Time Travel - Yes? No?? Maybe???

[Harry Vest]

Any serious thoughts out there on Time Travel???
Given the scientific advances in the last 100 years do you think one day someone will travel in time?
Yes?
No???
Maybe???
Oh ya, is anyone out there actually studying Time Travel - I mean serious scientist types.

 

[BrownEyedBoy]

Impossible.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Yes time travel is a scientific fact, we are moving forward in time.

 

[Harry Vest]

"Impossible".
Why Impossible???
Just like manned flight was "Impossible" 200 years ago.
Or radio transmission.
Or Atomic Bombs.
Explain why "Impossible".

 

[A_Wanderer]

Impossible to travel backwards in time because it would violate causality, information has a way of never actually getting that quick (EPR paradox, superluminal experiments where the group velocity is always <c), the time dilation effect on bodies at fast velocities asymptopes as you approach C so you will never exeed C and you can never get a negative time dilation.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Radio transmission, manned flight and atomic bombs were not impossible 200 years ago, they just had not been invented or exploited by human beings at that point. Time travel however obeys the laws of the universe, which we have some understanding of and with what we know now travel backwards in time is most probably impossible.

 

[DaveC]

Impossible, unless the only direction you can go is forward.

If you can go backward, we'd certainly know about it by now, wouldn't we?

 

[DaveC]

Impossible to travel backwards in time because it would violate causality, information has a way of never actually getting that quick (EPR paradox, superluminal experiments where the group velocity is always <c), the time dilation effect on bodies at fast velocities asymptopes as you approach C so you will never exeed C and you can never get a negative time dilation.

Correct, you certainly can't go backwards on a light scale. Time does slow down as you approach the speed of light but, because you can't go faster than the speed of light, you can't reverse time.

If you were to go superlight travel à la Star Wars, then you'd be going backwards in time. So it'd be tough if you're trying to hyperspace to a battle, and get there only to find out that you're 5,000,000 years too early for it.

 

[wizard2c]

reply

One of my favorite subjects.

Yes, time travel can exist.

 

[Earnie Shavers]

It would be sooooo annoying. You'd trip over and spill your drinks everywhere at a bar, and all your friends would be like "That was sooo good, gotta go back and see that again". Nothing would ever get done. We'd all be stuck back at that miracle one night stand with the model from Melbourne. Just as an example. Of course.

 

[wizard2c]

It would be sooooo annoying. You'd trip over and spill your drinks everywhere at a bar, and all your friends would be like "That was sooo good, gotta go back and see that again". Nothing would ever get done. We'd all be stuck back at that miracle one night stand with the model from Melbourne. Just as an example. Of course.

Earnie.....do they have elevators in Australia? I've been looking for a good place to hideaway.

 

[melon]

Time-space can be bent/slowed down, but it's an illusion. You can play tricks with electromagnetic spectrum, but you can't avoid the biggest problem of all:

1) Time is mostly a human invention.
2) Neither the past nor the future is "recorded," so it's not as if you can travel to something that doesn't exist.
3) If time travel existed, we'd already see evidence of it with visitors from the future. Hence, since we don't see it, it does not exist even in the future.

And just because we may eventually get the ability to go faster than light (although Einstein says that's impossible), why does that mean that "time" would reverse? Look into the sky and you'll see light from hundreds of millions of years in the past. But if we were even able to travel to that location hundreds of millions of light years away, you wouldn't be going hundreds of millions of years in the past. The universe is likely very different compared to what we see, because even though the light we see from them was emitted in the past, they're still existing in the present.

Melon

 

[echo0001]

I don't pretend to understand how this is so, but from reading of books of science for the layperson, I have gathered that it is mathematically possible to travel backwards in time, especially if you are a quark...

BUT-

there is no way that this will be feasible in the near future (think at any time within the next hundred years or more), simply because it's still just a mathematical possiblity, it would probably take near infinite amounts of power, etc., and they'd probably have to start with quarks anyway, and work their way up.

Possible? Barely.

 

[echo0001]

Melon, for you.

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Ford Prefect, "Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy Trilogy", by Douglas Adams

One of my favorite quotes of all time.

 

[BVS]

If it was possible the "when" part of your question would be moot for past, present and future would no longer exist.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Time is not a human construction.

 

[BVS]

Time is not a human construction.

Time as we know it is.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Define as we know it, an atomic clock using an atomic resonance frequency defines time accurately. Not our own experience of the world which is dependent on a whole manner of biological factors.

Time is a property of the universe, it is not made or defined by human beings or individuals; it would exist and obey the same laws even if we did not.

 

[BVS]

Define as we know it, an atomic clock using an atomic resonance frequency defines time accurately. Not our own experience of the world which is dependent on a whole manner of biological factors.

Time is a property of the universe, it is not made or defined by human beings or individuals; it would exist and obey the same laws even if we did not.

But you just defined time in our understaning of it. If we weren't here to experience it, what woud 'time' be?

If someone was able to travel the timeline then time wouldn't matter or have definition.

 

[A_Wanderer]

If we weren't able to measure it time would still be the resonance frequency of say a caesium atom.

 

[BVS]

If we weren't able to measure it time would still be the resonance frequency of say a caesium atom.

We as humans "discovered" and defined time. We are the ones to divide the day in order to record history.

What time is it? No one here knows. You may say it's 2pm May 30, 2005 because that's what your calender says. But who said your calender was right? Your country?

My watch is behind by a few minutes, does that make me wrong?

 

[A_Wanderer]

You are talking about different measurements of time but not time itself.

What time is it here? it is 3971614046332464000000000000 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at zero kelvins since the start of the Universe.

 

[Angela Harlem]

I have a question. Or two...

I am sitting here at 12:00pm AEST on a Sunday. I want to travel back to 12:00pm AEST on Saturday, a full 24 hours prior. My body which apprently 'leaves' the Sunday, actually moves to the Saturday, a time I have previously existed in, and exists a second time?
1. What happens to my body which had prior existence on the Saturday? Is that event overridden, or do I co-create history with 2 selves?
2. Does my physical self vanish into thin air on the Sunday? Would someone witnessing it, see me disappear?
3. Can the human mind remember 2 simultaneous events, which I am supposed to have lived both of? How could I conciously be aware of both?
4. Is the dragon happy in Romania? Dumbledore wont speak of it. Partypooper.

 

[Angela Harlem]

Oh, and one more...A_W, what the hell degree are you studying buddy?

 

[A_Wanderer]

I have a question. Or two...

I am sitting here at 12:00pm AEST on a Sunday. I want to travel back to 12:00pm AEST on Saturday, a full 24 hours prior. My body which apprently 'leaves' the Sunday, actually moves to the Saturday, a time I have previously existed in, and exists a second time?
1. What happens to my body which had prior existence on the Saturday? Is that event overridden, or do I co-create history with 2 selves?
2. Does my physical self vanish into thin air on the Sunday? Would someone witnessing it, see me disappear?
3. Can the human mind remember 2 simultaneous events, which I am supposed to have lived both of? How could I conciously be aware of both?
4. Is the dragon happy in Romania? Dumbledore wont speak of it. Partypooper.

1: The only feesible way that I could see time travel working is if you did not travel backwards in time but to another universe where it is just like it was 24 hours ago but altering anything will not alter your timeline, only this alternate universe timeline.

The idea of two selves existing is taking matter and energy from the future and transporting it back to the past which must really upset things.

2: There is no reason that your physical self would vanish in this impossible scenario, the question is that if you are travelling to an exact point in the past to an exact point in space what is preventing an infinite number of future versions of you instantaneously arriving at the same point creating a fixed point of such density that it creates a black hole, or worse.

3: A paradox is created, if you alter your memories in the past with your behaviour when you travel backwards you will alter your behaviour when you travel back and change those memories in the past. My advice is to take 2 asprin and then bash your head in with a blunt object.

4: Um, Harry Potter right? hey that movie, the one with the bus, that had time travel in it

Oh, and one more...A_W, what the hell degree are you studying buddy?

Bachelor of Science, double major in Zoology and Geoscience, but coming from a maths, physics and chemistry background in VCE and a strong general interest in cosmology.

 

[Angela Harlem]

In short, and it seems you agree, it is just not physically possible to go back to something which no longer exists.
Thank you mate.

Potter

 

[speedracer]

Travelling forward and backward in time really wasn't as exciting as I thought it'd be.

 

[Ft. Worth Frog]

Bachelor of Science, double major in Zoology and Geoscience, but coming from a maths, physics and chemistry background in VCE and a strong general interest in cosmology.

AHHHHH!!!! My poor head

Anyone interested in time-travel and research on superstring theory, and dimensions outside our 4 of space and time should read Hyperspace by physicist Michio Kaku, who is a professor at CUNY. It's written plainly for a physics book and he introduces a lot of ideas and theories in quantum physics. Actually quite a page turner.

 

[all_i_want]

oh, time travel is such a baloney. if anyone managed to do it, dont you think they'd come back and tell us about it

on the other hand, maybe those people are the UFOs we see! maybe time travellers are being kept in places like area 51! maybe jesus was a time traveler (he came back with a special lazer ray to impregnate mary to give birth to.. himself!) and miracles were merely technological curiosities. maybe people from the future live amongst us even now, and theyre keeping themselves secret!

on the other hand, i think we should just rule out any possibility of exceeding the speed of light so that we can eliminate this as a subject of discussion.

 

[VertigoGal]

Impossible.