Sundial with "multitudinous faces"?

James Wynn · 12 May 2011, 20:35 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 15:35:35 -0500
Subject: (urth) Sundial with "multitudinous faces"?
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>> I would think you could. Any regular tick-tock could analogize a time using a
>> different synch. It would be incredibly complex though since a day somewhere
>> else would be represented by more or less than a single cycle of the sun.
> Jerry Friedman wrote:
> It would have to be magic. Sundials don't have a regular tick-tock.

Sure they do. It's the yearly cycle of the sun. And that cycle (and 
fractions of it) can be used to synchronize anything.

>> I'm not an expert on this but it seems I read something that implied that. For
>> example, traveling in a worm-hole (such the ones in the Stargate franchise) is
>> actually Time-travel as well.
> Jerry Friedman:
> If you can get from one place to another faster than light, as with a wormhole,
> then you *can* use that to travel faster than light.

But I got the idea somewhere that the actual mathematics of the wormhole 
theory does not allow you to cheat Relativity, so that the farther you 
travel (that is, the greater the actual distance of your destination) 
then your speed is all the faster than FTL travel and you therefore 
(likely) move back further in Time as well. It's just that when you 
return, you move the other way in Time so you don't notice.

Of course, I might have been taken in by metaphor: They could have been 
actually saying that if you travel instantaneously to a distant star, 
you are moving FORWARD in Time since the star we can see from Earth is 
some number years ago. Or something along those lines.

Anyway, it's probably not physically possible even if you could muster 
the near infinite energy to do it. There's all that Space being 
constantly  created between us and the stars. We have enough trouble 
maintaining RF connectivity. Can you imagine the problems establishing a 
physical connection between two distant locations? Too bad because I 
really want one of those doors from "Howl's Moving Castle".

J

PS Incidentally, it's very annoying for me to watch movies that involve 
FTL travel. They never plot the Time distortions caused by their daily 
job. Captain Kirk spends months in Warp and never gets back to Earth 
just after he left (except when he goes back to 1968).

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