A course titled “PH 374: Time Travel and the Nature of Space and Time” will be offered in the fall semester of 2014.
The class will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:30 p.m. until 3:20 p.m. There will be not one, but two professors teaching the class — Professor of Philosophy Michael Silberstein and Professor of Physics Mark Stuckey.
Silberstein and Stuckey have explored ideas related to time travel and have published 16 papers together over the years.
This philosophy course will explore quantum mechanics, relativity and their implications for things such as time travel, quantum computing and the multiverse (the idea that there are many universes and perhaps many Earths as well).
As for time travel, the course will attempt to answer two major questions: Is time travel logically possible, and is it physically possible? Silberstein explained that relativity shows how it could be logically and physically possible in principle. The class will speculate on how an advanced alien civilization might travel in time, perhaps using closed time-like curves.
Besides that, the course will consider the two models of time travel: the one where you can’t change events because the past, present and future are equally real and the alternate model where time travel can change events.
Students can expect to encounter pop culture time travel references such as “Doctor Who” and “Back to the Future.” The class will utilize science fiction movies, novels and short stories; the class will be a mixture of lecture, discussion and movies.
Silberstein hopes that it will benefit all students who have an interest in these subjects. However, he thinks it is especially important for science students to see this field is not just technology and math, but is deeply intertwined with and grounded in philosophical assumptions about the nature of reality. He does promise that no expertise in physics is required and that there are no other prerequisites.”No math. We’ll show the math, but students won’t be expected to be able to do that math,” Silberstein said.
Any student interested in the possibility or impossibility of time-travel and all the questions it raises should make themselves one of 15 students in the course. These 15 students will discover that the world is “way weirder and way cooler than you have ever dreamt,” Silberstein said.
