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If today's physicists can use conservation to predict ghost particles, I can use- them to predict the behavior of a teleport system.
2) In any case, I'm entitled to make any assumptions I like, if they are internally consistent. This is an exercise in speculation, remember? Speculation starts with assumptions. If you don't like mine, try your own; you might get some interesting results.
3) A passenger teleporting downhill must lose potential energy. Some equivalent gain in energy must appear. But why heat?
Good question. I myself generally assume that the energy will appear as a jump in electron orbits. Then the electrons drop back, releasing photons. The photons are absorbed before they reach the passenger's skin, giving heat. But almost any reasonable process will ultimately end in heat. Heat is the most general, most randomized form of energy.
Could the released energy appear as neutrinos? That would not give heat. But it would upset some of the obscure parity laws of nuclear physics (thus upsetting Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement, and thousands of reactionary physicists) and it would make uphill teleportation impossible, for the process would have to destroy neutrinos which weren't there in the first place.
VIII
How about a perpetual motion machine?
See Figure 5 (page 107). The idea is to use open transmitter and receiver booths. The cargo, thirty gallous of water, is teleported to the receiver. It immediately pours out into the open transmitter, which teleports it back to the receiver, et cetera. Put a water wheel in the system and we get power.
Obviously there's a flaw. If conservation holds, the water freezes pretty quick. Furthermore, thermodynamics says that the energy to run the system will be greater than the maximum energy to be obtained from the continuously falling water.
But the system is interesting in other ways.
Let's replace the water with a ton of iron filings. That way we can enclose the whole system in a vacuum chamber and stop worrying about atmospheric friction, water evaporation, and freezing of the water. We let the filings fail under gravity until the mass is a black stream, near absolute zero, moving at seven miles per second. That's nineteen minutes of operation.
Now we let it go another nineteen minutes. The velocity doubles, and we've let the filings fail the equivalent of twice the distance from infinity to the Earth's surface.
We could maintain this acceleration forever, provided we do one thing. We will have to build our system at the North (or South) Pole. Otherwise the stream of filings will seem to bend away from the transmitter door as the Earth turns. (BOOM!) So we're at the North Pole...
In thirty days the mass of the filings has doubled. In sixty days it has quadrupled. Note that while Earth pulls the filings, the filings pull the Earth. Minutely, at first. But the filings aren't really going anywhere, so we have the equivalent of a reactionless drive. Every month the thrust doubles. If we run the system long enough the filings will weigh as much as a star. Obviously we don't want that. Tides! But in its present state, turning off the system would destroy the Earth. So we set up a second receiver at the South Pole.
The stream of filings goes tearing off through the Earth's atmosphere, a blue flash of iron vapor ramming air. Even the gamma rays are going upward! What a show! Listen to that applause! But all the teevee cameras have melted…
Well, this is where I quit. But try a few postulates yourself, and see what you get.
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TIME TRAVEL
Speculate : (2) To ponder a subject in its different aspects and relations; meditate; esp. to theorise from conjectures without sufficient evidence.
-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1959
Once upon a time a man was given three wishes. He blew the first two, getting himself in such deep trouble that if he let either wish stand, he would suffer terribly.
Now desperate, he cried, "I wish I'd never had a fairy godmother!" And the past healed to cancel both wishes.
The first time-travel story was a fairy tale-here drastically condensed.
Its theme is buried deep in the literature. L. Frank Baum used it in THE WONDERFUL LAND OF OZ. Cabell borrowed it for THE SILVER STALLION. Traditionally the protagonist may change the past without actually moving backward in time.
H. G. Wells, one of the fathers of modern science fiction, also fathered the time traveling vehicle. This may be the reason Well's spiritual sons tend to treat time travel as science fiction rather than fantasy. But Wells wrote only of travel into the future. He missed the Grandfather Paradox and all the other derivative paradoxes of travel into the past. His time machine was a mere vehicle, no more remarkable than the gravity shielding material, Cavorite.* (*Both were mere philosophical vehicles. Wells liked to preach.)
Wells also missed the most important aspect of time travel: wish fulfillment. When a child prays, "Please, God, make it didn't happen," he is inventing time travel in its essence. (He will probably give up the idea when he learns good English. More about that later.) The prime purpose of time travel is to change the past; and the prime danger is that the Traveler might change the past. The man who first thought of travel into the past combined the Wells machine with the fairy tale to produce time travel in its present form.
Time machines come in many forms. Well's man-carrying vehicle was as open as a bicycle seat, with a magnificent view of time flashing past. Poul Anderson's standard issue time Patrol vehicle could do anything Well's could, and fly too.
More restricted machines may travel only into the future, or may send only subatomic particles into the past, or may be restricted to things even less substantial: thoughts, dreams, emotional states. Others may move only in quantum jumps of a million or sixty million years. A writer who puts severe limits on his time machine, is generally limiting its ability to change the past in order to make his story less incredible.
THE GRANDFATHER PARADOX is basic to any discussion of time travel. It runs as follows:
At the age of eighty your grandfather invents a time machine. You hate the old man, so you steal the machine and take it sixty years back into the past and kill him. How can they suspect you?
But you've killed him before he can meet your grandmother. Thus you were never born. He didn't get a chance to build the time machine either.
But then you can't have killed him. Thus he may sire your father, who may sire you. Later there will be a time machine...
You and the machine both do and do not exist Paradox!
In general we will call any such interference with the past, especially self-cancelling interference, a Grandfather Paradox.
Travel into the past violates certain of what we regard as laws of nature.
(1) A vehicle which travels from the thirtieth century AD to the twentieth, may be regarded as appearing from nowhere. Thus it violates the law of conservation of matter. If the vehicle carries a power source of any kind, it also violates conservation of energy...a quibble, as they are both the same law these days.
To say that an equivalent to