Time Travel Thread

wrt to the Chaplin image, cell phone and satellite phone require infrastructure to work, but a time traveler might have a high-tech radio that does peer to peer cell calls.

It's an iPhone.....
There's an app for that........

Every instance of potential time travel so far has been proven false. Time travel itself is not impossible, and is in fact an integral part of the proper understanding of string theory.

If a person does travel back in time, there could be a lot of consequences like alternate reality and parallel timeline which have not been proved as valid concepts yet. So I highly doubt, it is feasible that this happened.

I see what you're saying, but string theory precludes the past from being screwed up.

Think of it this way: every yoctosecond of every day presents 10 to the 31 (or so) axis breaks along this universe's fifth dimensional plane. This means that every decision we make (and, really, every state change of every particle in the Universe) is a branch along the fifth dimensional development of the timeline of the Universe.

"Huh?" Don't worry, I'm getting there.

Simply, every decision we make creates a new "universe" (may as well use this terminology; it's easier to understand) in which the effects of each action (or lack thereof) are seen. In history, we see these as "What if" scenarios. "What if Germany had won the Second World War?" is a common question, but that's a HUGE break that could have easily been caused by one simple state change. Say one of Hitler's neurons dies in this timeline (This is still a huge change, but saying that one electron in one molecule of a string of part of one of Hitler's neurons undergoes a state change is harder to follow) when in ours it does not. He decides to forgo his original plan and focus Barbarossa on the Caucasus to strangle Stalin's oil supply. Germany then manages to take the Baku oil fields, Stalin's war machine grinds to a halt, and the Soviets are forced into a truce, leading to a surviving Third Reich Germany.

Now for something more relatable. Say you want to go back in time and kill Hitler. That's fine. You can do this. You take your time machine, travel back along the fourth dimensional axis of your Universe, step out, shoot Hitler in the head, and return to your own time. This can be done (and probably will have been done once we figure out time travel).

The problem here is (beyond the butterfly effect of your actions in that Universe) that when you return to your own time, nothing will have changed. You will have traveled back (and then forward) along your four-dimensional strand of the fifth-dimensional probability axis. You can't move to another. When you went back in time, the action of you even GOING back in time created a new universe along the fifth-dimensional plane in which you went back. Your actions in said universe would therefore have no weight in your own, and returning to your own time wouldn't change anything in your Universe. You can't get there from here!

You can go back, change actions, and then spectate, living out the rest of your life in this "past" time of a different universe, but returning to your own won't show any changes.


Nope, see above. Don't worry about the past being screwed up; it has not already will have been impossible to do that.

And I'm pretty sure that sentence is temporally correct.

re: Many Worlds scenario aka Parallel universes

My personal thoughts are that these Many World Infinite Universes hypothesis is a pile of steaming....but well, anyway, has anyone ever thought about where all the energy comes from that creates all these parallel universes every time a subatomic state changes...where do these Universes reside.?

and thats what were talking about, a universe being created for every subatomic state change for every single sub atomic particle in the entire universe....it isn't just a new universe if you want to go back and kill Trum.....Hitler.

Time travel exists and I apologize for dressing inappropriately in that one photo. I had fallen into a mud hole that didn't in the same spot in my time when I traveled back.

I hate to break it to you so starkly but since you've got the photo, you might as well know. I've decided to alter time in quite a different fashion.

See I've been going back to various times and been......well......I've been laying with your mothers.

I'm actually the father of all the frequent posters on these forums.

Yeah there's no evidence of time travel.
It is also not impossible. It would be so cool
though if time travel were easily accessible
today...

Why would you presume they were not previously sullied?

So it's you who slept with George W. Bush and fucked the economy!! I knew it!

We can only see the past. Everything we perceive already happened. Sound takes time to travel to our brain and so does light. Information travels faster than it has due to the internet but is still on snails tempo.
Parallel universes do exist, ask Palin.

What about the Transactional Interpretation though?

But aren't these spambots following this?



I reported him just the same, but at least these are better than the gindart idiots.

If current theories are correct If you could travel into the past that very fact would alter things or causality. So you would be really traveling to a parallel universe. One who's history includes you as a time traveler. So no violation of causality and no evidence in this universe. If the theory of parallel universes is correct every universe intersects every other. Same space different dimension. So from the time you arrived in the past you'd go forward from that point in the parallel one because of your actions. So you can travel into the past and kill say Hitler or keep John Kennedy from being killed. It would just be a slightly different past with of course different outcomes. It's fun stuff to think about.

I'm sorry but time travel is seriously considered in modern physics. And as to why anyone would go back to the 40's I can think of a million reasons. A lot of history there WWII, political figures, just to study the period etc.

Why wouldn't they?


You are assuming he came from now and not some time in the future. Plus if current theory is correct you'd travel to a parallel past not our so here in this universe there'd be no evidence like this in the first place. Also the stuff I talkied about in my previous post is real theory. Not from Science Fiction. However the idea may have started there. Maybe you need to watch the Scince channel more or something.


Here's a little something from Dr. Michio Kaku : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkE2yQPw6s

A real physics professor at New York University.

I am a physics n00b. But this is what I think.

There is the opinion, if time travel were possible, then wouldn't we be constantly inundated throughout history with time-travellers from the future? Why would only specialised, very few individuals be able to time-travel?

But I refute that statement by saying, if I were to go back or forward in time, I would create a new universe and timeline, unique to my perception because I am the one that time-travelled. Therefore, anyone in that timeline before I affected it would remain in their unaltered universe. Hence, everyone in their respective timelines remain unaltered until the point of an individual's time travel which then becomes a unique universe to that individual.

Basically the universe has a built in "duplicate" mechanism. Everytime you want to change a file (timeline) it automatically duplicates that file just right before you change the file.

I think maybe another poster on this thread said this but in a more scientific way.

'Shopped!

I'm not a physicist but I am fascinated by physics and read a lot of what physicists write.

You are correct in that the very fact that if you traveled back in time you would violate causality.

The way the multiverse handles this is you would move ( not so much create as per quantum theory did you make it or was it always there or both? ) into one of the infinite parallel universes that intersect this one ( same space different dimension so you can't detect them in any way known currently and this universe would have one of every possible variation on history ). One that includes a history of you traveling in time. The old saying is : " Anything that can happen does happen somewhere in the multiverse ". So since these universes are infinite you have any combination of events. Some Undistinguishable some very different and everything in between. Have you ever pointed two mirrors together and seen the infinite corridor of mirrors stretching away from you in the reflection? Each much the same but slightly different and more different the farther you get away from your perspective. It's very much like that.


So no evidence in this one of your visit but for all intents and purposes you would be in an almost identical past except for the changes your traveling in time has made ( which are a natural part of that universe's history ). So once again you could go back and kill your grandfather ( in the other universe ) and have the consequences ( never born ) without erasing you as a time traveler. This would also explain why we aren't inundated with time travelers from the future. So unless this picture was from another universe it's not evidence of a visit. There's of course no way to test this theory until our knowledge advances.

I love this stuff!



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...vel-hopes.html

That can be done. What you can't do while remaining in "our" Universe is travel forward on the new timeline after you've caused changes. You'll just come back where you were before.

you would be travelling forward on the timeline you altered simply by fact of being there!!

did you know New Zealand just released all their UFO files?, I guess youre busy reading

Well sorry you don't like the idea but according to recent thinking that's the case. If you did move backwards in time to one of these other worlds in would be so close to your own ( with the exception of what you changed ) you might not be able to tell the difference. It would be that similar a la Back to the Future part 2. And for the record " Sliders " was a show that had potential but failed miserably to reach that potential.

No, not really. Once there? Yes. Taking your machine back to your time would go back to your time, not theirs. You're implying that your timeline can't have had time travel happen in your past, but by virtue of you being able to travel through time, this is incorrect.

Any time you make a decision to turn left or right you affect in some small way all of history. That's causality. There's also a theory that time isn't linear. That's just our perception. So everything happens at once. So when you alter things you're changing everything. One thing that has been disproven is our notion of cause and effect. In experiments scientists have seen particles go from point B to point A. You get reaction before action. A reverse of common sense and causality. How can this be? Well what it says is our basic understanding of the universe isn't accurate if you just use everyday common sense. That's quantum mechanics for you.

Imagine a world where everything is two dimensional. Inhabitants there might have a concept of back and forth but when it comes to up and down ( as we experience in 3 dimensions ) they haven't a clue. There's no point of reference. They would never see it except in theory and analogies of the concept. Just like we do when we talk about 4 dimensions.

This is a good example of how we just can't trust our everyday existence when talking about the nature of things.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract

That's kinda my point along with jimmac... The idea of a fixed-universe, fixed-timeline that accomodates backwards or forwards time travel doesn't make sense to me. In my view any time travel would create (or as jimmac interestingly suggests, "slide" us into) a new/another timeline in which you have time-travelled. Which also means you could never go "back" to your original timeline after having time-travelled.

Yes! Because you've changed things already by just traveling there. You don't have to kill someone or step on a butterfly. Just being there is the change.

As the saying goes, "If a tree falls in a forest..."

Just because it is not perceived does not mean it does not exist.

where do you think all the energy comes from to duplicate the universe every time a quantum event occurs? Perhaps all possible combinations of quantum states already exist as distinct universe, so there is a universe where the time traveller disappears and a universe where the time traveller appears, yet that doesnt at all mean that the universes are connected, just that they had the combination of quantum events to make it appear that the time traveller left one universe and appeared in another.

What does this say about free-will? You might as well rule it out completely as a fundamental construct of the universe.

Isnt it odd though, that there must be an infinite amount of universes out there that represent all the changes in every single quantum state as ours for the last 14 billion years. Yet everything is neat and ordered, and physically the laws of nature dont screw around. Yet there must be an entire universe 'quantum state' somewhere that mirrorred the entire history of our own for 14b years, until, say, in Feb 2011, a time traveller appeared.

What about the universe like above, where only the leg of the time traveller appeared because the craft went wrong. Why isn't thid crazyness happening all the time.

I think many worlds is nonsense, however, believe what you want. I think were in a simulated computer program.

I see were just starting one ourselves
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12012082

As I've said before we don't create a universe every time a different turn is taken. They were already there. Intersecting this one in the same space different dimension. So they're both impossibly close and yet impossibly far away and undetectable by any means currently known. Every choice taken already exists. This is because time isn't linear. Not in the sense that we perceive it. We already know this is true through experimentation. Effect not following cause but coming before in some experiments.

As far as free will goes it's a matter of perspective. You made the decision to turn right and you'll always do that. But it was your decision.

As far as the order of things well I'm not about to say that there isn't some force out there controlling things but it also could be that it's just mere coincidence. The fact that we're here to question this is a moot point because it's just the way it turned out. There's an old saying that people love to see patterns in things. Even when they're not really there.
It may be just the way things happen to turn out ( lucky for us ). However you also can say that we got lucky because of some force controling things. It's a big multiverse and I'm sure there forces out there that are impossibly powerful and we haven't encountered them yet. We haven't even scratched the surface in this area yet.

To follow up that wonderful steaming pile of self indulgent philosophy. 1) Prove to me your consciousness exists. 2) Prove to yourself your consciousness exists.

Neither proof can be accomplished because without just accepting something actually exists there isn't anything to base a proof on. Hmmm.

If you have to just accept Thing A in order to do a proof, what's the difference in just accepting Thing B as a basis for a proof. Logically there isn't any difference if both Things A and B are "unprovable" without some acceptance of another thing.

The whole set of philosophical movements that try to dismiss the works as non-existing outside the mind are just logical deathtraps and toy language games as useful as trying to prove you cannot pass through a door because you always only get halfway there; therefore how could you possibly ever pass the asymptotic threshold.

Take a concept, apply it out of context, maybe sprinkle in a hidden philosophical equivalent of divide-by-zero and presto! New narcissistic philosophical logic where nothing can exist but the self!

As for Free Will; Some philosophers have considered that you can only have Free Will if given that you can freeze a moment in time, with all it's quantum "randomness" perfectly quantified and knowable in advance, you can choose to do any next thing, despite the fact that all that known quantum "randomness" perfectly quantified and known says the next thing you will do is something different. In short, they are arguing for a enforced destiny all the way down to the quantum level and Free Will only exists if you can defeat that enforced destiny.

The buildup to that leads through an impressive set of steps of accepting the way matter interacts and accepting the "random" nature of quantum mechanics. I don't know where exactly it is (I haven't studied the area just had it described by a philosopher), but I smell the bad assumption/out of context concept in there someplace. Does that mean Free Will exists or doesn't? No, it just means there's another well camouflaged, incredibly compelling, yet broken proof out there and that if we only know Free Will as well as we know Art and Pornography we still have a ways to go.

i bolded the bits I want to address.

You say that every choice taken already exists...so hypothesize about whether there exists a reality for every decision...how did the universe know to create this reality and leave out all the decisions that didn't happen?

If the universe created the realities to exist then that decision couldn't have been made under free will, because it had to have happened to justify the existance of the universe that existed to accomodate it.

If the universe created all realities for every decision, then no free will can exist, because every decision is made every time and every outcome exists to accomodate it. Free will is then an illusion. If you say that the realities exist until a decision is made, then where does the energy go when the universe that isn't needed disappears?

Is time linear? I think not, indeed I think the only sane interpretation of QM is the Transactional Interpretation. Essentially every event sends information both forward and backwards in time as the equations are symetric. (Where the 2nd Law, time and entropy fit with this is the big question), however, the major consequence of this interpretation is the complete lack of free-will, and perhaps this is why it isn't very popular.

However i didn't really want my main point to be about freewill, I am more interested in the mechanics and logic of the multiverse. I dont fully appreciate why people believe it at all.

"I think therefore I am"

How do you know you're thinking?

'zactly!