Could Time Travel Happen?

We are all time travelers of course–we travel through time every millisecond of our lives.  It’s just we only move in one direction, into the future. Conceptually, time travel into the future and into the past are two distinct concepts.  Traveling into the future could happen merely by slowing down your own time, rather than popping in and out of the future like in Primeval. “If you want to advance through the years a little faster than the next person, you’ll need to exploit space-time. Global positioning satellites pull this off every day, accruing an extra third-of-a-billionth of a second daily. Time passes faster in orbit, because satellites are farther away from the mass of the Earth. Down here on the surface, the planet’s mass drags on time and slows it down in small measures. We call this effect gravitational time dilation. According to Read more…

Shifting views of the past

On a history forum I frequent, someone asked a question about why historians’ views of the past have changed over time, particularly in reference to the ‘Dark Ages’. My novels are set in ‘Dark Age’ and medieval Wales, and this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Dark Age Britain, as one example, was conquered first by the Romans, who delighted in contrasting their ‘civilized’ society with the barbarity of the native tribes.  Next, the Saxons moved in, then the Normans who came in 1066. All of these conquering groups spouted continually about the brutish, uncivilized lives the native British people led (the Scots are included in this too). It’s not uncommon to have English media TODAY speak of the Welsh as some sort of less-than-civilized ‘other’ (I blogged about this here). Compare this to a similar situation: Native Read more…