Looking Forward

We would like to make the TTHB useful and interesting to practicing and aspiring travelers through time, and general enthusiasts of practical and fictional time travel. In keeping with those ideals, we will give you all some idea of the kinds of topics we will cover here.

Here is a best in class hit list of time travel topics the Handbook will cover here.

Causality:

Which has yet to be written but unsurprisingly has already been posted.

Time Machines:

How to and how NOT to use everything from Deloreans to naked singularities (SFW).

Grandfathers' Paradoxes:

More of a rant at Hollywood for ALWAYS screwing this one up.

Proper Travel Hygiene:

When is it safe to drink the water?

Proper Travel Ettiquette:

Why it is never safe to feed the animals, except when it is.

Language Difficulties:

Learn Chinese, Greek, and Latin dammit, and know your prime numbers. Oh, and mimes may be useful for something after all though don't assume all gestures are equal (see proper travel ettiquette).

Frequent Flyer Miles:

Convert minutes into miles, millions of them.

Etc. Ad Infinitum:

No really. When we say ad infinitum we mean it.

Also, we may comment on any time travel demonstrated in popular culture, or Popular Science along with commentary on historic incidences of time travel in this time line that may be of interest.

We hope you enjoy, and if you have any requests please don't hesitate to send them in.

Causality - More of a Guideline Really

The primary source of what time-travelers consider paradox is the issue of causality. Effect B must follow cause A. If A does not occur, neither does B. This view of causality is a product of our experience with time. Because we don't see B's spontaneously appear in front of us, causelessly, we assume it never happens. This is similar to early rules regarding conservation of mass. Until we discovered exotic events such as fusion and fission where matter is converted into energy, we assumed all matter must be conserved as matter. Before we developed quantum theory, we assumed that the universe must be Newtonian and an object had to be in one place or another. Before we developed the technology to move mass backwards in time, we assumed that violating causality would cause a paradox.

So, hypothetically, what would happen if we stand in front of a time machine in the 21st century and toss a grenade through to George Washington's boat crossing the Delaware three hundred years earlier. What changes would we notice in the 21st century?

None. We would see no immediate changes from this act. The grenade is causing changes, and those changes will propagate through the timeline, at the rate that events propagate through time normally, one second per second. Changes due to the grenade would not reach the time chamber in the 21st century for 300 years. In other words, you would not be able to visit the grenade-altered 21st century until the 24th century.

What of causality? With the 21st century time chamber perhaps eliminated from the new timeline, how did anyone ever chuck that paradoxical grenade? In short, it doesn't matter. Causality is something we view as law only because we do not commonly observe phenomena that contradict it. The grenade exists in the 18th century, even if there is no longer any cause for it.

What of conservation of mass and energy? Well, matter has been neither created nor destroyed. Yes, a grenade has been eliminated from the 21st century and added to the 18th, but mass and energy have been conserved 4th dimensionally. Matter and energy must be conserved in your available universe, but why must that be in 3 dimensions, rather than 4? There is now an extra grenade worth of mass in the 18th century and one grenade less of mass in the 21st century, but so long as both changes propagate forward, the balance is zero.

So, in conclusion, if you have the capability to return to your home time, any changes you make in the past will never reach you, and you shall never have to face the consequences of your actions in eras you time travel to. Have fun with that.

Time Travelers Handbook Introduction

Welcome To the Time Travelers Handbook

This is a handbook for both active and aspiring time travelers. We will be providing useful tips and tricks for managing your time traveling, instructional techniques for the beginning time traveler, pointing out common gotchas caused by poorly planned time travel (e.g. early onset relative aging, death by doppelganger, poor data backups, parallel universe fatigue, and many others), and a general primer for time travel in reality and fiction.

Please come back often for updates, or for the less patient, just hop forward a few years for the more detailed Handbook. If you have any notes about past or future posts, please email them to TimeTravelersHandbook at gmail dot com. We are trying to prevent informational causal loops as much as possible in the interest of readability, but we may, on occasion, need to reference instances that have not been yet. Please bear with us in these cases as they will typically make more sense upon completion.

So we hope you are able to take away some useful knowledge and enjoy the TTHB in the future.