IDEAS ON TUESDAY 599

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. Octavia Butler said, “SF doesn’t really mean anything at all, except that if you use science, you should use it correctly, and if you use your imagination to extend it beyond what we already know, you should do that intelligently.”

SF Trope: “The Chronocops travel in time to catch a Bad Guy who escaped into some other era.”
Current Event: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/13/opinion/opinion-time-travel-paul-davies/

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/thumb/e/e1/Falcon_9_Demo-2_Launching_6_%283%29.jpg/220px-Falcon_9_Demo-2_Launching_6_%283%29.jpg