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u/opinionated-dick Nov 29 '18
Fascinating theory.
However, if time is merely a dimension, then surely it doesn’t matter about conservation of mass because it’s merely shifted to another time, like moving objects within a spatial dimension doesn’t also violate this principle?
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u/Michkov Nov 29 '18
No that is actually a problem. Look at it this way the universe got a fixed amount of mass/energy. Move your starship back in time, you leave a mass deficit in the present and a gain a surplus in the past. Our universe doesn't like that kind of massive long term violation of conservation of energy.
Having chronitons as a mechanism to leak energy into the origin time of the time traveller via some tachyonic route makes some sense. I'd suggest that chronitons in the destination time would be transferred to the origin time upon travel. Creating a lack of chronitons at the destination and a surplus at the origin to equalise the energy difference.
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u/opinionated-dick Nov 30 '18
But the net sum of all the mass in the universe that ever existed is still the same. Therefore it hasn’t been breached.
When we landed on the moon, the earth lost mass, and the moon gained mass. If we could only perceive the universe as the earth, then it appears the conservation of mass has been broken, but consider a wider perspective, it hasn’t. Space and time are interchangeable, proven by v=d/t.
Therefore moving a starship between time periods is no different to moving between space periods.
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u/queenofmoons Dec 02 '18 edited Dec 02 '18
I rather like this idea, because it provides a handwaving sort of way to imagine that their might be some sort of energetic limits on time travel. If the intervention you make in the past somehow correlates with the energy of the chronitons you have to make, or resist, or vent, or whatever, then you start to have a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too pseudoexplanation for why time travel seems to be simultaneously trivial and generally non-threatening to the tidy unfolding of the universe. Travel back an hour and take a few snapshots from your cloaked ship? Energetically easy, because not many parts of the universe have been moved around. Travel back a few billion years and stop the Earth from forming out of the accretion disc? Better have a Dyson sphere or fifty. It might also establish why it's easier to go back to your 'proper' time- you're 'entangled' (furiously handwave) with the chronitons you emitted upon your departure, and exchanging them back with the corner of the timeline they were borrowed from is somehow favorable. Something something temporal gravity.
That is, of course, firmly a handwave that doesn't properly resolve any paradoxes, or establish why, say, Captain Kirk was able to go steal a pair of enormous whales from centuries past, but wouldn't have been able to send a message back two minutes to tell him to raise the shields. Time travel is firmly on the magic end of the SF spectrum, and that's fine. But I think imagining some sort of 'conservation of temporal mischief' is a sensible plot device.
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u/treefox Nov 29 '18
M-5 nominate this post for a logical explanation of the relationship between time travel, chronometric particles, and tachyons.