pinoychink790

What are your thoughts on time travel??? Do you think it's possible?? impossible???? Here's what I think. I believe that time travel is impossible, because time doesn't exist. or at least not in the way most people seem to think it does.

typhus

I'm no genius. I may be wrong but, in theory time can be manipulated by forces like gravity. I think if that is possible then time travel must somehow be possible. What I think is impossible are humans harnessing this somehow.

pinoychink790

yeah, same here. do we even know if time is something that can be manipulated? what if all time was, was just a measurement of units, and not an object that we can manipulate?

fckm

Sure there's time travel. Everything moves through time at a rate of one minute per sixty seconds.

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pinoychink790

you make a good point, but how can you use that information to help you travel in time?????

Slavakion

The closer to the speed of light that you travel, the slower time appears to be for you in relation to everyone else. So if I were to zip around space for a few months at 95% of the speed of light, I would go back home and find that more time has passed. A year, 5 years, I don't know the math.

Wormholes allow time travel because they offer a shortcut through spacetime itself. Drag one end of a wormhole next to a high-gravity body (like a neutron star?) and time will slow for that end.

Oh, you want to go back in time? Hmm, well I understand that a lot less. But according to Stephen Hawking it's possible. You just need a negative energy field. A big one. Which would be so unstable that you would die. It's in one of the later chapters of The Universe in a Nutshell if you want to read it for yourself.

aurigus

From the reading I've done I understand it would be possible but the energy needed to do so would be more than what we could ever dream of producing (for now).

But... that being said I think most time travel theories belong in the Sci-Fi section and not the Non-Fiction section. There are some good theorys out there but most are not proven, so they remain as theories. It has been proven that the faster you go, the slower time goes. So in that aspect it would be physically possible to jump in a spaceship, zoom out as close to the speed of light as you can get, and then return, and it would be in the future in regards to what your watch would say.

zen_tom

There is supposed to be a method of constructing a time-machine that works on the principal of warping spacetime using a spinning black-hole.

Whether it's possible to do is beyond me, but one thing I'm willing to accept is that if it is possible, you could never travel back in time to a point before the machine was first built.

If we ever do build one in time, we will be in the happy position of being able to avoid the end of the universe, and exist for all eternity.

Stompy

Travel back? Highly doubt it. I don't see how you could possibly make it so that YOU can go back in time to witness things that have already happened. For example, "I want to see the time when dinosaurs existed." It's passed, those pieces of energy have moved on to form other things. Theoretically could you if you bent spacetime enough to bypass blah blah? Sure, but good luck doing that. Works well enough on paper, but actually following through with putting someone back in time probably won't ever happen.

Forward in time? Sure. Go the speed of light and time comes to a crawl. 2 seconds to you means that YEARS have passed on the outside. Seems a lot more realistic than going back.

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fckm

There is no current scientific evidence that backward time travel is possible. None.

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zen_tom

No, but there is some strange and arcane math (not to mention some interpretations of a number of particle physics-experiments) that suggest it is a theoretical possibility.

ShaniFaye

so does that mean if you traveled forward in time you couldnt get back?

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fckm

It means that we have no scientific reason to believe otherwise. There is speculation, but no scientific evidence.

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Coppertop

A better question might be why do you use a different number of question marks each time you ask a question?

But seriously, yeah, it is possible.

"Time keeps on slipping, slipping slipping - into the future..."

jay_21

If you are talking about time travel....Do you think it is good idea to talk about minutes and seconds????
I don't know much about these things But Does the measure of time remain same??????? Shouldn't we be takin about space-time !!!

pinoychink790

Yeah, i don't know i guess it's my personal signature thing. i think it's cool. is there something wrong with that??? what to do you think??????????

Drayab

Everybody gets their own set of clocks and rods to measure with so it is okay to talk about minutes and seconds, but you have to be careful when you start talking about somebody else's rod and/or clock.

If make a round trip to Alpha Centauri at near the speed of light, when you return you will find that while the trip only took a couple seconds for you, about 8.6 years passed on Earth. It's special relativity, a well tested theory. Now we need some engineers to build us a spaceship that can accelerate us up to light speed in a reasonable amount of time. Without killing us.

Despite what Steven Hawking implies in his popular science books, all theories that give a mechanism for going back in time are relatively new and are not well tested. They are interesting to talk about, but I wouldn't place my bets on any one of them yet.

KnifeMissile

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...

flstf

One speculation that I find interesting and strange is that when you go back in time an alternate universe is born and another time line begins. Also there are an infinite number of universes available.

The Prophet

Wow, this thread gives me a flash-back to the year 1804; to a conversation I once had about traveling to the moon.

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fckm

The definition of a second remains unchanged.
The speed of light is defined exactly as 299,792,458 m/s. A second is defined by the frequency associated with a specific electron transition in a cesium atom. (see atomic clocks for more details). Using these two things, we can now define the meter.

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And if you say to me tomorrow, oh what fun it all would be.
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Gortexfogg

Who was it that said time travel is probably not possible because if it was we'd be swamped with travelers from the future coming and visiting us? ...but then again it's been mentioned that backwards time travel isn't hypothetically possible so maybe this doens't apply... still an interesting thought though.

flstf

If they are here it shouldn't be that hard to find them. Just see who got in on the ground floor at IBM and Microsoft when they went public.

Crisis

There is such thing as time travel. When I wasn't listening the physics teacher was saying something about it somewhat working at subatomic levels. But I remember from years ago doing time dilation questions when objects move at near speed of light velocities.

Cervantes

hmm. Interesting, Let's look at what we have, we have 4 dimensions out of wich 3 we have the sensory perception to sense to a certain degree.
Time howerver is the fourth dimesion that we have nothing but a strictly abstract sense of. The first thing we should ask us is if we can somehow alter the three others before we go for the one we know least about.
My guess is that timetravel will never be possible in a practical sense, thoratically perhaps but never practically.

Even if we mannage to find a way to travel back in time we have to find a way to nullify the effects of the paradox of existing in the wrong time. Somehow i think that the universe would either not allow the timetravel to take place or that the entity that traveld back in time would be either disintegrated or pushed back to it's original timeframe.

The idea of transfering a body outside the ordinary nature of time is facinating but practically could be very dangerous. Dangerous not only to the traveler but to the rest of the universe aswell.. What happends with the universe when a paradox occurs? Can we be so sure that the universe can tolerate a breach of one of it's basic fundaments?

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roderickpsu

I think that if time travel was possible, then the people of the future would have already come back to visit us.

Slavakion

When radioactive substances emit positrons (positively charged electrons, which are antimatter to electrons), it somehow works out mathematically that the substance travelled back in time to get an electron. Or something like that. I prefer positrons...

Maybe that's what you were thinking of?

Furry

Isn't that just a quirk of the mathematics? And if it isn't - how?

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Master_Shake

I remember reading somewhere that time travel can actually be measured. That is, relative to a stationary observer, time appears to pass more slowly for faster-moving bodies.

If you've ever travelled on an airplane you've travelled into the future, at least relative to those people on the ground, and probably only by a very small amount of time. As I said, I remember reading somewhere about hyper-accurate clocks needing to be recalibrated by a few nanoseconds after extended periods in the air or while travelling at great speed. Anybody know where these studies were conducted?

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Cervantes

Einsteins theory of relativity. Read The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene for a more modern view of the theory.

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ICER

Maybe they have already. But we may have mistaken them for aliens.

To get off the subject thread for a sec:

Maybe the aliens are not aliens, But people from the future who have come back to research their ancestors. But they are unable to tell us this. For fear it might damage the timeline.

When you think about this with an open mind. It all fits. Look at the facts

1. There is a whole thread is about the impossibility of FTL (Faster then Light Travel) yet. Without FTL. There are no way people for other planets could visit us.

2. If we had the ability to travel in time. Would we not visit our past and explore it without revealing ourselves?

There are tons more facts. But I don't want to disrupt the thread anymore then I already have. So. I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

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Manuel Hong

this has been posted eveywhere, but check it out anyway if you haven't already...

http://www.johntitor.com/

oooh. freaky.

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Hard8s

I go forward and backwards in time at least once each year.







Its called Daylight Savings Time!!! But really I liked the way they explained it in Star Trek when they came back to save the whales. When McCoy said to Scotty "You can't give him the formula for transparent Aluminum. It will change the future." Scotty shot back, "How do we know he didn't invent it?"

Besides Time Travel has to be able to go back in time. They did it in Star Trek, They did it in Back to the Future, Back to the Future 2, Back to the Future 3.......

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iamnormal

If an object on earth travels in time. Does it happen relative to the universe or is it relative to the earth?
Wouldn't an object that traveld in time 1 hour reappear in the same spot in the universe that it left from? Sense the earth is moveing wouldn't the object end up in space?

Paradise Lost

About the clocks part, that was one of the first real experimental time-dilation
tests conducted physically, with a real clock. A group of scientists boarded
a plane that went from (I think, London to New York) with a Maser/Laser Clock,
which, at the time, was ridiculously accurate, and found that people on that
flight were actually trillionths of a second younger than those who were not
on the flight (excluding others who happened to be flying elsewhere, I suppose.)

As far as this post, the only Time Travel theory I know of is moving into
the future, it basically consists of a giant gravity hole somewhere in space,
and the distance around the circumference of the circle is actually a lesser
distance than going into the well, so, if you were travelling at the speed of
light, (not 88 MPH) you could see yourself some out of the well, of course,
it would be a ridiculously short time later.

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Hain

I'm am glad to see that some people know the foundations of relativity. Time dialation effects is related to the Lorenz contraction (there is some "fun" math involving Pythagorean's Theorem to prove it... don't try though) where the relative time to a traveler dialates like this

[Time to you going fast] = [Time to everyone else]*[speed of light] / sqrt ( [speed of light]^2 - [velocity you're moving]^2 )

So this can tell you how fast you need to go if you want a nice jaunt to make you "younger" to everyone else.

Now if you want to travel back in time, my theory is to use the wonderful properties of Advanced Wave Propagation. And if you like the sound of that I am posting something later when I am not on school time and money.

Hain

Cursed slow dial connection! And Switch the times around and that equation works.
Now, I believe that traveling into the past becomes a plausible notion is when you deal with advanced wave propagation. The physics are this:
Whenever you send a radio wave out there are actually two waves being created: the retarded wave and the advanced wave. When you flip on the radio, you are listening to the stronger retarded waves--they go from point A to point B at c. Your advanced wave goes from A to B at -c, and since there are no negative distances in the universe, the wave actually moves backwards in time.
When these advanced waves hit some highly energized gas (like a solar emmisions) the gas resends the advanced wave as a retarded wave, and it loses amplitude in the transfer. Now the reason you cant turn on your radio and start jamming to 95 WILL rock from 2015 is because these advanced waves cancel themselves out when they travel back towards Earth.
I say figure out how to work quantum theory to own's side by making a radio with only advanced waves, rid the system of the retarded waves. This gives one the chance to send messages back in time. But you can never send a message back before your radio was made, unless you can work sending signals through already existing matter which I can scarcely guess as to how you can do that. But if you can do that, there is no stopping one from then using advanced waves on yourself, send your memories and mind back through your brain to an earlier date, and relive your life from that point.