Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY
IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I
generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family
rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to
write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration
(quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind.
These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat,
irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if
anything comes of them.
SF Trope: “The
Chronocops travel in time to catch a Bad Guy who escaped into some other era.”
Bolormaa Teuku
scowled at her physics partner, “What do you mean when you ask, ‘Could we
travel so fast that we’d start to slide back in time?’”
“We’re supposed to
brainstorm, not beat up every idea someone throws out,” said Rayyan Batkhuyag. “The point is to ask
questions that may not have immediate answers.”
“Yeah, but the
questions have to make sense!”
Rayyan used the
vernier jets on his EVA suit to gently turn until he faced the Sun. It loomed
giant in space. In the previous century, he would never have been able to do
anything like this. But his suit was unlike anything else in the Solar System –
except for the rest of the team on the Gravity Well Mission. “You think
floating around in mirror suits less than sixty million kilometers from the sun
makes any sense?”
Bolormaa grunted
as she turned in the same direction. “I see your point.”
“So then – my
question: could acceleration reach a point where we would actually go back in
time?”
“That’s so
very…STAR TREK of you.”
“Right, right, I
know. I don’t mean we fly some tiny tin can into the well then yank it out.”
“What do you
mean?”
“Gravitational
redshift follows on from the equivalence principle that underlies general
relativity. The downward force felt by someone in a lift could be equally due
to an upward acceleration of the lift or to gravity. Pulses of light sent
upwards from a clock on the lift floor will be Doppler shifted, or redshifted,
when the lift is accelerating upwards, meaning that this clock will appear to
tick more slowly when its flashes are compared at the ceiling of the lift to
another clock. Because there is no way to tell gravity and acceleration apart,
the same will hold true in a gravitational field; in other words the greater
the gravitational pull experienced by a clock, or the closer it is to a massive
body, the more slowly it will tick.”
“So?”
“The Doppler effect goes both ways. We’ve been stuck
on the red-shift end of the EM spectrum – the effect that stretches out time
making it appear to slow down to everyone around it. But we’ve never really
looked at time and gravity the other way...”
Bolormaa turned to
face Rayyan even though they couldn’t see each other. She finally said, “When
an ambulance with a blaring horn is coming toward you, the wavelengths are
shortened and we hear a higher pitch – with light it means that the waves are
shorter, which means they’re blue.”
“They move faster.
So – if we move slow enough, will be go back in time?”
They had continued
to roll in space and as they turned to face away from the Sun, there was a
brilliant flash of blue light. An instant later, two silvered bubbles floated
toward them from the center of the flash…
Names: ♀
Mongolia, Malaysia; ♂ Malaysia, Mongolia
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Shuttle-c_launch_painting.jpg
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