“Deception Point”, “The Time Machine”, and Other Books…

 

So besides being extremely busy with Summer things, at night I’ve been listening to some audiotapes (much easier to do during the lazy days of Summer) but besides that, I wanted to make a promise:

That I am going to keep with this blog no matter what it takes. Because, first, it’s what I like to do: To write, inform others, teach, etc. But secondly, it’s also my passion. My current dream is this: To be a professor of astrophysics at a great university and to do my own research.

This is what I want, and the blog is what I came up with.

Back to the news, I listened to the entire audiotape of “Deception Point” by Dan Brown (author of “The Da Vinci Code”, etc.) and it was one excellent piece of science fiction. Not too science-ish (in fact, you find out why it’s called “Deception Point” later)but very good nonetheless. Has alot to do with the government which is pretty interesting…

I have begun listening to “The Time Machine” and I’m happy to say it’s very scientific so far. A wonderful piece of science-fiction to read, and there’s even a movie of it.

I loved the beginning, because the ‘time traveler’ (as he’s called) hasn’t yet said he could time travel, but said that he theorized that there were four dimensions: that time is a fourth dimension (which today is still accepted by theoretical physicists)that we cannot perceive like other dimensions because we aren’t surrounded by it, we ride along it, just like space. This is why space and time are considered ‘space-time’. This time traveler didn’t call it ‘space-time’ but he did say that they work hand in hand and that we ride along the fourth dimension involved in our universe, time.

Now, thinking about time as another dimension didn’t quite start until the group of theoretical physicists became a bit more populated, which was around the time this book was written (I can’t quite grasp the exact year) but a number of decades later, here we are reading Lisa Randall’s “Warped Passages: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions” and we see that time being a fourth dimension is still used in common theories.

In “The Time Machine”, when the time traveler is done explaining his theory about us riding along this fourth dimension, he is speaking to a few very educated men in the science field, one being a psychologist. Three of the men were doubtful about his theory, but one man says that he thought it was a very interesting idea.

Then comes when the time traveler deduces that if he were able to change into another dimension by going fast enough, he could travel through time.

Does this sound familiar?

I solemnly swear that I have never, ever heard this story until last night, and I was very surprised by how the time traveler perceives things very similar to how I have been making my theory. Of course, I don’t know how much he knows about the universe and such, so he doesn’t get into great detail about how he came to this conclusion, other than that he believed that time worked hand in hand with space as another dimension with matter, and he couldn’t have been closer to the ideas of most theoretical physicists today.