By time travel, I mean the everyday kind- forward at a rate of 1second per second.
By space travel, I mean in everyday 3d space.
We know for a fact that time slows as matter approaches c. One could say that the more you travel through space, the less you travel through time. But how do we know it’s a mix of the two at all? Do we know that we move through both space and time…er, simultaneously? What if it’s binary, and you actually move through space, then time, then some more space, and so on? I’d think that if the flipping between the two is quick enough (like, say, planck time) we couldn’t tell the difference…especially if each particle in an object is “blinking” at a different moments. Do we have any evidence one way or the other? Is there any experiment, theoretical or otherwise, that could shed some light (heh) on the topic?
In our normal everyday lives, we are constantly travelling through time and space. As you mentioned, we travel through time at the rate of 1 second/second.
We also travel through space at a speed determined by the rotation of the earth, the revolution of the earth around the sun, the sun around other objects, ad infinitum, coupled with the speed at which we are walking, driving, etc. relative to the earth.
This brings up an interesting paradox with regard to time travel as depicted in science fiction. If Marty McFly hops in his DeLorean and travels back to 1955, the earth of the current time is not in the same place as the earth of 1955, so there would have to be some space travel involved as well.
1.) theories about time travel are actually in space-time. Look at any of the texts that describe this, like Misner Thorne and Wheeler – yes, you are considering coordinates and motions in thre-dimensional space and in time as well.
It sounds like what you’re asking is whether spacetime is quantized. To which the answer is, probably, but we have no friggin’ clue about the details. It might work out like one step forward, one step sideways, and so on, but it might also be much, much more complicated.
I am afraid I don’t understand your question(s).
But perhaps this concept will help: every thing in the universe is moving at one constant speed through spacetime-the speed of light. What differs among different objects (a photon or a spaceship) is how that speed is divided up. When you are not moving at all in space, all your motion is through time at a rate of 1sec/sec. If you are moving through space at .99c, then you are moving through time at a rate of 0.01c. Einstein used this concept to a) conclude that the speed of light is constant and b) space and time are no more distinct than x direction and y direction.
The concept of switching between time and space is interesting, but I think one could only make progress with the idea if it is supported by the (quantum mechanics) math.
I had trouble making my point clear. You should have seen the OP I drafted before I posted- it had 4 or 5 bizarre questions like this!
So imagine a graph with space movement on one axis and time on the other. Now, as rbroome said, we’re always moving through both at a total of c. You could represent this by having an arrow starting at the origin and extending into the (+, +) are of the graph. If it’s a steep slope, you’re like most things. You move through time quickly but through space slowly. If the arrow has a shallow slope, it moves through space quickly but through time slowly. Thus:
time
|
| ^ me
| /
| /
|/______space
But what I’m saying is that could possibly only be true in the aggregate sense. Over a given time interval, you might be moving through space and time simultaneously, sure. That’s what we experience every day- I spend 4 hours in the car and I end up in a different city. But what if that’s only true if you look at a sizeable window of time?
If we zoom in on this graph, do we still get that crooked arrow? Is it possible that at one moment, we’re ONLY moving through time, and then a bit “later”, we’re ONLY moving through space? So that the arrow is either all vertical or all horizontal, and it switches back and forth very very frequently?
Do I perhaps travel instantaneously through space, and then hold still for a tiny period of time, and then “warp” again to a new position in space?
And perhaps more importantly, is it possible to detect the difference?
is it possible to move in space and not time? yes/no. yes because of relativity time “stops” for an object moving at c. no because you’ll never be able to accelerate to c.
is it possible to move in time and not space? also yes/no. you’ll stop moving once you hit absolute zero. too bad you’ll never reach absolute zero.
Well, I’m more asking how we know that. Or rather, how we know that my idea is wrong or impossible.
I’ve thought of a theoretical way to test it but it’s impossible to do in reality. If you could observe an object moving very fast without interruption, you’d naturally assume that it’s moving at a constant rate. But if it were possible to observe it over a very, very tiny time interval, and if you found that it didn’t move at all for that time period, you could then say “This object was not moving through space at this moment and therefore was moving only through time”. You could then make a good-faith leap that the opposite occurs at some point- that the object “teleports” from one location to the next without any time passing.
That would turn my graph from a tilted arrow into a very, very finely detailed “staircase”.