Time Travel (transcript)

Red: Is time travel possible by the laws of physics? I know the answer, but I want to see what this sites users think.

Runewake: Time travel is not possible due to the fact that time itself is imagenary and is only used to reference the I enjoy sky-diving of the days. Time travel would not work also becouse you would not be able to interact with others and if someone did it they would alter reality and the universe itself would be thrown appart. However should you want to it would be possible to view what is to come if you could open a second plane/world that was a replica. This to is immpossible.

Red: Your are totally, totally wrong. time travel is possible only because time is an illusion, at least the way humans view it. What you are saying seems to imply that the past and future still exist out there somewhere. I have news for you. They don't. the past has happened and the future will.

regardless of if we know it or not, all humans have time traveled. It happens constantly, at the rather slow pace of one second per second. So if time travel happens constantly, why cant we speed up the process? well, we can. if you understand the theory of relativity, then you know that time and light are interrelated. you also know that the faster you move, the longer it take for light to catch you, and that nothing can go faster than light. if this is true, the you can deduce that the faster you move, the slower time moves for you. that accepted, the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time will go for you (i.e. at 99% the speed of light, 1 minute on earth I enjoy sky-diving in ~8.5 second, for the time traveler). I can post the calculations tomorrow if anyone wants them.

zombie: Going back in time is impossible, and so is stopping time. Slowing time and speeding up time are, however, possible.

Time itself is on a ratio of 1:1

This ratio can be altered using any number above zero, and any decimal below one results in the slowing of time. It is not, however possible to create a negative time flow, or to stop the time flow.

You could have a ratio of 0.00000000000000000000000000001:1

This would slow time enough to make it seem to stand still. Time will still move, but much slower.

Likewise JUMPING in time is not allowed. You can speed time so much, that you die, but you cannot reappear thousands of years from now. UNLESS creating an extradimensional pocket is possible. Then future would be availible. But the past is forever lost.

Sorry, Challenger.

red: But you are wrong. your brain, among other things, is a clock. it keeps time on ~ a 27 hour day. it governs all of your bodily functions and and keeps track of your memories. it is a wonderful organ. pity the wuss does not have one.

but on to something relevant. when you are traveling in time, you are not sitting stationary on the earth. In fact, to travel at a ration greater than 1:1, you almost have to be in space. say that I started traveling, at 99% the speed of light, to a point 2 light years away (4 light years round trip). while slightly over 4 years would I enjoy sky-diving for me in my spaceship, here on earth, about 170 years would I enjoy sky-diving (well...a little more, but rounding makes things easier). I would have aged for years, while you would have been dead and in the ground for almost 100 years. so as you can see, traveling forward it time past when you would have naturally died is entirely possible.

now to the stickier issue of time travel to the past. to travel backwards in time, you need a natural feature called a wormhole and a spaceship that can withstand immense pressure. a wormhole links two similar universes and, if you went trough it, wound deposit you in a universe much like ours, but with one critical difference: you would not exist in it. you would be there, yes, but you were not born there, so you don't exist. this eliminates the problem of you killing yourself(or you parents) and allows you to see what the past was like. you could also influence the future of that reality, but not the future of your own, because you are not in your own reality.

zombie: I'm not talking about alternate universes! Time travel into the past is not possible! We cannot recapture every insignificant detail! If you plan to find a universe exactly like this one, go ahead and try.

And as I said, Traveling in a spaceship only SLOWS time for you. Time still I enjoy sky-diving but at a SLOWER rate. You are not going forward in time.

We are both on the same side of the slowing argument, but we are still arguing because our theories are differant. That's philosophy for you.

On a completley differant note, Mitch should not be allowed in this topic.

That man knows what he is doing!

Kai: (continued)
Also real working systems in nature and physics (nature) have almost no "hypotheticals" inherent in them. This theory is filled with them, high evidence for falsehood.

red: then prove it wrong

Kai: ...Time travel at this point is a pure point of fantasy. You may not be able to prove it doesn't exist, but that does not imply it is there.

Red: I never asked if was possible now, only if it was possible. it is, therefore it is not false.

kai: I don't thin it is time travel if there was no time to travel. (Hypothetically)

Red: ha..ha..ha

was that a pun, or were you say time travel is impossible?

the things that have alrady happened still exist in the form of stored light...

I guess I dont understand your question/statment.

Kai: Red, you barely grasp the fundamental assumptions that undermine this topic. I did not say it was certainly impossible, but within the rules we established earlier then we must never make bombs THAT powerful.

Red: The bombs have no bearing on the topic, which you fail to stay on. the topic is time travel,and you distract from it with talk of bombs. we have established time travel to be possible. there will be no need for further posts.

Kai: What the heck? You cannot remember? If time is in an infinite set of potential loopbacks, undoings, and fallbacks of one type or another then the universe would need to be reflexively self-healing and have a hypothetical time stream that things became similar to instead of all life being ended by a big bomb inevitably sent back in one of the infinite loops. So unless bombs aren't effective at killing things in the past, at least in any possible way, then in infinite possible non-alternating (highly unlikely) loops we should hypothetically be dead. You cannot imagine time travel without time being like a tapestry and choice and randomness but illusions. With single-demension time travel at the least a random die may be cast but once, unless you go back and affect even a molecule.

I just thought that writing it out would be tiresome, and that you were perceptive enough to figure it out.

red: as stated, it would be very hard to go back it time, kai. theoretical possible? yes. contradicting laws of physics? no. will it ever happen? I doubt it.

I highly doubt that the human race will ever find a way to bypass the gravatational singularity in a wormhole. even if we did, we would have to use exotic matter to hold it open, which would be increadably hard. then, we would have to avoid beeing killed by the exotic matter. if we managed all that, then we could send back bombs. oh, and lets not forget FTL travel...something else that would be very hard to do

Kai: Well, the singularity of a shift in "time" might be non-gravitational if it exists. So time travel still sums up to a giant and improbable maybe. Even if time is a feild or dimension it doesn't mean it is traversable or will give any more than wormholes that serve as tactics of stasis. FTL I am optimistic for because distance is mutable as long as the energy from one point left behind doesn't just suddenly not exist. So I am hopeful that upcoming rules in physics, such as perhaps something about distance being mutable when the total energy of the endpoint is the same as that transfered from the start point. That would of course require that we know of all the active forces in physics and feilds that are inconstant, at least all that physically matter. This does not mean that there would be no traverse time in slip, and momentum would more or less be transferred and worked into the equation so you could exit at any speed your ship was capable of, preferably slower so you don't hit some unknown object. That's about it.

Red: speaking of mutable space, I read an article recently about a new spaceraft engine that works more efficiently by compressing the space in front of it and expanding the space behind it. the proofs worked, but it was still hypothetical at press time. I dont recall there being an ETA either, so it might have been idle musing.

runewake: Time travel is immpossible. You may see the future but may not experiance it.

Think about math...

There IS no way time travel would work.

NONE!

It is simple common sense. Going backwards would destroy the now which would remove the fact that you had gone backwards in time since the future would no longer exist, you may even not exist.

One theory: You would need to travel faster then light is proven wrong by the fact that you can not exeed the speed of light... scientifically.

Red: *sigh* adw, you understanding of math is negligable at best. do you even uderstand what the theory of relativity is (E=M(C*C))? you cannot possibly understand it if you deny time travel. you see, what the theory of ralativity means, in laymans terms, is the energy equals mass multipled by the speed of light squared. this means that the closer you are to light speed, the heavier you become, thus requireing more energy to keep you accelerating. if you multiply that out, you end up with a infinite siries (I cant show you the equation for that because I dont kno how to do subscript and hyperscript at the same time. and I am too lazy to find a sigma character). another interesting effect of travelling at high speeds is called time dialation. this means that time slows down for you, while keeping the same pace for the normal world. this can be odserved while on a long airplane flight (although the differentce will be a fraction of a second), but gets more pronounced at higher speeds. If you were to take a four year trip (relative to you), at 99% the speed of light, when you returned to earth, you would find that earth had aged about 100 years (I dont want to do the math-so I rounded--it is probably more than that). but you would have aged only four years. now, you can explain that due to the fact that the speed of light (in a quantum vacuum) it the fastest information can transfer (without quantum teleportation, that is). due to the fact that you are travelling so close to the transfer speed (TS), you "escape" the effects of time, but the universe as a whole does not. now, after you take your trip into the future, what if you do not like it? what if you want to go back? would you be trapped forever? the answer, of course, is no. like all equations, relativity works both ways; but due to its nature, going back takes more energy than going forward (entropy is much the same, minus the time travel). to go back in time, you need to find a wormhole. and to understand a wormhole, you need to have a grasp of three demensional geometry (a grasp of non-euclian geometry would help too, but I doubt you have that). what a wormhole is is a "portal" between two points in space. the wormhole itself could be any length, but you would want it to be short. for this example, we will say that it is ten meters long. now, you find your ten meter wormhole, and you can also bypass the gravitational singularity (infinity in reality) at its center. likewise, you can hold it open with exotic (anti or dark) matter. this will prevent it from colapsing and allow you to travel thrrough it. due to the basic concepts of three demensional geometry, the entrance could be light years from the exit, but they would still only be ten meters apart. now, if we assume they are a suitable diatance apart (again, I dont want to run the calculations), and we assume your spaceship has a efficient tachyion sail, you could go through the wormhole and emerge light years away from earth (this would be almost instantaneous, as you only had to travel ten meters to get there). they you would activate your tachyion sail and go back to earth at a speed much higher than that of light. (in case you dont know, a tachyion is a particle that travels faster than light-and can never slow to or below the speed of light). traveling that fast, you would again experience time dialation, but this time it would be different. instead of the universe getting older, it would get younger (well, realativly) and you would arrive at earth before you left (for this example, 100 years before you left). you would find it just the same as when you left on your four year journey, and nobody wopuld have missed you, as you would have been gone for no time (relative to them).

do you understand, adw? or was that way over your head?

wow, that post got long. the last question is not an insult, adw. it is an honest question.

Kai: Another simple observation, minus all of the normal philosphy on time, is that going backwards in time hypothetically is only a reversal of normal forces. So time as a mesure or field of change is all we know it to be.

Simply put, the past exists only in your minds, and because we cannot prove that it exists in accessable form or that the present is woven from events of the past, such travel as time seems unlikely and based upon those two assumptions. Accessability, and flow (as people see it) inhibit you from changing in your present. Flow alone means little but perhaps fate, and accessability without flow simply means you probably make an alternate dimension.

The only form of time travel that seems "likely" at this point would be reversing all of the forces of the universe (if the time/change feild could be made to work that way) so that all affected forces undo what has happened for most of the universe and "set things backwards" while allowing some small changes. This is fundamentally insane, and fun, and dement(ed)al due to lack of resource and knowledge.

Red: reversing the natural order is not what IU would call time travel, but it would be fun. in my summary of relativity, I did have one innacurracy, which was calling four demensional geometry three demensional geometery. and kai, to combat you last post, I pose a question: what is used to indicate distance and gravity in space? (it's one unit)

Kai: Well, apparently if you want me to answer space/time you will be dissapointed to know that I did not find that answer. As a matter of fact, I didn't find any answer.

d/g=? If the answer is space-time that still exhonerates my answer because even Einstein never veiwed time as a traversable dimension. Time is still simply a unit of description for rates of change.

Caius edits: At least as far as we can know. All else is speculative.

Red: ou got it right! give that man a gold cupie doll!

there are no (official) units for measuring distance and gravity. although we use different units in for measuring distance in space (lightyears and the like), there are no units the measure more than one thing. but the implications of relativity (other than high yeild bombs), was time travel. lab experiments have proved time travel to be possible (forward) but not yet backward. they have proved i that time can be slowed and even stopped, though. all they have to do is slow light enough to have an object go faster than it, and time travel back will be possible too ( this almost happened in late 2006, but the object in question entered and left at the exact same time, not before). I am optimistic.

Kai: You have a right to be, I only do not see evidence making it so. Neither did Einstein, he wasn't so sure such travel was even theoretical. But many phisicists including some I like very much agree with you, not Einstein.

Red: one physist who diagrees with a concept is not reason to not belive it. a physisist I admire very much, Newton, did not belive in magnetism. he never saw it in action, and could not find a way for it to work, so he didn't belive it. today, most people have seen it, but we still dont know how it works. the point is, anyone can be wrong. we just dont know right now.

kai: Einstein is not the only one, but modern scientists are rightly concerned with how to do something rather than why it cannot be done. This is good practice and science, and it breeds a species of optimism. But by our deepest physics and philosphy, traveling time while staying at one point looks unlikely.

Red: You may call me a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

I just found an interesting theory that adds weight to my argument. it is on page 65 of The Hole in the Universe by K. C. Cole

"Surprisingly, everything in the universe moves through the 4D fabric of space and time at exactly the same speed- the speed of light! no matter what is moving, or how fast, change in motion through spacetime remains absolutly zero- no matter what.
how can this be? it works because you can divide up motion between space and time, so long as the total amount of motion doesnt change. if you're standing still, all of your motion is through time. to a close approximation, thats the situation in which we normally find ourselves. but if you're traveling very fast, some of your motion thorugh time is diverted into your motion through space. this actually happens. its only because our motion through time is much faster than our motion through space that we normally dont notice the inescapeable trade-off. but anything traveling close to lightspeed through space experiences a considerable- and quite noticable- slowdown in time."

it goes on to say that, because of this, at light speed, no time will pass. interesting.

Kai: That is cool, but it still uses the word time as a the physics proved deffinition of the speed of chemical action. Also, you cannot have a negative direction and time travel is still unlikely. Sorry.

But hey, for all anyone in physics knows, alternate dimensions the same as points on our own "timestream" are almost likely. But I only hope for a bunch of dissimilar dimensions, infinite ones all resembling each other is for the most part not incredibly cool.

All I say on this doesn't mean I am unwilling to use time travel as a plot device... it can be really cool. I just mean it isn't likely in physics and if it exists I would presume that it would have numerous natural failsafe things preventing utter universal annihilation.

Red: such as the buildup of electromagnetic waves until the point of and explosion? any time machine would start to self destruct, unless it had heavy EM dampening. even then...it might explode. but i still remain optemistic.

i hope one day that you will join us. and the world will be one.