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Hey, hey, come here all of you! I’ve just read in my daily newspaper that a group of scientists have managed to create a working time travel theorem, and that a device to travel through time is a possibility. Although predicting where you’d end up in time is accurate only to the nearest 20 years(!), you just gotta consider the possibility that time travel IS POSSIBLE! Think of all the ‘X-Files’y mysteries that can be solved with this discovery!
At the moment, I am searching the Net for anything connected to the subject. Let’s pray that this is all true, eh? Whaddaya think? If it IS true….
hehe unfortunatly we all time travel constantly
Bad joke. Ill use the layman’est terms I can and not get into quantum.The normal passage of time as we see it is 1 second = 1 second
That’s not constant however. It’s just normal for humans on Earth perception. Time/Space is one piece, this is the most basic and most difficult concept for most people to understand. We only use the word “Time/Space” because it is a best fit, there are many other terms but its best for now. As you move through Space Time the constant 1 second = 1 second falters. At the maximum speed of light in vacuum you can reach up to and never exceed 300,000 klicks per second. At this point; time stands still.
The speed of light is never constant however. In fact we’ve ever observed anything to reach the maximum speed of light, its like Absolute-Zero 0K in that regard. Light has mass, and is affected by gravity therefore can never truly hit L since there is never a true vaccum unaffected by gravity wells.
Ok what does this have to do with Time-Travel?
It’s our first experience with it. Believe it or not when you travel on a Plane from Australia to America, set your watch against a national timepiece. Then when you arrive look if you see a difference. You’ll find you lose an extremely miniscule amount of time. But in effect you have just traveled back in time, or rather slowed the process of time around you albeit fractions of a second.
One reason we cannot understand time travel is that we have no real formula or theorum that explains gravity. Strings, Superstrings, Bubbles, they are all just theory at present.
Finally there’s the problem with how spacetime is affected by un-natural fatigue. In order to actually travel backwards in time significantly you would be required to move the mass of the entire universe, time-space is one piece much like a solid cloth, you can manipulate it but not seperate it. Anything else isnt really time travel but dimensional travel in which you slip from one dimension to an alternate one in a previous state of space time. This deals with Quantum physics. but until there’s a “Theory of Everything” to link the other physics its not worth looking into, as it is we can only build simple binary quantum applications at present. The math is mind boggling and its considered akin to SETI by collegues, and garners very little funding.
Ill look around at work tommarrow to see if I can find some material about the Berkley Project in which a time machine was theorized. Unfortunatly it takes the mass of about 10 neutron stars in a very confined space
ok i have been debating with myself about moving this topic to the “General TV Scifi Stuff” forum. but given the title of the forum and by reviewing the posts there, i feel as though it doesn’t need to be moved. it is “science fiction” as far as we know.
but the topic is not directly related to an actual TV show. so talk it up! 
btw-time travel gives me a headache! hehehe
besides that i do like an occasional conversation devoted to time travel. i do think that this is a very interesting topic. i do have one request though, please keep it fairly simple so us laymen can understand too. Lexxlurker i did understand what you were talking about. i was just talking about the really technical stuff that might not be clear to some of us. if you want to post the techy stuff just please translate it for us. No worries Lexx, I think I got the general gist of what you were trying to say. Pity there isn’t enough funding, guess we sci-fi fans are to blame for that
.Unfortunately, I can’t provide anymore details because I’ve lost the paper wot has the details
. The reason I’m so hopped up about this is because if it’s true, I’ll get to see at least one major breakthrough for humanity in my lifetime. I know, I know, cloning and such, etc. etc., but this will be a breakthrough in a field that really gets me, know what I’m saying? It’ll be something I can relate to. I mean, imagine the scientific and historical possibilities if it were true!Ahh, the joys of rambling
. Personally, I’m not disheartened by the Berkley Project limitation (’10’ neutron stars’, remember?). If I went to the 18th century and mentioned that by using the Sun’s power or a lump of carbon the size of a tennis ball to power a city with ‘electricity’, I’d be laughed out as a madman! So, the best thing to do is simply to hope and pray that this’ll become a reality in our lifetimes. Gives you something to pray about other than wealth and health, doesn’t it?Unfortunately, Lexxlurkers description of the nature of time travel is really the only way it can be described, it’s extremely difficult to explain these things in laymen’s terms (unless it was done in diagrams!!!).
The way physics and it’s laws are at the moment understood to be requiring the actual nature of the universe to be changed, which could be as dangerous as the infamous Higgs Bosen.
Light travels as a constant, although huge natural events like a Black Hole are powerful enough to disrupt light, which has lead a few scientists to believe that time travel may exist by entering a black hole, only problem is nothing can survive the gravimetric force of a Black Hole.
Our perception of time is looked at by the nature of light, another theory is that travelling faster than light would result in time travel, but if that were possible then you would only go in one direction.
I don’t believe the manipulation of light will yield the answer, I think it’s possible to create unatural events by bending or refracting light, but it’s difficult to see how we can affect the universe by mastering light.
At the moment we are still struggling to understand the forces at play in the universe.
But although it sounds far fetched, I think the answer would be to create a tear in space-time, somewhere where the forces of the universe could not impact upon.
This is not impossible, scientists have created a vacuum where no gravity or electro-magnetic behaviour has been observed, they had strived to remove all universal forces from within this area, it was at a microscopic level.
But even after acheiving this, an energy source was registered, no one knows how this energy was being created…it’s called zero point.
The good thing is that they know it’s only a matter of time before they realise where this energy comes from, and once they do they can add another force to be removed.
It’s my belief that if all forces are removed, then this may open up an area that might be able to be controlled.
At the moment we do not have enough information to guess where time travel might come from, and like Lexxlurker said, it may require the energy of the universe to allow time travel…but we simply don’t know.
It’s more difficult because time is man’s invention, it didn’t come as part and parcel of the universe, we created the concept of time to suit our needs, for instance the whole world could throw away our watches and clocks and pretend that time had halted, but in reality nothing has changed, the universe continues it’s actions regardless of what we do.
The same goes for light, we could change an area of light, but it would not affect the universe as a whole.
It could be possible to affect the laws that govern the Earth, if you created a large enough area where the universe’s forces couldn’t affect it, then it could do something spectacular, but without the forces of the universe the planet would die and us with it.
It’s difficult to see how anything could survive or be acheived, as any area that could exist outside of the universe could not be monitored from the inside, placing anything in this area would disrupt it, as you have entered something that is part of the universe.
Like if you created a bubble of an area that has no universal forces at play, would it continue to exist?, or would it just destroy the experiment.
You could look at it from the outside, but the most you could hope for is that your instruments have measured that area correctly by telling you that all universal forces had been removed, without actually being in there you would not what was happening, if there was a way of stabilizing long enough for a human being to enter it, then if it was possible for someone to see from the inside out, then maybe they could view time, but even if it were so then they would have no control of how they viewed it.
But then you might be able to affect the bubble from the outside, maybe cresting a bubble inside an intensfied field that combined all the universe’s major forces might influence the nature of that bubble.
But then not only do you have to find a way to introduce a human into this enviroment, in which they could not survive, but also get them into that bubble, where again it’s possible they wouldn’t survive.
The theory is because of what we know, we now know that matter and anti-matter does exist, and with everything in the universe there is a positive and negative at work, therefore an area that you could describe as a bubble (positive) universe (no attributes in our universe could be allowed to exist) would have it’s partner in our (the negative) universe, and that the greater power one has over the other, the more it could be influenced in how it behaves.
Squishy
quote:
Originally posted by LexxLurker:
At the maximum speed of light in vacuum you can reach up to and never exceed 300,000 klicks per second. At this point; time stands still.
It stands still only to the observer moving that fast, but time still moves at the 1 sec=1 sec for a causual onlooker. When the object stops moving at light speed it would appear to them as if they hadn’t aged and that they travel foward in time instanteously.
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The speed of light is never constant however.
It changes based only on the medium it’s moving through. The denser the medium, the slower it moves. This is becasue the photons are captured/absorbed by the matter in the medium, then emmited (albeit lower energy) from that same matter moments later. Becasue of this, matter can move faster then light in certain mediums(not all mass can be as easily abosorbed, as a matter of fact neutrons get absorbed less the faster they move). This is evident by the Cherenkov(sp?) Radiation. Or the blue glow we see in US reactors and cobalt cells. Conversely its a purple glow in Canada, and yellow-green in UK and many European reactors. The color is dictated by the medium the neutrons or matter is moving through.
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Light has mass,
This is debateable, but the general conception is that it is massless.
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and is affected by gravity therefore can never truly hit L since there is never a true vaccum unaffected by gravity wells.
Light travels in a straight line at the speed for its medium. However in gravity wells, a straight line isn’t always straight. Imagine taking a bed sheet, draw a straight line accross it. Now hold all four corners of the bed sheet taunght above the ground. Place a bowling ball in the center, the bedsheet will bend in on the ball and, the straight line will curve in toward the bowling ball as well. This is the effect gravity/mass has on light.
In the case of black-holes, light it still moving at light speed, but he curviture of space, and the speed at which space itself moves (a duo-effect), is greater then the speed at which light can move.Further more if it were possible to travel back in time, this technology should never be used! Perhaps not even shortly back in time(a la Seven Days). The chaos theory (butterfly effect) shows that even a small change can have huge changes down the line.
***
From personal expereince, I have two freinds whom I met 2 years ago. The path to meet them was not easy. A lot of bad things had to have happened to me in order for me to have gone out that night, and by luck have met them. While I wish that many of those bad things never happened to me, I know that if they didn’t, I would have never met thse two people. In the long run, I’m happy that the discomfort I was put through for a while wound up turning out so well. G-d works in mysterious ways.
***
How does this affect limited time travel in the sense of 7 days. Imagine the 9/11 attacks. Sure we all want those events to have never happened. But it was those events that cuased us to bomb Afganistan foward to the bronze age. This “War on Terror” (even thoughit only affects American Terrorm not that of other countries per se) has hampered al-queida. If we hadn’t taken them out now, then perhaps in a few years they would have gotten their hands on a nuke, and utterly destroyed a major city, killing millions or hundreds of thousands, instead of several thousand as was the case on the 11th. One could argue that the adminstartion could have just bombed the hell out of Afghanistan, without an attack. But we all know that, no president would act without provocation like that. The american public, and international governmetns wouldn’t support such a war.
In conclusion, we should not time travel for any reason, the consequences are to unpredictable to comprehend.Ah, but have you considered the fact that by travelling back in time, you are doing something in the past? I know it’s obvious, but what is more obvious, is that you’ve done something in the past! In other words, what you were about to do, was already done!
Confused?
Imagine you went back in time to change history, but the actions you take, have already done, therefore, instead of changing history, you’ll be ENSURING it. Forget chaos theory, because from what I’ve seen, the universe loves order and rhythm (night and day, life and death, chocolate ice cream and potatoe(sic) chips), thus, instead of chaos, you’d reinforce the universe’s law and order. Think of that?
From yesterday’s NY Times:
Here’s my favorite part:
“Dr. Davies recapitulates some fundamental principles of time and relativity and then shows how they could apply to a hypothetical time machine.
Readers may be disappointed by some of his conclusions. For example, he guesses that it is impossible to travel further back in time than the instant at which the would-be traveler created a time machine; in other words, we’ll never get to visit the dinosaurs.”Hmph.
elmey
quote:
Originally posted by Son Of Bester:
Imagine you went back in time to change history, but the actions you take, have already done, therefore, instead of changing history, you’ll be ENSURING it.
Your assumign that we are living in a non-first order world-line. In other words you assume that the events of the futures have already taken place, and therefore affect our world line. I and many others don’t hold this true, so by traveling into the past your create a new world line, the old one would contuinue without you. This is one way that alternate universes could be made up. Alternate unioverses or timelines is a whole otehr topic.
So far everything we know says that time travel is impossible or INFINITLY DIFFICULT to perform; and I like it that way.Headgehog quote:
——————————————————————————–
Originally posted by Son Of Bester:
Imagine you went back in time to change history, but the actions you take, have already done, therefore, instead of changing history, you’ll be ENSURING it.
——————————————————————————–Your assumign that we are living in a non-first order world-line. In other words you assume that the events of the futures have already taken place, and therefore affect our world line. I and many others don’t hold this true, so by traveling into the past your create a new world line, the old one would contuinue without you. This is one way that alternate universes could be made up. Alternate universes or timelines is a whole other topic.
that is the conundrum. do we by traveling back in time just do what has already been done, does it change our history, or does it split off into different timelines. this is what causes my headaches when i discuss timetravel!!!! LOL please keep discussing timetravel. i have a whole bottle of Tylenol available for anyone else who gets headaches from the topic of timetravel! LOL
btw Elmey that was a very interesting article you posted. i found it fascinating that time moves slower at higher elevations!
Philosophical Perspectives On Time Travel
http://web.mit.edu/~bnickel/www/timetravel/%5B/url%5D
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/%5B/url%5D
[ 25-04-2002: Message edited by: bonnee ]
Bonnee thank you for the links. i haven’t finished all of the material, but it is all fascinating! but i do have a problem with one of the topics posted on the MIT site. it is the one called “When Mischievous Idiots Travel in Time”. the author Adam Elga made 2 errors in his topic desciption. he only missed putting a space in between two separate words twice. as i see it someone who has been allowed into MIT should be able to proofread his own work and would notice these obvious errors! i mean it is MIT! these are the geniuses of our time and the ones that are supposed to take us into the future with their technical knowledge. but if they can’t be bothered to proofread something they wrote for a website then why would i think that they would actually think twice about reviewing their plans for a new sort of spaceship for exploration into outer-space! and whoever is responsible for the site should have caught those errors!
i am sorry for getting off topic about this but i just find it infuriating that this happened. there is a whole lots of difference between posting on a BB and posting an article on a website, especially a MIT website! i expect much more from our geniuses at MIT!!!but i have been enjoying the other posts and the other link for Stanford!
sorry for getting so heated about this. 
i just feel as though someone who has made it to MIT should at least try a little harder to make sure his articles are grammatically correct! You all really have too much time on your hands. Ha-ha!! Geddit? Too much TIME?
This is a discussion about TIME, hhehehheh … ah, stupid. *runs off as everyone else pelts her with empty Coke bottles*Mary Beth – LOL Lucky, most of the MIT articles are justabstracts.
The Stanford entry is possibly the best available overview of the philosophical problems, although it gets increasingly difficult. The opening paragraph is hilarious though – and a must read! The MIT ‘topics’ are therefore thought best as merely a preparatory for it, and are simply included for that reason. Meanwhile, nothing can prepare us for the following famous argument in philosophy regarding the non existence of time
http://dna2z.com/projects/time.html[ 25-04-2002: Message edited by: bonnee ]
Great links bonnee MAH MAN(or woman)! On another note, I am rather buffed up at the response to this post, not only from the Chaosmen (those who believe in chaos theory-no offense Headgehog, I just think the name’s cool
), but true science wonks like LexxLurker and Squishy. Even my sister, under the name FreakyDragon posted. All walks of life, man!Personally, I still think that the innate order that the universe contains would not let us make too many changes. Have you considered that our timeline may even depend upon our ‘meddling’ in it?
That said, I share mary beth’s enthusiasm for the topic, and as long as no one gets too uncivil, the more the merrier! Come one come all!
Wow! Wadda lot of intelligent peeps in the pub today!
Hey!? Who’s taken my drink!?
It was me Saddy, and you can’t have it back !
Runs away giggling.~Nirvanah stops giggling as soon as she takes a drink and finds out it’s just coloured water. Meanwhile, I take a drink from Saddy’s glass, the one I took from him earlier with the help of my time machine and I spark a chain of events that will lead to the construction of Babylon 5 200-odd years from now, which proves my point of time travel somewhat~
Ahh, refreshing.
HAHAHA! LOL! Son of Bester that is some time-traveling i can get into! Why thank you milady, glad you enjoyed it
!Back to the topic at hand though, before it turns into a discussion on potatoe (sic) chips (aw, come on, time travel ain’t that boring!), I’ve considered a few interesting questions, though. What if previous human accomplishments were actually the result of time travelers medling in the timeline? This may explain all of the ‘X-Files’y mysteries I’ve mentioned earlier, dontcha think?
Actually, that was the point I was trying to make earlier, and I apologise if my rambling got in the way.
All right, apologies out of the way, I’ll resume.
For example, UFO theorists have mentioned a Biblical prophet (Elijah, I believe, forgive me if I’m wrong) ascending to the sky on wheels of fire (again, forgive me if I’m wrong) and saying that this is proof that Elijah was some alien being serving his master who was identified with God. What if, instead, Elijah WAS a prophet chosen by God, but from the future where time travel was a reality?
I once read in the Fortean Times about hierloglyphs in certain Egyptian pyramids looking extremely similar to modern helicopters and tanks. There was even a submarine, bloody hell!
If you aren’t into that sort of thing, then could you at least consider the possibility that some of man’s scientific advances may have been made possible through time travel? I do not imply direct interference by a chrononaut, but maybe indirect influencing. I’ll try to make my point clearer as soon as I get a little time to think about it more, sorry for the inconvenience
.In one way, we’re travelling through time already. This is one of the most recently released Hubble Photos:
“One image, of a colliding galaxy 420 million light-years away, showed the large spinning body of stars disrupted by a smaller one. Scientists named the large galaxy Tadpole, because the collision resulted in its having a tail of stars and dust stretching 280,000 light-years long.
In the same image beyond Tadpole is a red dot, not seen in previous images of that part of the sky, that is a faint red galaxy formed when the universe was one billion years old, Dr. Ford said.
“We are now looking back in time to when the universe was young, seeing light from processes that happened billions of years ago,”Another quote from NYT Article (better than anything I could say):
“For what the Hubble cameras show us, especially in their new incarnation, is time itself. The distance of the distant objects in these images is measured as much by their relative youth, by how far back in time we must peer to see them, as by their distance measured in a spatial dimension. By now it sounds almost natural to say that among the objects revealed in these new images are galaxies that were formed when the universe was only a billion years old. It sounds natural until you really think about it, and then, swiftly, the scale of the Hubble revolution becomes apparent. It has taught us to see the properties of a universe humans have been able, for most of their history, to probe only with their thoughts.”
Seeing 13 billion years into the past–now there’s something to try to wrap your mind around!
If you haven’t had a chance to see the Hubble photos released last week, here’s the link (they’re truly amazing!): thanks for the great site Elmey! that was some fascinating pics!
and it is also fascinating that the images in the pictures are millions or billions of years! yes i agree that this is a very interesting take on the time-travel topic! so would this mean that time-travel in our galaxy would be just for us or would other galaxies be involved in the time shift? if and when we do find a way to “travel beyond the stars” would that change the face of the universe so to speak. how could we travel in time when it only affected a small part of the universe? or would it affect the whole universe? arrrrg!!!! where is that bottle of Tylenol? Unfortunately you can’t relate time travel or it’s possibilities to the hubble pics, yes we are looking at pics that shows a galaxy or star when it was only a billion years old, but that’s because the light sent from that star has taken billions of years to reach us.
If we were right next to it, we would have experienced it in it’s natural course of time, I can’t see light being manipulated as anyway of succeeding in time travel.
It’s like when we sent a message out via radiowaves for the first time, by the time it reaches another galaxy with life, we may well be extinct for over a billion years.
No one can quite comprehend just how big the universe is, we’d be lucky if we managed to map our own galaxy within the next million years.
But the hubble pics are fascinating, and with it’s ever increasing range, we may even see the big bang, the pic like shown above is a breadcrumb on it’s trail, it being a billion years in the birth of the universe is actually quite close.
But I still believe that affecting light will not give us an insight into time travel, light is to linear, you really have to think on how much you can do to change light, they call light, lightwaves, because that’s what they are, it emanates from a source radiating outward, it’s impossible to get light to change it’s properties in nature…it does what it does.
Squishyquote:
Originally posted by Squishy:
No one can quite comprehend just how big the universe is, we’d be lucky if we managed to map our own galaxy within the next million years.
There are three views of the size of the universe (in general terms). One says the universe is infinite, anohter says that the universe is huge! really really huge but finite. The last says that its really big
and finite, but its “clsoed” or self contained, such that if you moved in a straight line in any direction you will eventually end up back where you started. (Thats teh really simplified version, but there other parts to it that suggests that whilein theory you could get back to your origin, but otehr factors, like the expansion of spacetime or a an infinite universe (from our standpoint) would make that journey uncompleteable.
Our galaxy is very nearly mapped out. Or at least that is what all the astronomy prof down here keep telling me. Years ago one problem with mapping out he galaxy is that the galactic cores brightness, keeps the light from the stars on the other side of the galaxy from reaching us. A prof down here solved that by proposing to look for the radio signals from these stars. And sicne the galactic cores radio signals can be filtered out from that of the stars, (the hubble shift isn’t so extreme for the core) this results in getting a star map of the other side of the galaxy. This has been goign on at two radiotelescopes, one in Norway(?) or maybe Sweden or Finland (those countires all seemt he same to me) and anotehr telescope somewhere in the southern hemisphere. (I can’t remembr the country)quote:
Originally posted by Headgehog:
There are three views of the size of the universe (in general terms). One says the universe is infinite, anohter says that the universe is huge! really really huge but finite. The last says that its really big
and finite, but its “clsoed” or self contained, such that if you moved in a straight line in any direction you will eventually end up back where you started. (Thats teh really simplified version, but there other parts to it that suggests that whilein theory you could get back to your origin, but otehr factors, like the expansion of spacetime or a an infinite universe (from our standpoint) would make that journey uncompleteable.
Our galaxy is very nearly mapped out. Or at least that is what all the astronomy prof down here keep telling me. Years ago one problem with mapping out he galaxy is that the galactic cores brightness, keeps the light from the stars on the other side of the galaxy from reaching us. A prof down here solved that by proposing to look for the radio signals from these stars. And sicne the galactic cores radio signals can be filtered out from that of the stars, (the hubble shift isn’t so extreme for the core) this results in getting a star map of the other side of the galaxy. This has been goign on at two radiotelescopes, one in Norway(?) or maybe Sweden or Finland (those countires all seemt he same to me) and anotehr telescope somewhere in the southern hemisphere. (I can’t remembr the country)
I can’t imagine that we’ve even come close to mapping the milky way, but I don’t know this for sure, given the incredible size of the galaxy, with it’s stars being so numerous, I can’t see it being done.
I recently watched a programme where they claimed they’d only scratched a small surface, they were using a telescope and computers to map the night sky, but I’m pretty sure they said it was gonna take longer than their lifetimes or ours for it to be completed.
I know that telescopes, particularly Hubble, was now able to peer beyond our own galaxy, so I guess the fact they have moved beyond it lends credence to the galaxy almost being mapped.
Squishy bubbles are my thinking. like bubbles of thought.
entanglement comes in to play, no?
secondly, as the surface tensions are equalised over the sphere, relative to the greater scheme of things (the centre of the sphere being the assumed centre of inertial reference.) and the out is exempt from time, so travel would be relative to distance from the point being traveled to…
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