About time...

When I heard about Ronald Mallett and his time-travel quest, the one thing that intrigued me most was the possibilty of sending information back into time. Once it becomes possible to send even the tiniest speck of recordable particle or wave back into the past, time would come to a standstill at that very moment and at that very point in space. Laying down standards for communication, results of years of research could be sent back, effectively completing the research within zero or even negative units of time. Hence, at the very instance it becomes possible to receive information from the future, we would instantly have the technology to build infinitely better "time machines" as the exponential growth of our knowledge becomes a permanent vertical slope on the time scale, reaching upto infinity. There would no longer be any time barrier between any two points in time from that moment on, thereby effectively putting time to a standstill.

Today I thought about how we already have thousands of years' worth of knowledge available to us. It then occurred to me that we already have working time machines, only not as apocalyptic as Ronald Mallet's. Instead of an infinite amount of knowledge from the future, we have relatively limited and sometimes distorted information from the past. Thus, you are Pythagoras in ancient Greece with a time machine that sometimes corrupts its data and works only upto the present time. You are al-Shahrastani in medieval Persia with the same partially functional time machine. You are anyone anywhere in the past with this same time machine. Put it to good use.

Think moments

Some things have always intrigued me. They catch me unaware and lead me into think moments - while walking down a street, while waiting for the bus, riding in a bus, during an information theory lecture, in the middle of a book or a movie or anything at all - the tired science versus religion thing; then on a higher level, consciousness; and then ultimately, existence itself.

Let's start with consciousness. I've always believed in evolution (I also believe in God. How I manage this will be covered in another section.) I believe there is no exact instance at which "life" started. I believe life evolved as interactions between various particles started increasing in complexity, finally forming entities that acted as living objects (to cut things short.) Evolution teaches that these objects evolved to become what we are today. The question is, when did we start being conscious? Have the aforementioned interactions become so complex that a living object now possesses an idea of being. When I think of myself as an individual, I find it hard to see how my thoughts, my motives and will, my very act of being conscious and thinking of myself as an individual with unique thoughts and motives and will are all end results of neurons and enzymes. I can accept this is evolution when I see people interacting with each other. But when I myself am here to have these thoughts, it is difficult to accept that my own consciousness is just a bunch of biology. (That was lousy communication; I didn't even convince myself when I re-read it.)

Moving on to existence, sometimes I think about how if everything that exists never existed at all. Not just our planet or our galaxy, but everything - the universe, parallel or multiple universes, matter, energy, time, space, the other six dimensions, any other dimension or anything else suggested in any attempt to explain existence. Not even an entity to bring all these into being. If you believe in the Big Bang, think of how if it had never happened and how if time never existed to come to a point where it happened. If the thought doesn't do something to you, you're probably not visualizing it right. "Wouldn't that be wonderful?" is what I would think if I felt suicidal.

It's late. Time to sleep.