Latest Update:  February 2, 1992

RAMBLING THOUGHTS by a cosmogonist, Number 29

Here I thought I was through having to write these RTs and Ben Medvitz
 comes up with a couple or four questions that beg more than a reply
 in a message.

From Ben:  "But there is no way to travel faster than the speed of
 light, huh? That is, if Einstein's theory of relativity holds to the
 respect and assumed truth that everyone has given it."

Hmm. Ben, have you read *all* of my RTs? You said you read RT8-28.
 I'm sure that somewhere in there--probably in a later one--I com-
 mented on the practice of sending our minds traveling fast and far.
 While we cannot, as yet, take our bodies on a >c journey, that has no
 effect on traveling by thinking. Between the time I wrote the
 previous sentence and this one, I sent my thought out to M31 and
 looked back at our galaxy and its satellite Magellenic Clouds.

Okay, that's mental travel. Physical travel? Did you see the Disney
 movie, "Beyond The Black Hole?"  They travelled through a black
 hole's wormhole and came out through a white hole. (I think.) There
 have been a number of science-fiction stories written in that vein.

"Well you can say that to Ben, Uncle Don. But we all know that your
 favorite flavors of black holes don't have singularities and thus
 can't have wormholes . . . er, uh, I mean Einstein-Rosen bridges. So
 you are going to have to find a way to pierce the fabric of space to
 travel faster than c."

Yeah. Ben said, "Oops! I ripped the fabric of space again."  I
 wonder what tool he used. The only thing that will rip the fabric of
 space--in my book I say, `pierce' that fabric--is a galactic-center
 black hole, with the mass of hundreds of billions of suns, that
 occurring near the end of the Bang Smash cycle.

However, if you do manage to pierce the fabric, you could travel at
 "warp" speed. The distance between two galaxies between the folds of
 the fabric is shorter that that distance on the surface of that
 fabric.

That led me in writing my book to the understanding that galaxies
 could be billions of light years apart on the surface of the fabric
 and yet be crashing into each other as the folds came together in the
 "Great Attractor."  I wrote that theory about four or five years
 before I heard of the discovery of the Great Attractor, into which
 galaxies are being drawn. Our Milky Way is being drawn in at the
 rate of 600 kilometers per second.

"Whew!"

Yeah, I know what you mean. My--few--readers have been faced with
 that theory for some years now. It's only those who haven't read my
 manuscript who feel safe.

Ben's next question (How did I get into all this with a high school
 student? This guy sounds almost as smart as my wife.) has to do with
 time reversal. He wants to know if he reversed just his time, how
 that would affect our Universe. Well, Ben:  Good Luck! I don't see
 how you can physically reverse just your time. In my cosmogony (That
 is, in my cosmogonical theory.) our Universe has a causal relation-
 ship with another Universe that is reversed in time in relation to
 our Universe. It is only the outside observer that can say in which
 direction we or they are living.

Due to our cultural experience with d‚j… vu, it is my opinion that it
 is our Universe that is living time backwards. By the way, while
 looking up the spelling of that phrase I came across the neat
 description of us, sitting around the table and communicating over
 this BBS, as deipnosophists!

Ben, of course, is referring to a physical time-machine for his time-
 reversal. I *think* he's talking about what would happen if a
 future--he mentioned 2020--time traveler came back in time and
 appeared in the same space that Ben is using.

Ben said, " . . . appeared next to me right here while I'm using my
 computer." but I think he got confused at that point. It's only if
 the two bodies tried to occupy the same space that the Schwarz would
 explode, killing him and the traveller from the future.

Ben's next question verved into the subject of dimensionality. He
 asks, " . . . what makes a hypercube a hypercube and not just an
 ordinary cube?"  Hmm. A cube is a cube is a cube. If you take a
 two-dimensional slice in a cube you have a plane. Whether it is a
 regular plane depends on the angle at which you slice. In three
 dimensions the cube is a cube. In four dimensions the cube is still
 a cube, just as in both two and three dimensions, a plane is still a
 plane, a line is still a line, and a point is still a point.

A hypercube, on the other hand is a four-dimensional figure. Looking
 at it with three dimensions, the view we get depends on the angle at
 which we observe it. In four dimensions you see all of its sides,
 something not possible to see in three dimensions. Perhaps you
 should go back and look at the Hyperspace program, HS001.ARC, which
 *illustrates* three-dimensional slices (views) of a hypercube.

Ben's last comment was a request to continue with my reminiscences of
 Central and South America. I'll get to that later. For now I have
 to figure out a way to put my latest insight into my astronomy book.
 No, Ben, I didn't get it from our discussion. I thought of it about
 two weeks ago, getting out of bed about 3:00 a.m. to go write it
 down. My rather cryptic note to myself asks how the compressed
 material in a black hole punches its way through the fabric of space,
 that is, the mechanism by which it does so. My answer was to
 dk;kjdhed slierhewb83213=f*&4a it. (Sorry about that. Noise, you
 know.)

             --by don rosenfield, asst. general sysop/cosmogonist
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