[RightWhale]

Seems the way we think of time is supposed to be analagous to the way we think about distance. Now, consider that just because we can put a geometry on cartesian coordinates doesn't mean there is anything geometrical about space, or time. All this neat ink on paper linework hasn't got us anywhere near FTL travel. We need a new ideogram, Einstein had his 100 years with no result.

[NicknamedBob]

Our traveling faster than light will turn out to be the equivalent of cartoons showing the two-dimensional image lifting off of the page to move through a three dimensional reality.

If the author's thesis is correct, entities at opposite ends of the Universe could be moving in opposite directions of time. Regardless of that, however, each would still be moving away from the center.

Essentially, in Cartesian coordinates, we would draw our diagrams from left to right of increasing time, and they would draw theirs from right to left. But we will never run across these backward-travellers, because we would never reach them.

[NicknamedBob]

My physics requires time to be ongoing everywhere at the same rate, except for gravitational slowing, and independent of other effects.

This is the kind of thinking that allows the programming of spacecraft operating millions of miles from Earth, to turn at the appropriate time, as they are passing a body in real time, to capture images to be sent to Earth at a later time, from stored instructions received at an earlier time.

We thus operate under the conception that time is passing there at the same rate it does here, and that all instructions have to be sent in advance, clocked down, and acted upon at the appropriate instant if the spacecraft, which is passing the body in question now, will act now to capture the image. We then learn of the success of our activities later.

Now, if we are ever to be able to operate outside of the constraints of time, and therefor space, we will have to be able to develop a means of knowing, with mathematical precision, (the proverbial ontological certitude), that the things we perceive in our imaginations are exactly as they are at a distance. The map then becomes the territory, and Science then becomes indistinguishable from Magic.

[djf]

I have often said Einsteins work gave us one thing - a geometry. Not a cause or explanation.