SanitariumZero

Do you think it's possible? I do. I think of time like a never beginning, never ending stream. Einstein's Relativity says that as you approach the speed of light time slows down and it's been proven in an experiment. I wish I could find the link about it but I can't anymore.

I few years ago I read about an experiment where two atomic clocks were placed on a aircraft and on the ground. If I remember correctly the jet was flown a few thousand miles at the speed of sound and when they landed the times on the clocks where off by a few billionths of a second or something on that order.

I think if a person were able to travel in time you wouldn't be able to actually change anything. You would end up in your own time stream so to speak. That's my thoughts.

It's a very interesting subject to me and I'd like to hear other's thoughts on it.

GeePeeS'r

As for proving Einsteins theory, I have never seen anything conclusive yet. But there is a satellite up there now that is testing the theory. I have not heard of any results yet, but might shearch the net some tomorrow and try to find more info.

As for time travel, just ask John Titor about it. He has done it!

John Titor Link

It is interesting to read some of that stuff to say the least. I am confident it is 100% BS, but many of the theories referenced to have been in development of testing/experimenting by various sources.

Seething

I believe time is like a line. Only, you're not looking at the line's side, we're looking at it straight on. All points in time touch each other. So if you change one point, you'll change every point. So no, I don't believe in time travel. There's nowhere to go; no backward in time, no forward in time.

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adfaffasfd

That doesn't make since, you've no idea what your saying, you have no proof, do you even understand what that means? I dont think anyone else does. We aren't looking at anything, we're moving through it.

By the way, time travel as we would think of it (visiting the future or the past) is in no way, shape, form, or fashion possible. That's been proven by a man named Stephen Hawking (most consider him the smartest man in the world). Hawking made this statement when asked about his thoughts on time travel: "Its not possible because, if it were, we would have been visited by beings from the future". Thats not a direct quote, but you get the jist- dont you think people would have tried to come back to see major events in history or maybe try to stop catastrophes from happening- like 9/11, plane crashes, pearl harbor, etc...

ReebTop

Time travel backwards is either impossible or completely irellevant, anyway. You can't go back and, say, save Kennedy or Lincoln (or Franz Ferdinand) from being assassinated, because if it were possible, it already would have happened. So it is safe to say that the past is set in stone. Conversely, the future is one big unknown, making travel frowards into it wthout some sort of reconnaisance extremely dangerous. This isn't to say time travel is impossible, just exceedingly risky.

I also heard, once upon a time, that one's mass and volume or somesuch must increase as one approaches the speed of light, due to the effects of Relativity. Light speed requires essentially infinite mass, which would generate and infinite velocity, wouldn't it? And thus you'd be going not just FTL, but infinitiely faster than light. So travel backwards would be possible, if you really wanted to see the beginning of time.

cybersharp

Yea i also am 100% sure John titer is bs.

I agree that time travel to the past is impossible and i would also concure that time travel to the future would be possible but i would add that we arent at that the level as to where any human currently could make a jump to the future....
And if you think that time travel is a process in which you go from point A and land at point B in the future i would also say that you are wrong because this is a impossiblity made so by the fact that you are made up of matter ....so as time goes by and you are going to the future your **matter** has got to be somewhere......Because to survive this jump in to the future you would have to be in some sort of condition to survive the passing of time as you warped to this *future*....

So i would think that the only way to do this is to.
A.Make a machine that is connected to the brain which would slow down the brains process of time enough to keep the body from aging so much that you would come out of the process as a living dead type of thing...You would need to be in some type of stasis so that your body would decompose as you went forward in time. Because even if you jumped into the future time would still take effects on your body. Even if it was in the blink of a eye time would still take its toll....

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Fibrosa

I don't think it's possible, after all, wouldn't there already be time travelers if it was possible?

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GeePeeS'r

Not if they know how to keep a secret!

I also discount the theory of time travel in the fantasy image of it. But being able to warp time - i.e. slow it down or speed it up throught relativitiy - might have some truth to it.

itch vaccine

Don't find it impossible, but I doubt we'll be able to find our way to it for many milleniums to come

Maybe there's too much "messing up" involved in time travel that no one does it in the future.. you never know..

Who likes the past anyway? :P

d*d

"Its not possible because, if it were, we would have been visited by beings from the future".

a simple argument around that would be that time travel will only possible back to the time when whatever it was that made it possible was invented (make sense? I had to read it a few times myself) - an example being that you would need a receiver. Complete speculation i admit but a useful workaround

d*d

and you wouldn't know because your experiences would have changed along with the timeline - somebody could go back in time assassinate save JFK - then someone else could go back and kill him (in a completely different fashion) and you would be none the wiser.

Bill O'Rights

Maybe. Maybe not. Look at it this way. If I went back in time to prvent John Kennedy from being assasinated, and was succesful...you'd never know about it because the assasination never happened and Kennedy went on to do whetever it was that he would do. That then becomes the new history. You wouldn't know anything different. Or...what if we faced another Cuban Missile Crises type situation? What if this time the misiles launched? What if...someone went back in time to facilitate Kennedy's assasination in order to prevent a nuclear holocaust? What if worms had machine guns? Birds wouldn't mess with 'em.

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bonehed1

I agree word for word on this...that is my way of thinking and if worms had machine guns I would be running for the hills.....if you went back in time to correct something no one would know about it....you could go back in time and rob a bank and become a frikin billionare now and people would just think you won the lottery or something...I think time travel is possible but I dont think we have discovered how to do it yet....or have we and its another secret kept from the masses???

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ReebTop

That's actually a very good argument, because I can't think of any logical way to dispute you on that. You win this round, Mr. Bill O'Rights

warrrreagl

I thought scientists had already agreed that the advent of quantum computers will make it possible (and someone's already built one of those).

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ManWithAPlan

i don't believe in this. i think its nonsense, what PHYSICAL REASON would make time slow down for you just because you're going faster?
and a few billionths of a second is how long it takes for a processor clock cycle so it could have been calibration error.

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Akira

theoretical physics has always been one of my favorite subjects. I'm going to post some links that will explain it alot better then me.
http://www.mkaku.org/articles/phys_time_travel.shtml -pretty simple explanation of time travel and some of the paradoxs of it. There's also some other crazy physics on there.
http://www.ettnet.se/~egils/essay/essay.html#what -little more indebt then the last link. But still easy to understand.
http://homepage.sunrise.ch/homepage/...pace-time.html -this sites for the physics geek that knows einstiens equations, how they're derived and stuff like that.

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ObieX

Well the way i thought of time travel is that you can only travel to a time that is in the future, a point in time after you left our relative time. For example imagine you were able to travel in a spacecraft at 90% of the speed of light. You would get into your spacecraft at earth and shoot into space. As your ship approaches it's top speed your relative time has been shifting further and further away from the people still on earth. You travel for some time at this speed, maybe in an orbit around the sun. Then head back to earth, slowing down over time, and landing. The length of time of your trip would determine the size of the time difference you would experience when you get back to earth.
If you were in space for 2 weeks and would compair dates with someone from earth you may find that they claim the date to be 2 weeks and 1 day after you left. You traveled a day into the "future". You spent 2 weeks on a ship, but basically you gained a day of existance. This would be more practical when teamed with some kind of suspended animation. In theory, you can send a group of humans into the far distant future. The only problem is you cant get back.

Disclaimer: Numbers made up for example! I have no idea on the real amount of time you would "gain" over any extended period of time at any PSL. If my understanding is completely wrong in every way feel free to tell me, this stuff interests me :P

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ObieX

LOL

I tried to explain that as easy as I could but even I started to get confused along the way

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seep

John Titor had a pretty good explanation for most of the logical problems of time travel - but not really the physics.

asudevil83

i'm glad i read this instead of having to post it. i couldnt find a way to make what you said make sense, so i'm glad you said it.

if you go back in time to stop an event from happening, logically the future would never know it could have happened or was prevented from happening. it just wouldnt exist for us.

JJRousseau

I remember reading about this too. The important part of the experiment was that one plane travelled East and one West (ie. one with the rotation of the Earth, one against). When they met up again, their clocks were different. The author of the article said it made more sense if we stopped thinking about time as linear. What ever that means...

neutone

Hmmm, I think you need to embrace the power of imagination. In science, philosophy and theology we create metaphors. I understood the line metaphor and it resonates perfectly with how I intuitively understand time. You obviously didn't hear about Stephen Hawkings somewhat enormous errors in his calculations. He's still a genius, mostly because he can imagine better than most of us.

neutone

People picture time as being linear in that it is pictured as a sequencial series of moment, minutes, years etc. Our measurement of time is similar to how we measure distance, the past (behind us) and the future (before us {or to many people's right}). This visual framework for understanding time makes it very difficult to imagine time travel.

Here's a scenario. It assumes that there is a spiritual (generic) dimension to our existance. It also assumes that time is irrelevant to that dimension. (Can you imagine Moses, Buddha or Allah checking their watches)

If it were possible to tap into that dimension (prayer, higher self, meditation or other method) and if it were possible to make known( in that dimension) desire, need or simply make a statement of fact that something were to happen, it would be possible for that desire, need etc to occur/be influenced/created beyond the confines of the human time experience.

In other words. Camilla has power to make things happen. She tells the universe that she needs money immediately. Her phone rings in an hour and she inherits money from a deceased relative. In the next 2 hours she receives 2 job orders. This sounds impossible. This is how it happens. Camilla sends a demand ticket to the crew upstairs who are not bound by earth time, they set about planting the seeds that will ultimately flower at the moment that Camilla makes the wish. The crew from the other side are putting suggestions into peoples minds, creating opportunities and setting the scene for the the ticket to be fulfilled at a particular moment, and they are reaching into past months, weeks and hours to make it happen.

This scenario is more than a story. Camilla is a real person, and she showed me that it was possible. I could do it to for about 2 years. I lived in a foreign chaotic European City for a year and lost it. Odd and true, and about as close to time travel as a person can get right now.

dr3n

Nope.. Still don't believe you...

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Dostoevsky

I was actually thinking about time travel the other day and came up with something I think may be new.

Isn't the fact that we aren't sure whether or not time travel is possible proof that it isn't? I mean, if time travel were possible, wouldn't someone from the future have traveled to the past, before us, and made alterations that would make us aware of time travel?

Any thoughts on this theory?

Gatorade Frost

I do know that they have proven that time slows down at faster speeds. One with the clocks that were travelling at the speed of sound, and I think muons (Not the real particle, but gives the general idea) or something, they break down in something like .001 (Not the real number, but gives the general idea) seconds, but they took one and accelerated it to near the speed of sound and instead of breaking down at .001 seconds it ended up breaking down at .5 seconds.

The concept of speed slowing down is all based on perspective, so if I'm moving at the speed of light, I age the same as always, and you're moving at your average speed you're going to age the same as always, but when we look at each other from our separate perspectives then time appears to either move really slow or really quickly. It is being pushed as more then simply theory now, but it's just a really hard concept to wrap your mind around.

Drider_it

i dont know.. say you could the power needed would probally be upgraded to a higher needed usage the farther back you went.. say a year would equal the output of a major city for a month ... 10k years.. output of the suns energy in a day..

although i think time travel could be possible which in this case comes to it all.. super powers, interstellar travel, time travel not possible in this dimension.

thing is i believe time as a web.. you disturb one strand it sets them all off.. too hard they break.. you divert from the original time stream and create and alternate one.. heh pick up any comic book they go into them all the time.. called a multiverse

what if we needed 9/11 to happen and an agency came back in time and did it.. what if jfk or such needed killing.. he probally would have stopped 'NAM from happening.. yet bam gone.. and etc.. etc.. list goes on

although wasnt there an experiment done with in the last few years that they shot a beam yet before the experment started the beam showed itself frist .. then they shot it?

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Bustello

There is another theory. If time is an infinite line, then it is impossible for a time traveler to find the right time to travel to... Which part of the line contains the earth history for example?

Drider_it

i like the mobeus strip.. a loop that twists in the middle .. or infinity symbol

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It means only one thing, and everything: Cut. Once committed to fight, Cut. Everything else is secondary. Cut. That is your duty, your purpose, your hunger. There is no rule more important, no commitment that overrides that one. Cut. The lines are a portrayal of the dance. Cut from the void, not from bewilderment. Cut the enemy as quickly and directly as possible. Cut with certainty. Cut decisively, resoultely. Cut into his strength. Flow through the gaps in his guard. Cut him. Cut him down utterly. Don't allow him a breath. Crush him. Cut him without mercy to the depth of his spirit. It is the balance to life: death. It is the dance with death. It is the law a war wizard lives by, or he dies.

DewMan

Some famous physicist, I forget who (Sagan or Hawking or someone of their ilk) pointed out an obvious bit of logic which seems to disprove that time travel can happen.

If time travel can indeed happen, and there are people in the future that can travel in time, then why haven't any of them visited us from the future?

JustDisGuy

Well, the thread below this one seems to be about that very type of traveller. I don't necessarily believe that John Tritor travelled here from a possible future, but I don't believe that it's impossible.

It seems fairly obvious, based on personal experience alone, that there is more to the phenomenon of "time" than simple linearity. Simply reference any occasion of a 'deja vu' incident, or a dream that actually ends up happening precisely as one dreamed it. I'm sure this stuff doesn't only happen to me, so the obvious answer is that we can at least be aware of a point in time that has not yet happened, so perhaps time can indeed be manipulated conciously in some manner. That I think it can be done does not necessarily mean that I think that it should be done, should anyone intelligent enough to figure out how to do it solve the problem.

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FngKestrel

I think one thing that needs to be addressed is the implementation of time. Let me elaborate in a manner that everyone can relate to, movies.

There's the Back to the Future model, which states that for every change that is made from outside the timeline (time travel, whatnot) a new timeline is generated that branches off from the old timeline and events take place along that timeline, not affecting the prior timeline.

Then there's the Terminator model, that states that changes made in the past by outside influences creates a new future, directly altering future events and that timeline.

While we can't know which way time truly operates, having some frame of reference that adequately addresses observable behavior will point us in the right direction.

taog

Ok, this is my cup of coffee.

I'm an astronomy nerd, and stuff like this used to interest me a hell of a lot. Theoretical physics is one of my interests, and I have done much research on the subject, especially related to space and time.

When you think of time, do not think of time as a clock, though clocks are used in experiments all over the place to prove theories. Think of time as a dimension related to space. Really what we are talking about is the expansion of space when we speak of time. If space didn't move, we would only have three dimensions, that we can comprehend. We would have length, width and height. Now, you take the expansion factor, and you have time.

Time is simply the difference between two events.

Now lets take a look at Einstein's relativity.

It HAS been proven that the faster you go, the slower time goes. You were right about the jet being flown around the globe with a clock in it, correct to the nano second with another clock stationary on the ground. The clock on the ground and the clock on the plain were then compared after the jet flew around the glob at high speeds, and the result proved Einstein to be correct about his theory. The clocks times did not match, and they should have if you take all types of error into consideration, including our magnetic feild. It proved that the faster you go, the moretime slows down.

That theory is called time dilation.

Time dilation also states that you cannot exceed the speed of light, due to a theory in relativity called mass increase. The faster you go, the more your mass increases. As you approach the speed of light, your mass approaches infinity, and the energy it takes to get there would be infinite as well. Just look at the famous E = mc^2. Mass increases as you more faster, and if you were to look at the formula to get your mass, it would show that you cannot go faster than the speed of light, or your mass will be infinite.

Another small, and not so interesting theory in relativity is length contraction. The faster you go, the smaller your length is, in the direction that you are moving. You get squished in other words. It makes sense if you think about acceleration and the fact that you are going faster near the front than you are near the back.

Now, if you take all of these into consideration, you will see why time travel, in terms of back to the future or something like that, is impossible.

YOU CAN SLOW TIME DOWN, but you cannot travel across time. If you were able to go faster than light, which no object with a mass can do, you can possibally switch your direction of time, which could possibally be looked at as time travel, but i think it's more complicated than that. The problem is, you can't go faster than light.

So, you can slow your own time down in reference to everyone elses, but time itself is constant, universally.


And, though this was mentioned, the best way to disprove time travel is to simply say, why haven't we been visited by anyone from the future?

Now, I know that Hawking didn't say that first, because I'm reading a book, written by Hawking, about Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Einstein, and one of those dudes had written something similar in one of their papers.


Anyway, that's our problem when thinking about time travel. Time isn't defined the way we think about it. It's more complicated than we can comprehend with general knowledge about the subject. Time is a dimension, not something that can be changed or reversed. You can change the length of something, but you can't give it a negative length. It's the same as time. You can change the rate of time, for yourself, in reference to everything else, but you cannot change the direction of time.


I believe that time is actually slowing down. When the universe began, I believe that it was going as fast as it possibally could be going, and since then, it's been slowing down. There was a distant supernovea that was closer than it's redshift had shown, which could be explained through the speed of light slowing down, which would mean that the universe's overall rate of time is slowing down, as we expand. Eventually it will come to a halt, and time will reverse.

Now, i mean time moving at rate 0, not time 0. I believe time 0 was just befor ethe big bang.

My above theory about time slowing down is likely wrong, since I haven't found any evidence of any scientists thinking the same thing. I also don't have the means to test it to prove it wrong, but it's just a thought.

Anyway, time travel is impossible, but if either were, it would be more likely for us to be able to go into the past, rather than the future. We would have to slow ourselves down to a speed less than 0 to be able to start going into the future. It seems more possible to speed ourselves up to a speed faster than light.

d*d

I find this fourth dimension business tricky to get my head around (in fact I believe it to be impossible for us to truly comrehend) if we take a dimension away it becomes more easily digestable. this expansion of the universe is not as it sounds - an expansion from a central point, because the whole universe is moving away from itself in every direction,
if you were to draw points on a deflated balloon and then blow the balloon up all the points would move away from each other in a similar fashion but the central point of expansion is inside the balloon i.e not on the surface with the dots. Theoretically time is the dimension from the centre of the balloon to the surface, works fine with a 2d surface chuck in a third dimension and suddenly it hurts to think about it

taog

Think of time as the difference between two events that happen in space.

When you define time that way, it's easy to see that expansion is what causes time to exist, because an event will happen, and across that time line of expansion, the next event will happen. It ends up being linear and measureable through space-time. If time didn't exist, we would just have 3d space. Nothing would move at all. Being able to move is a dimension, which is defined by time.

I used to think of this when I was a kid.

If you were to take a human down and look at the smallest thing they are made of, and look at space as a 3 dimensional grid, each time you moved, that small thing would have to move into the 3 dimensional space, and so on.

Now, I was always confused when I was a kid, because I asked myself, how is it possible for us to move then? How can our smallest parts move into the next 3d space?

When you are a kid, it's a lot harder to think of why that happens. You might be like, well, it just does, but honestly try to come up with an answer. Time will always be a factor in any answer given. Why? Because time is the dimension that allows us to move into that next 3d space. If we just had three dimensions, things would just be.

Time has a direction, also. You just can't draw it on a 2d piece of paper, which is how we generally think about such subjects. You would, however, be able to draw it on a 3d piece of paper, if they existed. 3d papers, which are 4d models, can only exist in 5d universes. That's just a thought of mine.

I heard somewhere that if you were to have people in different universes, which had a set of different dimensions, ranging from 5d to 1d, you would end up with the following.

5d can see and comprehend 4d easily and draw it and all that shyte, 4d comprehend 3d, 3d-2d, 2d-1d....

Think about it for a bit. It makes sense.

But it also reverses. 1d can't see 2d, or comprehent or model it. 2d can't see 3d, and so on.

Also, try to draw in 1d. It's impossible, because your pen always has a width.

I need to go to class now. More on this later!

FngKestrel

If you haven't read Flatland by Edwin Abbott, you should. It talks about exactly what you're saying here, in novel form.

taog

Nope, haven't read it. I went to the link, and noticed that he's got a newer version of that book out. Either that, or something very similar, called 'Flatterland".

I'll have to take a look at those books the next time i am in the library.

JustDisGuy

Okay, so that seemed like a pretty intelligent and potentially correct model of time and why it might be impossible (sorry - my world, 'nothing' is impossible, merely varying degrees of improbable) to physically travel through time at other than a constant forward rate.

I'm curious about your thoughts on the idea of being able to perceive events in 'other-time', and by extension of that possibility, the potential of being perceived by others who are "currently experiencing" (perhaps more accurately stated as intrinsically linked to) that event in 'other-time'. If matter or our physical being cannot penetrate the time barrier, perhaps our consciousness can?

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Pfhorte

Hmm, well, imagining time as a line is just something humans make up to help visualize a concept. It is NOT that concept. So conclusions made based on that concept are flawed.
Thinking of time as flowing etc does not mean time works that way.

There is no way to travel backwards in time because backwards does not apply to time. You can obviously travel forward in time, since that is what currently happens to everything.