Time travel...where'd my wife go?..?

Question

Ok..say time travel is possible by increasing the velocity of my surrounding enviroment nearing the speed of light whereas time would speed up so essentially I would travel to a future time. Now say I bulid this geosphere/motion sphere or what have you...and I put my wife in the sphere agreeing that we will let the sphere spin for one hour. Wife gets in....I stand there and watch the sphere spin faster & faster till it nears the speed of light then continues for an hour thereof..all done then...now say our theories were sound and time has actually sped up for the wife and she has traveled .say...1 week into the future just for argument...now since wifey is a week in the future she shouldnt be in the sphere when I shut it off because after all...I won't be seeing her until a week has passed right?...Ok...so what happened when I shut off the sphere...did she disappear into the future?..will I see her in a week?..and how?..would be cool if a flash of light and out she popped 1 week later.

Answer 1

Okay.. this is tricky.

The thing is, as she is movin in a circular motion, she is in a state of continual acceleration. This means that she is taking a sin-wave like path through space time. You on the other hand as moving in a straight line (in spacetime), which is a longer distance. This means that once the sphere stops spinning and she steps out, she has taken a short cut through space time, and therefore has not aged as much as you.

BUT this also implies that the sphere would not appear to be spinning as fast from your perspecitve as it does it her.

Its quite hard to work out because she is never in an inertial reference frame.

I would say that the sphere would appear to spin at much slower that the near-light speed. If from her point of view she spins at near light speed for, say a year, then for you she would be spinning much slower for many many years.

Yes.
Thats my answer.

Thank you for making me think.

Answer 2

Let's see, to get something to spin in a circle you need to apply a centripetal force. Spinning in a circle close to the speed of light would require such a large centripetal force that your poor wife would be squashed to an atom's thickness around the outside of the sphere if the sphere didn't fly apart well before that (a much more likely event).

But let's say that somehow it worked and your wife survived. She's been travelling close to the speed of light, so time slowed down for her relative to the time flow in your part of space, so when you open the sphere an hour later, you'll be an hour older and she'll be only a few minutes older (the amount of time it took to spin up and slow down the sphere).

I guess this could be a version of the "twin paradox"--see the reference.

Answer 3

May I make it clear that when your speed is increased, time starts to decrease for you so if you travel at the speed of light your time will stop. The world's time will continue as normal so then if say after a short while you slowed down and returned to normal then you would have travelled to your future but the world would be further ahead so even though your are in the future you are actually in the past if you can see what i mean.

Another issue is that the extreme acceleration needed to get to speed of light will damage your tissue by crushing you. Also, when you get to speed of light you will become energy so you will no longer be matter anymore and it will not be possible to convert you back to a normal human. I mean who will hit the brakes for you and also remember that light travels in a straight line and so travelling at such a high speed even for a short while you will be too far from earth anyway and you risk being absorbed by an object. Can you please get this out of your head that this will ever work. Thanks.

Answer 4

Let's simplify: Your wife get in a box and the box circles the earth at 1/2 light speed. She does this for long enough for the math of general relativity to suggest she has aged 1 day *less* then you. Her watch states that it's Jan 1. Your watch states that it's Jan 2.

She then slows down and stops at the house and steps out, is she in the past by a day? How can you both talk to each other? What day is it?

This is why the *perception of time* is just a relative as the perception of motion, gravity, etc. Albert Einstein taught and popularized the theory, now held to be true, that time is from the perspective of the viewer, and there is no "universal time" by which all viewers live. All observers' perspectives on time and space were equally important.

Your wife is indeed 1 day younger, from her body's chonological standpoint. But when you open the door and she walks out on your Jan 2nd, she simply must use the local clock and calendar. This is similar to when one must use the local clock/calendar when taking flight to another time zone. Your body needs time to adjust, but in the end it simply "forgets" the prior clock and begins to believe the local one.

BTW, astronauts have this effect each time they travel into space, since orbiting craft travel at a very high velocity. They may only age a few minutes or hours less, but it is a real effect on the clocks of the ship versus the ground.

Answer 5

First of all, the theory states that if you move near the speed of light, time passes slower for you, true. But stopping such sphere for example, is a one way action, i.e. you can either do it from the inside or from the outside.

Which means that either your wife can stop the sphere in one hour, so she will get out in one week of your time; or you can stop the sphere in one hour, so that she will get out in 1 sec of her own time. The paradox results from the choice of who's stopping the sphere. So, whoever stops the sphere, nobody will vanish. There is no travelling, just time passing at different rates.

Answer 6

One catch is that unless she's taped to the outside of the sphere, SHE can't go the speed of light, only the very outside of the sphere can. Anything inside moves proportionally slower as the radius decreases. If she stands in the middle of the sphere, she might not move anywhere near as fast and will experience less time dilation.

You're mixing the time dilation effects. YOUR time 168 hrs, her time 162 hrs if she's traveling at 0.25c, 145 hrs if 0.5c, 23 hrs if 0.99c, 2.4 hrs if 0.9999c.

Takes a lot of doing to get sizable dilations. If you did get her up to c, and waited a week, she'd be still getting into the sphere, assuming the acceleration and deceleration didn't squash her flat as a bug to begin with.

Answer 7

she became energy for the time n then became mass again,but she never teavelled in future,i mean she never saw what is gonna happen in future. days just became according to her, she was not a week ahead of u,she was with u,within the sphere as energy n mass

Answer 8

Hey, I'd just save my brain from exploding and read "The Time Traveler's Wife"

Answer 9

I don't believe in time travel, however, I do believe in parallel universises that happen to co-exist along our own that take place in a time period before or after ours that we could travel to. Food for thought.

Answer 10

you will never see her in ur present because she will be 1 week before in the time.....who knows she marry someone else in the future coz she cant see u....
Thats why i dont belive in time travel