In our lifetime, right here and now, scientists and engineers are working on such technologies as transportation and time travel, albiet on a rudimentary level. They have successfully transmitted a cell from one point to another, much like the transporters on Star Trek. They have also been able to send electrons through what can be described as a crazy magnet, so that the electrons exit the magnet before they actually enter it, effectively, traveling backward in time.
So, let's do a little thought experiment on time travel.
Suppose you leave your house at 6pm, go down to the newest pizza parlor for dinner, and order a pizza. You take a couple bites, and decide you don't like it. But you're still hungry, and now it's 7pm, time to get to the movie before it starts. So you jump into your time machine, and go back in time to 6pm, the point where you got in your car, and go to the chinese restaurant instead, and have a wonderful meal.
So here's the question. Which of those scenarios is reality? You did both of them, in the same linear timeline. when you reach 7pm, you're still on the way to the movie. But what did you have for dinner, pizza or chinese? Which timeline is 'true'?
Well, the reality is, that both are true. You actually did do both, both are a reality, even though they took place in the same linear segment of time. What has actually changed, is you.
You have effectively jumped from one 'time bubble' to another. They both exist, more or less side by side, but they are separated by the order of specific events. And since events are time independant (you can go get a pizza at any time that the store is open) what matters to you, what you remember, is the order of events that you chose to take as you move through linear time.
So, from the moment you get back to 6pm, your specific order of events change. You no longer take the route to the pizza parlour, you take the route to the chinese restaurant. Your experiences in the chinese restaurant are different, the food you eat is different and thus your current chemical composition is different. You take a different route to the movies. All those events may or may not determine the movie you decide to see.
So, in very subtle ways, you are two different people in each of those timelines.
Here's where the interesting questions start.
If you are not the same person, is the other 'you' going to show up at the movie theatre too? And will you 'run into yourself' while you're buying a ticket? Maybe you took a little longer to get there from the chinese place than you did from the pizza parlour, and the 'pizza' you is already in the theatre, and you'll never see yourself? Will the guy at the candy counter see you coming out of the 'pizza' movie, and then 5 minutes later see you coming out of the 'chinese' theatre, and wonder if he's experiencing deja vu?
Have those subtle changes in you created subtle changes in everything else in the universe of that timeline that you're in, and now it's a slightly different movie theatre, so the 'pizza' you and the 'chinese' you are still separated by specific sequence of events, and the set of people at each theatre are different?
Or since you chose to use your time machine after the pizza and started the same timeline from a different point, did the 'pizza you' timeline cease there, i.e. the 'end of days'?
These are the things I think about, because i spend entirely too much time alone.
