Inside the Fourth Dimension, Time Travel and Stacked Time Theory
Author Mike Ricksecker is an avid baseball fan, and indeed, this book knocks it out of the park!!! (Yes, it’s worth the multiple exclamation marks!) I’ve already introduced Mike’s non-fiction book after just a brief glance through its pages, and now that I’ve read through it properly, it’s time for a deeper look!
Coffee. Deep and dark please.
It was already clear when I started on my travel into this travel through time that this book has all the makings of a coffee table book. You can leave it lying around your lounge so your visitors can be impressed with how well-read you are. They can glance through its sections whilst you’re making the coffee. And it can be used as a conversation starter.
Indeed, unless you’re talking about Travels in Time with your visitor, it might even be more interesting to (re) read it on your own than chatting to the person you’re having coffee with!
But beware – it sucks you in with more power than any black hole you’ve never seen.
Looking over the event horizon
It’s difficult to see the fine line you cross where you realise you haven’t just read a few introductory lines of text, or the caption under a figure, or glanced at a photo, but you’ve carried on reading more and delved into detail about the subject. Mike’s easy, conversational writing is like the mythological siren luring you ever deeper into the fourth dimension of time without you realising, and trapping you within its lexiconic musings.
Before you know it, you’ve metamorphosed from the butterfly flitting over flowers into a busy bee, gorging on the sweet nectar that is stacked time theory, desperate to devour the next cycle when the chapter is exhausted.
A Journey on the desk side
Travels Through Time has about as much time travel content as our metaphorical black hole has matter, so it would certainly do well as a desk-side companion for the time travel enthusiast.
The intriguing thing about this book is that as well as covering the ‘traditional’ tropes like paradoxes and real time travel, it treads less well-trodden roads like time slips and the simulated universe. And then it swerves off the roads completely and skids onto muddy footpaths like time loss during UFO abductions and doppelgangers.
Offside
Some chapters – or “cycles” – start to sound far-fetched with wild claims; Humans vibrate on a personal resonance between 9 – 16 Hz. (I half expected a reference to the Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel 2000 movie Frequency! 😉 ) Next come testimonies, personal accounts (including from the author) and eye witness accounts which you might think belong in an “unsolved mysteries” -type book rather than this popular science book from a series on a connected universe.
Much as I’d love alien visitations, UFOs, timeslips and interdimensional beings to be true, I must admit to being resistant to their reality. As a scientist I need fact and evidence to derive a theory or draw a conclusion that matches results from experiments or even just what I see. My first thought was that some stuff here is the reading equivalent of click-bait and lacks substance. It’s just too fluffy.
Come to the fluffy side!
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” —Nikola Tesla
It turns out after some time and more thought, this isn’t the case! Indeed, the bibliography is testament to the (scientific) research behind much of the ‘fluff’ (including vibrating humans!). To quote Mike quoting Netflix series Dark – “Everything is connected”. Time travel is just one facet of an extremely complicated universe, and Travels Through Time puts this into context – if not perspective. Indeed, Mike writes from the perspective that “we humans have a very narrow view of our universe. Our context is limited.”
So is my disbelief on, for example, the reality of out of phase people, me being narrow-minded? I suspect it. So this is the super power of Mike’s Travels Through Time – it widens my mind!. Or at least, it prises it open with an out of phase interdimensional doppelganged copy of a retconic crowbar.
How does it do this? Not necessarily because of the accuracy of the accounts and stories from the guy in the pub, but because it doesn’t try to convince. It simply lays down points and suggests pathways for me to connect the dots. Undefined, fuzzy pathways that expand and leave a rain-soaked watercolour picture that evokes the emotion whose words would be: hang on a minute – there might be something here!
And I should add that when I reached the real time travel section at the end of the book, it almost seemed disappointingly simplistic. Too conventional. Shallow. I would never have had expected that!
Writing style
I love how Mike writes! I mentioned in my last post how it’s easy and conversational, and how he builds ideas and concepts in easy to understand layers.
As I delved deeper into Travels in Time I came to appreciate the writing style more fully – not in terms of poetic language, sentence structure, grammar and wotnot, but the consideration Mike has for his audience. He knows that in the ufology scene, for example, there are some people who believe aliens have visited Earth. But he also knows that there are many (many more?) people who don’t. “We’ll default to the traditional narrative,” he writes. (I’ve added emphasis).
He exhibits sensitivity too – he (thankfully) leaves out the gory details of a guy who murdered his wife, knowing that the details would be difficult for many of us to stomach. And, I suspect, these details are irrelevant to the point he’s making in the text anyway. In any case, I bet you’re wondering how this might fit into time travel! 😉
Brief unofficial review by a member of the Dutch public
I mentioned earlier the large, bold font inside the paperpack cover. This makes Travels in Time easy for long-sighted 50-odd year olds like me to read in a culture centre in the Netherlands whilst waiting for his daughter to finish her recorder lesson.
So it’s also easy to read for people who aren’t officially reading it either, but who see other people reading it and are curious. Take Mevrouw Jansen, the non-fictional character with a fictional name. She’s hovering in front of me, peering over the top of my book. I don’t know how long she’s been there. Don’t really care anyway, to be honest, but I sense a disturbance in my reading pleasure is imminent.
“What’re you reading?” she pipes.
What was I reading? *Growl*) I avoid eye contact, but I tilt the book so she can see the cover whilst I continue reading about the Polchinski paradox. She takes this as an invitation to grab the book from me.
Having judged the book by its cover, she now turns to its weight by balancing it on one hand and looking at the ceiling. She tells me it’s “heavy”, flicks through some pages and shrieks. She’s pinching the bibliography at the back.
“You can’t include this bit! And the writing’s big as well.”
“Oh go on,” I reply, “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not happy about the pictures either.”
“No, those are OK.”
Take home message? You might not need your reading glasses. Also, don’t let your reading be interrupted by your daughter’s friend’s mother when you’re waiting for your other daughter to finish her music lesson.
Besides. There’s enough music in this book! (And the pictures are OK! 🙂 )
Connect with author Mike Ricksecker
Mike has a host of channels where you can read / listen / watch even more of him.
You can Join Mike at the Connected Universe Portal, watch him Gaia TV or check out his YouTube channel. Mike’s website can be found here.
Paul
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