What exactly determines where you will appear in the past? Because there is no absolute reference frame, so...
Those who say “on the other side of the Sun” assume that time travel follows the position of the Sun. Well, why Sun? Why not the center of the galaxy? Why not Earth?
Given these three options, Earth reference frame feels most logical to me… the intuition is, it is the gravity of Earth that impacts me most, and in the absence of absolute reference frame, the time travel should track the gravity lines instead.
Problem is, I am not a satellite orbiting Earth. I am standing on the ground, which limits my movement as the gravity of the Earth would want it to be. Should the time travel also take this into account? Sounds wrong: then it should track all interactions of my body with everything, including the air I would be passing through… does not make sense. So if I change my model into “time travel converts my body into a point-with-mass and then tracks the gravity lines”, travelling in time backwards should move me up—into such height that I will drop to the ground during the time interval.
Under this model, travelling six months in the past would move me to a place in a space, difficult to calculate precisely (chaos theory, etc.), where if I start freely falling, in exactly six months I would drop on the ground approximately on the place where the time travel started (but not exactly there, because of friction and other interactions). Sounds similar in effect, but it’s not the same.
I have a whiff of this type of literary time travel being supernatural i.e irreducibly mental: the closest model is replaying a memory differently this time: a mental thing.
What exactly determines where you will appear in the past? Because there is no absolute reference frame, so...
Those who say “on the other side of the Sun” assume that time travel follows the position of the Sun. Well, why Sun? Why not the center of the galaxy? Why not Earth?
Given these three options, Earth reference frame feels most logical to me… the intuition is, it is the gravity of Earth that impacts me most, and in the absence of absolute reference frame, the time travel should track the gravity lines instead.
Problem is, I am not a satellite orbiting Earth. I am standing on the ground, which limits my movement as the gravity of the Earth would want it to be. Should the time travel also take this into account? Sounds wrong: then it should track all interactions of my body with everything, including the air I would be passing through… does not make sense. So if I change my model into “time travel converts my body into a point-with-mass and then tracks the gravity lines”, travelling in time backwards should move me up—into such height that I will drop to the ground during the time interval.
Under this model, travelling six months in the past would move me to a place in a space, difficult to calculate precisely (chaos theory, etc.), where if I start freely falling, in exactly six months I would drop on the ground approximately on the place where the time travel started (but not exactly there, because of friction and other interactions). Sounds similar in effect, but it’s not the same.
I have a whiff of this type of literary time travel being supernatural i.e irreducibly mental: the closest model is replaying a memory differently this time: a mental thing.
Charles Williams’ Many Dimensions has time travel as moving your sense of the present along your time line.