Nothing travels faster than light. Or so Einstein has taught us. Despite tremendous respect for the architect of relativity, a couple of decades ago, I tried to think of some things that might prove him, ah, well, wrong. I didn’t necessarily want Einstein to be wrong. I just wanted to find something faster than light. Because I wanted the concept of time travel to be possible.
I found something. And I worked out the mathematical proof.
Before I get ahead of myself, I should explain a few things. First, I’m not a physicist; my last physics course was an introductory one in college. Second, I’m not a math or science whiz. In fact, most of what I learned about math and science was in high school and very little of that textbook learning has stayed with me these past forty years. Finally, I take no great pride or feel no great sense of accomplishment in working out the math that shows the possibility of something traveling faster than light. It has, after all, been twenty or more years since I did it. And the solution required only some basic arithmetic.
Plus a reasonable amount of nerve. Literally.
The answer is all there, right inside us, right behind our eyes, right within our crania. It is immanent in the billions of nerves densely packed into 1200 cubic centimeters of our skulls. It is manifest when sections of those nerves, and the networks to which they are connected, fire when we do something we call “think”.
I think, said Monsieur Descartes, therefore I am.
When I think, my younger self posited, therefore I go. And I go there very, very fast. Faster than 300,000 kilometers per second.
Picture yourself in a chair, in a dining room, bent over a table. Your food is pushed aside, untouched. Your hand holds a glass that you do not raise. Your eyes are staring at numbers on a piece of paper which demonstrate that the mental idea of sitting in that chair, in that dining room, with neglected food and drink involves so many neurons, in such a short period of time, that the speed of light has been surpassed.
Impossible?
It just happened inside you. And there, it just happened inside you again.
Have you ever seen photos taken by fancy medical scanners that show different parts of the brain lighting up as different colors, in response to simple tasks. “What does your best friend look like?” Bam, a large section of your brain just lit up. “How did you feel when you met your first love?” Kaboom, an even larger section of your brain fired into action. In less than a second, based on the measurement of a neuron, the multiple connections from one neuron to many, and the large number of neurons involved in those thoughts about friendship and love, speeds greater than light have been achieved.
A skeptic might, will, and probably should balk. “That can’t be measured! And it’s based on estimates. And it’s all happening out of sight – and I can’t resist – in the dark.”
Ah, the beauty of creation. And the simplicity of experience as it applies to time and its traversal.
I originally explored the basic math on speed because I wanted to find, like so many before me, that it was possible to travel across time. To really travel inside time. I read fiction on the subject, plodded through a lay book or two on physics made understandable for the non-physicist, and wondered how to bring something new, something fresh, to a story of my own on time travel, something new, something believable. I imagined myself going forward and backward in time. I imagined characters in a story doing so. And then I imagined what was happening inside me when I did that imagining.
Time flew. Or it stood still. Or it was lost, as a tangible, measurable “thing”.
We so want to re-experience the past, or participate in the future, that we have missed the obvious: we have access to such experience inside ourselves. Don’t believe me? Think about your first grade teacher. Remember something great or horrible that has happened to you. Close your eyes and see a future generation of your family remembering you. It’s there. It’s always been there. It’s here.
Right now.
Does this mean that humans won’t ever be able to truly, physically, go to a place, past or present, and look at a clock with a different date than today’s? I don’t know. I would guess that Mr. Einstein was right about that limitation. But then again, sometimes I think about people before they call. Or I notice something around me before that something later decides to do something … surprising. Time traveling? That idea moves faster within me than light does outside me. Maybe it’s possible that ideas move between and among people with special bonds as fast as they do inside any individual brains. Maybe we are all traveling faster than light, all the time.
See you later, Albert.