Thinking about these things too much

[gemfyre]

A few days ago at lunch I found myself musing about Time Displacement. This isn't conventional time travel. Time displacement essentially takes a chunk of matter from one time and swaps it with another chunk of matter from another time. It's not made absolutely clear in the movies, but in the book of T2 there's a bit describing how a chunk of metal and some rubbish, including newspaper stating that it's 1984 appear in 2029 after Kyle Reese is sent back. This got me thinking.

Obviously this prevents a law of physics being broken. The one that states matter can neither be created or destroyed. Conventional time travel, as in sending a person and maybe a few things back in time, breaks this law by placing more matter into the universe at a particular time than there should be. Time displacement on the other hand swaps chunks of matter around.

Now, here's where it starts getting complicated for my non-physics trained brain. Matter is composed of molecules and space. Swapping the same area of random matter wouldn't work would it? Because a bunch of air and newspaper is less dense than a human surrounded by less air. It's not about area, it's about the amount of molecules.

Or is it?

Comments

[arkem.livejournal.com]

It's less the amount of molecules but the mass of them. I'm fairly sure that it's the molecular mass that is being conserved by that law. Though your thought still holds, swapping a volume in time like that would change the amount of matter in the universe.

For science fiction explanations you can say that an arbitrary amount of extra atmosphere was swapped to make up the difference. In fact in the same handwavy way that explains the wind effect in T2 (am I remembering this correctly?) by the new/removed atmosphere shifting the local air pressure which causes a slight wind as the atmosphere compensates.

Of course, I'm not a physicist either and I'm not even sure if we're talking about physics here :)

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping perhaps if it's considered enough it can be invented.

Maybe.

Or maybe I just like sounding like I'm smart when I'm actually spouting crap. :)

[jet-ski.livejournal.com]

what happened to 'nothing dead goes through' which I guess was a cinematography type invention so we get to see arnie naked?

[meljane.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should check the time travel discussion next week at the Inglewood library .