Time Travel or Time Transfer?

In a previous post of this site, I proposed the following thought experiment:

“Your life is near its natural end (you’re 80) when you are visited by an angel. Bear with me! You are given an option. You can ‘go gentle into that good night’ or you can relive your present life from the moment of your birth. However, there are some ground rules:

1. You will not be aware that you have lived before; everything will seem brand new to you…although you may have déjà vu moments.

   
   

2. While you will have the illusion of making free choices, in fact you will repeat every decision and relive every experience exactly as you did before. Sorry, it’s not a ‘do over’; it’s just a ‘be-over’…”

Surprisingly, this is no longer merely a thought experiment. “Today this is fulfilled in your hearing!” (Luke 4:21) We now know that we can ‘transfer time’ among entangled entities. We can make your dream of eternal youth a reality. So does that mean time travel is finally a reality? Well, you decide:

Let’s keep it simple: we have an experimental framework (A) that includes two entangled entities (B and C). If 5 seconds pass according to the clock on the laboratory wall, we would normally expect A, B, and C each to age 5 seconds. And normally we would be right.

But physics is anything but normal! ‘Magical’ might come closer. We now know that we can configure A so that when A ages 5 seconds, B ages 10 and C does not age at all.

Really? How? Let’s look at what we’ve done. Everything ‘in aggregate’ is unchanged; collectively, the system (A) ages 5 seconds, period. So B and C must age a total of 10 seconds (5 seconds each). 

Normally, we would just say that A, B, and C each aged 5 seconds. But that assumes that time is an independent entity, an objective standard of measurement, entirely divorced from the phenomena it is measuring, an idea held over from Euclid and Newton.

At least since Einstein we’ve known that that’s not true. Every entity has its own time. So in the example above, T(A) = 5, T(B) = 10, and T (C) = 0. Entanglement allows A to distribute time unevenly among its constituent entities, e.g. 10 to B and 0 to C. 

Now let’s take this further. There’s no theoretical reason why A couldn’t distribute 10 seconds so that B ages 20 seconds and C grows younger by 10 seconds. A sends C into the past (-10) by allocating more of the collective age difference to B (+20). Mind bending? You bet! 

But we’re not done yet! An organization of scientists has committed to making safe and affordable time travel a reality in our lifetime. Maiden voyage: send 3 physicists back in time 30 years (each). 

First, we’ll need volunteers. But please, don’t send me your resume. While we know theoretically that time transfer is possible, we have some engineering problems to solve before we can actually start moving people around. We’re not yet able to place a body the size of an adult human in a coherent quantum state. We will be able to do so someday, but that day is not today.

Plus, you might want to curb your enthusiasm. A volunteer would need to age 120 years for  3 physicists to travel 90 years (3 x -30) back in time. No one would survive and even if someone did, who would make such a sacrifice?

But suppose our volunteer only had to agree to age one month. I could see myself agreeing to that…in the name of science! And that will work, provided 1091 likeminded people agree to join me, hold hands (i.e. be entangled), and age one ‘leap month’ each. Of course, now A contains B, C, and 1092 other independent entities.

Our first mission was a resounding success. We sent a team of 3 scientists back 30 years, to the height of the dot com boom (1995). Fortunately, our scientists were all over 50 so none of them had to endure a second childhood. 

News travels fast, especially if it has a ‘new age’ vibe. Soon volunteers from all over the world were raising their hands, some to time travel, some to donate a few months of their life expectancy for the benefit of humanity.

We now have more than enough volunteers for a more ambitious second trip. This time we will send 15 ‘mature’ chrononauts deep into childhood (average time transfer: 45 years) and another 15 back an average of just 15 years each.  For this, we will need a total of 10812 eleemosynary ‘time donors’. No problem! Seems everybody wants to make history even if it’s at their own expense.

But we are left with questions. What if someone wanted to go back to a time before they were born? Would they simply be annihilated? Would their life be expunged? In that case, our experiment could indeed change history. In fact, we could use this technology to ‘disappear’ our enemies. Or would events somehow conspire to ensure that our intrepid chrononaut would be born anyway?

Our initial chrononauts had no interest in returning to A’s time frame; they had found the fountain of youth. But others might wish to return. Would they be able to let us know that they’d decided to come back (probably not) or would that need to be arranged in advance? 

Could we bring them back if they and we wanted to do so? Probably, yes. The time transfer steps should be reversible…provided we had enough volunteers to make it happen. 

Finally, is this ‘time travel’? Organisms B and C do return to an earlier internal and external state-of-affairs, so yes. But they won’t know they have traveled in time, so no. They’ll have no awareness of having already lived through events, except possibly for moments of deja vue. They will have learned nothing from their future life experiences, they will be unable to bring information back from the present…or to send information forward in time…except via the usual muggle routes.

No one will know that they are a chrononaut and no one will know if there is a chrononaut in their midst. We know that someday folks will discover ‘time transference’; we just did. So we may assume that there will be chrononauts in the future; therefore, it is possible that each, or any, of us, dear reader, is already a chrononaut ‘back from the future’. We have no way to know.   

Still, this is a breakthrough. Sure, it is a poor version of Captain Picard’s universe, but it is available to us without warp drives, worm holes, etc., and the energy required is nearly zero. Plus, we can be assured that there will be no prematurely deceased grandfathers in our wake. 

So we’ll take what we can get, work with it, see if it may lead us to something a bit more useful.  

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Marc Chagall’s Time is a River Without Banks (1930s) dissolves the boundaries between past, present, and memory, layering dream and reality into a single, fluid moment. The work mirrors the idea of time transference in physics, where seconds can be unevenly distributed and even reversed, creating the sensation of traveling through time while remaining within the same current of existence.