What If: The Physics of Selectively Stopping Time

It’s a standard sci-fi scenario – somehow, someone is able to bring time to a relative stop for everything and everyone except themselves. They then can move through the paused world, stealing valuables, looking up skirts, moving people into compromising poses, and otherwise taking advantage of the helpless and immobile masses. The mechanism through which this wizardry is most often facilitated is some sort of temporal field, which either protects the wearer from the time freeze or accelerates them until time’s ‘normal’ passage seems sluggish. The key, of course, is that the physical and mental processes of the affected individual seem normal to them, but are much faster than everything else. So what, I asked myself, should the user of such a temporal field be able to do?

I made a few assumptions.

First of all, the temporal field had better travel with its user, or else you don’t have a very interesting scenario – just some bored schmoe watching a frozen universe.

Second, the field should not only ‘fit’ the person using it fairly closely, but also be elastic – otherwise the user will have some severe mobility issues.

Third, time can’t actually stop: that is, the effect is relative, not absolute. The frozen world must still be experiencing time as normal, no matter how relatively slow it may seem to the accelerated individual. However improbable the whole scenario may appear, for it to be possible at all requires the effect to be on the individual and not on the universe as a whole, as the effect is to be generated from within the universe, using the energy of said universe. An effect on the universe as a whole would require a source of energy external (!) to the universe, which is somewhere I just don’t want to go philosophically right now.

Finally, I asked myself, to what degree would the temporal field be impenetrable? Mass transfer is unneccessary, and a complication. Assuming that the force field requires a certain amount of energy per unit mass enveloped to maintain functioning, a mass fluctuation would require a power supply that could fluctuate with it. Much easier to designate a mass to be affected initially. So mass transfer is out, though I will admit this is not a theoretical restraint so much as a perceived practical one. Another practical argument to make against mass transfer relates to events at the boundary. What happens as objects enter the temporal field? Does half a butterfly flap? Does half a heart beat? How about half of a waterfall – water can enter the field, but when it exits it will create a barrier to other water exiting. No, better by far not to allow mass transfer.

But would the field allow energy transfer? As I see things, it must. Since photons, for example, are already going lightspeed - which I will take as the theoretical maximum speed anything can go, regardless of ‘temporal fields’ - they are going as fast a an accelerated individual can go, and thus they effectively see no barrier. So light as a particle, at least, can pass. Additionally, since the field must be elastic, energy as a wave can act on the field which then acts on the contents of the field. Of course, low frequency waves will have negligible effect.

So, having set up the basis for what is actually a simple argument, I think maybe I’ve let my penchant for definition get the best of me. Here goes.

Basically, the faster an individual in a temporal field is going relative to real-time, the less they can interact with objects in real-time. Manipulation of real-time objects requires: applying force over time – tranferring momentum – tranferring kinetic & potential energy. Since an accelerated individual’s interactions occur over infinitesimally short time intervals, mechanical energy & momentum cannot practically be transferred. For example, given KE= ½ mv2, and v=dt, as t approaches zero then KE must also approach zero.  No posing of people like mannequins, and in fact, no motion in the air whatsoever once the relative temporal difference is large enough.

There you go – you’ve been geeked. Shady physics and broad assumptions, but that’s what you get for a brief thought at a lunch hour.