of "take over" as the future instance. That would explain some really odd days where I can not remember doing something that I clearly did, or remember doing something that I can see that I did not do! How about you?
Maybe I am a snake in time! If a tenticle of a hydra bent down and then back up, would we expect that to damage him, the other tenticles, or significantly change the rest of the hydra higher up... nope.
Rectilinear motion is another interesting option! In this case, there is only one instance of consiousness... that is a good thing! However, there is an odd twist coused by the 'now" surface again. Lets suppose that the worm is able to stretch and squeeze himself like the worm. That would effectively take the "now.1" slice into the past or future and move some other "now.n" slice to the "now" surface. However, while the future slice was visiting the "now" surface, he would be self-aware. If he moved back to his normal surface and then eventually that became the self aware surface, he would remember being there in the past. Cool. Also, all oh his slices would experience passing through the "now" surface, so there would be an accelerated time passage for him during the move. Time would rewind very fast if he stretched the other way.
Another possiblity is that there is only one slice who is the designated driver, in that he is self-aware no matter where he goes along the time line. I find this possibility more appealing, and it fits with the syfy story lines better too! In this model, I am consious when I meet my grandma! I suppose I would have to be unconsious in the now... my wife would say she finds me drifting in another plane fairly often, so maybe that is it! I do not know what phenomanon makes me self-aware at the now surface, so I can not speculate what the rules might be for the traveling worm slices.
This experience seems similar to me as the "accedent awen" (1) I have experienced several times. Take for example a time when I witnessed a broad side collison. I was driving along a 55 mph road in North Denver in the inside lane when the light in front of me turned yellow. I made an instant decision and stopped. At exactly the moment I stepped on the break I heard the car that was behind me in the right lane accelerate to go on through the intersection. We all make those choices every time we drive... I thought they were pushing it, but hey, each person knows themselves and their car's abilities. I watched as the right lane car slowely approached the intersection. Across the intersection in the left turn lane was a car waiting to turn. When they saw me slowing to stop, they hit the gas and slowely began to turn. I was amazed to watch as the slowly turning car moved in front of the slowly crossing car to my right... why did they not both just stop! Oh well, I thought, they are going so slow, there will not be much damage... the crossing car hit the turning car on the right rear and that car spun around at least once, ending up going backwards back across the median on the other side of the intersection and into the the path of the oncoming traffic. Luckily, they were all slowing to stop at the red light and there was no additional damage. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the two drivers come out of both cars un-hurt... they were both mad at the other... but safe!
Wait a minute... play that back... that makes no sense. How could there have been such a forceful collision if they were moving so slow? Then I realized that I was awen... I call it being "accident awen" (1)-- that state of mind where time slows down and you experience everything in slow motion. (Some writers describe a battle awen where a warrior is able to fight better than 10 opponents because they see the opponents moving in slow motion while the opponents see them moving with lightening reflexes.) The police gathered my information as a witness, then went to handel the situation. When the policeman returned he explained that neither driver saw the other because my car blocked their vision... makes sense. He had one question for me... Did the car in the right lane enter the intersection before the light turned red... did it? Well, unfortunately, I reviewed the tape in my head several times and I never noticed the light change - duh!!! The police man sent me on my way... probably very frustrated.
So, my time travel question is, how did my brain know to go into the awen state so that I would watch the accident happen in slo-mo? Some researchers have said that our brains actually record all of those details all of the time and we arrange them to suite (
Temporal Binding). So we are always assembling un-synchronized events into coherent sequences, so can easily perceive evereything in slo-mo. I don't know... not very appealing to me. I do not think I was remembering the slow-mo, I think I actually experienced it! Another school of thought (e.g.
Kappa Effect) is that we can actually speed up or slow down our perception of time by how many incidents we perceive per second. So, if we want time to pass quickly, we can just become unaware of our surroundings and go into "limbo". I have a hard time doing that! About the only time I can stop my brain from whizzing around is to be fishing (and recently when barely running!)! Not sure Why! Also, if I want time to slow down, I just start to notice as many detials as possible. The mind perceives that time is passing slowly because it assumes a certain habitual rate of instance notices per second - see? This leaves me cold too because I still want to know how I knew to start watching, or perceiving those details? Others say that the adrenalin rush we have in
danger slows down our
perception of time.
Now, with our current RSW time travel metaphore, this is fairly easy to explain... Either I have some part of me that is a little bit aware of the future (remember when my Flatland friend agreed that he must have a little
wafer thickness in time?) or I am able to slip back just a bit in time so that I can relive that snipet in slo-mo. I have thought about this a lot, and I really can not think up a better explanation... I can travel in time! And I do it on a fairly regular, but mostly unconsequential way. Suppose I was able to "change the past"... wouldn't I have told myself to look at that light?
Then again, it is possible that hearing that driver rev his engine right when I stepped on my break is what caused my mind to start recording in high-def and my perception to be in slo-mo. That would fit the second school of thought about the speed of time passing, and eliminate my time travel explanation... but, if so, wouldn't I be awen a lot?.. Like everytime something triggers my spider sense? Oh well... no easy answer here...
Nois
1. I am not referring here to the Awen of Welsh poetic inspiration, but related to it. You know how it feels to be "in awe" - right? That sort of breath stopping emotion that can comes from various sources... fear, grandness, majesty, power... accidents. Well, if you fall you are fallen - right, or If someone takes you, you are taken - eh? So if you are in awe, you are awen - see? In the Arthurian novels of Stephen A. Lawhead, he uses the term as I have - a state of mind. He talks often of the battle awen.
