Small space of slow-down time

Question

I am aware of this question: Speeding up time?

My question is about the opposite effects. Specifically, I want to describe the results of using the time altering device create by the Great Race of Yith from Lovecraft stories. The device slows down the time flow around itself, allowing the user to very quickly progress through time.

I want to be able to describe a very short travel - only a couple of seconds inside, while outside passes a couple of hours. This would be triggered by charging the device with some electricity, which would be cut off very quickly (circuit breakers would get blown upon the connection, only allowing very short functioning).

I would like to understand how this space would look like from the outside and how it would react if someone try to breach it. What would happen to a body part if it tried to enter (would the blood stop flowing in the part that enters, causing similar effect to a clot)?

I want to make it entertaining ;-) This is for a Call of Cthulhu tabletop game.

Answer 1

They go somewhere else.

This is for Call of Cthulhu! Let us borrow from Dreams in the Witch House. The protagonist sometimes finds himself transported to a bizarre dimension.

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dwh.aspx

All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike.

It is a weird, scary place that your players spend their few seconds of time travel. Maybe it is like the transdimensional realm where poor Gilman finds himself in dreams. Or maybe a place that is dark, with shifting masses just beyond the edge of sight. These are not empty places where one goes to move through time. There are good reasons one might want to spend only a few seconds. A few seconds might actually be too long.

The Great Race had things that they feared. If this is Great Race tech, maybe they stole it from the beings they supplanted and evicted to the lower world. You could have the dimension visited during time travel be the dimension of those ancient octopoid entities. What happens if you stay longer? What if you find something and bring it back - or something comes back with you?

Answer 2

This kind of time dilation is much more plausible than the other kind. It is in fact very similar what happens near the event horizon of a black hole. The faster you move the slower you perceive time compared to a stationary observer. If you are still, then your internal happenings like chemical reactions, electron orbits, quantum vibrations, etc (aka time) can happen quickly. As you approach the the speed of light, your internal happenings slow down. Thus conserving the speed of light.

So, to get this effect, you need to speed an object up relative to its environment. However, speeding an object up like this will have all sorts of dire consequences for the environment around you. In order to achieve the level of time dilation you are looking for, you must be moving VERY close to the speed of light (299,792,446m/s to be exact). The problem here is that any matter that you collide with will do so at such forces that your time dilated entity will trigger an explosive reaction similar to what would happen if you were to replace a person with a same mass of antimatter. For such a field to work it would need to perfectly isolate all the matter inside of the field from the matter outside of it. That way you can oscillate the object you want to slow down without it running into anything. So you can imagine two force fields surrounding your subject, one holding the time traveler's environment inside of it and another holding the environment out with a perfect void between the two environments giving the oscillating environment room to wiggle in.

So this means that your field will have to be impenetrable to matter so if someone tries to reach through it, it would feel like a solid wall of repulsive force. But what about seeing into it? Well, making a field that electromagnetism can pass through would be dangerous as well. If light could pass through, one of two things would happen, either it will instantly be synchronized with the bubble's vibrations, or it won't. If it synchronizes, then it will be slowed down by a factor of 3600 relative to the environment. So, being in a typically lit room at 500 lux, would suddenly appear to the time traveler at a brightness of 1.8 million lux. This is 18 times as bright as the sun at noon on the summer solstice. Sufficeless to say, this would be uncomfortable, but not nearly as uncomfortable as if light could pass through the bubble without syncing up. If light did not sync up then the lightwaves would expand and compress so rapidly that normally harmless short wave light from outside would behave like very high energy gamma waves... which are also not good for your health.

This means the field either needs to block most light, or all light. Let's say you want your time traveler to see what is happening around him, you could have it block most light and sync what it does let in. In this case, someone on the inside would see the world around them vibrating so fast that it would look like things are just stretched out or blurred a bit, and people looking in would see a nearly black ball, if their own light is being absorbed, or a white or mirror like ball if it is being reflected.

Answer 3

One big cold mirror

From the outside, nothing can get in. And when I say nothing, I mean not even light. Because for light to go in, time would need to move on the inside. But as soon as anything would be introduced to timelessness, it would be stopped dead in its tracks. So anything trying to get in (light, air, sound, etc.) would stop at the edge and form an inpenetrable barrier in between, being both timeless and not. As this would bounce off light as well it would basically act like a mirror. From the inside, nothing would change until you get out, when basically everything instantly changes to the new surroundings.

Initially I wrote down a lot of thoughts about this idea, but thought better of it the more thought I gave it. I'll leave my thoughts below if you think this better fits your magic/technology system or your story. Also I am assuming you want to handwave the whole spacial displacement thing, which happens if you want to fix something in space and time. Anchoring yourself to the spot you are in time would be influenced by earth's rotation and travel through the galaxy, meaning you'd end up in the cold hard vacuum of space in an instant.

My earlier take from outside:

Dark

Time practically stands still in this bubble from an outside perspective. Depending on your rules, I would assume this goes for sound and light as well. If no light escapes, for an observer all that remains is a black sphere. Possibly with lens like or distorted edges directing light around it.

Cold

If everything stands still inside, this means molecules do as well, and as heat is basically motion at a molecular level, there won't be any of it inside. Meaning if you were to touch (or go inside) the bubble for any length of time you'd get near instant frostbite. Anything entering from outside would instantly freeze, and it wouldn't be pleasant for anything living.

My take from inside:

loud and bright

Since you'd be in there very short (from your perspective), but the bubble gets a lot of input from sound and light for several hours, you would experience all of that practically at once. Coming out of the bubble would sound like a very loud explosion (even if you were in a quiet field) and possibly a lot worse in a loud environment. The light would hit you all at once, and getting out would result in a very bright flash. Possibly for onlookers as well as all the light that was trapped inside is released at once. During the trip inside, you probably don't have much time to see what happens outside, so I'd assume it wouldn't change much from what you see the moment you go in.

Decompression

At the least, I would recommend the transfer time in and out of the bubble to be several seconds at least. Mostly to lessen the instant effects as above, but also since things like airflow will be very different in an instant. This will be extremely unpleasant to say the least. If the exit were to be instantaneous, I think anybody inside would be ripped to shreds right away for various environmental reasons.

And as a bonus a weakness with this technique: one could launch any number of projectiles into this bubble with no consequences until the trip was over, when all the projectiles will "resume" their trajectory with very little the traveller could do about it.

This idea reminds me of something done in the webcomic Girl Genius (a good read if you're into steampunk adventures. I forget which passage it is but might update the link later). Although from a realistic standpoint they get a lot wrong, they also got a few things right.