My book LOVE SEX AND TIME TRAVEL is not strictly a science fiction novel. More of a bittersweet romance mystery.
Here is a small excerpt from Chapter 7 exploring some theories on the viability of time travel.
Originally it was believed inconceivable that time travel was possible, as any action back in time would cause a paradox. The classic explanation quoted is that if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he met your grandmother then your father would not be born and you could not therefore be born to travel back in time to kill your grandfather. I supposed that this could also apply here to with Romilly and me. If Romilly and I changed history by getting together and not splitting up this time then I wouldn’t marry Elaine and be where I was in 2007 to go back to meet Romilly. Nice little explanation of a time paradox that, but quantum theory allows for a multiversity of infinite universes side by side all branching out from each other and taking different paths from each different action taken and even rejoining as they come back into line.
So if I go back to kill my grandfather then I will cease to exist in that universe but in another I don’t kill him and so go on existing and don’t go back to kill him. Two new universes then exist, one with me in it and the other without. It gets a bit trickier to understand after that, but it seems these different time universes called ‘branes’ by the scientists can theoretically co-exist physically as little as a millimetre apart and there are an infinite amount of them too. By infinite I mean never ending too not just a very large amount either.
I read about quantum computers which we are apparently only a matter of time away from building. They are no faster than an ordinary computer but by using quantum mechanics they can dash off into hyper space and perform their calculation returning instantly with the answer a billion times or more all at the same time, time is irrelevant to them which is going to get a lot of governments worried as no passwords will be safe with them. For example say you have a 10,000 number password protecting your files or even a million then it won’t matter to a quantum computer. It can try every one of the millions of different combinations instantly and simultaneously. Don’t take my word for it. Look it up, it’s all on the internet.
But if any of you budding Doctor Who’s out there think it would be a cool Saturday morning’s work to nip out into the shed in the back garden and knock up a quick Tardis so you can nip back in time to place a bet on the lottery after getting the results, forget it, because although at least possible in theory to build one it would need the power of a black hole to power it up. It ain’t gonna be going nowhere on a few quid’s worth of unleaded I’m afraid. Also who can say if these universes have the same lottery results either?
But anyhow sitting there mulling these mind boggling thoughts over I started to think about dreams, another subject full of theory as to the mechanics and meanings of them. I even remembered reading many years ago about astral projection, which basically allows for the idea that by training the mind to enter a trance state the mind can leave the body and travel around at will. If different but similar branches of the same universe could be so close then maybe in a dream state couldn’t we maybe step from one to the other? In fact couldn’t dreams or even astral projection actually be that sometimes? Insights into a parallel universe that is right beside us. Little sleeping mind trips to a different universe or reality? Could that be what I was experiencing, not a trip back in time but just a small step to a close but slightly different reality in another time universe? My head tried to get around it but just found it so hard to understand it all. Also for instance if there were infinite numbers of universes co-existing would it not be a pretty small chance that Romilly and I had met up in the same one. Wouldn’t that make it statistically impossible I thought? But by following the theories through I realized that all I had just researched allowed for an infinite multiplicity of Romilly’s and even of me’s. Statistically impossible becomes possible maybe even probable. It’s like the old chestnut about being given an infinite amount of time a group of monkeys could type the entire works of Shakespeare. O My God I needed a drink to even start to get my head around that one. But was there any way I could test the theory myself? All of a sudden it came to me. Maybe there was. Just maybe there was a way that I could. But I would need to be back in 1981 to do it first.
