time travel is not possible

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Started by Orb August 10, 2005 02:45 AM

86 comments, last by Daerax 18 years, 8 months ago

6,963

August 10, 2005 08:43 PM

Quote:Original post by Orb
here's a new question:

if i were to travel to a star 15 years away, in the blink of an eye. and i looked through a telescope that magnified my view of earth... would i not be looking at earth as it were 15 years ago? i would be able to see myself 15 years ago. this could be a form of time travel in a way, that you could be a spectator on events in the past. you couldn't interfere with them of course because all you are really experiencing, is the light as it reaches that star you are on.

those stars you see in the sky? they could have blown up, but you wouldn't know it until the light reached your eye. you are viewing the past right there, just by looking up in the sky

that's like asking if you travelled to the stop sign 20 minutes away, in the blink of an eys and i looked through some binoculars that magnified my view of the parking lot... would i not be looking at the parking lot as it were 20 minutes ago. i would be able to see myself 20 minutes ago. ....

i say this not possible and you're up way too early.

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JoshM

128

August 10, 2005 10:01 PM

Everybody knows that time travellers come from post-apocalyptic America and their goal is to spend a few weeks collecting old computers from the 70's but do it in the 90's and prognosticate about the future on internet forums while they're sitting around waiting for the flux capacitor to recharge :)

John Titor said so!

JoshM

128

August 10, 2005 10:05 PM

Quote:Original post by kingnosis
Time travel is impossible because there's nowhere to go.

The past and the future don't exist. We have memories of the past and expectations of the future, but the past and future don't exist as places you can go to.

There is only right now, which we live in seldom enough. We fool ourselves into believing in a past and a future because we spend so much time thinking about them.

But I wonder if it's possible to visit flatland and somehow turn the paper inside out or project it onto a wall so that space is distorted in a way that creates the effect of time travel? (pardon the horrible analogies)

kelcharge

180

August 10, 2005 10:26 PM

What happens when you think of time as a variable, just like you would when coding.

float time = 0;  while(1) {   time += whatever;}

Now taking that into cosideration before you start thinking of time travel, you could clearly see that time is what it is, and can never be change. You might be able to go back in time only erasing yourself and everything else up to the point where you went back. Going into the future then would be like wasting your life, because the events would still happen, but it would go by in an instant. Maybe somehow, this might be albe to be manipulated, but as far as I see it, it can't.

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Tron3k

660

August 10, 2005 10:30 PM

Quote:Original post by Salsa
Quote:Original post by Tron3k
You can't redefine anything. All of four-dimensional space-time exists and cannot change, because (as is trivially obvious) space-time has no concept of time - it CONTAINS time.

Dude. If there's a piece of cake in front of me, then my universe's definition involves having a piece of cake in front of me. If a time traveller takes my cake, he's redefining my universe. You don't even need to bring up something like 4-dimensional space-time.

I don't see anything being redefined in that scenario. The time traveller took your cake, and always would have taken your cake. His "free will" is not changing "what would have happened".

“[The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” - Thomas Jefferson

Conner McCloud

1,135

August 10, 2005 11:05 PM

Quote:Original post by kelcharge
What happens when you think of time as a variable, just like you would when coding.
*** Source Snippet Removed ***

Now taking that into cosideration before you start thinking of time travel, you could clearly see that time is what it is, and can never be change. You might be able to go back in time only erasing yourself and everything else up to the point where you went back. Going into the future then would be like wasting your life, because the events would still happen, but it would go by in an instant. Maybe somehow, this might be albe to be manipulated, but as far as I see it, it can't.

float time = 0.0f;while(1) {  time += 1.0f;  if(want_to_go_back_in_time && invented_flux_capacitor && speed >= 88.0)     time -= 100.0f;}

jimywang

100

August 11, 2005 07:31 AM

Think about it in this way. Since everything in the world is formed by atoms, then any particular single "moment" in the past, future or now, is just simply that the universe is changed to a different combination of the atoms and allocation of energy. In order to relive (jsut relive not time travelling yet) the past, we have to find a way to reform the atom combination in the universe to be the same as the moment you want to relive. Given this as the primary condition, there are two way to archieve time travel:

1. We can create brand new universe which has the same atom combination as the time you would like to travel to. and then somehow send youself into the universe. In this case, anything you do in this "past" wont effect "now", because these are two completely different universe. In another word, you in the "past" is entirely another person, but you two are only formed in the same atom combination .

2. We can find a way to reform this present universe to be the same atom combination as before. However this will bring total destruction to the world including yourself and the time machine(you will be destroyed if you already existed in that "past", but all memory experience and so on will be erased), because simple the atoms form you and the time machine were used to form something else in the past. Unless they are restore into previous combination, there is no way to fully go back to the past.

you can break the arguement down to even lower level, but the result is always gonna be the same.

rohde

432

August 11, 2005 07:52 AM

It's just a matter of speed. In 1971 Hafele and Keating showed, by putting atomic clocks into airplanes, that time travel is possible. The results showed that the time ran more slowly in the airplane then in the laboratory. When the experiment was over the airborne clocks was somewhat 60 nanoseconds behind the laboratory clocks.

Now, 60 nanoseconds are not much. But it's just a matter of speed At half the speed of light time is about 13 percent slower, at 99 percent the speed of light it's 7 times slower etc. And of course at the speed of light the warp is infinite; which implies that it's not possible to move at the speed of light.

Of course the feasibility of all this, and the possible physical constraints posed by quantum physics upon time travel is another discussion, but in some sense I consider it quite possible.

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." -Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680). | My blog

cyric74

100

August 11, 2005 07:58 AM

Quote:Original post by jimywang
...Since everything in the world is formed by atoms, then any particular single "moment" in the past, future or now, is just simply that the universe is changed to a different combination of the atoms and allocation of energy...

Exactly. "Time" is a relative term of human perspective. We exist in a constantly changing bundle of matter, and have applied the concept of time as an arbitrary measurement of that change.

To travel back in time is like trying to recreate a tree from the ashes of burned paper. To travel forward in time is like trying to find a blade of grass that used the energy from the ashes of that burned paper to grow--it just doesn't exist yet. There is no past, future, or present--the matter has just changes its configuration, and you have adjusted your perspective to mark this change.

You may view the configurations of matter that have now change because of the nature of light interaction with the human eye. Humans are slow creatures who are always a step behind reality--we have to wait for light and sound to eventually make its way to us before we know what form the matter has taken.

Cyric

The Alchemist

348

August 11, 2005 08:03 AM

Quote:Original post by benryves
Quote:Original post by kSquared
If you believe in the many-worlds interpretation, then time travel is not only feasible but commonplace (at least from the point of view of certain subatomic particles). MWI also solves a lot of the weird killing-your-grandfather-before-you-were-born paradoxes but introduces new paradoxes of a different sort.
...makes a good story, too.

and makes every conscious being completely immortal

"Everything works out in the end, if it doesn't then it is not the end"

time travel is not possible

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