The thought on time travel

[bathory]

Side note: Time paradoxes are a stupid idea...any change that a time traveler has, or will ever make to the past has already occured  a paradox is impossible, because if any change was made (say someone went back in time and succeeded in assassinating Hitler) then Hitler's face would not currently be in our history books.

yup, and all would be peachy until we go upto the events that led to someone being sent back, noone gets sent back, so hitler would still have existed, someone kills him, noone kils him, someone kills him etc etc

that is assuming that time requires the cause from the future.

[the rune guardian]

The reson going back in time isn't posible is becose if you ga back and say kill hitler then you will never be born meaning that you can't go back in time to kill him the moment you change the past you change the futher and thus your self and the time travel would have gone differntly as for time traveling to the future that is posible.

Time is bend as you aproche the speed of light going slower and slower until it stops (probebly at light speed) meaning that if you would have a shutle that could go the light speed that the reletive time would be slower for you as for the rest of the universe meaning that in 2 seconds of time you could have traveld 200 years for instans.

(time does exist how can you bent it if it doesn't exist??? )

As for the 100 light years away looking at earth that is the same as looking at a star. if you look at a star you see it as it was X years ago where X is the number of light yeas it is away becose that is howlong the light traveld to get here.

it is like a hot air baloon if you seen one flying and the turn on the flame you wil first see the flame and a second later you will hear the sound this is becose of the distance between you and the baloon. so you are hearing a sound from the past.

[secondhand]

I'm not sure about the whole thing. Perhaps paradoxes are impossible for a different reason? To use the Hitler example, perhaps you could go back in time again and again to assassinate him, but every time you would fail. Perhaps the past is set and there's no changing it, but the future isn't. Like if you could go back and kill your grandfather so you wouldn't be born-maybe if you tried it something would happen every time so you could never actually do it.

Travelling to a different time period would scare seven shades of ****e out of me.

[thebarman]

Here is an interesting idea , I heard somewhere that if you look through a telescope at the earth from 100 lightyears away you will see the earth as it was in the 1970's ... I heard this in a museum so I am not sure if this is bogus or not .

If you saw the earth from 100 light years away, you'd see the earth as it was 100 years ago, not in the 70's, think about it, it makes sense. Just as if you saw the earth from 30 light years away then you'd see it as it was in the 70's.

Also, there are a couple of theories suggesting why we haven't yet seen visitors from the future.

One is that you cannot travel backwards in time only forwards. Imagine driving forwards in a car, in order to go in reverse you need to slow down, stop, and then accelerate backwards. With time, once you'd managed to slow down, and then stop, you'd be stuck because time had been frozen.

The second theory has something to do with not being able to travel back before the point at which time travel is invented, so if its invented in 2004 for example, in 2005 you'd be able to go back to 2004 but no further.

[treznor72]

I believe

Edited June 9, 2004 by treznor72

[The Cheat]

ahhh , but then they wouldn't have to go back in time anymore because they already fixed it when the time comes to go back in time and destroy hitler , but then they would need to ... then they wouldnt... then they would ..... 

excellent point

hehe:

"So, Basil, if I travel back to 1969 and I was frozen in 1967, I

could go look at my frozen self. But, if I'm still frozen in 1967, how could I

have beenunthawed in the 90's and traveled back to the Sixties? and...

Oh, no, I've gone cross-eyed."

but seriously

i do not think time travel is possible, because time does not exist... it is a concept, not something in the physical world. How can you say that time slows down when approaching the speed of light? the concept of time is measured by minutes and seconds, and a second is still a second, regardless of how fast you are moving

as for the theorey of parrallel dimensions for different periods of time, that doesnt make sense (at least not to my peabrain). each dimension would have to have a set amount of time,and how long is that? you could say there is a dimension for each moment of time, but can you define a moment? and if that were true, it would mean we were constantly switching dimensions, wouldnt it? and im pretty sure i am in the same dimension I was in when i started typing this.

Edited February 14, 2004 by The Cheat

[mechanicalcorpes]

a cool movie that has a little time travel in it is Donnie Darko. If you see one movie this year that is from 2001 then make is Donnie Darko.

[Fluffybunny]

I think we need to get a much better idea of what time actually is before we could even consider looking into traveling through it...

My gut feeling is that there is a fundamental aspect to time that we don't understand yet, stuff that theoretical physicists are just now considering. I think that some day there is going to be some kind of discovery that changes everything we know about what we call time.

On a related note, I was just reading an article in Scientific American dealing with Dark Matter and Dark Energy. The "Fudge Factor" calculations that have been causing everyone to come up with Dark Matter and dark Energy to explain anomalies could actually be because gravity doesn't work the same everywhere...

Talk about a fundamental ooopsie. The Voyager craft that we launched in the 70's to go out and take pictures of the outermost planets are now past the outer boundaries of Pluto and heading out into space. They are losing communication with the craft as they are too far away to be able to transmit back with the limited power of the craft, but they found something interesting.

It seems that the craft are not where they should be in space. Gravity dissipates at an inverse square of the distance of the gravitational center. In this case the gravitational center is the Sun(with variations for the mass of the planets). The gravity of the sun should be lessening the further away the craft is, but that isn't the case.

Several teams have been trying to figure out why the craft isn't where it is supposed to be, and right now they are considering maybe gravity isn't as constant as we once thought. We've never really been outside of our own little solar system to be able to directly observe gravity elsewhere and we had always assumed it to be the same everywhere...

The article goes on the explain that the "fudge factor" that scientists explain with Dark Matter and Dark Energy could actually be gravitational changes that we just don't understand quite yet.

Scientifically we have a long way to go. I look forward to seeing what changes occur over time. My money says that we are missing major fundamental chunks of knowledge about the universe around us...

[Talon]

I know making such a short post is shameful after the essays placed here by Sera and Fluffybunny but:

I agree with Sera

[Novo]

I believe time can be altered through the mind ... all it is is what we have been taught to believe is and isnt...We COULD alter time because I think all time coincides like slides in a movie... we can always go back and change the script...Ill meditate on this

[Burgundy Johnson]

The past as we know it can't be altered...if it had been, then we would never have known about it, would we?  As I've said before, it's probably quite possible for a hypothetical time traveler to influence events, but all they'd do is end up putting them in the direction history records them...if they did anything differently (say, someone from the year 2360 goes back in time and shoots Hitler when he was 15) then that's what history would record right now (in our case, the history books wouldn't make any mention of Hitler, and we would never have heard of him).

Who's to say that there hasn't been tyrants or dictators already that have been erased from history? Maybe someone tried to erase a bad, bad man from history and time, but I've heard the quote somewhere, it goes like "The Universe must balance out equally. If you kill a bad man, it just makes room for another to take his place" or sumthin like that. Maybe somebody killed a dictator, only to have another rise in his place, etc. So technically, history could have been altered. Our arrogance would have us beleive that things that have already happened would not have. So what if something bad that happened has been erased? Such as nuclear war, WW3, etc.

Just my thoughts. I beleive its possible. There is too many inconsistencies in the way the world and universe works.

[mechanicalcorpes]

Joe103 makes a good point, if you go back in time to kill anything then that would mean they would have never really existed.

[JLA369]

All this talk about Time Travel kinds of reminds me....

My mother and I, this past December, flew nonstop in a 14 hour flight from New York all the way to Tokyo Japan. We left around 11 AM Sunday morning....and arrived at Tokyo on Monday afternoon around 3PM. Despite having to travel 14 hours, we lost 12 hours of time!

Later in the month, we flew from San Francisco in a 4 hour flight to New York. We got off the ground around noon and by the time we got to New York, it was around 7:30 at night. We lost five hours (or rather, we aged 5 hours less than those in New York).

Then again, when we flew on December 26 from Hong Kong to San Fran, we landed in San Fran on December 25, Christmas Day, we technically have travel back in time because we moved into a different time zone.

Strange and convoluted when you think about it.....

That's very true! Right now over in japan it's probally Feb. 23!

Here's another interesting question to add to this..does time exist?

I mean KayEl said she lost 12 hours of time in like an hour or something!

Edited February 23, 2004 by JLA369

[DC09]

I think its totally doable. At least to the future, not so sure about the past, though.

[Dark_Grey]

Well I myself am with the the whole 'light speed time-travel' theory...

Its a touchy subject but a few tests have been conducted with supersonic jets to try and prove that the closer u are to the speed of light, the more time slows down. Anyways, the jets were equipped with extremely precise digital stopwatches and apparently, after the jets landed and the watches were tested against those of the scientists who stayed on the ground, data showed that the watches DID in fact slow down when the jest were maxed out (Mind you it was sumthin miniscule like a hundred-thousandeth of a sec, seeing as they were no where NEAR the speed of light )...so that info brings us to my point:

If we look at Einsteins infamous formula 'E=mc2' <- Thats squared, by the way,

we see that energy is actually just mass traveling at the speed of light (squared).

Now, since time slows down as you approach light-speed, it theoretically stops completely at light-speed (at this point you're pure energy )

Here's the kicker, folks: Logically, because your'e stopped at light speed, anything faster than that would be moving backwards in time...see wut I'm saying?

So I'm with the notion that traveling into the future is impossible...but provided we could surpass the speed of light, we could go back in time! Great Scotts!!

[PsychicPenguin]

Unfortunately E=mc^2 is not about energy that is actually mass traveling at the speed of light, but rather mass is actualy energy, and the proportionality constant between kg (mass) and joule (energy) happened to be c^2. One of the holy grail in engineering is the anti-matter engine which will directly convert mass to energy.

Now, sorry to disappoint you, but it is impossible to accelerate mass to the speed of light. As you put kinetic energy to any mass, its speed will increase. However this increase is not linear. Mathematicaly speaking, if you put infinite amount of energy to accelerate a mass, its speed will approach the speed of light. So to break the speed of light, you need to put more energy than infinity, which is... well.. impossible.

[Dark_Grey]

lol Hey thanks fer the major correction man. Idunno where I heard my version of the 'E=mc2' explaination *glares at physics teacher* but I'll be sure to stick to urs. As fer the 'infinite energy'....well....darn thats tuff...so much fer time-travel in a porsche!

[montauk]

i absolutely think that it is possible to time travel. Physics allows us to be able to do thid. i am sure we have to go thru some sort of vortex/ you should read the montauk project. remember-time is man made.

[IrishBlood]

I wouldn't mind being a time traveler. And If I did I'd choose an old english police box and have sexier looking companions then dr who did. at least in bikinis.

[strichar]

Has anyone seen or read timeline?

Basically the way I see it is, if you were to go back in time to change something then you would never be able to do it, for the entire fact that you taveled through time because that event had already happened. Proving that nothing you did in that time actually changed anything. Because you were there things went exactly the way they were supposed to happen. I'm trying to make my point clear but I don't think I am doing a good job of it.

[Universal Absurdity]

wanna see something funny on this topic? link

[strichar]

That is pretty funny.

[Xenojjin]

[Cerberus817]

Of course time travel exsits - there's no question about it. As the point has already been made, the easiest means of time travel is looking to the sky. Think about it though - it takes sun 8 mintues to send us it's wonderful light. It shows us that distance very much effects time. We only need to find a way to harness it, and learn how to turn the dials. Look at jet lag! Our bodies are not only worn the from trip itself but the traveling in time may leave us often tired or exhausted. And what about all the reports of people just walking down streets and then finding themself back in time. I do agree that not all accounts may be creditable but the idea has to flourish from some truth, of course it is to an extent.

And what about the speeds of sound and light! Surely these are not the only two senses we have as humans, so maybe there are speeds of all the senses! There has to be. Absolutely anything is possible. And if the gov't is in on all of this, it wouldn't surprise me. The american government is not involved with the people, it only looks out for the people who work there in those high places. Ans so they only share amongst themselves. And the way we are sculpted as a society - we can't handle these sort of things. Outcomes are always chaotic.

[aquatus1]

According to modern physics, traveling to the future is theoretically possible, in the sense that there is nothing saying we can't do it. We cannot, however travel to the past. The only way to time travel is by creating a local time distortion (let's say a phone booth). As this phone booth approaches the speed of light, it moves faster through time. It cannot, however, move backwards, because it would approach the time before it began moving backwards, a paradox that would cut off travel to the past before it begun. The only way to go to the past is to transcend the third dimension, ours, and go into the fourth dimension, in which Time is medium to move through like space is for us. This would allow us to go back in time in a parallel dimension, and possibly save others from Hitler, but not ourselves.

Time is not a concept, it is a dimension which we can only detect but not influence, in much the same way that 2-dimensional creatures can detect, but not influence the 3rd dimension.