Is time travel possible? At first i ....

Discussion in 'Science' started by The DARK LORD, Jun 13, 2012.

  1. The DARK LORD

    The DARK LORD New Member

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    DIDNT think so, but now I have proof it is possible, theoretically. Anyone care to pipe in?
    Alternate universes is a cool idea, but have no rational substance to sustain such a belief.

    Time does not fit on a horizontal line as we so commonly think of it. Time is three dimensional.

    think about the speed of light, and distances,
    distance = time.....
     
  2. Wolverine

    Wolverine New Member Past Donor

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    Well, I wouldn't so no rational substance can sustain such a belief.

    The Multiverse theory is an extension of Quantum Mechanics and explains the weakness of gravity.
     
  3. FactChecker

    FactChecker New Member

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    The many worlds interpretation doesn't preclude the existence of time travel. It just takes on a much more vague form.
     
  4. Junkieturtle

    Junkieturtle Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    What is your proof that it is possible?
     
  5. Taxpayer

    Taxpayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Of course it's possible. Take out your watch and note the time. A minute later note the time again. You've time traveled. Now if you want more control over your journey, if you want to speed it up or slow it down -- find a bartender.​
     
  6. The DARK LORD

    The DARK LORD New Member

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    Ive always thought it was possible, but not in the ways that are usually expressed. Such as, you cant go back and kill your grandfather, its counterintuative and down right impossible.
    I dont think of time in terms of a linear unit, go to the left, and you go back in time, to the right, forward in time.
    I see it as a 3 dimensional existence, and once something occurs, its done, over with.
    Time is relative, just like everything else, and you can calculate time by the distance of an object, and the speed of light.
    Theoretically, you would need to go faster than the speed of light to time travel, but of course we have to figure out how to do that.

    EVERY THING we see, touch, hear or taste, is from the past. For example, we know that we can see stars that in fact have burnt out 10,000 years ago and no longer exist. So we are experiencing time from 10.000 years ago.
    Now the same can be said of everything else, it may be a min ute amount of time, but it is time non the less.
    When you see an object, you dont really see it, you see the light reflecting off of it, which is why we cant see glass, light doesnt reflect off it.
    But for objects that do reflect light, by the time we "see" it, time has gone by and we are experiencing the past.

    Now, lets say one is adjacent to a star 11,000 light years from earth. One day it totally collapses then explodes, no longer existing, at the moment it stops to exist as a star, you travel to earth, at twice the speed of light.

    So when you arrive on earth, which took 5,500 light years, the light from the star is still on its way, so you can see an object you already know doesnt exist, for another 5,500 light years of time. You have experienced something that has occured 5,500 light years ago.
    So, when on earth, you have already experienced the death of a star "which is still there" so you were back in time when next to the star, in relation to earth time.
    So, "what time it is" present, future or past, depends on how far away an object is, and how fast you can travel.

    I dont believe in alternate universes.
     
  7. Angedras

    Angedras New Member

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    Remember when this first happened?...


    "Subatomic particles called neutrinos were beamed from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to a laboratory in Italy 454 miles away, and beat the speed of light by 60 nanoseconds."



    Well, I've still got a bag packed. LOL
     
  8. Taxpayer

    Taxpayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    4 dimensional: x, y, z, t​
     
  9. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    I do not believe time travel is possible.

    As far as I am concerned here and now is all we have.

    Even if you see light from a star many light years away you are seeing as it was...but you are still seeing it now...not then.

    Look at your watch now and note the time now...look at the watch later and note the time...it will still be now.

    I don't think past and future even exist.
     
  10. Panzerkampfwagen

    Panzerkampfwagen New Member

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    Of course time travel is possible. You're doing it right now.
     
  11. The DARK LORD

    The DARK LORD New Member

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    you are right,
     
  12. Slyhunter

    Slyhunter New Member Past Donor

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    A lot of over-educated morons claim that if you travel faster than the speed of light you break the time barrier. I call bull(*)(*)(*)(*). I say time isn't limited by the speed of light. If you travel faster than the speed of light then you travel faster than perceived time, ie you can turn around and see yourself. But that doesn't mean a fraction of time hasn't passed because it has.
     
  13. Anders Hoveland

    Anders Hoveland Banned

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    Yes, time travel is theoretically possible. But it would be very difficult because the energy associated with an object's rest mass has to be overcome.

    A typical setup for time travel involves two fast moving supermassive black holes flying past eachother. If you pilot your spaceship towards the gap where they have already just converged in the immediate past, the gravity from the past could fling your spaceship into the past. The blackholes must be extremely massive, and the gap distance sufficient to create a uniform gravitational field, otherwise your spaceship would simply be torn to pieces.

    In reality, simply two black holes would probably not be enough. One would have to align several stages of black hole pairs in a sequence for this to practically work.

    Tremendous energies need to be involved for time travel, and these energies must be carefully controlled if you do not want to be merely blown apart into subatomic particles. Suffice to say humans do not currently have the capacity for sending any significant quantity of matter back in time. It may be possible to send signals a fraction of a second back in time using current technology. While scientists do not know with certaintly, likely there would not be any "paradox" phenomena observable. Coherence and quantum entanglement prevent this. On much more macroscopic scales, this type of paradox-preventing phenomena would have much more bizarre manifestations. For example, someone who tries to go back in time to kill themselves before they were born would find that it was impossible because strange (extremely unlikely) coincidences would thwart their efforts.

    Also, going back further into time might be exponentially more difficult, because of interraction between "the butterfly effect" and statistical resistance to paradox-formation. Going back in time 1000 years and touching even a single blade of grass would hypothetically substancially alter the outcome of the future, so the time-loop of existence would need to compensate to prevent the future from being altered (which would create a paradox forbidden by the laws of nature). Statistically, the more the time-loop would need to "compensate", the more difficult it may be to go back in time. Notice that by "compensate", this is not an actual event in time, it is merely something which exists as part of time, a simple relationship between events. Trying to understand sequences of events in terms of "cause and effect" becomes meaningless in time travel.

    Indeed, it might even be possible that the failure of any scientists to attempt to send a signal back in time could actually be a macroscopic manifestation of this bizzare law of nature, to prevent any paradox from forming, although this is just baseless thought-provoking conjecture on my part.
     
  14. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    The energy needed to travel faster than the speed of light is not there... because the faster something moves the more force it takes to push it.

    When you get near the speed of the light the mass of any object (that has mass) is so large you cannot muster enough force to push it faster. It "weighs" too much.

    Place a baseball on your bare foot....then drop a baseball on your bare foot from shoulder height if you disagree.
     
  15. Anders Hoveland

    Anders Hoveland Banned

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    Some physicists think this could be because of coupling with the background energy (the Higgs boson or the quantum vacuum, "empty space" actually contains energy). An object only "increases" in mass because it begins to have more interaction with surrounding energy at higher velocities. The very fabric of space-time may actually be plain energy. Take away this energy, and an object could theoretically move with infinite speed. Reduce this energy in a particular location and space-time would become "warped".

    This could be why neutrinos have been able to exceed the speed of light, since they have such little interaction.

    This may not necessarily be true. There could be "non-linear" effects at extremely high energy-velocities, essentially the effect of continuosuly "gaining mass" could start to level off. This can be seen in lasers traveling through a dielectric medium (like a crystal). At suffiently high energy densities, the dielectric constant changes, and the light can travel faster through the medium than it otherwise normally could.

    Since the vacuum energy has an extremely high energy density, the energy of a particle would have to be extremely high for it to exceed light speed, which has never been observed.

    The other strategy would be to "rarify" the vacuum. Essentially two reflective parrellel plates (Casmir effect) on a huge scale (many lightyears wide), could allow a particle to travel slightly faster than the speed of light. But from another persective, since the space between the plates would be warped, the speed of light would still be conserved within the framework of relativity.
     
  16. Panzerkampfwagen

    Panzerkampfwagen New Member

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    I'd like to mention particle accelerators.

    We've observed time dilation in those.

    But using atomic clocks we've also observed time dilation on planes.

    As I said, we're always time travelling.
     
  17. Anders Hoveland

    Anders Hoveland Banned

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    It appears to be much easier to slow time than it is to speed it up. And going back in time would be extremely difficult. I would even wonder whether in the entire universe's existence any bit of matter has ever been sent back in time through natural cosmic processes. I would think that in a collision between two black holes, some small fraction of the matter might get ejected back in time, although it might not escape.
     
  18. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    I still follow Al.

    It may be possible to warp space but that would not be traveling FTL...the object we were travelling to would be closer.

    If you could warp the space between here and Mars to make the journey in an hour. The hour journey would be in real time.

    You would get there an hour after you left Earth. Mars time and Earth time.
     
  19. Anders Hoveland

    Anders Hoveland Banned

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    My guess is that going back in time would be even more difficult than people imagine. The normal fabric of space would likely try to resist anything going back in time, just like it resists anything trying to exceed the speed of light. To send something back in time, likely space would have to be extremely warped also. If you want to think of it this way: a temporary man-made "worm hole" into the past.

    We know space-time is affected by gravitational fields.

    Many scientists view time is the "fourth dimension".

    I believe the past and future exist in the same way that the present exists. Think of it this way: you only believe the present exists because it is the present you that is thinking. The past you, 1 hour ago, thinks the exact same thing.

    Time only appears to flow from the human perspective. It has already been demonstated through quantum entaglement, and phenomena such as the double slit experiment, that the "cause and effect" relationship is an illusion. There is a connection, a correlation between the past and future, certainly, but there are instances we see where the future appears to affect the past. This phenomena is typically not obvious in ordinary human existence, though it is necessary to explain why we can even see our reflection in a mirror. If it was not for the fact that photons are forbiden to annhilate eachother in the future, there would be no coherence, and without coherence, all the photons reflecting from a mirrow would bounce off in random directions, because each individual photon is actually transiently absorbed by individual spherical atoms.
     
  20. fifthofnovember

    fifthofnovember Well-Known Member

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    It seems to me that there really isn't much difference between the "energetic fabric of space-time" that we all plough through and the classical notion of an ethereal plane overlaid with the physical plane. But the notion of 2 black holes actually sending a sizeable something back in time, compared with the theory of "one timeline", where all time travel changes have already been factored in to what is, was, and will be, reminds me of an explanation for the Big Bang that I heard once: That "stuff" came back from a possible future, destabilizing the singularity. With a universe that seems to have preferences to prevent paradox, preferences to do everything with the least effort, perhaps it prefers to exist?
     
  21. RevAnarchist

    RevAnarchist New Member Past Donor

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    Well, time is not dimensional, space is. (space)Time is sometimes called the fourth dimension. So in addition to the three non-relativistic spatial dimensions of space i.e. width, height, and length we can add 'spacetime' as a fourth dimension. When Einstein demonstrated by elegant theory that time was relative, and wrote his papers concerning relativity (to the observer) space/time was born. I want to give credit to Kurt Godel as well as big E. He is almost always ignored even though he was instrumental to Einsteins theories. Godel proposed that if the universe was rotating time travel would be possible so maybe it was Godel that prompted Einstein to pursue his theories? Just a thought.

    Special relativity shows that time behaves somewhat astonishingly like the three spatial dimensions. Lorenz equations demonstrate indicate that. Length contracts as speed increases. Time expands as speed increases. Space became linked with time, and are the components of time dilatation. When length contracts and time expands its fairly easy to see how time dilation ie time travel can work at relativistic velocities ie any speed above 99% light speed although there is no set value on relativistic velocities, its a general term.

    In my opinion it's only because of big Al's big brain and his beautiful imagination and masterful grasp on geometry and physics that time, spacetime specifically, is now recognized as the fourth dimension. I hope I did not bore everyone to death but I wanted to provide some back ground info so it might be easier to understand why 'timetravel' is indeed possible and has already been accomplished on a very small scale. (the space station astronauts are a fraction of a second younger than they would be if they had spent their entire lives on earth due to time dilation of the slow velocity (compared to relativistic velocities) of the international space station. This has been confirmed by atomic clocks. Two synchronized atomic clocks also confirmed that mass (gravity generated by mass) also 'slows down' time. As does velocity etc (according to an observer).

    In fact if we built a space craft that was capable of say, 99.9 % the speed of light and this craft left earth and went to the nearest star (around 25 light years my memory fails me) then returned to earth, the astronauts would have aged a few decades while earth would have aged thousands to millions of years depending on the final percentages of speed. According to science 100% light speed would be impossible because as velocity increases so does the mass of the object being moved. Attempting 100% light speed can not be done because there is not enough energy in the entire universe to attain 100% the velocity of c. There may be shortcuts to faster than light travel such as warping space or entering a rotating black hole but those are pie in the sky science fiction proposals even if theoretically possible.

    I hope this helped. Any of the claims made in this reply can be confirmed by validating with a search engine. I would be happy to clarify or expand on any claim made, even though its all from my faulty memory.....

    reva
     
  22. leftlegmoderate

    leftlegmoderate New Member

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    There is no such thing as time, so how is time travel possible? There is no before or after, just now. There is no place to go, just here and now. Time travel theorist are not much different than those who faithfully believe in fanciful theologies and fairytales IMO.

    What we call time is nothing more than the naturally occurring physical activity of this universe we exist within. There is no forward or reverse, just now... and now, and now... ad infinitum. What has happened has happened, what has not yet happened cannot be known or visited. But by all means, keep banging your heads against the wall...
     
  23. Durandal

    Durandal Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    If you want to prove that time travel is possible, you either have to show that it's possible to travel faster than light or find some alternative means (and demonstrate that).

    I'm told it's possible to essentially distort time by traveling very near to the speed of light, such that time passes more slowly for you than for Earth and every other slower-moving mass, but obviously that's not getting back to the past.

    I for one see the notion of sending one's self back to the past as purely impossible, because we're talking about separating ourselves from spacetime and arbitrarily mucking about in a way that is simply not possible in our normal condition. I feel that we are ultimately too much an ingrained part of the universe to be able to break its fundamental laws.
     
  24. Durandal

    Durandal Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Agreed 100%. Time is an illusory concept for describing the pace at which the observable happens. We are entirely subject to spacetime, as much a part of its matrix as every other form of matter and energy. The concept of time travel is pure hubris (and flawed thinking).
     
  25. Durandal

    Durandal Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I was really amazed at that concept when I saw Carl Sagan describing it in an episode of Cosmos. The idea that something going that fast could be "squashed" in the direction it's moving is certainly a strange thought. Personally, I'm thinking it has everything to do with the expansion of spacetime since the Big Bang. I don't know how the speed of cosmic expansion and the speed of light compare - I expect the rate of cosmic expansion is considerably slower. I get the inkling, though, that if something could in fact reach the speed of light, that would completely alter its state and quite possibly obliterate it completely. Further, it's like the expansion of the universe is what actually gives us a 3D universe in which to play, and when something gets up to light speed, it cancels that effect out, and so leaves existence (or, as is said, reaches a "barrier" and cannot proceed beyond it. Since it would cease to exist otherwise, this makes sense in a way).
     

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