distance, is the partial result of physical properties of nature misleading him, paired with a sincere desire on his own part to see that oasis in the first place.
It may be that, although technological achievements from our future
are
actually capable of influencing what we perceive as being events taking place in our present day, this may not require physical travel through “time” at all, let alone the existence of alternate dimensions. Furthermore, if we could suppose that time as we know it, represented by our own chronological progression through history, were an artifact of human perception, who is to say that humans of the future would need to be capable of “traveling” through time in order to perceive past, present, and future as a single, conjoined entity? To a future civilization whose levels of perception greatly exceed yours or mine, perhaps through the aid of cybernetic enhancements and other innovative science that await us in the coming years, moving through what we perceive as “time” could become a very different process—and far more easy.
And to be fair, there certainly are empirical studies that demonstrate how time is not the unbendable constant that we typically perceive. For instance, we are aware of the effects of what is called time dilation, which constitutes a difference between the way time passes relative to different gravitational masses, or even two individualstraveling relative to each other. While this concept has become a fundamental precept within the physics theory of relativity, it illustrates with surprising finesse how time is not really everything we make it out to be.
Imagine a clock sitting on the ground that has been synchronized perfectly with an identical clock sitting nearby. A man arrives with his wife, and while he sits and watches one of the clocks, his wife takes the other with her on an airplane, which travels high into the sky, and at great speed. In this instance, differences between the passage of time relative to the two clocks becomes measurable; this is because the effects of a single source of gravity exerted against two objects can vary, based on such things as the distance each object is from that initial source of gravity, as well as the speed they may be traveling. And to be precise, what, exactly, is being affected is
the passage of time itself,
relative to either of those two objects and the conditions surrounding them.
The same general experiment just outlined has taken place more than once, each time displaying predictable outcomes based on relativity theory. 4 This presents for us the notion that there are likely to be a number of odd universal conditions that, as we’ve begun to see already, humans are largely incapable of perceiving directly. For instance, because the effects of gravity on the passage of time differ in relation to the distance from the object exerting a gravitational force, when we walk down the street each day, our head and shoulders are literally passing through time at a slightly different rate from thatwhich our feet are traveling, because the latter are closer to the Earth and hence influenced differently by its gravitational pull. Though this is strange indeed, the effects are so minute that they are imperceptible to people going about their daily lives, and thus are very seldom even considered. We have adapted with time to function within these conditions, and with little thought about the actual mechanisms that may be underlying such simple acts as an afternoon stroll.
To be clear, the reason we illustrate all this here is because experiments with time dilation, with respect to their repeatable effects, show us that what we perceive as time is indeed somewhat pliable, and that physical actions humans may take can indeed cause minor shifts in the way time passes around us. We are still a long way from being able to harness any degree of functional manipulation of time, but we are nonetheless made aware, at least, of
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