If Your Molecules were Reversed, Would You Die?

[heeyy_joe]

Damn! Knew there was something we should of asked Spock.

[LOL!]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LOL! So she brings along some food stuffs to eat for 60 years or so that they also get reversed and she is golden. She uses the 60 years to figure out to put stuff in the time machine whenever she needs more sustenance..

The more obvious solution: She jumps back into the time machine and goes a minute forward in time and reverses the chirality of all her molecules and is thus back to normal.

So they fix the time machine so that it always does an even number of cycles automatically, so that everything pops out with the correct enantiomers whenever it is used.

[TromboneAl]

Quote:

Originally Posted by unno2002 For your story, you may want to look for some reason for the mirror-image that does not involve molecules becoming mirror images.

Yes, that's what I think I'll do. Maybe I'll say that the reversal only happens down to the range of a millimeter. I don't need this effect at all, but it seems like it would be a fun thing.

And as I learned from REWahoo, I can do anything I want because it's Science Fiction.

Here's a first draft of the very beginning of the book:

The naked woman materialized behind the umpire during the first game of the playoffs.

I squinted at the TV. It looked real. Not a special effect. I moved the live video stream back one minute and paused it. “Hey, guys? You’ll want to see this.”

“Double play?” Stan wandered in from the kitchen, digging into a jar of peanut butter with a spoon.

“Not exactly.” I said.

“How old are these olives?” Craig’s voice sounded like his head was in the fridge. My condo is small. I could hear him fine.

“Get in here, Craig.”

I waited until Stan had flopped down on the couch and Craig stood behind it with his arms crossed. The smell of the pizza we’d demolished still hung in the air. I pressed play.

Her body appeared all at once. One second: normal baseball game. Roar of the crowd, droning announcers, runner at second, fast-ball pitch. Next second: blip, a floating body. It looked as if she were lying face up on a high table. But there was no table. She was stretched out in the air at head level. In fact, one of her hands was touching the ump’s head.

Craig gave a little yip, and Stan stopped chewing. Then started again.

Her body dropped to the ground. No table, remember? The hand must have been caught in the umpire’s mask or hat, because she pulled him down with her. He was a big man, and his butt landed on her face.

“That’s gotta hurt.” Stanislaw Stanislowski guided the spoon back into the peanut butter. Nothing fazes him. Thirty-five years as a cop will do that. He put another oily gob of my all-natural crunchy into his mouth, getting some on his mustache.

Craig looked at him. “Really, Stan? The weirdest thing in history happens, and you’re joking around?”

Stan shrugged. He had a wide body and a rough face. His five-o’clock shadow usually arrived around lunchtime, and his eyebrows looked like woolly bear caterpillars heading into a cold winter.

Craig got up close to the screen. “Hold on. Back up to when she appears and zoom in.”

I made the appropriate gestures to the DigiCast, moved the video feed back, paused it, and zoomed in.

“No, not on her boobs, Eric, sheesh. On her hand. Here, let me drive.” He snatched the controller and panned over to the official’s head. My system had resolution up the wazoo, and we could see the ump’s individual hairs.

My first novel should be out in a few weeks, and everyone here gets a free copy!

[Surfdaddy]

I was also going to mention Clarke's short story.

The accident inverted a guy and he was destined to starve. They decided the only answer was to try and "re-invert" him. So they put him back in the magnetic chamber (which was the shell of a turbine to generate electricity) and tried to reproduce the odd magnetic event that caused the inversion. The issue was that the guy just disappeared. Nobody knew why, so they assumed he was dead and put the turbine (commutator?) shaft back into the shell and started it running. But then one guy realized that due to different conditions, the missing guy might reappear in a bit different time - like soon, right where the turbine was spinning! He ran to get somebody but then there was a shake as the lights went out and the turbine fragmented...

[HFWR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TromboneAl For my new book, a woman will be transported to a new time via a time machine. I thought it would be fun if she comes out as a mirror image of herself (heart on the right, liver on the left, etc.). BUT, I'm guessing that if all her molecules were to be mirror image isomers of what they had been, she would die. Think so?

The official, scientific term for this is "bassackwards"...

[jimbee]

In some ways, your story concept reminds me of this movie.
Doppelgänger (1969 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It was known as "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun" in the US. The alternate Earth was a mirror image of our planet. Internal organs are reversed, but technology is also reversed. Clocks run the opposite direction, tape decks run backwards, etc.

[TromboneAl]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jjquantz Arthur C. Clarke wrote the story "Technical Error" (1946) about this very thing. The conceit was that, due to an industrial accident, a man was somehow transported through a 4th spatial dimension and ended up mirror imaged at the molecular level. Starvation was the prognosis so they attempted to reverse the process. Not one of his best, but his usual attention to scientific details shows.

Thanks. I just read that and it gave me some ideas.

After the guy is reversed, everything appears reversed to him. He can't read, at first, unless he holds the text up to a mirror. It's funny that Clarke didn't think to mention the heart being on the right.

The Alice in Mirror-Image Land was also interesting, and stated that there were some things that she could eat (some fats and one amino acid).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3YmE5yhKxM

[MooreBonds]

The one thing I never understood about "time travel" stories is the complete ignoring of the fact that not only is the Earth revolving around the sun - but our entire solar system is speeding through space at about 45,000 miles per hour.

Have any science fiction stories ever claimed to solve this dilemma of having someone travel through time and somehow still reappear on Earth, even though Earth at that different time is millions of miles away from where they were in absolute space-time coordinates when they left? Even if you calculated where the Earth would be in some other date, you would have literally zero room for error and would have to be impossibly accurate in your positioning of what the universe's absolute coordinate system is, or else you would rematerialize inside Earth's molten core, or (more likely) find yourself in space.

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MooreBonds The one thing I never understood about "time travel" stories is the complete ignoring of the fact that not only is the Earth revolving around the sun - but our entire solar system is speeding through space at about 45,000 miles per hour. Have any science fiction stories ever claimed to solve this dilemma of having someone travel through time and somehow still reappear on Earth, even though Earth at that different time is millions of miles away from where they were in absolute space-time coordinates when they left? Even if you calculated where the Earth would be in some other date, you would have literally zero room for error and would have to be impossibly accurate in your positioning of what the universe's absolute coordinate system is, or else you would rematerialize inside Earth's molten core, or (more likely) find yourself in space.

Good point! I'm with the group that will accept one 'suspension of belief' in order to tell a fictional story. But when the 'suspension of belief' just pile on top of each other, I lose interest.

Just a personal view, others may fully enjoy this kind of thing.

-ERD50

[MooreBonds]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MooreBonds The one thing I never understood about "time travel" stories is the complete ignoring of the fact that not only is the Earth revolving around the sun - but our entire solar system is speeding through space at about 45,000 miles per hour.

Thinking more about it - perhaps you could incorporate some sort of nuclear-powered beacon that has been hidden in some landmark long ago (perhaps home plate at some old, historical stadium that they figured would still be around - which could explain how the woman suddenly appears in the baseball game?), put in place decades ahead of time by a scientist? In the future, they know approximately where the earth will be, and aim the signal in that direction, and the beacon fine-tunes the actual location of the rematerialization.

Maybe a beacon was slightly damaged by something when someone is rematerialized, which causes them to be different? Either from all of the fans clapping, cheering, and stomping their feet over the years....or even a rock concert at the stadium that involved some electrical display, during which a high-powered wire was drawn towards the beacon and sent a jolt of electricity into the ground, which altered a few circuits? Or the baseball team had some publicity stunt one year with a Faraday cage on homeplate, sending massive electrical bolts towards it, which then went straight down in the ground and messed up the beacon?

[TromboneAl]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MooreBonds The one thing I never understood about "time travel" stories is the complete ignoring of the fact that not only is the Earth revolving around the sun - but our entire solar system is speeding through space at about 45,000 miles per hour.

Yes, that's always bothered me, too. I think I will either ignore it as almost all time-travel books do, or acknowledge it, like this:

"Okay, Viviana, let's say you're right, you've time-traveled here from thirty years in the past. You materialized in the same place that you left from. Do you see a problem with that?"

She frowned, "No. Is there one?"

"Damn right there is. In those thirty years the earth has been spinning and traveling around the sun, and our solar system and even our galaxy have been moving. If you did come out in the same place, it would have been into empty space, literally twelve billion miles from here."

Viv said, "Oh, that. Yeah, I don't know the details, but my uncle [who built the machine] said it takes care of that. I think it tracks the movement prior to the jump and extrapolates--"

"Yeah, but there's no way that would be accurate enough."

"Well, hello, I'm here aren't I? Whatever he did, worked."

[TromboneAl]

It's also my contention that time travel into the future is not only plausible, but it happens every day.

We all know that clocks move slower when you are traveling, although the effect is slight until you are traveling at a speed that is a significant fraction of the speed of light. Spend a day traveling out and back at half the speed of light, and when you get back you will arrive 3.6 hours in the future.

Note how the spatial displacement problem is fixed there.

So I contend that even walking across the room and back is time travel, although the amount of time you travel is almost infinitesimal.

Also, going to sleep at night and waking up the next day is, as far as you are concerned, time travel.

So, maybe I'd deal with it like this:

Viv said, "Oh, that. Yeah, I don't know the details, but my uncle [who built the machine] said it takes care of that. If you were to travel near the speed of light and return to the same location, you'd arrive in your future. Somehow the machine accomplishes that with what he called 'virtual travel.' It's a mystery to me, though."

[M Paquette]

Gravitational field strength does the same thing. Stronger fields 'slow' clocks compared to weaker fields. A really strong field (think event horizon of a black hole) effectively stops time for objects within that field. Of course, they also get smooshed...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravit..._time_dilation

Even better, any accelerated frame experiences time dilation relative to an un-accelerated frame. Put a clock in a nice circular orbit, free-falling, and its clock slows relative to a clock at rest at the same altitude. Ah, but they are both at a greater distance from the center of mass of the Earth than the Earth's surface, so both clocks run faster than one on the surface. GPS systems have to allow for this pesky faster-into-the-future difference!

[TromboneAl]

This is a good book:

http://www.amazon.com/Build-Time-Mac...a+time+machine