Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post

KnifeMissile · 01-08-2005, 01:04 AM

First of all, in order to accept time travel as a possibility, you'd have to give up our current conservation laws, such as conservation of energy, momentum, charge, etc...
Now, if you can do that, there are two time travel ideas that I find interesting.

First is the time machine that my friend, Russel O'connor (who doesn't have a web site or I would have linked it), devised and was, possibly consequently, used in the movie Primer. Because of this, I will call it the Primer model. This machine is a vessel, like a teleport booth, that can transport you back in time. Before you can go back in time, you must turn the device on. Now that the device is turn on, you may step into the machine and travel to any point in time that the machine was left on. Obviously, this precludes the possibility of travelling to a time before time machines were invented. The movie primer had other restraints, too like Spoiler: I'm not sure but I think you had to spend just as much time in transport as you are travelling. So, if you wanted to travel 24 hours back in time, you would have to spend 24 hours in the booth "travelling" there.

The other form of time travel is what I will call the Twelve Monkeys model, based on the movie of the same name. The idea here is that you cannot create paradoxes by travelling to the past because, by definition, the past has already happened. If you were to travel back in time then you have already done so and we are, thus, already experiencing the consequences of such activity. Consequently, if you had travelled back in time then you will time travel to the past because that has already happened, so obviously nothing will stop you from doing so in the future. A lot of people don't like this theory of time travel because it doesn't allow people to change things using time travel but I think it's a really cool idea and, perhaps more importantly, makes the most sense of any time travelling theory I have ever seen...

Of course, none of these ideas suggest an implementation of time travel but that's only because we have absolutely now idea how to do such a thing. Still, that doesn't mean we can't investigate its possibility, such as these gradenken...

01-08-2005, 01:04 AM	#18 (permalink)
KnifeMissile Location: Waterloo, Ontario	First of all, in order to accept time travel as a possibility, you'd have to give up our current conservation laws, such as conservation of energy, momentum, charge, etc... Now, if you can do that, there are two time travel ideas that I find interesting. First is the time machine that my friend, Russel O'connor (who doesn't have a web site or I would have linked it), devised and was, possibly consequently, used in the movie Primer. Because of this, I will call it the Primer model. This machine is a vessel, like a teleport booth, that can transport you back in time. Before you can go back in time, you must turn the device on. Now that the device is turn on, you may step into the machine and travel to any point in time that the machine was left on. Obviously, this precludes the possibility of travelling to a time before time machines were invented. The movie primer had other restraints, too like Spoiler: I'm not sure but I think you had to spend just as much time in transport as you are travelling. So, if you wanted to travel 24 hours back in time, you would have to spend 24 hours in the booth "travelling" there. The other form of time travel is what I will call the Twelve Monkeys model, based on the movie of the same name. The idea here is that you cannot create paradoxes by travelling to the past because, by definition, the past has already happened. If you were to travel back in time then you have already done so and we are, thus, already experiencing the consequences of such activity. Consequently, if you had travelled back in time then you will time travel to the past because that has already happened, so obviously nothing will stop you from doing so in the future. A lot of people don't like this theory of time travel because it doesn't allow people to change things using time travel but I think it's a really cool idea and, perhaps more importantly, makes the most sense of any time travelling theory I have ever seen... Of course, none of these ideas suggest an implementation of time travel but that's only because we have absolutely now idea how to do such a thing. Still, that doesn't mean we can't investigate its possibility, such as these gradenken...