Thread: New Time Travel Method Using Magnets

First of all, hello... I'm new to these forums. I'm hoping to get some ideas here.

I'm working on a project that, in short, I'm trying to come up with a fictional method to travel through time using magnets. I was hoping to give an idea of what I'm thinking of and see if I could get some feedback on how to improve the concept.

My idea started with considering using a medicinal base as the catalyst for the time jump... rather than an external source only, like a typical time machine. I was thinking of using a pill that is a mixture of a magnetized element, along with a coupling substance that would help protect your body from the magnetized element effecting your organs. Perhaps it could be an advanced metallic liquid or something that would eventually dissolve. But the concept is to take these pre-magnetized pills and use high powered magnets to bend gravity and create folds in space. Then with your body's heightened electromagnetic field, the super magnet would (at a certain strength/intensity of resistance), essentially pop you through the gravity folds to another time.. this would more or less act like an open wormhole (im guessing).

As long as the super magnets were active they could keep you at your destination, while holding the wormhole open... but the purpose of this idea being medicinal based is so that it also acts as a failsafe. Traditionally, if your time machine/belt/ring/suit/etc gets damaged, you become stuck in whatever time you traveled to.. but in my case, once the substance begins to wear off or dissolves from your system, the super magnet system can detect the changes in your magnetism levels and initiate a reverse polarity that will pull you back and close the wormhole before your levels drop to low and can't be pulled back.

That's the idea in short, there's much more that has to do with distance in time and duration your there, but all that will be easy for me to solidify if I can get a better understanding of the founding technology of the concept.

I hope what I'm asking makes sense... just remember this is an entirely fiction based project and doesn't need to make complete sense... it just needs to SEEM like it could make sense. And I'm not a science guru of any sort, so I would appreciate avoiding intense technical terms that would just go over my head. Thanks, and any feedback would be appreciated.

I don't have much input for the overall concept, but there was one thing that stood out to me. If I've understood this correctly, the wormhole will be in a certain place, waiting to pull you back in before it's too late as per your fail safe plan.That's all well and good, but unless you can also phase through solid objects, that super magnet thing could do more harm than good if there are obstacles in your way. If you land in a clearing in Central Park in Manhattan in like 1945 and then go wander around the city and lose track of time, not only are you going to be knocked into a number of things including signs, cars, people, trees and buildings, but you'll definitely be noticed and that's usually never good in time traveling stories. You could probably just work around being seen, but the magnetism thing is a bit different.

I'd travel back in time and punch my former self in the face for wasting all that research money on a mostly pointless experiment.

Oh magnets are magic again.

Originally Posted by Bay Ridge

I don't have much input for the overall concept, but there was one thing that stood out to me. If I've understood this correctly, the wormhole will be in a certain place, waiting to pull you back in before it's too late as per your fail safe plan.That's all well and good, but unless you can also phase through solid objects, that super magnet thing could do more harm than good if there are obstacles in your way. If you land in a clearing in Central Park in Manhattan in like 1945 and then go wander around the city and lose track of time, not only are you going to be knocked into a number of things including signs, cars, people, trees and buildings, but you'll definitely be noticed and that's usually never good in time traveling stories. You could probably just work around being seen, but the magnetism thing is a bit different.

It's not an actual worm hole, that's just the closest thing I know to describe it as. So when you get pulled back, essentially you just disappear. Imagine how a piece of paper between two magnets.... you can slide one magnet around and the other stays joined. Perhaps you could think of it like that, but instead of the magnets shifting position, the paper shifts position. I didn't think of it like that, before you said it... so I just came up with that analogy on the fly :P But it was never the intention for the person to be flung around like a rag doll.

Originally Posted by shlunka

I'd travel back in time and punch my former self in the face for wasting all that research money on a mostly pointless experiment.

Originally Posted by Sealeaf

Oh magnets are magic again.

It's just for fun... hence, I'm posting in the Science Fiction section.

How would you solve paradoxes that result when time traveling, such as the grandfather paradox? You need some method to make sure things like this never occur.

Originally Posted by anticorncob28

How would you solve paradoxes that result when time traveling, such as the grandfather paradox? You need some method to make sure things like this never occur.

I'll have to think on that for a bit... But let me ask you this, if the concept is used or presented in such a way (let's say a story) where the audience is never presented with opportunity to consider certain paradoxes, can you just avoid having to deal with issues like that? Or are paradoxes like that generally something people want answers to regardless if they have anything to with the application of the concept?

My biggest problem with time travel is this.... if a TM is ever invented that could transport people back in time then what happens if millions want to attend the same past event? It doesn't matter when the millions of people decide to go back in time because all of them will appear in the same past moment if all goes well. Imagine millions of people attending a sports event at a specific venue for instance, just doesn't happen.