The Space Time Trampoline

It occurs to me that when people try to explain the concept of Space-Time they always use an analogy of a foam mattress or the surface of a trampoline to illustrate it. Gravity is then shown to be what happens to Space-Time you sit a mass in it - it creates a dip, or hole, in the surface of space, that objects - usually rolling marbles! - fall in towards.

"So, if Space-Time really is like a trampoline" I wondered to myself, "would this form of space travel work?"

What I had in mind was a sort of bounce effect.

If you were to take a large mass, and then thrust it into the surface of Space-Time using some sort of exotic energy or field source, you could drive it into its surface like an acrobat, and then harvest the spring back effect to lift it out of Space-Time.

I would imagine, to observer's in the 4 dimensional universe, you would disappear in a shower of energetic relativistic particles to mark where the object "took off" from.

And then it would travel out of time, either straight up or down, or perhaps in a non-existent curve, and arrive back in our Space-Time in another shower of energy as its energy is absorbed by the 4 dimensinal universe. It may stay in place if enough energy is scrubbed off, or it may "bounce off again" somewhere else.

I wonder what there would be to see outside of Space-Time? Where gravity bleeds into our world, and where light perchance bends back on itself.

The Turing Machine

I love the concept of the Turing Machine...even though frankly I don't really understand it. It just makes me think...a mechanical creation with a computational power equal to anything produced my modern computers.

It's evocative. I see a clacking, scrawling, erasing clatter of wood, wire and clunking metal, emitting raw heat with the speed of its working.

Busy Beavers, Operations, and Halts. Results output on a long paper tape.

The Steampunk Captain surveys the results and makes computations of scientific fact, and navigational corrections to the course of the great iron spaceship straight out of Jules Verne. The gunnery officer calculates his deflection to shoot accurately upon the martian enemies as they speed by in their heliothopters, and the engineer predicts the temperature of his great whirring bearings with his own Turing Machine in the engine room.

The best thing about Turing Machines? They don't really exist. They can do anything you want, virtually. I can make one on the table over there merely by imagining it, and it could do anything I wanted it too, if I so wished.

I wish I could make a real one, my mechanical passport to a better life.