Time Travel
Ice9
Join Date: 2004-06-09 Member: 29208Members
Join Date: 2004-06-09 Member: 29208Members
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">No, Not One Of Those...</div> You may think this document is worthless, but everything has a history behind it. With out a history, there simply is nothing. This document will now transfer from a brief history to an opinion. Everything has a history. You can't change anything in the past, only the future. There is, thus, no way to travel into the past - only the future. In the future, if there is a way to travel into an even further future, there is no way back to the past. There is no way to reverse anything really fast. You will understand this after reading the following paragraph.
To travel into the future, there is no black holes you need to travel into, no worm holes interupting the space time continuum. You need to travel extremely fast, faster than the fastest thing. Right now, it's probably gravity itself, maybe energy. Basing this on gravity, you need to travel faster than gravity to experience time travel. You can't really go backwards, because you'll still be moving that fast. There is no way to reverse speed, traveling in negatives. Just like you can't reverse a light. Flashlights are called that because they flash lights where you point them. There is no such thing as a "flashdark" because you can't flash a shadow, or darkness, onto something without reversing light. You can't reverse gravity, so you can't travel into the past.
To travel into the future, there is no black holes you need to travel into, no worm holes interupting the space time continuum. You need to travel extremely fast, faster than the fastest thing. Right now, it's probably gravity itself, maybe energy. Basing this on gravity, you need to travel faster than gravity to experience time travel. You can't really go backwards, because you'll still be moving that fast. There is no way to reverse speed, traveling in negatives. Just like you can't reverse a light. Flashlights are called that because they flash lights where you point them. There is no such thing as a "flashdark" because you can't flash a shadow, or darkness, onto something without reversing light. You can't reverse gravity, so you can't travel into the past.
Comments
(don't remember where i read it so i can't back it up <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/wink-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink-fix.gif' /><!--endemo--> )
Some believe that time is static, meaning that if you went back in time and changed something, it was bound to be changed anyway (you can't say, go back in time and change anything unless part of the past includes you changing something).
The other is dynamic, meaning you could go to the past and change the future (more typical sci-fi time travel idea).
So you believe in either one of those and then one or more of the following:
Past/Future Relatism - Simply means that the past has a direct affect on the present and future. Typical past alters future theory.
Future/Past Relatism - A little bit harder concept to grasp, but it basically means the past has to change according to how the future will turn out (if you could go into the future and change something, the past would have to alter to make it possible).
It touches a bit on fate and such. Some people think the future is not even written yet, but I believe that it is all static and interrelated. Even if you could go back in time, I think we would have already known about it happening. I mean, if you could time travel, wouldn't you go back in time and visit yourself? If that's true, then you would have already known at an early age that you would be a time traveler.
It might help to think of it like this: you have two universes, A and 1. Both universes are static, meaning that their entire history, from big bang to big crunch (or whatever), is locked in stone. However, at some point in A's history a man invents timetravel, lets call him Bob. So Bob, seeking to bring a live specimin of the extinct Dodo to the present, fires up his time machine and disapears from A. Bob may, or may not, ever be seen in A again (i'll get to that). Bob arrives in 1, picks up a dodo and leaves. "But wait!" you say, how could Bob have changed 1's past if it was locked in stone? The answer of course is that nothing changed, universe 1's history has always been exactly the same as A's, until the point where a man appears out of nowhere, grabs a Dodo, and misteriously vanishes. Now, however, there are two things that could happen to Bob, depending on how the time machine works, he could end up in the present time Universe A, he could end up in the slightly different present time of Universe 1, or he could wind up in a completely different universe which is either exactly like A except for the sudden arrival of Bob from nowhere shortly after he disapeared, or exaclty like 1 except for the sudden appearance of Bob several hundred years after his sudden arrival and departure.
Of course, in the end, this is all worthless speculation. As far as humanity knows Time travel could be entirely impossible, or it could be happening all the time without us noticing, we just don't know enough about physics to say for sure, and we may not know for a <b>very</b> long time. Which brings up an interesting point made by the man claiming to be from 2036: what if time travelers really are visiting the past, and really are being observed doing so, But humanity has changed so much by the time we invented time travel that we don't recognize the travelers, and people who see them are called crazy because they see things that they can't explain, and are indeed considered impossible by modern standards?
Well, I think I've rambled enough for one evening.
This is best explained by example.
Let us consider that a frog sitting somewhere in a jungle has evolved a genetic flaw, or mutation, that alters it's perceptions such that it views them not as they are now but as they were 3 seconds prior (damn laggy universe).
Since this frog has been furnished with a survival malus, that of not being able to determine where it's prey is at the right time, the frog hence dies and it's faulty genes are never passed on.
What does this have to do with time? Simple. Natural selection has tooled us to percieve "time" in a fashion that is most effective for survival.
We pericieve a "now" "flowing" from the "past" to the "future", all furnished by Natural Selection as the most effective method for survival.
However, there is a flaw with this reasoning.
Consider a river. It flows from upstream, to your position, and then downstream and eventually into an ocean or lake. The main constituent of this reasoning is that time allows the river to flow from these respective states.
Now, when you apply this to time, what does time flow with respect to? Unless you can prove that there is a kind of supertime that time flows to I'm afraid that times flow is a logical error, and in any case, a supertime must also flow according to something thus leading on into a mortal coil (read: absurdity).
Also consider that Special Relativity doesn't allow for a "flowing" of time. It's simply another dimension of the 4 dimension view (3 of space and one of time).
This lends weight to a fatalistic view of the universe. Everything has been laid down since the dawn of time. You were meant to make that spelling error, notice the mistake and fix it. If you ponder whether you were meant to correct it or not you were clearly meant to stop and think because every interaction in the universe has lead up to and beyond that point.
You may think that you have free will but under this system you really dont, though the illusion of free will remains it is sufficient for us to get us to sleep at night. If you see your future however, you remove the illusion and consign yourself to needless worrying which was doubtlessly meant to happen since everything is nailed in stone (a very hard combination).
Now, onto more brain cracking.
Consider the concept of "Now".
Now on planet Earth is not necessarily Now on planet Xi Omicron 5 (known locally as KZTHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! [Hey, gotta add some kind of unfunny humour in {whoah, too many brackets, gotta get back to the damn post}]) and in neither location is it exactly the same Now experienced in the galactic center.
So, if time is essentially meaningless what is this thing I call memory and this perception that I will wake up with a headache tomorrow from too much abstracted thinking?
Consider us as if we were computers. We handle information, store it, process it, etc etc.
We take in perceptions from the senses and through introspection and abstracted thought by finding relationships and such (donking myself on the head will hurt. Alot). This all initially comes into the frontal lobes, the equivalent of which, I'd hazard, would be the CPU.
Sensory memories are dumped soon after they are sensed. Remarkable, or important things are shunted off to short/long term memory.
Now, how does this tie in with time?
We are concious of the present, of the now. We are "right here, right now" so to speak. We remember what has once occurred, the past. We are not directly concious of the past, it is remembered, recorded, but not experienced (I dont experience my first ride on a rollercoaster, I remember it).
It is the passage of this information, from one form of memory (sensory) to another (short/long) that gives us a kind of perception of time.
This is perfectly analoguous with Einsteins spacetime so long as you translate flow of information into flow of time.
Past and future become different qualitatively. The past is remembered, the future is predicted (based on past information presumably) and the present is experienced.
The past directly affects the future. This is self evident but past information can affect the flow of the future. IE; I hurled when I rode on the roller coaster 5 years ago, therefore I shall not ride on this rollercoaster (past information has altered a decision under the illusion of free will).
I think I've blabbered on enough for now. Biology affects our perception of time as much as physics does. Relativity does not make concessions for past present future or now since they are essentially meaningless when taken on high speeds approaching that of light or vast distances. If we view the universe as a gigantic computer altering data then our perception of time is that data being altered by the process. The past is recorded data already altered by the process, the now is the process in action as percieved by you and the future is data waiting for the process to alter it.
Ultimately we will never understand time in any respective manner because we are limited to our perceptions of it, by our biology.
If(Cronos == Blabbering)
{
cronos_shutup.Protocol();
Slapself++;
}
people have a wierd imagination of time travel. Time travel is easy, I do it all the time, its pointless though you just get older more quickly.
4 bottles of robitussin
Drink one after the other and don your time travel gear. Sit down and get ready to depart.
Robitussin is actually quite toxic. Follow usage guidelines as printed on the bottle(s). Unless you want your liver to explode. Robitrippin is not good for you. Do not abuse the 'tussin.
In it, it said that chaos is growing in the universe. Entropy is the right term. According to probabilities, there are a tremendous amount of chaotic "states" that glass can be in, however there are very few orderly states it can be in (namely to be in the shape of a drinking glass for example).
You knock the drinking glass from the table and it easily shatters into one of these chaotic states. This action produces kinetic energy, friction, sound energy and a number of other energies into the universe. In order to place it back to its orderly state, it must be melted (heat energy) and then transfered into its shape (kinetic) and then lifted back onto the table (potential).
So in the end, more energy is released going to chaotic or orderly states, though it is far easier to go into chaotic states. Likewise, when the brain creates memories, heat energy is released as a byproduct. This is the way entropy flows.. the universe expands, therefore entropy increases.
Some believe that if the universe began to collapse, there would be far less chaotic states and far more orderly states. Drinking glasses would literally jump onto the table repaired and good as new. Likewise, we would lose heat to make memories, so our brains would work differently than they do now. They would no longer be memories, but insights of the future of the things.
So as far as that goes, time is an illusion, viewed by a brain which can only see the past, but exists in the past present and future at once.
4 bottles of robitussin
Drink one after the other and don your time travel gear. Sit down and get ready to depart.
Robitussin is actually quite toxic. Follow usage guidelines as printed on the bottle(s). Unless you want your liver to explode. Robitrippin is not good for you. Do not abuse the 'tussin. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
I nearly killed myself doing that mate, dont ever smoke the magic tobbacco while your on it.
no joke
Past/Future Relatism - Simply means that the past has a direct affect on the present and future. Typical past alters future theory.
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Whats the difference here, or is it that the first one is just a broader theory that includes the second one?
Does that explain it better?
Does that explain it better? <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yup thanks, thats what I thought u ment but I just wanted to be sure,
Time travel is one of those topics I always like to read up about. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
...You need to travel extremely fast, faster than the fastest thing. Right now, it's probably gravity itself, maybe energy. Basing this on gravity, you need to travel faster than gravity to experience time travel. You can't really go backwards, because you'll still be moving that fast. There is no way to reverse speed, traveling in negatives.
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Gravity is a force, not a speed, and it travels in the form of Gravitons, at the speed of light.
Energy travels in many ways, (in fact, anything that travels carrys energy,) and the fastest moving things have the most energy, and the things with lots of energy tend to be moving very fast. However energy itself cannot be said to be "the fastest thing"
Travelling at the speed of light does wierd and wonderful things to time and physics, possibly to do with timetravel. Move faster than light, and you see the light from something in the future. It is, of course, not possible to move faster than light without a negative mass or some other near-totally incomprehensible interpretation of Einstein.
Speed is a scalar quanitiy, so it cannot be negative. However you can have a negative velocity...
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Future/Past Relatism - A little bit harder concept to grasp, but it basically means the past has to change according to how the future will turn out (if you could go into the future and change something, the past would have to alter to make it possible).
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If you change the future why does it become necessary for the past to facilitate this change? Unless of course you are from the future, and changing something which will then effect how you exist in the "past". Unfortunately english grammar lacks past-futre and future-past forms of verbs, so continuing this logic would be impossible to describe. (Bring on Douglas Adam's H2G2 tenses!)
Hawkeye, your post on chaos was a good read. However why should the roles of physics be reversed one the Big Crunch begins? (I am not a fan of this "closed" universe theory, but hey.) There is no reason (AFAIK,) why the universe tends to chaos; it just does. In every chemical reaction, in every movement of particles and flow of charge, entropy governs motion. Ironically, this knowledge of how the universe likes to be chaotic allows us to predict a lot of things too.
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I digress. The Big Crunch theory comes into play when gravity is a little too strong for the universe; the rate of expansion of the universe does seem to be decreasing, so there is evidence for this. (Blue/red shift, but this is hard to judge, as we do not know where the "centre" of the universe is, nor the speed we are travelling away from it.)
So when everything does start collapsing, I dont think there would be any dramatic change in the laws of physics; although admitedly it's an neat concept.
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Cronos,
As I understand it, time is not linear. There is no direct link between past, present, and future. Even so, it is US that are progessing along time. We move relative to IT. There is a smallest unit of time. I think it's 10^-42 seconds. Anything smaller than this is not possible. (Yeah, try wording that... :S) So time is simply a path consisting of 10^-42 second paving slabs, which we wander across, wasting about a quintrillion of them reading posts like these. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Oh if your looking for that research you can find the report <a href='http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996303' target='_blank'>here</a>
but space is enlarging at an expanding rate, due to the amount of "dark matter" increasing...
and to get back on topic:
Once u do not percept time, u have reached your answer.
ponder what i said but do not try to do so
Although it may seem that way, words don't denote the emphasis behind the idea or thought, generally speaking.
Entropy is always increasing, so why should we presume it will always work this way? Likewise, time flows towards the future, so why is it always this way? Is it conceivable that something might cause a shift in motion and things might reverse themselves? Seems like a very hard concept to grasp (not excluding myself for that matter).
You want to hear what entropy is in a nutshell? You take a bag and a bunch of puzzle pieces. You shake it and then you open it up and see what is inside. Now there are an almost infinite number of states that those pieces can be in other than the state that is where the puzzle pieces are entirely assembled and orderly. So what are the odds that if you shake it that the puzzle will come together? Number of states in which the puzzle is assembled (1 state) divided by the number of total states it can be in (ridiculously large number). So yes, according to entropy laws, it is *POSSIBLE* to shake a bag full of puzzle pieces and have them assemble themselves for you, simply not likely (in fact we've observed the behavior so long for things to act in a predictable way, that we think it is not even possible).
Everything works like this. If there were only two possible states (like flipping a coin), then the odds of it being heads for example increases tremendously. All it is is just measuring the total amount of possibilities. That is a little impossible to do accurately, so we cannot do it.
I'm sort of touching a little off topic, but this is the idea behind entropy. The thought processes is that when the universe begins to collapse, things will come together, and the behavior will be that chaotic states are in the minority, thus making orderly states more prevalent and more "possible" to happen.
Steven Hawking talked about this quite a bit in a brief history of time. He said that the expansion of the universe, the rate of entropy, and the way our minds "remember" things is all dependent upon each other (can't have one thing change and not change the other two). Interesting stuff really. <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
In it, it said that chaos is growing in the universe. Entropy is the right term. According to probabilities, there are a tremendous amount of chaotic "states" that glass can be in, however there are very few orderly states it can be in (namely to be in the shape of a drinking glass for example).
You knock the drinking glass from the table and it easily shatters into one of these chaotic states. This action produces kinetic energy, friction, sound energy and a number of other energies into the universe. In order to place it back to its orderly state, it must be melted (heat energy) and then transfered into its shape (kinetic) and then lifted back onto the table (potential).
So in the end, more energy is released going to chaotic or orderly states, though it is far easier to go into chaotic states. Likewise, when the brain creates memories, heat energy is released as a byproduct. This is the way entropy flows.. the universe expands, therefore entropy increases.
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Isn't this the 1st law of thermodynamics? "things naturally go from a state of order to a state of disorder"
*hyjack*
apply to evolution
*/hyjack*
Ah! I see. lol, took me a while to see what youy were getting at with evolution. No, evolution does not happen that way. It does become more chaotic, but the random changes that occur die off unless they provide a survival advantage. (Or, more precisely, DO NOT provide a DISADVANTAGE.)
See the news about the protein found in the population of an Italian island that prevents heart disease / failure? It catylses the break down of fats in arteries.
Exciting stuff. <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
but space is enlarging at an expanding rate, due to the amount of "dark matter" increasing...
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Also irrelevant, but wanted to correct this point. Space continues to enlarge because of increasing "dark energy". If dark matter continued to increase, then so would the amount of mass in the universe, and eventually gravity would cause the universe's collapse.
Might be a tad off the general discussion here, but I just had to know... <!--emo&::nerdy::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/nerd-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='nerd-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
However, I think that the universe is not expanding faster at all. If you take a balloon and put two dots on it and then expand the balloon.. what happens to the two points? They get further apart. Not only this, but they get further apart at an exponential rate as the balloon expands at the same rate.
This is what is happening to our universe. We're already on the outside of the universe believe it or not, like the outside of a balloon. As you head towards the middle, you are moving inwards towards time and forward in time if you go outwards. If you continue in one direction, you will eventually come back to where you were. It all makes sense. There is no "center" of the universe unless you are referring to the big bang at the start of everything. Not only did the big bang start the universe, it also started time.
Heavy things pull inwards towards the center (ever so slightly). This explains gravity. I believe gravity is just a result of heavy objects in the wake of a huge expanding sphere accelerating past it. Heavy things are sort of dragged along with it. Black holes are tremendously heavy and might even sink back to the big bang (so in a way you'd be time traveling).
This is my humble theory of time, the universe, and everything.
But things are still at our "current" time on that star as we see it's light from the past.
Even if the universe does start to come back to a big crunch, that's just the way that everything is moving now, it's still forward as far as time is concerned.
Moving backwards in time means that you have to reverse EVERY force in the universe simultaneously whilst keeping a "bubble" that you exist in subject to normal forces. Even if someone achieved this effect, without this bubble interacting with the rest of the universe, the reversal of time won't be the same as you think it should be, the materials that make up you and your time machine will not be participating in the reversal. To bring the point home, consider if you got a long metal rod for part of your machine from an old ford pickup truck, when time rolls back far enough for that truck to be in use, that rod won't be in the truck. BROKEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Recently I've come to understand that free will is in-fact an illusion (still a very cool illusion, mind you) and that the laws of physics are entirely arbitrary. There is some lowest level of physical interaction that will NEVER be explained. No matter how simple that lowest level is, there will be no explanation for it.
The rest of this post is just about the whole universal expansion speeding up, so if you only care about time travel, skip it.
Universal expansion is speeding up, but not because of dark matter.....
Consider a star giving off light and gravity. And now consider two scenarios.
1. All of that has *some* mass, nomatter how immeasurably small. Assuming that light and gravity are equally distributed in all directions and that they don't have an accelerative force applied to get them going in that direction (since the speed of light is apparently static [which I don't personally believe], that means attaining this speed cannot be obtained through acceleration)
2. This light or gravity *used* to be part of the mass and is now just energy (and has no mass), that is just lost mass.
In either scenario, this star would just lose mass without losing it's momentive force. And conservation of momentum states that when an object loses mass to the nethervoid funnel of doom, that it will speed up.
I don't appreciate being flamed. I don't have a boring job. You don't have to agree. It's not psychology, it's physics that made me realize it.
Take a perfectly rigid stick. Push on one end to displace it 1 inch. The other inch will move instantaneously. To get a better idea, imagine if this stick were 1 light year long. Push one end and the other moves, the light from your hand would still take 1 year to reach the other end. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Another idea. If free will is a myth, then every decision must occur due to the sum of events leading up to that decision. However, it then must be assumed that it is possible to predict the outcome of such a decision if the preceding events are known. Knowing these preceding events, it must be possible to theorize what decisions will be made in the future. With the knowledge of what decisions will be made in the future would it then be possible to alter that decision?
Or would you have to take into account that your knowledge of the future decision is a factor in your decision to alter your future decision and thus it isn't really a decision but the end result of an equation that relies on the fact that you have knowledge of your future decisions?
Assuming it were possible to have a material so rigid, maybe you would be right.
Assuming it were possible to have a material so rigid, maybe you would be right. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
I know. I just posted it as a goofy thought exercise.