Slashdot Mirror
Time Travel
Almost Anonymous writes "Ronald Mallett, a physicist at the University of Connecticut, believes he knows how to build a time machine - an actual device that could send something or someone from the future to the past, or vice versa. He plans to have a working mockup this fall. For all those doubters, he assures people that "I'm not a nut"." Uh-huh.
Where do you find the Plutonium, and the Flux copacitor.
Also can you maybe make it out of, oh i dont know, a ferrari?
It is interesting that he wants to focus light in ways to distort space time. The recent time machine movie alluded to just that technique. Maybe he will go into the future, see a bunch of canabalistic humans then try to come back to warn us but over-shoot the mark and end up talking to HG Wells.
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.
Oh good. Governmental control. That makes me feel a WHOLE lot better. There's no WAY a government would misuse something as mundane as time travel...
Define "Working Mockup" :)
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
Uh... government control, eh? sounds like we'll have timecop pretty soon. "Going back in time is pretty good way to make money."
Vital Idea
Oh, just an engineering problem. That's great. Maybe after Mallett perfects time travel, he can get to work on cold fusion and a perpetual motion machine.
By the way, that reminds me of the Simpsons where Lisa builds a perpetual motion machine, and shows Homer. Homer gets mad and yells, "Lisa, in this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!!"
I guess this guy doesn't have a Homer to yell at him.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
If he has a working model nexy fall, why dosn't he just send it back to our time so we have it now?
I have no idea how physicists approach the question of the creation of a contrafactual timeline which removes its own motive for existing (if his father lived, then he wouldn't create the time machine, and thus etc. etc.) But I think this is more interesting, if tragic, as a story of a man who still misses his father than as a viable line of research.
If I thought I could build a time maching, I sure as hell wouldn't tell anyone about it. I'd be using it for my own personal advantage, and maybe "for the good of mankind" after I have gone back to the 70's and bought a few thousand shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock.
it should be "uh-oh" instead of "uh-huh."
things i learned from movies #429: don't screw with the past. period.
Jesse Newland
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes
Can we get Sen. Hollings on this?
c-hack.com |
from the article:
.
"If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes. "
Now, if the fact that you go back in time doesn't affect people in this time, as we exist in a parallel universe, why should we care if someone goes back in time and screws things up? They're no longer in our world, and we continue along happily without them. Good riddance!
I see no real reason to have any loyalty to versions of myself in alternate universes and alternate times . . . however, the problem is that someone could come into this universe from the future and screw things up. But then wouldn't he be governed under our laws?
Also, if someone came back from the future in this world and somebody chased them, wouldn't they end up in different universes? Why would they end up in the same parallel universe?
Basically, I see lots of really strange questions here . . . unfortunately we'll never really have any way to know the answers, because even if every time we send someone back they end up in the same universe as the person they were chasing, we still don't know that it's just a probability, and we've been lucky every time . .
Oh, the strangeness of time travel . . .
I thought Flux Capacitor was one of those fake science fiction things so I sold mine in that yard sale last spring... ARG!! Hmm... plutonium you say? Well... my atom poster says I can bombard U238 with neutrons and get U239 which gives me Neptunium 239 pretty fast and that changes to plutonium... woo! Now wherethe fuck do I get my particle accelerator and 12 pounds of 238. MOOOOOM!
I plan on building a machine that travels faster than the speed of light. I'm not going to provide any proof, but you'll have to trust me on this one. Expect a mock-up sometime this winter.
Most physicists who are not nuts believe that traveling backwards in time is logically impossible. For example, someone could travel back to a time before he was conceived, and murder his parents.
...or is michael completely incapable of not adding his own stubborn bias at the end of every article he posts?
For once can't you refrain from adding your idiotic opinion at the end of everything?
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
That's just it.
If time travel is possible, where are all the time travellers?
So if he actually does manage to travel to the past, what happens to us? Do we just STOP!?
Or does everything continue as normal except for one missing professor of physics?
And if so, does his going back in time create an alternate time coexisting with our time but using the same space?
"It was penguin lust...at its worst." --someone
Say someone in the future develops a time machine using some newly discovered way of exploiting a loophole in the laws of physics. Such a machine would almost certainly be used to travel into the past. And yet in the present, no time travelers from the future have been observed.
I have much more faith in the possibility that a time machine is impossible to construct than the possibility that all time travelers in the future will be so careful that no one will notice them.
As long as his experiments don't turn out to be as disastrous as the recent movie....
If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''
I'm not sure about anyone else, but him answering a valid question with "Parallel Universe" doesent really put me at ease about the vadility of the whole thing. Whats it worth living in a parallel universe anyways, if I cant smell it or rub it against the wall, i dont want it!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Yee"
Newsgroups: sci.space.news
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2001 1:34 AM
Subject: Time Twister (Forwarded)
> New Scientist
> http://www.newscientist.com
>
> Contact:
> Claire Bowles, claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk, 44-207-331-2751
>
> EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: May 16, 2001, 14:00 EDT US
>
> Time Twister
>
> Before your children are born, their children could turn up at your door.
> Michael Brooks discovers how to turn the future into the past
>
> RONALD MALLETT thinks he has found a practical way to make a time machine.
> Mallett isn't mad. None of the known laws of physics forbids time travel,
> and in theory, shunting matter back and forth through time shouldn't be that
> difficult.
>
> The catch usually comes when you try to make it work in practice. Remember
> wormholes, those clever little tunnels in space and time that can supposedly
> be used to travel from one moment to another? On paper, they're a perfectly
> respectable way to travel back in time. Trouble is, you need a supply of
> exotic "negative energy" matter to prise your wormhole open.
>
> But Mallett, a professor of theoretical physics at Connecticut University,
> believes he has found a route to the past that uses something much more down
> to earth: light. Mallett has worked out that a circulating beam of light,
> slowed to a snail's pace, just might be the vital ingredient for time travel.
> Not only is the technology within our grasp, Mallett has teamed up with
> other scientists at Connecticut to work towards building it. "With this
> device," he says, "time travel may become a practical possibility."
>
> It may be hard for us to climb into Mallett's time machine, as slowing light
> down requires temperatures close to absolute zero. But future, advanced
> civilisations might work out a way to do it. And they might even come back
> to tell us how. If it works in the way Mallett believes it might, his device
> would provide time travellers from the future with their first gateway into
> our history.
>
> Mallett began his journey into the past when he was just ten years old. In
> 1955, his father died of a heart attack. "For me, the sun rose and set on
> him. It completely devastated me," Mallett says. But then he came across
> The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Even as a child, Mallett knew his father
> hadn't taken care of himself. Drinking and heavy smoking took a toll on
> his weak heart, and it gave out at the age of 33. "My notion was that if
> I could build a time machine, I might be able to warn him about what was
> going to happen," Mallett says. "That became my guiding light."
>
> What started as a childish notion grew into a passionate investigation of
> everything ever written about time travel. When Mallett studied the work
> of Einstein -- who died in the same year as his father -- he realised that
> Wells's novel was right on track: time travel is, in theory at least,
> achievable.
>
> Einstein himself found the notion upsetting, but he had only himself to
> blame. He showed that the effect we call gravity is a bending of space and
> time. Anything that has mass or energy distorts the space and the passage
> of time in its vicinity, a bit like the way the surface of a soft couch is
> distorted when someone sits on it. Solving Einstein's gravitational field
> equations tells you just how space-time is distorted by mass and energy.
>
> A lump of matter stretches space and time. So, for example, clocks run
> slower in the gravitational field close to Earth than they do far out in
> space. And if you set a massive lump spinning, it begins to whip space and
> time around after it, like a rotating teaspoon dragging the foam on a cup
> of coffee. The denser and faster-moving the matter, the more strongly it
> distorts space-time.
>
> Take this idea far enough, and you find that time can be twisted so much
> that instead of running in an infinite line from past to future, it is
> bent into a ring. Follow this loop around, and you return to a particular
> moment, just as a walk around the block brings you back to your front door.
>
> Theoreticians have found some solutions to Einstein's equations that include
> these "closed time-like loops" -- physicists' jargon for a time machine. The
> first to do so was the Austrian-born mathematician Kurt Gsdel, in 1949, but
> unfortunately his solution required the whole Universe to be rotating --
> which it's not. Decades later Kip Thorne of Caltech came up with the idea
> of using wormholes, which link different regions of warped space-time, to
> provide such loops. Other loops can be made by infinitely long, spinning
> cylinders -- somewhat hard to come by -- or fast-moving cosmic strings. In
> the early Universe, these ultra-dense strands of matter may have been as
> common as dirt, but alas, no longer.
>
> Mallett's idea of using light is much less outlandish. "People forget that
> light, even though it has no mass, causes space to bend," he says. Light
> that has been reflected or refracted to follow a circular path has
> particularly strange effects. Last year, Mallett published a paper
> describing how a circulating beam of laser light would create a vortex in
> space within its circle (Physics Letters A, vol 269, p 214). Then he had a
> eureka moment. "I realised that time, as well as space, might be twisted by
> circulating light beams," Mallett says.
>
> To twist time into a loop, Mallett worked out that he would have to add
> a second light beam, circulating in the opposite direction. Then if you
> increase the intensity of the light enough, space and time swap roles:
> inside the circulating light beam, time runs round and round, while what
> to an outsider looks like time becomes like an ordinary dimension of space.
> A person walking along in the right direction could actually be walking
> backwards in time -- as measured outside the circle. So after walking for a
> while, you could leave the circle and meet yourself before you have entered
> it (see Diagram, http://www.newscientist.com/ns_images/2291/22911F
>
> The energy needed to twist time into a loop is enormous, however. Perhaps
> this wouldn't be a practical time machine after all? But when Mallett took
> another look at his solutions, he saw that the effect of circulating light
> depends on its velocity: the slower the light, the stronger the distortion
> in space-time. Though it seems counter-intuitive, light gains inertia as
> it is slowed down. "Increasing its inertia increases its energy, and this
> increases the effect," Mallett says. As luck would have it, slowing light
> down has just become a practical possibility. Lene Hau of Harvard University
> has slowed light from the usual 300,000 kilometres per second to just a few
> metres per second -- and even to a standstill (New Scientist, 27 January,
> p 4). "Prior to this, I wouldn't have thought time travel this way was a
> practical possibility," Mallett says. "But the slow light opens up a domain
> we just haven't had before."
>
> To slow light down, Hau uses an ultra-cold bath of atoms known as a
> Bose-Einstein condensate. "All you need is to have the light circulate in
> one of these media," Mallett says. "It's a technological problem. I'm not
> saying it's easy, but we're not talking about exotic technology here; we're
> not talking about creating wormholes in space."
>
> Mallett has already caught the interest of his head of department, William
> Stwalley, who leads a group of cold-atom researchers. Their first experiment
> will be designed only to observe the twisting of space, by looking for its
> effect on the spin of a particle trapped in the light circle. If they can
> then add a second beam, Mallett believes evidence of time travel will
> eventually appear. He's not sure how time travel would manifest itself.
> Perhaps what starts out as a single trapped particle would acquire a
> partner -- the particle visiting itself from the future.
>
> Stwalley is more interested in the practical challenges of the experiment,
> and remains sceptical about possibilities of time travel. "A time machine
> certainly seems like a distant improbability at best," he says.
>
> Last month, Mallett gave his first talk on the idea at the University of
> Michigan at the invitation of astrophysicist Fred Adams, who accepts that
> the theoretical side of Mallett's work stands up to scrutiny. "The reception
> was cautious and sceptical," Adams admits. "But there were no holes punched
> in it, either. The solution is probably valid."
>
> But even Adams isn't convinced that the experiment will work. That's hardly
> surprising, as time travel raises disturbing questions. Could you go back
> and murder your grandparents, making your birth impossible? There may be
> ways out of this problem (see "Paradox lost" [below]), but most physicists
> think that any attempt to mess with history should be impossible. The
> Cambridge astrophysicist Stephen Hawking calls this the "chronology
> protection conjecture".
>
> The general theory of relativity, which Mallett used to work out his theory
> of time travel, does not take account of quantum mechanics. Could this be
> the crucial omission that means time machines won't work in the real
> Universe? Hawking and Thorne say that any time machine would magnify quantum
> fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, and destroy itself with a beam
> of intense radiation. But to know for sure, we need a theory of quantum
> gravity -- a theory that merges quantum theory with relativity.
>
> Even Mallett doesn't claim that time travel is definitely within reach.
> "Whether it will do what I predict is something that one will only know by
> performing the actual experiment," he says. Then there's the problem of
> getting on and off the loop of time without destroying it -- or yourself.
> "I really don't know whether you could use this in the sense of H. G.
> Wells's time machine," says Mallett.
>
> But who knows? In a few years, we may have entered an era when time travel
> is possible, and all kinds of strange people, things and situations from
> the future might come to visit. One thing seems certain, though. Even if
> the Connecticut time machine works, it won't be taking any Yankees back to
> the court of King Arthur. Mallett's circle of light won't allow anyone to
> travel back beyond the point where time first formed a closed loop. So it
> will be impossible to go back to a time before it was set up. "A later
> person could only travel back to the time when the machine is turned on,"
> Mallett says. This may explain why we have never been overrun by visitors
> from the future. It also means that although Mallett might change the
> Universe, he won't ever achieve his childhood dream. Mallet's father will
> remain forever beyond his reach.
>
>
> Paradox lost
>
> Time travel is littered with paradoxes. The most notorious is the idea of
> travelling back to the time before your parents were born and killing your
> grandparents, making it impossible that you would ever exist. And if you
> didn't exist, you wouldn't be able to travel back, so you wouldn't kill
> your grandparents, so you would be born after all
> past can lead to self-contradictory logical loops like this.
>
> People have dreamed up ways to try to break out of the loop. One is the
> "consistent histories" approach, which says that you must be somehow
> forbidden from doing anything that would change the past. However hard you
> try, something will stop your killing spree. But this is uncomfortably
> deterministic. In a universe with time travel, should everything be
> predetermined?
>
> Another way out is the "alternative histories" hypothesis. In this idea,
> you go back to a different history from the one you left. You are free
> to do anything in this alternate version of history -- killing your
> grandparents included. It won't change anything in the history where you
> originated.
>
> This has parallels in the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics,
> an explanation of how the bizarre quantum laws allow unobserved particles
> such as atoms and electrons to be in two places at once. Every time an
> observation forces them to choose one position or another, a new universe
> is created -- one where they took one position, one where they took the
> other. So perhaps a time machine would take you into a parallel universe.
>
> ###
>
> Michael Brooks is a Features Editor at New Scientist
>
> New Scientist issue: 19 May 2001
>
> PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF PUBLISHING
> ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO: http://www.newscientist.com
>
>
> --
> Andrew Yee
> ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca
>
>
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Wow, that is a weird thought! Trippy..
i hate pansy republicans
So I'll believe it when I see it. If he is correct then we'll all be readinig about it next fall then. Thats settled then, I'll go back to what I was doing..er, will go do what I'm about to be doing rather.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
The guy's story is true! I know this, because, in the future, time travel becomes commonplace. He actually travelled back in time to thwart the WTC bombings. This really pissed off Osama so he got hold of one of these devices and travelled forward in time to assasinate the good doctor before he had a chance to make his trip. Which negated the good doctor's travel back through time which allowed the WTC bombings to go ahead as planned.
Enough paradoxes for you? Don't worry, the government won't allow this research to continue, because this device is a tool of terror.
still not possible, since we still havent had any visitors from the future yet??
oh wait, is the present really the present...
my blog
This could be a first post!
Maybe he knows something few others know or are willing to find out. Or maybe his experiment will end in the untimely death of a few people. Who knows? Don't jump to conclusions just yet, folks.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
- a blanket
- a clock
Operations:- cover yourself with the blanket
- use the clock to wait for the desired amount of time
- remove the blanket
Et voila, you've just traveled into the future! Right now this method can only let you travel 1 min into the future per min under the blanket, but there must be a way to improve that ratio.Does this count? It was daylight savings and no one told me. I think I'm an hour in the future.
Umm...this guy forgot that Time Travel was invented in 1985 with Emmet "Doc" Brown's 'Flux Copasiter'. This guy was 17 years too late.
Maybe I can go back in time a change my posts to ones that have been moded up.
This Professor at Uconn has been in the news before. I believe he was posted on /. several months ago. More information on the project can be found here:
Moving Time with Light
There is no
Didn't you read the article? They are in "parallel universes". Some people...
So say he builds his time machine, goes back in time, and saves his father. Now he did that in a "parallel universe" (according to the article), and so now in this universe he doesn't invent time travel because his father is alive.
In conclusion: this man will not invent time travel, because if he does, it must only happen in a parallel universe.
...if he really can build a time machine, then he doesn't have to. All he needs to do is wait for his future self to beam back the machine and viola! He's got a time machine. Which he can then beam back to himself.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
"Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha" (monotone computer-synthesized voice)
- Stephen Hawking
Once you've got it right,
Could you send me back to the
First time I had sex?
As far as I know, it's possible to go FORWARD in time, since the faster you are to the speed of light, the slower the time around you. I once read that they took an atomic clock on one of the Concorde supersonic planes, and another one on the ground, and there was a time dilation of 0.0003 (or something like that) nanoseconds. If you could find a way to go even 99.999% the speed of light, you'd age only a few days while the sun's entering it's Red Giant phase. Or something like that.
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
My thought is that time travel will NEVER exist. Imagine a time machine is built in the future. Wouldn't someone use it to travel back to the present (2002 or even earlier)? I think we would see evidence of time travel and even exponential technological advancements (bringing technology from the future, most likely for profit)
Hasn't this story been posted before?
0xB
Hey if you're in British Columbia do that time travel thing and spring forward... :)
Ah well back to learning Java.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
"Circulating laser beams in the right way, by slowing them down and shooting them through anything from fiber-optic cable to special crystals, might create a similar distortion that could theoretically transport someone through different times, Mallett believes."
If I remember right, some crystals could slow down light because when the light travels through them the light has to turn into some other slower form of energy. So how would this have any affect on time because the speed of light stays contain regardless of the things you put it through, right? Can someone with a better understanding help me out? I would like to know how making gravity force a neutron to rotate sideways can lead to a second neutron forming next to it (shouldn't it for IN it if at all?)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If the machine will be working this fall, why hasn't he come into our current time from the future?
Maybe he can go back in time and warnt he US government about the WTC disaster.
You heard me.
Attention John Katz luvers everywhere.
; -)
He has a new book out. Go to amazon, and -ahem- write a review
For most of his career, however, Mallett kept secret that his desire for time travel had drawn him to become a physicist. It wasn't until a few years ago, when he began researching a book on the topic, that he arrived at his idea of how to build a time machine.
Seems to me that's a great reason to become a physicist. Imagine what kind of creativity we could produce if the reply to something like that was "Cool! Here's some books to help you," rather than "You're crazy. That can't happen, so go do something else."
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Well if you think of it....
Man kills Man,
Man fells bad,
Man builds time machine,
Man tells Man not to kill Man,
Man doesn't kill Man,
Man doesn't fell bad,
Man doesn't build time machine,
Man never goes back in time to fix problem of killing man so the man still kills man, man fells bad.
This would put time into and endless loop and we would never know it!
he's a nut
four-oh-four
It's impossible to go back in time. The proof is all around us. If we were ever able to go back in time, would we not aready know from the time travelers visiting us?
Our universe is the only one without time travellers? Wow.
According to the quote in the article there is a big flaw in the plan"If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''
In other words, anyone or anything sent into the past create some sort of parallel universe. Which means we will never see any evidence that the time machine works. At best he'll be able to create an effect where you toss something in and it disappears. Sounds to me like a great way to get rid of garbage but a less than ideal way to travel.
Of course there should also be plenty of parallel universes where stray neutrons, lab rats, and grad students will appear out of no where. THOSE timelines will have proof time travel works. But unless that happens I'm not getting into any so called time machine.
unless the amount of time to be travelled is proportinal to the energy required to 'send' anyway back time.. it would be interesting to see what it was like back in the day Christ on earth. maybe this would stop all the religious wars.
maybe this would align all the planets together.
maybe alex chiu and his eternal life magnetic rings do actually work.
still, i think the time cube would be economically cheaper than the ring of light.
my blog
Maybe because the future hasn't happened yet.
Vital Idea
There are plenty of things in modern physics that are "logically" impossible. Besides, the many-worlds interpretation neatly sidesteps logic for problems such as this.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Then wouldn't we be occasionally running into strange looking people from the future who are here to accomplish various tasks?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Consider Steven Hawking's chronology protection conjecture (for example here: http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/5803/c ron.html).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Of all the parallel universes, we just happen to be in the one universe where no time traveller ever visits.
I feel kind of gypped.
a black hole? Instead of using a massive body to distort space-time, he wants to use massive amounts of energy (photons). It's a bit sparse on details; and I'm (admittedly) a bit rusty on physics, but this sounds like trouble to me.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
One of us has got to dress up like Ronald Mallett-- all out, with a mask and everything, plus a scorched labcoat and frizzy hair-- and show up at his doorstep.
Slashdotter: Ron! Ron, it's me, your future self! You must listen to me!
Ronald Mallett: Who... who are you? You look like me!
RM: How do I know you're really me, and not a robot imposter from the future?
etc.
Better yet, we can send him an "aged" letter from himself postmarked April 6th, 1843. *evil grin*
Let's see the universe is expanding at the speed of light (or something like that), our planet is rotating at 1 rev/day which works out to 1,000 mph (24,000 miles at the equator over 24 hours) and we're spinning around the sun. So where we were yesterday is physically 1000s of miles away from today. Time travel ain't gonna work unless you want to arrive in the middle of the earth or deep dark space. You definitely won't arrive where you expect to.
I suspect, based only on absolutely nothing, that only forward time travel is possible. I think it may be possible to go forward in time at an accelerated rate (time goes slower for you) or to slow down time (time goes faster for you), maybe to a complete stop. But going back in time does not make much sense to me, it seems as if it would involve the reverse motion of all the particles in the universe. IANAP though. :/
Hell, I think that all products making references to time travel (Lost in Space) should have warning stickers on them stating so.
Funniest thing I read tonight.
Go Huskies!
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Well if time travel does exist maybe this guy is from an alternate universe created by Universal(?) when they were doing back to the future, and he got stuck here and now that technology is good enough he trying to get back to his own pararrel universe! Exactly what colleagues is he talking about?
I haven't taken anything beyond rudimentary physics, but that isn't the heart of my argument. Am I crazy, or does this guy contradict his own logic in the way he claims to bring a copy of the neutron back so that there are two. His later statement about the creation of a parallel universe is vague and partially contdradictory- "time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''" Is he saying that it's possible for one of the neutrons to end the universe it's in (provided it had the ability to kill it's parent, or perhaps it's entrance into the universe would radically destroy the laboratory as a side effet :) ) yet it would still live on in a parallel universe?
He who controls the past, commands the future... He who controls the future conquers the past.
First of all I assume by "someone in the future" you mean a human on earth. In this case, one of the simplest ways to avoid the future time travelers paradox is to posit that a backwards time travel of N years must physically be accompanied by a spatial displacement of more than N light years. That way, nobody who travels back in time can interact with anything affecting their own past, since they can't interact outside of their light cone.
Another way out of the time travel paradox is to adopt the "parallel universes" viewpoint put forth in the article, and provide some mechanism for explaining why we always stay in the one universe out of these that has not seen time travelers.
Finally, if by someone in the future you mean aliens from somewhere other than earth, then this problem is also easy to resolve: since we have not seen any aliens at all (roswell notwithstanding), it's unreasonable to expect to find alien time travelers.
Apparently, this guy doesn't realize that we have yet to develop a finite probability generator. How improbable is a time machine? If he does create one, he's bound to be mauled by his peers.
Time travel. My big question is this. Where is it all stored. These events, these moments. Where is it kept this archive known as the past. It is not a physical entity that one can manipulate or encounter. The past is in our minds. It is what we remember.
The furture. It does not exist either, not to the degree where you can travel forward and see what is to become versus where we are headed. Because of free will. We can decide to go to work or stay home. We can decide anything at any given moment. If the future did exist and was an entity that you could see, and feel and hear. Then it would look exactly like chaos. Always changing because of free will. I didn't have to type this message and post it. I could press the close button on my browser right now and forget it all. Free will my brothers.
As for time existing. In my opinion. Time, the way we have always known it, does not exist as a real factor of anything. Time has measure only because we will it to have measure. Time was created as a countdown to ones death. (In essence) Time neither speeds up or slows down because it isn't really there. Not like gravity or magnetism or light. It is somthing we created as mortals. The atomic clock experiment. Think about it. You have a clock, relativly close to sea level, where gravity has a greater pull and there are more particles compacted together. Then you have this plane way up there further away from the earth. Equalling less gravity and less particals compacting it. Of course it is going to slow down. The atoms are more free to move. It is like throwing a baseball on the moon and on earth. Which will fly further? The one in the plane will slow down. In fact I bet, if you suspend an atomic clock high above in the stratospere and leave one on earth. The one suspended up high will slow down. Even without any movement in any given direction. This is common sense here.
We need to invest this kind of intelligence in something of more value. Like Kernel version 3.0. OR! a better energy drink! (Now I am getting sarcastic)
~Admrlnxn
"I got your mom in my trunk"
Seeing as this guy doesn't concern himself with 'engineering problems' all he needs to do is get something with lots of mass, say Jupiter, and harness it's gravity.
If you could sit in a vessel exposed, yet protected from those kinds of forces you'd be able to look out the window and see time flying very quickly forward. Even easier would be to actually fly to Jupiter and back. Easy being relative in this case (geddit?).
Going backwards in time is a lot messier and means messing with all kinds of negative gravity. The biggest forseen problem will always be that you can't go back before you invented the machine.
I take as proof that it will never be done because the bible doesn't have any mention of a pale scientist standing next to the cross with a video camera saying 'Can I have a quick interview, the guys back home will never believe this'.
Everyone knows Mallett invented time travel. Geez. Kids these days just don't read their history books.
We can assert he is a failure because if he was successful, his future-self would have visited him and congratulated him on his success, and his dead father would have risen from his grave to promptly bash him on the head for meddling in God's power.
Thus, I submit this is old news because it's not from the future, which is now considered the only "new" news, and slashdot should be sent to the parallel universe this wacko keeps yammering on about.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
You can only really encourage that to a point, i mean this guy was interested in time travel and then became a physicist, found a book and developed a theory. It's not like he just said "i want to go back in time and i'm going to make a machine to do it" on a street corner downtown and someone handed him a book. This guy worked hard and earned a lot of respect by becoming a professor, then he expanded on his knowledge. If this gets as much press as i think it's going to, then people are still going to call him crazy, and they will keep calling him crazy until he proves it works.
At least my name's not Jerry.
...only forward-based time travel is possible. Yes, we can travel into the future, but unfortunately there is no way of travelling back into the past. This explains the seeming paradox of why there hasn't been any evidence of time travellers coming back to correct past wrongs.
All it takes, as any casual viewer of Star Trek would know, is an orbit around the sun. So far, I have successfully made 35 orbits around the sun and have travelled an astounding 35 years into the future!
See you all next orbit, bitches!
They're called "canadians".
My HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE is on DRUGS.
I'm going to bet that this is old news, but not really because it's new news from the future because someone from the future came back here and gave us his old news and presented it to us as new news, but really it's just his old news, right? So really, this is just new news that's old.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Time travel is not a new concept, obviously. Time machines have been invented and successfully used for some time now. However, the reason we haven't seen any successful results of them, is that time protects itself from tampering.
If Professor A creates a time machine, and uses it to travel back to the past to alter a certain event, say preventing JFK from getting shot. He may effect the timeline, but he will create a branch at the same time. He will continue along that branch and reality forever.
The rest of us on the main trunk will never see that effect that professor A had on the past, since history has already been written for us. Professor A has been lost forever since he will be living in the history he has created.
You could go back in time, but you will never be able to return to THIS reality. That would be the paradox.
"Sherman, set the wayback machine to September 10th, 2001..."
Notice that he's talking about sending back in time - probably a very short period back - of just one subatomic particle. This doesn't require harnessing the insane amounts of energy, or the degree of fine control, required to transport something like a living human.
:-)
And relativity does allow for it. It would be a very interesting experiment. If it doesn't work even though it "should", it would have profound impact on physics.
And if it does work, well, imagine being able to send just a few bits abck in time. Like "don't eat the Salmon!"
As for breaking causality is harder then you might expect. As long as the same bits are sent back in time, it doesn't matter that nobody died from eating the salmon... But the bits need to be sent back anyway.
Robert L. Forward's book "Timemaster" explains it saying that once something has traveled back in time, improbable events become probable to ensure the same thing does indeed get sent back in time... I understand that reflects at least some physicists understanding of how time travel can work in practice.
"Been there, done that..."
Time travel isn't that big a deal, I mean come on, when you can get a book on How To Build a Time Machine at your local bookstore why are people so amazed at this? The book is real, and it is a serious book (it is not to be confused with the children's book with the same title published previously). The author explains that we know how to travel through time, it is just really expensive at this point. It is a budgetry problem, not a science problem.
Since his father, a heavy smoker, died at the age of 33 when Mallett was 10 years old, Mallett has longed for a way to travel back in time to warn him about the dangers of cigarettes.
Sounds like an episode of Quantum Leap.
Actually, there is. As has been pointed out, in special relativity, if you are moving then time passes slower in your reference frame relative to everyone else's. So all you have to do is speed up (preferably as close as possible to the speed of light), and you can travel into the future at higher than a 1:1 ratio.
This effect has been empirically confirmed using the atomic clocks on board the GPS satellites, so, no, it's not hogwash.
This seems to be somewhat related to the problem of faster than ligth travel.
A very througout treatise of the problems concerning faster than light travel can be found here
Summary: There is bad news, very bad news and downright awfull news for people dreaming of a warp drive (but a little light of hope is given in the last section).
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.
I wonder how long they will debate such things before someone goes back and kills, say, Hitler. And I can think of a lot of other bits of history that people of influence might rather erase. (Linux? Never heard of it.)
it occurs to me that if you'd have to travel back to exactly the same place. to say you end up in the same place on earth would really impressive, as the world both rotates around the sun and spins on its axis really fast . . .
Well, it could be the machine, but that means you can only go back to the moment when the machine started funtioning. So I don't really buy the father thing. (April 1st joke, I guess)
Vlad
The Raven
This theory is more realistic and would resolve the problem of "why haven't we met people from the future" problem.
From what I understand, physics allow for a limited amount of time travel. I say limited because you would only be able to travel back only to the time in which the time machine was created (i.e. you would need a machine that sends objects through time and a machine that receives objects through time, and if one or the other does not exist, time travel doesn't happen.) Within this framework, it would be impossible to travel back in time and tell everyone that time travel exists because you wouldn't be able to travel back that far.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Yes time travel into the future is possible, by aproaching the speed of light. However once at the speed of light time stops. This leads to the theory that if you go past the speed of light you will actually arrive at your destination before you left (negative velocities) and that is basically travelling back in time. Breaching the speed of light is the obsticle to be passed by in this instance. So yes you can go forward in time, but you can also go backwards in time, in theory... but since no one has done either it's all theory anyway. As for the why haven't people come back in time to right the wrongs, you can't predict what changing the past could do. Think about it, if you change the past so that something bad never happend, then in the future the bad thing never happend, so there's no point in going back and changing it, but if you don't go back and change it then the past isn't changed. For that reason it's probably illegal to time travel without certain licensing and training to stay inconspicuous. Maybe it never happens at all, or maybe the people inventing time machines realised what type of a weapon they are unleashing on the world and stopped trying to make their machine.
At least my name's not Jerry.
Dude, I just want to point out that you're seriously considering under what circumstances you'd get into A FUCKING TIME MACHINE.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
...he could come and give the machine to himself today and save us all the wait.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I always thought eventually time travel will be possible, except you can only go forward in time. Otherwise we'd have seen a machine sent back from the future already.
Come to think of it, we're traveling forward through time right now, so maybe I'm not as smart as you look.
Remind me not to post while drunk. (Apparantly you will have to travel through time to do that now.)
"And like that
On a very related note, Alex Chiu has some nice plans on his site for a Teleportation Machine.
Well, who's to say someone/something from another parallel universe hasn't done this already? Maybe our universe is already one of the many dumpsites of stuff/beings sent from parallel universes.
The good thing is that you dont actually need to test the time machine, just build it and say ok, this time tomorrow we will be sending back this apple a whole day...
:) ...
... and you NEVER needed to buy that apple !!!
...
and you just sit and wait for an apple to appear out of thin air
hmmm and you grab that apple and send it back tomorrow
time travel is sooo cool
What makes you think that traveling through time would result in a slow or stop in movement through space, or that the laws that hold a person to the same trajectory as the Earth would no longer apply?
Relativistic effects do not negate the effects of gravity or inertial effects - the effects that cause us to "stick to" the earth. The majority of this force is the force of gravity - which would really do the job no matter which direction we were moving in time (inertial effects would only be helpful in "sticking" to the earth if traveling forward in time.
Also, if you read the article, the effect only happens inside the beam of electrons. That means that there is some minimum point before which time travel is not possible - the point at which the electron machine is turned on. This also limits the point in space.
If time travel where possible, I guess maybe you'd feel a strange sensation, something like getting off the elevator (perhaps worse - you might be thrown several hundred feet in the air), as the earth began to rotate in the opposite direction though.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
That the professor is a time traveller?
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
Sounds like a misconfigured network to me.
Packets keep on getting looped around.
Odd that it happened with fibre, more common with CAT5 in building LANs, but hey, if you've got the money for a Fibre LAN, why not go for it, eh?
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
And you wonder why some professors take so long to openly discuss such crackpot theories...
Like the one on that Black Adder special (yes, I know, that wasn't original, either).
If the future hasnt happened yet, that would also mean that we cannot travel back in time since 2002 is the future of 2001..2000..1999, and so on...
Maybe we nuke ourselves out of existence before we get it working.
If he made a time machine in the future wouldnt you think he would come back to the past to give his "younger" self the blueprints? so we would have it by now? just a thought... unless this is the first time it EVER happened
keanmarine.com
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
So his father quits smoking.
So he doesn't die.
So Mr Wizard has no incentive to invent a time machine - thus never inventing it, thus never traveling back in time to warn his father, who continues to smoke, and dies of cancer when Mr Wizard is ten years old, motivating him to invent a time machine and go back into time to save his father...
Mr Wizard should forget this craziness and concentrate on his true passion: Dance, Dance, DANCE!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Lets say you make a machine that can travel in time, you still have to make it travel through the 3 physical axes too. Say i want to go 1/2 a year back in time and i get into a stationary machine that will do it for me... i'm going to end up with my lungs exploding through my chest as i watch the earth orbit on the other side of the sun. The only real way to do this is to make the machine into a space craft of some sort and take it into space to do the traveling, then travel only in 1 year increments and hope the sun hasn't pulled the earth too far out of your way on it's orbit of the Galaxy. Then you also have to take into account any other matter that may be there, such as an asteroid, even if it's only a few centimeters diameter you could materialize with it in your brain. There are still a lot of problems facing time travel, dangers to ones own person still pale in comparison to what someone could do with a little splash in the primordial ooze. Time travel is a very stupid idea to bring about in a society filled with murders and wars.
At least my name's not Jerry.
And he'll no doubt travel into the future where he'll find a utopia based on the principles of Be excellent to each other and Party on dudes!.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Analog time machines suck. HG Wells showed us that. I mean look at it, you just sit down and play with a few levers. The Delorean time machine though... digital, and it could fly!
"Derp de derp."
wasnt this already posted
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Well, it'll be a good way to mark all those mid term papers and still manage to get a little rest.
threadeds blog
His fire
His Sputnik
Hell he thought to himself, all the inventions in man's short history was nothing compared to what he hoped to accomplish now.
And he was going to send it just one week in the past.
Nobody thought this could have been a late Aprils Fool joke.
I sig, therefore I was.
According to my time machin... clock, it will be 2 am in approximately 2 and a half hours.
Where do you live? I live in Surrey.
exactly how in the hell was this article posted at 2:30 anyway?
2:00am - 3:00am didn't happen today...
maybe it was the time machine...
KingPrad
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
"The second particle would be the first one visiting itself from the future."
I see two problems with this:
1.) What would keep the particle appearing in the future from appearing in the same spot? Seems like they'd try to occupy the same space..
2.) how will they know it's the same particle? Guage it's spin maybe?
Im concerned that the experiment could produce positive results, but not positively. Kind of like that fusion bubbles thing not too long ago.
Here's a question though: Is it possible this could be a new way to harness energy? Imagine reclaiming energy from the past...
"Derp de derp."
.. with a decent physics-looking explanation: an interview with April Holladay on Wonderquest.com.
p.s. I hope this venture succeeds.
Because if it was possible, then that means that there is no such thing as free will.
If it was possible then everything that has happened and everything that will happen, has already happened. How else could you move around time?
Go forward to a time that has not yet happened? Go back, but from a person in the past our time has not yet happened.
So time travel cannot exist. Or else there is no such thing as free will.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
if it is possible at all someone from the future must have visited us already. any ideas who it could have been?
Hey, I have one of these! Aparrently someone else built the thing and disguised it as my washing machine and dryer. I wonder if it was him... and if it was... why in the hell did he build it into a washer and dryer?
;)
Somewhere... out there... in a parallel universe... people get free socks out of thin air. Of course, these socks are always half of a pair. It's not possible to send both socks in a pair into one of these parallel universes. I'm not sure which law of physics this would falls under.
I wonder... if I tied a string to a pair of socks... and one went into the parallel universe and the other remained in my dryer... where would the string lead to? Oh well... I'll leave the string theories to the experts.
-Twilight1
You dont get it
Time travel is not traveling through our time and our future, but through a parrellel universes past and future
most likely you wont even be physically there, you'll just see it
but im not exactly sure myself
you never can know this until you try it, theres theories of other dimensions, string theory proves it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Indeed, on April 9th in the evening, we had a backstep. I arrived at the destination on April 2nd, as planned, but however I lost all memory of why we had that backstep. How am I now supposed to undo the catastrophe that'll happen, if I don't know what it is?
I was thinking he ment crystals that slowed down light not speed it up Light Stopped, Held And Re-emitted By A Crystal
As Richard Feynman said, "Scientific imagination is imagination in a straitjacket." The other kind may seem more fun, but accomplishes nothing because it doesn't work.
Now if a kid wants to engage in time travel, I would discourage it. Nothing we know that I know about has any chance of doing that. Ditto for anti-gravity. You have to learn to accept the straitjacket.
But if the kid wants to understand time travel, then encourage that. From the mystery of Time's arrow, to anti-particles being regular particles going backwards in time, to strange geometries in General Relativity where it is possible (but which require multiple stars worth of material moving in rather unnatural ways to accomplish), there is lots to engage the mind. But you can't lose track of the gap between what we think we know, what we think might be possible, and what we know doesn't work. Without that you might as well be a witch doctor invoking the spirits for all of the effect you are going to have...
it is obviously a troll. no one has time travelled. I can't believe he fooled a clueless mod into modding him up.
we are among you. Art Bell used to have a time traveller call-in line every once in a while. I called in on a couple of previous trips. Generally, though, we're not supposed to talk about your future. Some of us do, though. I'll tell you one little tidbit: Bill Gates died a pauper, and the webcase of his funeral got h4x0r3d by some 1ee8 h4x0r5.
There's a physicist doing research on ideas surounding time travel. I think he recently published a book which is a theoretical cookbook to building a time machine.
In summary, he explains that the conflicts of meeting yourself, etc. isn't really a "problem". There's no mathematical problem that can be stated or conflicted with that philosophical question. The reason that you can't go back in time prior to the point of creation of the time machine has to do with the connecting ends of a worm hole. If the creation of the time machine creates one end of a worm hole, the other end can only be in the relative future.
I don't claim to understand the physics behind any of this, but that's what some of the leading physicists are thinking.
-Alex
If someone in this world time travels, they vanish FOREVER. They can never return to THIS reality,
You see, if they go to the past, it creates a new future, thus a new reality
If they go to the future, its the future but they cant return to the present after they get to the future because the present is no longer the same present, if they return, they'll return to a new present.
basically time travelers arent traveling in time, but traveling through diffrent realities, its more like sliders.
This is based on string theory, and the current ideas of dimensions, and understanding of the multiverse and physics
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When you go to the past, this is assuming time travel to the past is actually possible, it modifies the future, the future is no longer the same. You are now in a totally diffrent dimension, a diffrent reality, one which you created when you entered the time machine.
Time travel is something our minds do on a daily basis, you can imagine future events, sometimes you are right and sometimes you are wrong, traveling into the future allows you to travel into a POSSIBLE future, but no future is THE absolute future,
Time is not mapped, its dynamic, it works like this, everything that can happening, is happening if not in this reality in another.
Its more like sliders than likee the time machine movie, you travel through realities, or mirror universes, according to current theory, its believed theres infinite mirror worlds
A time machine actually isnt a time machine in that sense, its a machine which allows you to go into any reality you want, or create your own reality by modifying the past.
We all create our own reality anyway, the diffrence is with a time machine, YOU have an advantage, you can not only imagine a new reality but literally control the future by modifying the past.
Its like gambling but cheating.
A time machine allows you to essentially cheat.
The reason we dont see anyone coming from the future is, when you travel to the future, the past changes, you can never go back to the original past, if you do go back to the past its a new past thats a mirror of the original one.
I'm convinced anyone who will time travel into the future will never return, basically they'll vanish forever and all will vanish with them
Anyone who travels to the past will vanish forever from our reality
basically time travel is a one way trip.
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Its a known fact based on super stringn theory, that there are other dimensions, up to 11 others, according to M theory, and string theory, and the newest theories in physics, Time travel if it is possible in terms of what we understand from physics, would create a fork in reality where the time traveler would go through the fork in the road and join the future, we'd continue on our own fork in the road and go to our future, this person who time traveled would simply be missing from our reality and placed into the other. It would be a transfer of matter from one reality to the next, like if you create a fork in a pipe and you send a ball through one of the forks, the ball can either split up and be in both forks at once (which i doubt) or the ball can go into one fork or the other.
If the ball goes in both forks at once then they'd be able to return back to our time and tell us what happened, if the ball leaves our reality, it can never return back.
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... if this guy gets a hold of one of these.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
IANAP (I ain't no freakin' physicist), but I don't get this -- if this scenario is true, then where does the parallel universe go? Doesn't it take energy from the same universe we're in?
Nope, because the exact instant that our good-hearted scientist jumped back in time (to another universe) to save JFK, and evil version of him jumped into our universe to kill him in our timeline. So the mass exchange will be exactly equal.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
His entire inspiration behind becoming a physics professor is so he can invent a time machine and go back to tell his dad not to smoke. But if he succeeds at that, then he has nothing driving him to physics, and therefore never invents a time machine. I've already exploited the huge hole in this cheesy Hollywood plot. Give me a break.
I don't get why people think the speed of light has anything to do with time travel.
First, let's assume you would be able to see me from 50 light years away.
If I travel from 50 light years away to a point 5 feet away from you at a speed faster than light, I will appear to be in both places at once.
Did I arrive before I left? No, you simply can't perceive that I'm not still at the point I started at.
Furthermore, assuming I travelled at double the speed of light, we're both 25 years older than we were when we began our little experiment. We'll be another 25 years older before my image 50 light years away finally fades.
Maybe, he already has...
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Dr. Guth, do I detect the hidden talents of a comic physicist?
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
But Alan Guth, a physics professor at MIT who has studied the theory of time machines, says he isn't sure it's even theoretically possible to travel through time. As far as whether time travel is a possibility, he says: ''Definitely not within our lifetimes.''
/. articles, stumble across this quote, than jump back in time and travel forward again just to spite him!
Researchers from future read archives of ancient
I stole this Sig
The US Government surrendered on the next day when Germany nuked Washington DC and Baltimore on Dec. 25th 1942. There's a Fatherland out there, mein Kamerad, where Swastika banners proudly fly and black boots stomp the rhythm of human advancement! There's a world where Eisenhower and the rest of the war criminals and traitors were executed in Bergen-Belsen. The American Nazi Party has ruled this country for other 60 years now ever since George Lincoln Rockwell became Amerika's new Fuehrer.
This timeline of yours is perversely wrong in almost everything detail I can come up with, Kamerad. For example, I remember from history class, the mass execution of thousands of American "Resistance Fighters" terrorists in Bethel New York, August 1969. Over in your timeline they had a rock concert called "Woodstock" instead.
However, soon this sickening charade of a parallel history of yours is about to undergo major revisions whether you like it or not. We have a time machine and you don't. We have beaten you again, just like we did 1942 when we beat you to the nukes!
so if i understood that right, all of this is based on the theory of relativity?
so if it works, it would prove it, and if it didn't, it would disprove it correct?
maybe he has other motives than transporting an atom or whatever across time
Except he has kept silent about his goals for oh all of 20+ years... Only now that he's become "respected", does he go public with this idea. ;)
That being said, I believe time travel *will* be invented/discovered *some time*, but I'm not holding my breath.
This is actually not that new of an idea. Larry Niven (sci-fi novelist) wrote a short story called "All The Myriad Ways" about something like this. It basically was about a detective researching suicides in people that travel parallel dimensions. It also has the notion that each second infinitely many parallel universes appear as each possible outcome of the present.
The real kicker is about how when the dimension travellers get home. When they leave, a little point is set on their display as to which universe to return to. As time passes, the universes multiply, and that single point becomes a band of points--because their universe has already been going on without them. The "widening of the bands" apparently causes these guys to get depressed and off themselves.
This begs the question (with regards to those timelines appearing out of nowhere) about whether a time traveller will be able to direct which universe they could head towards. There was another book, Novelty (can't seem to find the author), that had an idea that you couldn't travel contrafactually (so universes containing many time travellers just got wierder and wierder), so it was possible for a set of parallel universes to exist where people, were their own grandfather, but not a universe where someone killed their grandfather (or if they did, they got kinda stuck in that universe because they couldn't go back, or something like that). Although, the book didn't explore the idea too thoroughly.
Anyways, seeing how nature would sort out this kind of hubris would be damn interesting.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
Sure he could travel into the future, even the past, but from what we know about physics and what this so called scientist should know, 2 versions of the same matter cannot occupy the same space.
This means if he travels into the future he'll be slipped into a mirror universe, just like creating a fork.
From what i know, time is change, we control change, and we control the future to some extent, but we control things as a mass conciousness,
we can use our conciousness to predict future events and remember past events, and this allows us to have some control over the future.
Someone who time travels, is essentially cheating, they cant effect our past or our future, instead by time traveling they create a seperate path for them, which is a mirror of our universe.
So i believe anyone who time travels will never return, they will vanish out of our exsistance and enter into another.
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I gather since he hasn't told himself how to do it yet, he probably never got it working quite right.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Wow that's funny.
Where are my mod pts now?
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
I'm not getting into any so called time machine.
Step into my disintegr...... er 'time machine.'
look at the picture on the guy's homepage.
not a nut. riiiight.
You have to promise me that you'll never do that. You could end up ripping a hole in the space/time continuum! Who knows what could happen! All the socks that ever disappeared could simultaneously materialize in your dryer! Can you imagine the devistation it would cause?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
For those that think backward in time travel is logically impossible, it's not. In a deterministic universe only self-defeating times like lines cause the problem but those obviously aren't the only ones, in an indeterministic universe then there is no problem at all. Here's an even more interesting paper on retro-causal influences.
t ml
http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Braud_Retro.h
Because while there are countless numbers of people from the future trying thier darndest right now to make it back here to muck about with our world, there are an equal number of people, also from the future, who are activly working to stop them. Anytime they see a paragraph in the history books suddenly appear that says, "King Jose De La Rosa, most beloved and wise man who ever lived, inventor of the time machine.", they go back in time and kick Jose's butt and make him give back the time machine he took from the physics lab.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
At the risk of being a little offtopic here..what if this reality is the result of a time traveler (or group of time travelers) who decided to mold this one to their liking? Human history has been filled with so many near-misses that one can't quite help but wonder if this reality, in fact, is nothing but a mere modification of someone else's reality..
literally he could instantly know all that is, was and ever will be, and control the whole uniiverse.
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I alwayz waz wanderin how it waz started. By ze way -- iz it year 2002 or I missad ze rait point?
As a UConn student myself I know about this story. It was unveiled several months ago (took you guys long enough to hear of it). It's a very interesting theory he has going. The actual document he has written up for this is quite large and goes into a lot of detail on how it works exactly. It really isn't that useful though as it only allows you to jump back in time to when the machine was created. More like a save and restore feature (expensive one at that). It also sounds more like a dimension skipper. At the creation of the machine someone could walk through it (possibly yourself).
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true." --James
So TT could be an alternative to executing people? Send them back a couple of 100k years?
Actually, to really understand what everyone means by "time travel" you have to understand time itself. "time" as humans know it, is simply a uniform and repeated measurement of change.
The change, of course, is the increase of "entropy" or "chaos" in the universe. Time travel requires that you somehow hold the traveling object still (0 degress kelvin) while somehow reversing every interaction in the universe (or maybe a local area) and then starting the mix up again.
It has been shown that there are "impressions" made by small subatomic particles as they travel forward in "Time" (ie they progress toward chaos) that travel backwards in time (towards order).
Of course, this may just be an artifact of using symbolic math as a model.
Then again, there is no real world, there is no spoon. There are only individual human experiences.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Time travel is a disturbing thing, at least to me. First, think that i would travel to tomorrow (keep it simple). The me of now would skip one day and exist only the day after this. Thus, i would not exist during the time between now and tomorrow (some people would rather enjoy that... "Hey, why not take a week while you're at it!").
But what freaks me out is that if i were to travel to yesterday, i would already exist in yesterday. After travelling there, there would thusly be two of me. But what would happen when yesterday became today, and say that one of me wouldn't care to go back to the day before? There would be two of me.
Forget cloning. Just time-travel me to one epsilon back in time, and there'd be two of me, only one epsilon different in age. Then repeat.
Time-transport some fascist-fundamentalist-idiotist back just a jiffy an umpteen times, and you have an army of fascist-fundamentalist-idiots. With guns and all.
Buy, now i'm scared!
dude. you're like so pre-time-travel. take a chill.
Dark moves faster than light, meaning invisible pockets in space
black holes, void, dark matter, gravity
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wonder how hard/easy thing he's missing in the equation...allways the equations!
Good question, conciousness would be the first time traveler.
You can imagine any possible future, or remember any possible past.
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For that little of physics education I had, there's one point which I think this guy forgets, cause and effect. I'm not too sure, but I understand that bending space is an effect, while this guy is turning things the other way and wants to use the space bending as a cause... I don't think it'll work.
In 1995, all Math was ready to explain how black-holes work, which was also an acceptible proof of black-holes. The Math implied that time travel would be possible through "worm-holes", a big story which even the greatest anti-time-travel-theorist "Steven Hawkins" had to admit that it could be possible.
Then came the grandfather paradox (read posting below to see what that is).
Within the math on worm-holes, it could be proven with billiards balls on a pool table that cause and effect were the most important relations within mother nature.
Tim could not kill his grandfather before he was born in a time travel age, nature would always prevent this. The math proved that mother nature never lets the relations between cause and effect to be broken. Math is math and practice is practice, I belief that the unbreakability of cause/effect relations is a viable axiom. It does mean that not everything has happened yet and that one is in charge of its own future.
Bizar technology?
Okay if this is true and if he's really that clever then why can't we have a time machine by yesterday then?
"It's the early bird that get's the worm, but the second mouse that get's the cheese!"
With a Machine like that, I could beat the trolls to it :-)
If profesor A uses his time machine to travel back in time and 'say' prevents the jfk death, THEN for all of us it never happened and you wouldn't know it... Let's put it this way: Profesor A travels back in time AND gets JFK SHOOT, with that he CHANGED the history, but for all of us, it always was that way. So, YES we can say that time changes have been happening since always, but we simply can't know, since we cannot remember how the past was before the change. Now you can stop here.. or you can go on reading if you want to have a new paradox problem... the relly paradox is in the fact that prof A travelled with an objective... say.. shoot jfk.. in the moment he get it done, then jfk was death and then in the future the prof A doesn't have a motive to go to the past to get jfk killed, so he doesn't travell, since he doesn't travell jfk is not killed, so he has motive and travell... AND SO ON AND SO FORTH. THAT is the paradox...
If you read the article, he explains why this wouldn't necessarily be possible. See his future self may very well have gone back in time to today to tell him how to build the thing. Problem is that when he came back he ended up in a parallel time line. So, it's entirely possible that he does succeed and that he does go back in time to tell himself how, but it wouldn't impact this timeline.
:)
Convenient non?
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Art Bell's show is great for listening to a bunch of liars trying to deceive trailpark trash into buying their lame-ass books.
Send me back in time so I can buy a shit load of Microsoft Stock for cheap, and collect all the rarities that can be sold on ebay for thousands.
The story was unveiled on September 10, 2001 ... that would have been a great day to have a working time machine.
I thought this was a belated April Fools post for a moment. I remember following some link from Slashdot on the 1st that had articles talking about how to modify your car to use water instead of gasoline. Articles like this are always fun because there's never any follow up that shows some progress on the subject. Like "Time Travel: Still yet to be achieved" and "Is it yesterday yet?" I also like the cute little pictures of spacemen going through some hole in time that often accompany the articles (). Here's an amusing (though thoroughly hostile) article that argues against the possibility of time travel: The dreamy Star-trekkie side of me would love to believe time travel is possible, but the down to Earth part of me believes that it's our perception of time that can change. The commonly accepted "legal" form of time travel that people talk about is that of going into the future. I can accept that someone traveling at relativistic speeds will experience time slower than someone on the Earth, but that doesn't mean that he's travelling faster through time. It just means that all the factors that we use to measure change in time (including consciousness, his heartrate, the ticking of a clock, or the wavelength of a photon) are being distorted by speed he's travelling. There is still a unique *moment* in time for everything in the universe regardless of how fast you are travelling. It's sweet that Mallett wants to travel back in time to save his father, but it smacks more of a Hollywood cliché than anything (Contact, anyone?). If he can show an experiment that is more than a trick of physics then maybe I'll start to take him seriously.
Well, since I am posting this from the future using my neutron-timewarp 3COM network card I can assure you: it will work. Oh and ByteHog: do NOT leave the house tomorrow. There are some satellite batteries heading your way.
If his idea pans out, won't there be a host of potential paradoxes, such as time travelers killing their parents and making it impossible for them to exist? No, he says, explaining that those travelers would continue to exist in a ''parallel universe.''
As an armchair physicist, it's not clear to me that the parallel universe theory holds a lot of weight. People seem to forget that it stems from an attempt to explain quantum uncertainty, or why particles spread out into waves with a probability distribution, and only fall into a specific location when they are observed.
The theory is, well, every possible path is taken across an infitine number of universes. But it's equally likely that there is just one universe, and that we simply don't understand the mechanism by which quantum probabilites are selected.
As for time travel, the theory seems to be that, hey, time is a dimension like any other, why not traverse it? Nobody suggests that you can exist in two times simultaneously, or leap from place to place. But time travel suggests that you can be in two places at once, and leap from time to time. Why?
The other thing is that time is not like the other dimensions. It moves in only one direction, which nobody can explain, but it clearly does. We have access to left and right, up and down, but only through time. Where is the fifth dimension that will allow us to access the past and the future?
Time is consistent in a local frame of reference. If you want time travel, jump in a fast spaceship and stop aging with regards to earth. You can alter the rate of time, but it still goes forward. There is nothing in the theory of relativity that suggests otherwise.
I think that's the closest thing to time travel we'll see. And even achieving that much would take a hell of a lot of energy.
Fact: Knowledge or information based on real occurrences
Theory: A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomenon
You cannot base a fact on a theory, but rather it's the other way around, basing a theory on a fact. Superstring theory is just that, a theory We have, at this point, no practical way to determine the results of time travel since we have no way to time travel (with the possible exception of sitting here and waiting a while).
While I tend to think superstring theory, from what I understand of it, makes sense, lets not go suggesting that it is in any way a fact. Hopefully in time we will find enough facts to suggest whether it is the correct theory or not.
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unfortunately, this has been posted already.
Sorry to disappoint everyone.
I speak seven different body languages fluently, including ToughGuy and Swinger.
I thought this was a belated April Fools post for a moment. I remember following some link from Slashdot on the 1st that had articles talking about how to modify your car to use water instead of gasoline.
a ult.htm#).
u s. htm
Articles like this are always fun because there's never any follow up that shows some progress on the subject. Like "Time Travel: Still yet to be achieved" and "Is it yesterday yet?" I also like the cute little pictures of spacemen going through some hole in time that often accompany the articles (http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/wormholes/def
Here's an amusing (though thoroughly hostile) article that argues against the possibility of time travel:
http://home1.gte.net/res02khr/crackpots/notorio
The dreamy Star-trekkie side of me would love to believe time travel is possible, but the down to Earth part of me believes that it's our perception of time that can change.
The commonly accepted "legal" form of time travel that people talk about is that of going into the future. I can accept that someone traveling at relativistic speeds will experience time slower than someone on the Earth, but that doesn't mean that he's travelling faster through time. It just means that all the factors that we use to measure change in time (including consciousness, his heartrate, the ticking of a clock, or the wavelength of a photon) are being distorted by speed he's travelling. There is still a unique *moment* in time for everything in the universe regardless of how fast you are travelling.
It's sweet that Mallett wants to travel back in time to save his father, but it smacks more of a Hollywood cliché than anything (Contact, anyone?). If he can show an experiment that is more than a trick of physics then maybe I'll start to take him seriously.
- And what about the ethics of changing history?
just set the dial to before when this law has been passed and kill the people responsible for making the lawThere would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.
Just because there is a simpler explanation doesn't mean that the more complex answer isn't correct. Theories suggest that time travel is possible though likely VERY difficult to accomplish. Let's not write the guy off because he MIGHT be a crack pot, let's wait and see what he does.
As for the implications of parallel universes, if it does imply a meta-universe, I have one question for you: so what?
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Really! If you take a moment A, 5 minutes later I'm in a moment B 5 minutes later on the timeline. It's something we all do unless we travel out into space.
But consider this: If I'm defining my present moment as the reference point, I will never be able to "timetravel" at all. I'll always remain in origo.
Then we have the next interesting issue: In quantuum physics a positron is really an electron going backwards in time. The net effect is that timetraveling backwards in time reverses its charge, but there's nothing special about the particle per se. We'll perhaps never know if a positron is REALLY travelling backwards in time, or if it is REALLY the opposite charge as of an electron. Maybe it's both? Or the question of "timetravel" is irrelevant somehow?
Maybe we have completely misunderstood time itself? I feel we take it for granted, without really knowing it. Einstein seems to have gotten a big part of it though. If you understand the models in the special relativity, you will know that time and space is interconnected - you cannot have one without the other. So, ultimately Everything That Is is just events connected in time and space, each part with its own point of reference. That may mean that there is one universe for every possible reference point in this one. I tend to believe the universe is infinite in more than just space, so this is not a problem for me to accept. Then we have the laws of "nature" (physics), maybe those are just limitations in the system. Even local to our neighbourhood (dimensional or spacial). Well, well. Food for thought. If you want to read an interesting book, read Fridtjof Capras "The Tao of Physics". Very interesting read.
The problem with time travel is that you have to master space travel as well. Lets say you decide to go back to september 11 to warn everybody about the twin tower attacks.
You press the magic button.
The machine whrils.
You're wisked into the past.
And you die because you're in the middle of space and the earth is on the other side of the sun.
The earth turns, the earth rotates around the sun, the sun rotates around the galactic core, the galaxy is hurtling thru space at a phenominal rate. So any machine which moves you through time must also move you through space.
Given this rather simple fact does anybody STILL believe this guy can make a time machine?
Has anyone ever considered that the Earth, the Solar System, and the Milky Way are all moving? If someone travelled back in time, even just a single day, wouldn't the Earth be in a different place? Why would the time traveller just assume that their position in space would just magically change as they go back in time so that it matches the position of the Earth?
"Yes, well, we have a few trips we'd like to make. Strictly historical interest, you understand. Now tell me, if you want to travel to...oh, say, Finland, does the machine have to be in Finland, or can you move in space as well?"
"Oh, I think we'd have to move in space, what with the Earth's rotation, movement around the sun, and so forth. Finland?"
"Just an example. Do you see any particular limit on timespan? Say you have a working model by 2010; would you be able to send a person back to, say, 1990? Or even 1970?"
"That should work. Longer trips would require more energy, of course."
"Well, 1984 might be as good as 1970, really. Hmm, have to find some maps of Cambridge as it was in 1984..."
"Er...exactly what kind of historical research were you thinking of doing, Mr. Gates?"
There are many unspeakable horrors that await us if we begin to monkey with this technology; many bizarre paradoxes that we can't predict or even comprehend.
For instance, what if we use a time machine to travel back to the 70's, then we return to the present day. Everything appears normal, but then we go to download some pr0n, and all we can find is cheesey 70's pr0n with bad soundtracks and mediocre women. AAaarrrrgggghhhhh!
Evil is the money of root.
So that's where all these damn republicans came from, I was wondering about that... thanks dude!
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
I already read about this, like, three zillion years from now. Can't you find anything to report about that HASN'T already happened?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
He can go back in time, stop his father from smoking, but then he'd come back and his father would still be dead (because his father would have quit in some alternate universe). But then his father has aleady quit in a number of alternate universes, and who's to say that the good professor will even come back to our universe?
I mean, really, you're talking about building a pretty useless machine, as far as time travel goes. You can affect alternate universes that we can only experience by going through a time machine, and even then, it sounds like we won't really have complete control of the alternate universes we go to.
I do like the idea as a way for getting rid fo garbage. Now we can save Yucca Mountain. We don't need to dump our nuclear waste there, let's just send it off to alternate universes. Of course, then you bring out all the hippy "save the alternate timelines" freaks. I guess we could toss them in too, and they could get really involved in saving those alternate timelines.
The notion about parallel universes and the possible outcomes are shapped like cones or hourglasses dependinding on the perspective, and they are outlined in Stephen Hawking's, "A Brief History of Time", go give it a read.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
We tried this March of 1999. It almost works, but what really happens is that time slows for anything inside of the zero barrier of light. I imagine it would kill anything living. The only way we could tell was by putting a clock in and observing it.
The only practical use of this that I can think of would be to get it to actually stop time completely. Of course, what a lot of people don't realize is that stopping time is much different than stopping light. What we see happening inside, could simply be light being stopped.
This reminds me of Back to the future. Personally, if I were to discover how to make time travel possible, I would go back to that moment to prove to myself if I was right. Think about it... you discover time travel and 1 minute later you arrive beside yourself. Or at least send back a notice of congratulations: Dear you, you were right, from you 2 years from now.
On his homepage I found this:
Gravitational Field of Circulating Light Beams
In Einstein's general theory of relativity, energy as well as matter produces gravity. This means that the energy of a pure light beam can gravitationally affect matter. A portion of my current research deals with considering the gravitational field produced by a single continuously circulating beam of light in a unidirectional ring laser. It is predicted that a spinning neutral particle, when placed in the ring, is dragged around by the resulting gravitational field (Mallett, R.L. 2000. Weak gravitational field of the electromagnetic radiation in a ring laser. Phys. Lett. A 269: 214).
Another aspect of this research explores the effect on time of the unidirectional circulating light beam. It is shown that an increase in the intensity of the beam of light results in the formation of closed loops in time.
Everybody knows, that one of the biggest problems with time travel is *grammar*. If you don't believe me, go and read that part in "the restaurant at the end of the universe". - It's big time fun! :-)
Proof:
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.
And that should reassure us?
Harald
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
Between this and the earlier slashdot story on skynet, what he's "invented" is a time displacement machine. I don't know about you, but I'm going to LA to see if James Cameron is as accurate when it comes to picking stocks. Although, cyberdyne would seem to be a good investment, at least until 1997 rolls around.
A few things. Some have been mentioned, some have not.
Time travel exists already. We are traveling to the future, at the rate of 1 day/day. Some are traveling a little faster. All explained by Einstein's relativity. You could travel at very high speeds, and effectively travel to the future.
Most problems are with traveling to the past.
Grandfather paradox. There seems no way around it. However, some recognized physicists have published theories about time travel and parallel universes. That would circumvent the paradox, by traveling to a different universe. This is not as nutty as it seems. The parallel universe hypothesis does not fall into the crackpot category, this is serious physics.
Although time seems to move in one direction only, there is nothing in physics that mandates this. One of the unsolved problems.
When Einstein published his theory of relativity, he challenged the idea that time is constant. This was rather shocking in those days. History has proven that he was right. Don't take anything for a fact, just because it seems obvious. Question everything.
There is a slight problem with the experiment (as described in the article) of sending a neutron through time, though. Nature cannot distinguish between one neutron and another (or protons, electrons, or other elementary particles for that matter). All neutrons are the same! There is no way of marking one (unlike atoms), so that you can determine if it actually meets itself in another time. That causes the experiment to be meaningless.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
"If it wasn't for the silly chaps, we'd still be living in the stone age."
--Sir Christopher Cockerell, Inventor of the Hovercraft
It takes absolutely no effort, risk or thought at all to badmouth a new idea. Such is the very cornerstone of most middle manager's careers.
The theory may not be sound, and the experiment might not work, but the man at least deserves respect for having the courage to take the risk.
Sen. Hollings was played by Ron Silver, as I recall. That was Van Damme, playing me in the role of not-so-bright superhero.
I'm in no way an expert in the matter, but according to one theory I've read, some scientists think it is possible to travel through time using Einstein's theories.
The trick is that you can only travel as far back as when the time meachine was started. On other words, we haven't met a time traveler because the time machine hasn't been invented yet. Once the machine is invented people from the future can travel to that point, but not before. He'd be the start of that chain. From the article it appears as if he'd be following some of that theory.
Of course, as the article points out, transporting a person & a sub atomic particle are different & quantom laws are a little different. Don't forget, according to quantom theory a particle can exist in two places at the same time for brief periods. I'd guess the engineers haven't made that possible yet on a human level. Just another challenge for them. Once they get that solved I'd like to see them make it impossible for cops to figure out how fast I'm going & where I am at the same time.
"This sucker is nuclear????"
"No, no, no, this sucker's electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity I need..."
I'm guessing if it was possible to go back in time, then we would already be aware of people that have done it, as they would have already visited. There is a simple way to work out if time travel is possible. Set up a meeting and determine that the first time traveller will go back to the time and place of the meeting. If by the time the meeting ends and no=ones turned up, then you're pretty sure its not going to happen.
Have nobody mentioned Eddie yet?
Sounds to me like a great way to get rid of garbage but a less than ideal way to travel.
I want this scientists' phone number! I want to know who to call if, walking down the street some day, a portal opens, and some really pissed-off two headed green thing starts throwing AOL cd's at me.
What a pimp.
Damn, sorry I can't stay--thirty seconds to the next wormhole. I gtg.
Quinn Malory.
Someone above posted thois article as additional material, check it out http://www.lightwatcher.com/home/articles_lightbyt e/time_light.html
That should address those of you who think that if a time machine will exist then we should already have met the people from it.
Ok, now that's done. After reading both articles I have to ask one MAJOR question. Why does this guy think that light changes gravity? I have NEVER heard any refrence to an inverse effect between gravity and light.
I know that gravity bends light and time. I know this. I have never seen anyone prove that light has an influence over gravitation. Or time for that matter. Maybe I am uninformed (possibly) but this just does not sound like it holds water.
Here is a list of criticisms, based on the articles....
1)How does he bend light into circles? I've never seen the model for it, but I assume that light can enter the right gravitational field at the right tangent and get stuck in a circular motion. Given that possibility, it then becomes a question of orbital mechanics (?!?!?!!!). SO maybe he CAN slow light (in deference to recent experimental evidence) thereby making it easier to keep it in a circle in some sort of crystal or something.
2)GIVEN that the above is possible (and I'm getting a facial tic thinking about it) then well...WHY should a ring of light have a strange gravitational effect inside of it. Quote from the second article "The strength of gravity caused by the light circle causes a twisting of space." PROVE THIS PLEASE! Show me math and experiments! Please!
3)FINALLY if the above are true then WHY should I believe that the duplicate particle is from the future? How far in the future? What offset does this device provide? How do you compute the distance in the future it is from?
Any comments folks?
In the Timothy Zahn short story "Time Bomb" (I believe), a scientist discovers how to make a time machine and then, just from the possibility that he would build the machine, things around him that people hate so much they would go make in time to destroy start falling apart. He can't hold cigarettes in his hand for more than a few seconds before they disintegrate; internal combustion engines seize up; computers simply stop. Etc. Given the motives of warning about smoking, it seems particularly relevant.
The scientist manages to halt the effect, by the way, by building the machine and wiring sticks of dynamite to the "back in time" lever.
Yeah, the physics and logic are a bit goofy.... It's still a good story.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Okay, here's what I know:
1. UFT was discovered by Einstein in 1938, (although he was targeted and dealt with at that time, after which he was no longer a problem to his progenitors. The poor guy was basically mind-raped for thinking too clearly.)
2. The closest he got may be seen in a paper he published with Bergman which was a revival of the Kaluza Klein theory. That was exactly 1938.
3. UFT largly undid much of his work on TOR. The mind blowing thing about UFT is that it allows for variability of matter. The 5th dimension is real. Time travel is not only possible, but a required direct result. --And most importantly, consciousness is a vital factor.
Okay. .
I've been called crazy before, but only by the timid Nile swimmers who have yet to break away from the propaganda machine, and who in varying degrees believe that corporations are benevolent, Government is run by the people for the people, their school text books were not programming tools, and that the 'Learning Channel' is somehow on a higher plane than CNN and Goebles. --And that this current spate of crap in Israel is not being conjured for a specific end, that it's "Just happening natural-like, guffaw guffaw."
Think about this folks, if time travel is real, (which it almost certainly is, if you bother to do any research whatsoever), you will also discover that it is just a damned toy. Using Tesla and Puharich EM theory, Von Neumann built one for the Government decades ago, (and they killed him for it. How nice.). And so what? This is basically a non-issue. Humans with machines are a non-issue, despite what they think. Beings living in 5th dimensional reality would be able to 'time travel' just as easily as you can walk down the street. Can, have done, will do, over and over again. Think about this.
Okay. That's MORE enough fodder for the fire today! Mod me down or funny or whatever you want. --And to those of you who are reading this and thinking, "Shit, what if. . ?" and there are sparks going off in your minds, then that's good, but it isn't enough by far. Awareness is key!!! So don't sit around. Learn! 'Time' is fast running out.
-Fantastic Lad
There's a fundimental problem here. Wouldn't the second neuron goto a parallel universe and not THIS timeline? How is he going to see the second one visiting from the future if it works? Would be rather ironic if it does work but he never gets to see the second neutron becuse it doesn't exsist here in this time stream and the whole project is scrapped
I'd like to make a few points on the topics of changing the past and of so-called "Parrellel Universes", in context to time travel.
I've pondered on this for quite some time and I have come to a conclusion that I will keep, until proven wrong. This conclusion is that you simply can not change the past. If a person were to go back in time and affect things, nothing has changed. That is the way it always was. Because of this, it would simply be impossible for time travel to negate the existence of an object or person. You can't kill your parents before you're born.
Also, this is interesting as I recently heard that scientist managed to increase the speed of light through a crystal gas, causing the light to emerge before it entered. I think I'd like a phone made out of one of these. "Hello, Me, don't forget to where some pants!"
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
This will be a boon to the package transport industry. Imagine the newest service: TARDIS Express: When it absolutely, positively has to be there before you sent it.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
The article says the guy's trying to see if he can send a single neutron back in time -- but that's "a long way" from sending a whole person.
Why is everyone talking about sending a whole person back in time? I think a single neutron is plenty good enough.
If you can send a single neutron, or not, then you can send bits backward in time. Since sending bits *forward* in time is trivial (my hard disk does that), this gives you bidirectional communication.
From that you could build a TCP/IP link, browse the web of the future, phone up people in different times, even pipe video and audio and control signals back and forth so you could put on a VR suit to control a robot walking around in the past or future.
If this guy succeeds in building an apparatus that can send a neutron back in time, no-one is going to bother trying to scale it up to a zillion-times the size and cost to transmit a person. Instead, we'll just pipe data through it and do telepresence.
He isn't going back in time to have sex with himself.
What makes you think that if he COULD travel back in time that he would be transported back to a point in Earth's history? Time travel would be relative to its position in the universe.. not on Earth. Say I were to travel back in time.. it would be back in time at that exact point (xyz location) in space during that time. umm... last I knew.. Earth wasn't a stationary planet in the great cogs of the moving universe. Just another silly scientist thinking that Earth is the center of the known universe and the universe revolves around us...
"And then, if I tie the ends of the string together, and buch it up so all the points on the string touch all the other points on the string..."-Sam Beckett, Captain, NX-01, USS Enterprise
I can definitely prove without a doubt, that in 2009, time travel was perfected. So, remembering the slashdot article that inspired me, I decided to come back and let you guys know, so that we could end this silly debate.
Bonus: Intel is going to announce something new on April 15th that will totally kick ass. Look for the share price to jump $50 in the following 2 months.
Note to the SEC: This is a joke, so don't you dare try to prosecute, you asswads.
Subject says it all.
Ignoring the obvious apparent violations of basic physical laws associated with travelling through time, this leads me to two conclusions:
Sorry, is this giving anyone else a headache? I'm not really sure how this applies to travelling forward in time; I suppose the same way as going back. It makes a pretty convincing argument for determinist theory over free-will though.
You can map a changing object onto a constant linear or circularly changing object (a clock) but but this is analogy only, albeit a deeply ingrained function of the brain ( I suspect for purposes of locomotion - in order to move 'intelligently', i.e., in persuit of food and other needs one has to have some idea of where one has been and where one is going in space/time). Because you can map a changing object onto a spacial displacement and gain insight into how it work (is it a one time event or a periodic event for instance) DOES NOT MEAN THE REVERSE APPLIED, that is, because you can freely move around in space does not necessarily mean you can freely move around in this abstract concept of 'time' - an abstraction using analogies of space in order to understand things that change. I can move from the kitchen to the bedroom because they both exist - I cannot move from the 'present' to the 'past' because the 'past' doesn't exist! It is not 'out there' accessible by any means of travel. This confusion is partly reinforced by Einstein with the idea of time as a fourth dimension. This may be convenient for theory and computation but you have to consider that one dimension has very different properties from the other three.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Possibly threw a Cat 5 or something. 4 D computing. Where there is no limits and no need to buy faster computers. Take a TSR 80 give it something to work on. When it is done say after a couple years it sends it back in time to give you the answer. Infident computing. Plus you can IM with your self in the future.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While he's at it, he can give his father, as a young boy, a Christmas present:
"Yahoo"
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
I thnk it may be like when "virtual particle pairs" are constructed near the event horizon of a black hole - one the the pair gets sucked in and the other shoots out, free.
[...] we will NEVER be able to send people back in time, for the simple reason that we'd have met them already.
It is fascinating how big some people have managed to grow their egos.
Not taking into account the already mentioned piece of information that you can't travel back to time where the time machine did not already exist, why do we even consider that future time travelers (if there will be such) would actually bother to travel to our time? Hasn't it occurred to you that our time could be considered not only dangerous but also very uninteresting and hence not worth the effort?
I sincerely propose you read Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. It paints a nice view of things that could happen and especially how people react. For some very weird reason, we tend to think ourselves as the centres of the entire Universe. Now it seems we also think ourselves as the centres of the entire space-time continuum.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
Actually. this professor had disclosed this idea of his one year back! Look at this. I dont know how Slashdot didnt perform a search on this before posting!
I have found a solution to Riemann's Hypothesis, but have run out of spac
He said that two neutrons would appear where there was originally one right? How does he lock up the position of the neutron? How does he make sure that the one from the future doesn't arrive at the same position/coordinates as the original?
:-) I wonder what results when that law is broken...Will it be like TimeCop...Or will the universe implode? :-)
Isn't there a law which states that the same matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time?
Hm...If this works it could turn out to be an experiment of an unexpected nature
It's impossible not from a technological standpoint really, but it is impossible for just this: you cannot reinvent the universe. To take a packet of mass, be it a human being or a DeLorean, and project it either forward or backward in time, you are actually doing one other thing. You are adding mass to the universe at a given point in time and subtracting it from our present, which, if you were reading along diligently, you just wasted reading this sentence. You really should go out and play in the sun a little. If we can simply pop a decent-sized object (assuming the travel theory doesn't limit mass) such as a solar system back to the first few nanoseconds of the known universe as science now claims it occurred, then not only would mass be added that is already somewhere in there, but a chunk of WAY different physics appears as well, because the nanouniverse hasn't gotten around to having the physics that a current solar system takes for granted. Who knows? Perhaps the opposite is true as well. In the expanding universe model, you have to assume that physics is constantly changing with increases in distance. Project a huge chunk of mass forward several hundred billion years, and it's relative "heat" and "order" should be catastrophic to a physics that has cooled and dissapated. The concept that a Russian cosmonaut is already a time traveller by being a few billionths of a second ahead of the rest of us for his time on Mir is whimsical at best, and he is only considered a traveller because he is human. Are all the comets, asteroids, etc. "time travellers" as well just because they are moving rapidly? If they are, should any of them be "here" "now"? Of course they are here now. Any contraption or phenomena that can be claimed to remove something, literally subtract it from the universal constant of available mass, only to reinsert it elsewhen is either snake oil or vastly misunderstood in its function and results.
On a side note: if there are any ladies out there who found this post "sexy", you can post below and we'll chat about it in a more personal manner.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
errr ;)
.
> On a slightly different note, the speed of information can be faster than light, such as when transmitting a signal over a conducting wire.
.
_conducting_ wire. That's the problem. In the case of DSL lines, the possibility to carry information slows down with the length of the copper cable growing. You idea is really seducing, but I think ppl should do researches on the subject before believing it what you say
>Imagine a frictionless tube of sand a billion miles long. Push the sand on one end in with a plunger, and as soon as you do, sand falls out the other regardless of the length of the tube. Imagine just using a really long stick. Weird, huh?
interesting, but in the real world?
Ludwig Plutonium and Alexander Abian? Clearly these guys should collaborate!
Actually, popular SF like Star Trek and Star Wars does recognize the speed of light as the limit. In Star Trek, the whole point of the "warp" drive is to "warp" space-time in order to get somewhere quickly *without* going faster than c. In "Star Wars" ships make "hyperspace jumps" for similar reasons.
And if we _do_ observe the neutron, then presumably we could do the same thing with a human or any other object. But now we have just opened up the universe to all sorts of logical inconsistencies since it indicates we can actually travel into the past to affect the future of the same folks around us.
IANAP (but I majored in Physics as an undergrad). But this is boggling me a bit at this instant. I am trying to figure out if this is a hoax, if this guy is an idiot, or if my little logical fallacy above is malformed in and of itself or missing some critical information from this dudes "brilliant research". Outrageous claims that seem internally inconsistent require some pretty fucking outrageous proof - I wouldn't go spouting crap like this off to journalists unless I had the damned thing working. And convinced at least a few of my more open minded colleagues that my explanation of the results was correct.
I'm wondering what will keep the neutron from bumping into itself as it moves back through time. You can't just have something go back in time in the same place, because it was already there and the two instances of the item would be occupying the same space. Does this time travel mechanism involve skipping over time?
We haven't seen time travellers ?
:) . In short: no aliens, just time travellers from _our_ future (no need for parrallel universes).
One reason could be the biiiiggg fear of making dangerous (for them) time paradoxes. So they _should_ hide from us. Elsewhere, this will be the proof of the possibility of time travel, and mankind will find a way to do it "before the right time".
Hint: develop the myth of extra-terrestrials life like UFOs to hide strange facts
Dany-CL.
---
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
This sounds impossible for one simple reason... we have never been visited by a time traveler.
To me, that means one of four things:
1. Time travel is not possible
2. The people who have time travel don't come back to ancient earth
3. Time travel is possible, but the human race was destroyed before we could figure it out.
Personally, I think that time travel is not possible. What historian would not want the opportunity to go back, and wittness a key battle, or event? Even if in the future some kind of "time travel treaty" was reached, and people aggreed not to travel back to earlier time periods, I think that someone somewhere would get their hands on an illict device and come back and take out someone they dont like.
thats why I think this guy will inevitably fail. Just my $0.02.
Idle hands are the devil's workshop, but idle minds are much worse
If he was to create a black hole in the lab, I seriously doubt it would be of enough size (mass or energy in this situation) to cause any trouble.
Picture our sun turns into a black hole of the same mass... We don't get sucked in... Earth would continue to orbit around the black hole. We just wouldn't get any light from it and freeze to death in minutes. Anyway... Just remember black holes are not infinitly massive objects just infinity dense objects. Picture 5 pounds of mass in a space of 0 inch by 0 inch by 0 inch... that would be a black hole.
When you push on the sand on one end, you don't immediately push sand out the other. Instead, you will create a shockwave in the sand (a moving area of higher-density sand), and that wave will travel slower than light.
... try it and see :-)
You have a clock, relativly close to sea level, where gravity has a greater pull and there are more particles compacted together. Then you have this plane way up there further away from the earth. Equalling less gravity and less particals compacting it. Of course it is going to slow down.
That wasn't how the experiment went. What they did was put the clocks in two different planes, one going west (against the earth's rotation) and the other going east (along with the earth's rotation). Then they compared the clocks.
I closed my eyes and it was dark outside. And then when I openned them again, it was about 7 hours later and it was light! It was pretty amazing.
This is a bit more concrete than the BS in this Boston.com article. There is also a more reasonable New Scientist article, at least it isn't riddled with the same awful logical fallacies as this Boston.com piece is, and Mallett doesn't come off as quite as much of an arrogant idiot, and the author doesn't come off sounding so worshipfully stupid. I found a copy of this here.
When I read this article and how it was written, I thought: "Damn, this just has to be an April Fools joke. But then why has this been posted a week too late?"
;)
Then it hit me: in an attempt to pull what was meant to be an innocent April Fools prank, the professor inadvertently stumbled upon the secret of time travel, causing the the joke to be transported a week into the future!
Damn, think of the implications! What a mind job...
If the time machine works, you would see three neutrons, not two:
1. The original neutron, traveling forward in time
2. The same neutron, traveling backward in time
3. The same neutron, traveling forward in time again after it reached the start of the experiment
There would be a brief instant when neutrons 2 and 3 are the same, but that wouldn't be measurable. So for all intents you should observe three neutrons. Probably two neutrons and an anti-neutron, since that's what a backward-traveling neutron will look like.
That is, unless you permanently reverse the neutron's direction of time. But in that case the event is indistinguishable from a normal neutron <-> antineutron annihilation, which happens all the time.
... or, I guess, if the neutron "teleports" (chronoports?) back through time rather than traveling there.
I think this guys real motive is to keep his girlfriend in the english department employed. You thought It was bad enough to learn all the proper tenses for sentence writing now. Wait until we have to start adding stuff like the future present past tense to the language.
Try this on for size "In a little while I have completed what I did yesterday". or how about "Finished with what I am about to start."
Because of this I urge that we re-kill him now before he starts what he finished. As many of us had dreamed, when we will become grade school children, about killing Newton or Gauss before they invent their mathmatical formulas before/after they are inflicted on us we should move against him now. Someone get the pitchforks, torches, and angry villagers, I saw a labratory to have been stormed.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
OK, imagine this. I baught 1 nuke, bring it into the time machine, go back in time 1 sec. So now I have 2. wait for 1 seconds. Bring the 2 nukes back in time 1 second. Now I got 3 nukes (and 3 me, but that's just a bonus). And so on.
Come on! thermodynamics man! And doesn't matter if its a paralell timeline.
There are several ways of looking at time travel.
There's the one that seems popular here(the one I agree with as well) that says that the past is in the past, and therefore if anything big happened in it, it has already happened, thus meaning a) if it was a big event, we'd probably know, and b) it's already happened, so we know the world wasn't destroyed.
There's another that compartmentalizes time, so that the past can exist in the future, if someone is going travel back in time. Of course, this runs into theories of predestination, fate, and a load of other stuff. Icky stuff. Mixed up stuff.
Several people have mentioned that "if a visitor from the future visited us, or our past, there's no way they'd be inconspicuous enough that we wouldn't notice." Well... would you believe it? If someone walks up to you and claims to be from the future, isn't your first reaction likely to be akin to that of the popular reaction to this man's claim to be able to travel through time? In the past, a professed time traveller might be thought to be possessed, or to be some kind of witch or warlock or something. Or worse. Nevertheless, popular fear and skepticism make recognizing a theorhetical time traveller for what he or she is extremely improbable.
One other thing- The time Traveller in this guy's machine seems kinda screwed over long trips... barring any parallel universe silliness, the time traveller is still stuck at his destination as the machine doesn't come on the trip.
While I agree with your post, I find it funny that you are sure enough of yourself to presume that the other guy "just doesn't get it". How can you be so sure until time travel is actually performed?
You said yourself that your thoughts are based on current ideas and understanding. What would happen should Ronald Mallett succeed (or even fail, you learn from that too) in his attempts? Current ideas and understanding could be obliterated.
Sometimes the best solutions come from the craziest, most uninformed ideas (fresh, unbiased perspective). I believe that closing your mind to those ideas, closes your doors to success.
I see a series of static shells, each representing a point in time, lined up like golf-balls in a row. Now, one could assume that time is linear, and that if you travel backward and eliminate your grandfather, then you have the paradox and you die.
However, nothing in this world is really linear; evolution for example is almost certainly a bush... it branches out in all directions, forking wherever it feels. That is likely what time/space/dimensions are; forks at any turning point. So if you kill your grandfather, a brand new set of shells appear in a new direction in which you don't exist.
Time travel and dimensional travel are, according to this hypothesis, one in the same, and that makes it all the more difficult.
Time travel wouldn't have to be a one-way trip, but it would most certainly be so if dimensional travel were not also harnessed somewhat.
I have what I think amounts to an interesting theory disproving any possibility of time travel. Perhaps somebody else has already brought this up (not necessarily on Slashdot), but here goes.
I believe that, in this case, "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". In other words, the fact that we don't already know about time travel is evidence that time travel will never be possible. This gets confusing quickly, but if time travel ever becomes possible, somebody will surely travel to what is our past. While early attempts might be "covert" (a la "Back to the Future") to prevent altering the future, this could only be successful for so long. Even if attempts continued to be made to keep it a secret, somebody at some point would have either told somebody that they met in the past or there would have been rumors or something.
But all references that we hear to the possibility of time travel are based in the future, such as this story about a guy who's "going to do it". Of course, we all know he will fail, because otherwise, we would have already known of his success. At the very least, if he was to ever be successful, we would not be living in a world where he was trying to travel in time to save his dad from cigarettes, but rather in a world where his dad had been saved from cigarettes by his son.
In fact, if time travel were to ever be successful, we would have always known about it, and the quest for time travel would not exist.
It gets more interesting and more confusing as you think about it...
RP
Please see my other post here. As I point out, I believe this whole article is logically inconsistent. IF it is truly the case that you branch into a parallel universe, then we will never observe a neutron. And as you point out, the machine reduces to a disintegration chamber. Then there's no reason to expect we'd ever observe 2 neutrons at all. This is why I have LOTS of trouble taking this guy too seriously. But then again, see his paper on the topic and judge for yourself, or wait for him to finish building his prototype.
Why a neutron?
Wouldn't it make more sense to use a proton or a positively-charged ion, so that you could easily hold it in one place?
Anyone here familiar with the actual experiment being proposed, who can clue me in? (might just be looking for a double event from a radioactive decay, or some similar measuring trick)
if he goes back, to tell his father about the dangers of smoking, his father will live -maybe- longer and his son will never invent the timemachine..so we have indeed infinite possibilities of futures....unless you really believe everything goes as god has planned it to be...MUHAHA!
<sarcasm>Oh you're right...We don't know how to do it now, so we'll probably never be able to do it. Damn the guy for dreaming to climb the mountain.</sarcasm>
Haha, come on! With nay-sayers like you humans would never have created the wheel...or dared to fight back against Microsoft!
The original article plainly states that he is only attempting his time travel scheme with a neutron (definitely not someone). In fact Dr. Mallet specifinally states that the current state of physics isn't capaple of producing the energy needed to time travel a larger object.
Ars Technica handled this soooo much better.
You're doing it right now.
My point : it'd be impossible to simply hit a button and appear in an exact location at a different time. You'd have to figure out how to appear in a specific place too. This guy can't be much of a physicist if he hasn't figure this out.
Bah! Bring me the Eye of Harmony. Then you can do more than just time travel.
So we can stop pissing off those people in Nevada. And instead piss off people we'll never hear or see from.
Doing a quick search for the Second Law, I found the following hilarious article: Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics .
After saving his dad, he goes on to form the band Wyld Stallyns. (OT: Did you realize one of the "historical babes" was the French exchange student from "Better Off Dead"? "I can't even get real drugs here!" he said, brandishing a whippet.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Would you believe someone if they told you they had come from the future? Think Back to the Future again... Doc didn't believe Marty was from the future without a specific piece of information that no one could know without time travel. Thus, the time traveller would have to have the specific intent of becoming known to the people of the past(not out of the realm of possibility). The time traveller would also need sufficient information to make such a display to a large number of people. Then he still might not be accepted, as the people he convinces could fall prey to the same "crazy nut" treatment that he would start out with.
Maybe time travel does/will work for this guy, but he either decides not to change his past for moral/ethical/headache reasons, or doesn't get a chance to do so within his lifetime.
I don't believe that just because we don't see evidence of something that that is in fact evidence that that something doesn't exist. If you're looking for a certain kind of evidence, and that's the wrong kind of evidence, you're not gonna have much luck. Likewise if you don't know that a particular occurance is definate evidence of that thing.
Some said that if this contraption works, all will succeed in doing is whirling objects back or forward in time, out into the middle of space where the Earth once was, or will be. I say: "Hey! that's not a bad thing! It's the new travel craze! Just pop in the time machine, and zip around to the other side of the world hours before you left! Just remember to pack a parachute, eh?
Seems to me that the good doctor has forgotten Niven's Paradox: That the invention of time travel inevitably changes history to the point where time travel is not invented.
The Polo Exclusion Principle.
This isn't so far out. I just time travelled this morning somehow. I woke up and somehow during the night I skipped over an hour.
April Fools was a week ago...
It is absolutely impossible.
The reason I say this so strongly is that I know that it's so. Think about this for a moment. Time is a concept. One cannot travel through a concept.
Time is what people use to the explain the phenomenon of rearrangement of matter. Things are in a different configuration so it is a different 'time'. The only difference from one 'time' to another is the position of all of the matter and energy in the entire universe. To revisit another 'time' would be to observe the precise configuration of all matter in a previous state. Now check you thermodynamics pocket guide, and the relativity manuals you were issued and immagine the energy required to restore every particle and quark to a previous state simultaneously without using any energy from the universe; you can't siphon your own gas tank! And this is further complicated by the theoretical presense of the observer in the data set. Adding 165lbs of matter to the total massof the universe may not be a good thing.
Now recreating the position and vectors for all matter and energy is one problem, but the database to store the coordinate and vector data for all those objects for an infinitely resolved universe is going to HAVE to be quick!
Simply stated. time does not exist. There is only one instance of existance and it's now.
Traveling to the future is easier than traveling backwards. The Mir astronauts traveling at 17,500 MPH have already traveled 1/50 sec into the future on their missions.
Why have aliens not long since colonized the entire universe?
Because (reverse) time travel must be trivially easy for a sufficiently advanced civilization, and, regardless of policing, people over millenia in the future will jump back in time, farther and farther, until someone does something that stops the evolution of a sentient species.
As Cypher might say, "Jeeeeee-zus. What do you say to something like that?"
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Think about it!
Nuclear war, rogue nanotech, rogue viruses, catastrophic physics experiments, none of these is good enough. Statistically, there must be some, viciously totalitarian regimes if nothing else, that would spread to the stars.
However, the future is a long time, and all it would take is for one person to one time send a neutron back to their planet before intelligence evolved, and BAM! Another one bites the dust.
It's so clean, too. Even if another civilization developed, that would self-destroy, too, repeating until no more evolved.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
here is a further thought
if you force a particle to move through time to a different moment
what happens if it appears in a space that is currently occupied by a different particle !
and what is the probability ?
now re-calculate the probability taking into account the billions and billions of particles that make up a human being !!
disintegrating chamber indeed , if not on leaving then on re-entry
one day I'll have a
Let's hope not. If he really does get back in time to warn his dad, his motivation to create a time-machine would be gone. :D
[insert random fortune here]
All that happens is that the Time Lords ask you politely to stop.
spacetimes with "closed timelike curves", essentially time travel. This was done by Kurt Gödel when he was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study and met Einstein there.
And it has also been theorized by other physicists that a rapidly rotating object could distort spacetime enough to permit time travel. Light circling in a ring is essentially similar.
Of course this is a phenomenon, where general relativity might not work correctly at all,
so this will really be an interesting test for general relativity if he can make it work..I think it's pretty unlikely that he will be able to generate a light beam that is intense enough to bend spacetime that much.
If you send the neutron back, and it stops the first neutron from being sent, you'll now have two neutrons.
Eventually the universe would clog up with copies of matter.
It's been nice knowin' ya.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
I think this guy should attempt to send me the powerball numbers from the future and I will determine if his time machine works.
http://Lenny.com
...I'm gonna send him two letters with stock picks and Super Bowl & World Series winners. "...and if you could just drop one of these in a mailbox when you arrive, I'd really appreciate it... thanks!" :-)
One for my dad, if he goes back to the early 60's, and one for me if he only goes back to the early 90's. Maybe my dad will throw his out, but I've been dreaming about doing that for so long that I'd certainly believe what I was reading if a mysterious letter in my own handwriting suddenly showed up in my mailbox one day.
~Philly
This guy's web site gives a convincing argument as to why time travel will never be a reality: because time doesn't exist! Time is not a fundamental property of our universe; change is, and time is only a concept we invent to measure change.
Quote: "Motion in time is self-referential."
Quote: "Moving in spacetime is impossible because an evolution parameter (time) cannot be its own evolution parameter."
Something to consider...
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
Great. I can just imagine us creating 'landfill timelines' for all of our useless crap.
This is akin to shipping all our garbage to a foreign country. Just because we can't talk with those guys over at [insert 11-tuple coordinate] doesn't mean that they aren't people (or, perhaps, intelligent dinosaur-evolved cyborg-bipeds) too!
- undoware.ca
Terrrance Mckenna talked a bit about this.
His thought was that you cannot travel backwards in time before the creation of a time altering device.
Don't recall the entire justification for that, but the end result is interesting -- eventually you'll have an infinite number of people go back to the first instant possible.
And wreck everything. And it's going to happen on 12/20/2012ish.
Funny how he kept finding ways in field after field that that date is the end of the universe.
His future self went back in time to give
his younger self the time machine plans.
shhh... don't blow our cover. ;-)
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
My apologies to many of those in the eastern timezone. I was experimenting with my apparatus and the effect.. was somewhat exaggerated. If you are experiencing the effects of my time machine, you will have noticed the time advanced forward one hour. Please... deal with it.. while I search for a way to compensate for the distortions in time with my machine.
Thanks
crazy-mad-scientist
Alot of people have been wondering: "if time travel is possible, why haven't we already met time travellers? Surely they're not THAT good at concealing themselves."
Let me say this once for you people: they have a damn time machine! If they fscked up and accidentally revealed themselves, they (or someone) could just go back and change it so they are not revealed and we would never know.
This isn't to say I actually believe in time travel, it's simply a logical conclusion if it were possible.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I developed a passphrase about 10 years ago. Actually it's more than a passphrase, it's a handshaking protocol with some non-verbal components. If anyone ever comes up to me and does the protocol, especially if they look older than me, I'll know that they are a time-travelling version of me, and I'll listen real carefully to what they have to say.
... or maybe I've been secretly drugged and have spilled the protocol ... or maybe I'm living in the Matrix and they are an agent of the Matrix that has lifted the protoocol straight from my brain ...)
(Or maybe they are a telepath
Lets say he actually builds this thing.. how would we know it actually worke... since he'd leave our timeline, and who knows where he'd go... maybe he's got a "Home" button like a web browser :). And is he planning to perfect time warp from Star Trek? Better call Spock.
Even if a traveller from another universe appeared in our own, whats the guarentee that our universe's time machine isn't just a garbage disposal?
Thinking that when you go in the past, you could change something and come back, with maybe everyone affected, while it seems a normal idea, isn't a reasonnable idea I think. After all, you, the time traveller, are not the center of the universe. Nobody is. It's not because you do time travel that suddenly every person's life on earth just freeezes and waits for your return. And if you changed something in the past, it wouldn't make sense either I think that everyone in the future just change without even realizing it. It's not the best proof that you can't alter future (maybe it's not even a proof, I fact, I wouldn't bet my live on it, but it satisfies me so I guess I'm hapy about it), but to me, this idea can mean only two things : either you can't time travel, or if you do, you'd leave this current dimension (time) and enter a new one. The place you left will only be missing you. It's not as if you'll change your old present's past, but some alternate reality past you're going to change.
It might also be an issue that even if he transports something "back in time", that it will remain at the same point in space. Now, the earth is moving around the sun, and the whole solar system is moving around the galaxy, and the galaxy is moving through intergalactic space, so if you send something back in time it is unlikely that you will ever see it, since it will be the same place, and you will have moved. Am I missing anything here?
Still, sounds like an interesting guy.
It's not possible to send both socks in a pair into one of these parallel universes. I'm not sure which law of physics this would falls under.
I *think* it's the Pauli-Ester Exclusion Principle...
http://www.physics.uconn.edu/faculty/mallett.html If that isn't the face of the future...
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
A nice read as it shows not just what is, theoretically, possible but where the, practical, problems are once the scale become macroscopic.
But warping space will make travel into the future possible. Well, technically you don't travel into the future, time just passes much faster than it normally does, at least from your perspective.
However, unless he can find a way to produce negative mass or negative energy, this isn't going to happen. Even a singularity, at infinite mass, does not cause space to warp backwards.
And even if it did, the best he could hope for is a wormhole.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Well for starters, there isn't any real evidence to support the idea that traveling faster than the speed of light causes time to move backwards nor have I ever seen any math to support such an idea.
That of course doesn't mean that time can't go backwards... I once read an interesting essay on that matter that went something like this:
We just went backwards in time! How do I know? How do you not know? If one traveled back in time, then one would forget all former experience (as many have pointed out, all reference systems would have to move back too). In fact, we could be going forward and backward through time almost ad infinitum as long as there was a general trend towards going forward. That would give us the perception of moving forward in time.
So, we are already traveling backwards in time, we just keep forgetting about it.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
?-|||-----x<*))))><
When you go to the past, this is assuming time travel to the past is actually possible, it modifies the future, the future is no longer the same. You are now in a totally diffrent dimension, a diffrent reality, one which you created when you entered the time machine.
Time traveling does not modify the past because if you do in fact travel to the past then it has already happened before you time travel. [READ: The past cannot be modified. Because it creates paradoxes such as "you were there" and "you were not there"; "p" and "not-p" in the same instant of time]
I'll bet that while it might be possible to send a single subatomic particle through time with a huge energy cost, time travel in any way that would be interesting to us is impossible.
This is just a hunch, but look at the EPR paradox. Experiments demonstrate that two particles can be linked in such a way that you get action at a distance, or non-local behavior, which has implications for communication through time, because you're talking about faster than light effects.
Guess what though: You don't know the initial state of the particles, and you can only change their state, but not merely read their state. You can't actually send any information with them. So you can't actually them use for faster than light communication. No tomorrow's lottery results today for you.
My bet is that this is a consequence of some fundamental rule of our universe, and the paradoxes that pop up with time travel also support this.
Maybe you can bring matter from a parallel timeline into our world, but only at an energy cost greater than mc^2.
Oh, and to the guy who said there is no time, and are only individual human experiences: No point in my talking to you then, is there? Solipsim implies an extremely dull universe. Why should my world be limited by my imagination?
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
While transporting a person is obviously very, very far off, I wonder if there are applications for this in the shorter term. Could you communicate by sending neutrons back it time? It seems like you would. That would open all kinds of possibilities.
You could have a message from the future. I'm still really fuzzy on how these things work, but if you could get a message from 100 years in the future then you could implement their high-tech today. They could send us info on 22nd century tech like nanotechnology, space travel, and medicine. That would be great.
Another thing I wonder about: Intersteller travel. Is it possible to send a long-lived low speed probe like Voyager to Alpha Centairi? I wonder if after 40,000 years when the probe arrives at alpha centauri, it could send it's radio signals back to earth. Then the signals would be recieved by a time machine, which would in turn transport them back to our time. So you in effect have a fast intersteller flight while only sending out a cheap probe going 30,000 MPH.
Anyway, would those scenarios work? Any physicists here? Human time travel is a long ways off, but it seems like these things could be implemented in the near term.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
I thought tachyons were conjectured to be possible http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndN uclear/tachyons.html. Though this does not mean time travel is possible, the idea of time travel may not be as "bizzare or impossible" as some people are saying in their posts. On a lighter note, there a funny onion spoof on time travel that is pretty funny.
While Mallett acknowledges that sending a person through time may require more energy than physicists today know how to harness
If it's possible to use light to send a neutron through time using small amounts of energy that can actually be quite useful can't it?
We can send 1 or 2 neutrons and communicate to our past selfs using binary.
Like in next weeks lottery numbers are: 111101010110111
Maybe this would also allow very fast computers.
Hitler's in the fridge.
I disagree. All he has to do is create two working prototypes, and use one prototype to send the other prototype through time, with a message attached telling whoever receives it to use it to send something to our time. Voila. Proof of time travel made easy.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
And the result of this mockup experiment is the uconn physicist will have an element particle travels through 10^-32 seconds of time, so that the rest of the physicists may spend the next 200 year proving/disputing the claim. Fermat's Last Theorem, anyone?
Time travel is already very possible through a couple bottles of Tequila. You drink a few, and then you wake up in the morning in some bizarre location. It has this unfortunate side affect of creating spacial anomalies where people claim to see you doing strange things, but that's not possible since you would remember if you had. It also seems to have a degenerative effect on the brain, and tends to give you a headache.
i'll bite
;) i don't think that something like a time machine would be abel to be kept a secret, need examples? how about all the militaries super-secret spy planes that we all know existed before they were pubically acknowledged (read: SR-71, B2 bomber, stealth fighter, etc) need more evidence? got another one worder for you Roswell.. the gov't isn't particularly good at keeping big secrets
;)), watch the titanic sink, and have my cheeks flap in the nuclear breeze 300 miles outside hiroshima
;)
wtf is a UFT and TOR
your little rant is scarce w/ the details
assuming that people could time travel as easily as "walking down the street" where are reprecussions? Why didn't they stop planes from smashing into the world trade center if the gov't has time machines? i mean really, do you think they would have just let something like tha thappen? what you have to remember is that no matter how evil the gov't is, it is composed of largely patriotic good decent honest people who are all paving the road to hell w/ their good intentions
if the point you're trying to make is that people traveling through time are harmless, i'd like to see an explanation as to why you think so, because if it were true it seems like a huge cash cow industry (think jurassic park), i mean i dunno about you but i would sure drop $10 to see myself lose my virginity (again
timid nile swimmers? is that some allusion to crocodilian waters? ah well.. lessee how many of my precious few karma points i lose for htis one
I fear that the scientist is going to go back in time and do something ba
Our planet is on a collision course with something that we, at our present state of knowledge, don't have a word for. A black hole is simply a gravitationally massive object, so massive that no light can leave it. What I'm talking about is something like that, except that it isn't so much gravitationally massive as temporally massive. We are soon to be sucked into the body of eternity. My model points to 11:18 am, Greenwich Mean Time, December 21, 2012 AD.
~Terence McKenna
Of course, McKenna was a (another) drugged-out nutcase, and (I believe) later decided he was wrong about a temporaral singularity, but it's (still) fun to make the connection.
> Then wouldn't we be occasionally running into strange looking people from the future who are here to accomplish various tasks?
..why would they necessarily be "strange looking"? Someone from our time makes a suitable set of clothes, and (somehow) gets a suitable set of currency could go back several decades / several hundred years and probably not raise more than the "what a strange person" thoughts. Once accepted for their good nature (we assume s/he wants to fit in), that would be that.
Here is an interesting article about time travel theory and development at MIT.
after myst came out, i loved it, and wanted to work for cyan on riven. O OO oh course EVERYONE wanted to work for cyan on riven. OOO OOO so i wrote them a letter, on a clay tablet, O OO O explaining that they needed to hire me, so that OOOOO we could discover time travel, so that they OOOO OO could come back in time and save me where i'd OOOOOOOO been stranded by my broken time machine. OOOOO OO OOOOOOOO i got the job anyway. OOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO K.
Ok... but wouldn't this directly contradict the professor's hypothesis that he'll be able to observe a subatomic particle doubling because it's visiting itself from the future?
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
There could be a reason we have seen no time travelers coming back to our time or around this time.. Invented in the future with earth having a higher population then present, with the possible use of time travel we could go back to a time where there was no humans, only forest, pristine forest. Why not cut them down every half million years? Why wouldnt somebody use it to mine all the gold before it was first discovered? Or to steal antiques to sell? It might mean the end to our space time linearity.
Time travel forward is always possible. What is it called? Cryogenics?
At first, this may seem like a true statement. But think about it for a minute...
Ok... if there are many parellel universes, and we develop time machines and start "disintegrating" things by making them pop into other universes, don't you think there will be some other universes doing the same? Creating time machines and disintegrating things into yet other universes? And if this is the case, don't you think that things would start poping into our universe??
So, if he does develop this thing, and he does start making things appear in other universes chances are parellel scientists are doing the same thing and making things appear here...
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
One of the basic results of relativity is that you can never say that you are moving except in terms of something else. Therefore you can never say that one object is moving faster than another in an absolute sense.
If the twins were able to detect (and agree) that one twin (the twin that stayed behind) was older than the other, this would violate relativity because they could say in an absolute sense, "I was moving, and you were not."
In reality, there would be no external validation that one had "travelled" and one had "stayed behind". You could look at either one as the traveler (or a combination of both) and the universe all still works out the same.
Consider this: there is nothing in the universe but the two twins. One twin moves at near the speed of light away from the other twin for one year. Then the second twin moves at the same near-light speed toward the first twin for one year. There can be no way to distinguish this from the situation where the first twin moves away from the second twin, and then moves back toward him.
The conceptual mistake here is that when considering the relativity of time, people forget that distance and mass are also relative. Therefore when the "travelling" twin experiences time at a slower rate, he also experiences distances to be greater; he would measure a clock outside of his ship to be running fast, but he would measure mile-markers outside of his ship to be closer together than a mile. Thus, while, relative to the outside world, less time would be going by, he would also be traveling a shorter distance relative to the outside world.
Observing his own local environment, he would not notice a change, since an inch in the cockpit would still be an inch.
This is how you resolve the paradox of headlights on a ship traveling at near light speed. Relative to the ship, the light travels away from the headlights at the speed of light. Relative to the outside world, the light travels at - you guessed it - the speed of light. The reason it is not a paradox is: Relative to the ship, the light travels approximately one foot in one nanosecond. Relative to the rest of the universe, the same event is perceived as the light traveling less than one foot, but the perceived time it takes is less than one nanosecond.
Same thing with the relativistic "paradox" of spinning in a circle. If you take the perspective that you are still, and the rest of the universe is spinning around you, you might think that this means that Alpha Centauri must be traveling (relative to you) at faster than the speed of light. But distance, time and mass being relative, as Alpha Centauri approaches the speed of light relative to you spinning, it gets smaller and closer (due to the relativity of distance), and clocks on Alpha Centauri appear to run fast to you (which are both the same - distance shrinking and time speeding up - if distance shrinks than it takes "less time" for a cesium molecule to complete one vibration, making clocks appear fast).
Anyway, the idea is that relativity only works when you apply it to all of the variables. If you assume that masses and distances are absolute, then you will come up with all sorts of paradoxes when considering the relativity of time.
And the bottom line is, relativity says that you cannot pinpoint your absolute location in the universe. Your mass decreases when you "slow down" but when you weigh yourself, you do it relative to weights which are also "slowed down," so you can't perceive the change in your own mass, so you can't say, "I weigh as little as possible, therefore I am not moving with absolute reference to the universe."
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Yeah, right. Imagine time machines in the hands of some /. trolls, fighting each other for first post.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Hey guys, on the day where we (those using DST) go one hour into the future, we are promised a time machine IN THE FALL, at which time it just so happens we will all set our clocks back one hour and "travel" in time! See, just an elaborate joke!
hamham
Not delivered by me, because I lack the physics background to do do the topic justice. However, I've copied an URL below, to a page that does an excellent job of debunking time travel, multiple universes, and other dubious claims of modern physics. Personally, I found the information contained within the page compelling, and when I take physics as one of my required college courses, it will be interesting to see if it remains so.
. htm
http://home1.gte.net/res02khr/crackpots/notorious
he isn't sure it's even theoretically possible to travel through time. As far as whether time travel is a possibility, he says: "Definately not in our lifetime."
But wait a second: didn't he say that he isn't sure time travel is a possibility? These two sentences don't quite contradict each other, but the first really should have prevented the asking of the second question. Right?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
He says that the reason he wanted to be a physicist was to invent time travel so that he could warn his father about the dangers of smoking. When Mallett was only 10 years old, his father died, allegedly from smoking. But if Mallett successfully builds his time machine and goes back to warn his father, and prevents his premature death, wouldn't the motivation for and thus the invention of the time machine disappear, making it impossible for any of this to have happened? Perhaps what Mallett is really trying to do is become the first person to instigate one of the time travel paradoxes of sci-fi fame.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
These theories about parallel universes isnt really convincing enough. If time really works like that, the multiverse having an infinite number of universe happening at different instances, that would mean everything in the world is premapped and scheduled to occur at different moments.
But according to what ive learnt during these 2 decades of existence, the world doesnt work like that. Everything that happens here is dynamic and random. So suppose a guy travels back to the past just before he was even a foetus and then after 9 months when his mother gives birth to him, he might turn out to be a she since sex determination during fertilization is completely random. When many things (things that happen randomly) like this happened at the same time, the changes are dramatic.
Lets say there are 2 universes, one that we are living in and the other lets just name it B. Assume that they are exactly the same in the beginning in year 1900 and there are no external influences(like time travellers screwing around). Do you think they will still be exactly the same after 100 years, given that billions of things that could have happened randomly in these years?
So even if time travelling was possible, it would be completely pointless because the past that you see would never be the same and it goes the same for the future.
For example, consider time space A, and time-space B. In time-space A, by some magical twist everybody was instilled by a commandment from God (and all believed in said God) that said, Thou shalt not time travel. These people will never time travel, never leave, and therefore this time space will continue to be populated by people. In time-space B, on the other hand, no such constraint by the man above is imposed and henceforth, the people may start time travelling. People will have an opportunity to check out, and may do so, meaning that this time-space is in danger of being devoid of humans at some point.
Hmm, that turned out a little fuzzier than I thought. Here's another angle that demonstrates the point that I'm trying to get at is. Consider our own time-space. Those that have developed a propensity to leave via time-travel will more likely do so. Those that do not will most likely stay. Those that stay will continue to reproduce while as those that leave, well, have taken their DNA with them. Eventually, those that have an extremely strong disposition to stay will be the majority, in fact it may develop into becoming a human instinct, and the time-machine would probably end up being destroyed or abolished by that population. So consider, in the abstract sense, time travel to be the equivalent of death in the sense that both satsify one basic feature "the termination of one's existence." Just as we are biologically wired to be adverse to any form of death, isn't it likely that we'll become adverse to time travel.
- philipkd
How to invest in the stock market
Philosophistry
Is it still on, maybe on the Sci-fi channel?
Can you say, Ad hoc reasoning? Eg. Q. If time travel is possible, why dont we ever meet any time travellers? A. Well, obviously, because there are many parallel universes out there that they travel to. [insert theory du jour here] theory tell us this! Dont you know anything? [Insert rant about other dimensions/time lines/universes et cetera here]. --------- Yes, the world looks so much clearer if you are the one writing the rules. I have read a lot about the universe, all the latest theories et cetera; but I dont think for one minute, that these theories are any different from Orgone energy theory. Most of the theories here are nothing more than speculation. Fun to read, interesting at times, but speculation none the same.
you forgot the closet. ive herd theroy that the closet is another gateway to parralle universes. everytime you lose a sock you gain a cloths hanger in the closet. maybe if we put cloths hangers in the dryer we will get our socks back in the closet. if not we have a potential mess in the dryer.
1) Why bother with time travel when LSD is so much cheaper?
2) This guy doesn't need a grant. He needs a therapist.
3) Time travel will be the easy part.. Convincing his father not to smoke is the real challenge.
4) Someone should tell this guy to go down to the Circle K and get a pack of his own instead of continually bumming them off his dad..
4) Got Relativity?
5) Rumor has it the research is being funded by Bill Buckner and overseen by O.J. Simpson.
6) Uhhh...So this guy is going to risk cancer...to go back in time....to warn his dad about cancer. Mmmkay.
7) Hey, now wait a minute. I just spent $5K on a ring for my girlfriend, and she doesn't look any friggin younger!!
Seriously, I think its a fun idea. Why not. Faster-than-light communication has already a reality, why not time travel? I say go for it. Worst that could happen would be a complete collapse of the fabric of space-time.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I don't care what the article says. Time travel using this method is simply not possible for a number of reasons. First off, the amount of energy in standard desktop lasers is far too weak to create the necessary effects. Yes, rotating objects or energy currents can have wierd effects on spacetime, even up to the possability of creating closed timelike curves, but it requires neutron star densities, and huge amounts of energy. Secondly, even if he did create the device, he could only (and this is according to the rules of general relativity) go back as far as the time machine's creation. He would still be locked out of the past. Lastly, a discovery like this you would think would be associated with all sorts of pre-print papers. I can only find one from him on the Lanl preprint server .
Even if time travel is possible, I doubt there is a temporal paradox, or a new dimension/universe created (think of the energy involved in the 'creation' of a universe and you'll see just how unlikely that explanaition is).
... and the time traveller's memories of what had been would be all that remain of the way history unfolded the first time.
... without a family, without childhood friends that remember you, without a birth certificate, but very much a living, breathing, time travelling murderer.
Timetravel by definition represents a discontinuity in cause and effect. This discontinuity likely means that if cause is on one side of the discontinuity (time traveller creates time machine because of memory of father's untimely death) and the effect on the other (time traveller goes back in time and warns father), then removing the cause likely won't remove the effect.
Put another way, a time traveller altering history such that s/he was never born likely would continue to exist, as an orphan of time in a world whose history would likely unfold differently from what they remember.
The wavefront of change would propogate forward from the time traveller's intervention. It wouldn't jump back across the discontinuity to affect the time traveler themself in any way
In short, no new universes, no paradoxes, simply a history that unfolds differently from the first iteration, and a lone person who remembers how different things once were.
You can kill your grandfather, but you'll still exist
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
otherwise we'd be swamped by tourists from the future!
Tim ODonnell (trying to be the most
Just count to 10. In 10 seconds you'll be 10 seconds further in the future than you were before you started counting to 10.
If this guy can build a time machine why can't Microsoft build a stable OS?
cause i would have gone back and given myself the numbers to a winning lottery ticket by now...
The Truth: There is no string:)
But isn't there a different between them -- one twin undergoes acceleration (to turn around} and the other does not. This takes it out of the realm of special relativity into General relativity, and indeed, one twin will be younger than the other.
It is true that while one twin is speeding away from the other, it is nonsensical to speak of one being younger than the other since they would both see the other as dilated. It's the turning around that does it.
There was once a girl from bright,
whos speed was much faster than light,
she went out one day, in a relative way
and came back the previous night.
You can mod my comment down as a flame if you like, but I was serious.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
UFT= unified field theory
TOR= Theory of Relativity
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
Here - teenager says that the 23rd century sucks.
Just a thought... If it were possible to travel into the past, and someday we figure out how to accomplish that, wouldn't someone have come back to our time, and told us how to do it already?
God became man to enable men to become sons of God. -C.S. Lewis
For that Asteroid Eugene! ;o)
Maybe someone can explain this to me - if time travelputs you into an alternate universe to avoid paradoxes, wouldn't the neutron also travel not only back, but into another universe, thereby never popping up to prove his experiment?
Or am I missing something and just not understanding the whole thing...?
That reminds me of that guy who claims he gets stuff from the future in his toilet... what was the name again?
I have a neat way to create infinite energy for all future generations, and you dont need to send a lot back in time: one volt will do. If you can reach back in time and set up one volt potential difference in my Huge Battery(tm) then I will now be on a different time than you. In this different time you of course send one volt back again. Now we are in the "two volts in the battery" universe. Is there anything to contain this process? If not we have just solved all energy problems for all time. This begs the question: why dont physical processes create time travel?
More energy than we know how to harness? There are black holes and neutron stars and all sorts of things out there with waaaaaaay more energy than we know how to harness. If one of them set up a runaway process like this we would DEFINETLY notice.
Also, forget parallel universes, it doesnt get you out of this paradox. If even one universe violates conservation of energy then physics is out the window.
First invent, then publicise.
This guy says he will have a demonstration possible "in a few months". Great! Spend a few months, do the demonstration, then publicise. The university, Nobel Prize committee, and the rest of the world can wait while you finish your invention.
Early publicity will kill your project; you will have to defend your idea from skeptics and cranks, waste time in interviews and business negotiations, and will give competitors information.
Simply invent your invention first. Then the invention can defend and publicise itself, you can hire a lawyer to negotiate, and you can patent the device to block competition.
But you need to actually invent it first.
How about this.
;o)
.
Build a time machine.
Build another time machine
Build yet another time machine.
Start time machine #1
and send time machine #2 through time machine #1,
then start time machine #3 and put time machine #1 inside. Wait. Im cornfused. . .
Okay wait.
Start time machine #1
put time machine #2 and #3 through #1
put scientist through #1
when they get to where ever, they can tell the people these are time machines and I brought you two of em... no Wait
Wait..
Okay okay,
Tell em we brought em 1 time machine, meanwhile, enjoy their hospitality and women etc..
Get up the next morning and start #2
put #3 through #2
kiss beautiful girls goodbye
put scientist through #2
then um....
enjoy sex with alien creatures
Start #3 time machine
put scientist through
enjoy life as a lab rat / sex toy for alien species.
yeah.
that sounds fun.
It was a very cool show, until FOX ruined it by ripping off other sci-fi movies and by replacing John Rhys-Davies with Kari Wuhrer, in a shameless T&A ploy. It didn't get any better on the Sci Fi Channel, and new episodes stopped being produced. After a while, even the reruns stopped being shown.
:-(
It's a real shame. Hopefully they'll release the 2-hour pilot and at least the first couple of seasons on DVD at some point. I still have a videotape of the pilot buried somewhere in my house. Gotta find that.
Why does he even care trying to build a time machine, when we as far as I know have never had any visitors from the future? He should stop wasting his time, and do something useful instead....
While physical time travel might be out of our technological reach at the moment. Information time travel might be within out grasp if his experiment works. If you can send one particle back then it is only a matter of time before you can send dozens of particles. With that you might be able to create short messages to send back in time. A good SCI/FI book that talks about this is "Thrice upon a Time" by James P. Hogan.
Mallett's homepage
Wouldn't the time machine be enough?
Well, he does not understand his own theories.
A mockup, by definition, does not work. Jackass.
He plans to have a working mockup this fall.
His first step is to find an old blue Police Box.
I'm convinced anyone who will time travel into the future will never return, basically they'll vanish forever and all will vanish with them
... and all this time we though he was abducted by aliens. Silly me.
I guess that is what happened to Elvis, he discovered time travel
That gives me a thought. Can we nominate Brittany Spears to be the first human to travel thru time?
Beyond this researcher's current experiment, assuming that we someday might be able to transport a human, this form of travel sounds pretty dangerous. Wouldn't there be a lot of travelers floating in space (considering that the earth would move between the times they were sent and received) or trapped in solid rock or other nastiness? I'm reminded of the good old teleport spell.
Perhaps, as someone mentioned before, the travel destination would always be the current location of the machine and one would be limited to times when the machine was functioning.
"Temporal Paradoxes give me a headache." -Captain Janeway
We really need some way to find our coordinates 5th dimensionally...
Take, for instance, the base of The Statue of Liberty at 0:00 today (GMT) as point (0,0,0,0,0) (W-E, Up-Down, N-S, Time of day, Universe Deviation)
Climb the statue of Liberty, which takes you 30 minutes, you might be at some point like (0,1,0,.5,0)
Or, if you were to fly to LA, which takes about 8 hours (coming from the statue), perhaps you'd be at point (-200,0,100,8,0) when you touch down in LA.
Now, if someone were to change the past, and return to The Statue of Liberty at 0:00 GMT today, he'd be at (0,0,0,0,x), where abs(x) gets larger the worse he changed history.
Problem is, we have no idea as to that fifth plane of reality. If it were measurable, then, THEN, time travel would be feasible (ie, you could return to THIS universe at 0:00 GMT today)
Otherwise, you're stuck.
I'd be content just to have information travel through time - not matter. It sounds like that would be a far simpler proposition. If you can send back individual particles to exact locations and/or times, you'll have information travelling ... it sounds like a quick way to make a "simple" experiment useful. Of course, it would have to be a significant amount of time to be worthy... at least a few hours.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Sinister side note:
Someone else brought up the Fermi Paradox: Where the fuck are the aliens? (short version :-)
If
- creating a time machine is this easy
- creating a time machine will blow up the universe
then only the very first intelligent spieces will ever create a time machine (ie. we).Therefore we must be the first, and therefore our universe will cease to exist in a few months when the prototype is first used ;-)
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Letter from 1954, December 15th
It works! I traveled back in time. But I guess you knew that allready, huh?
There could be a problem with time travel though. We are not certian that there are actual parallel universes/timelines. The big problem is, I think, called the Grandfather Effect. Assuming that there is only one universe or timeline, if he does go back in time, but accidently goes back too far, he'll cause the entire future (relative to the time he traveled to) to change, thus stopping him from creating the time machine, or even being born. I know... this happened in Back to the Future, but if this would actually happen (...and if it were possible), some theorise that the universe would, in a sense, cave in on itself, blow up, stop... do something to distroy itself or time. Time would contradict itself... ans be distroyed...
I am not saying that I believe in this, but it is something to think about... trying to save his daddy's life could destroy the universe.
You can not rule this out... for this is all still theory.
hoax. next.
Simply take a machine that transports a neuron back a second in time, 2 Neurons will exist then in a second before, put the time machine will still run there "a second time", so 3 Neuron will exist a second before, a second later the time machine will again send a neuron back a secnd. 4 Neurons will exist, so on and so on.
Ring Around the Neutron,
Pocket full of photons.
Black hole!
Black hole!
We all fall down!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
He quite clearly states that when you travel back in time, you create an alternate universe. Therefore, in this universe, we will never see time travelers. This also means that he could simply build a vaporization chamber and claim it's a time machine, because one you're in that alternate universe, there's no way for anyone to confirm that it was successful.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Circulating laser beams in the right way, by slowing them down and shooting them through anything from fiber-optic cable to special crystals, might create a similar distortion that could theoretically transport someone through different times, Mallett believes
So take some fiberoptic cable, hook your computers network connection through it, create a loop in it, and pingflood someone... that'll be a good test...
As we all know, Slashdot is mostly about a bunch of geeks arguing about topics they don't really know about but claim to be experts on. (And yes, I include myself in that group for most values of "topic".)
This article is about time travel. None of us are in the field. None of us have done it. None of us have seen anyone else do it. Few, if any, of us have read a single front-to-back thesis on which the proto-science is based, or anything else more detailed than SciAm. Yet the thread now has SEVEN HUNDRED COMMENTS, filled with the usual "I hate to introduce facts into the conversation" and "No, no, you just don't get how it works!"
It doesn't get any better than this.
I'm not very knowledgable about this stuff, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Simon
Betcha he finished it on December 21st, 2012.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Now to get a patent, you'll have to invent something and go back to the beginning of time to claim it. Better send the patent office there first though. What's that? They already live in the past? Oh that's mean.
Anybody wonder why a full professor affiliated with a major academic institution has his email address at AOL?
Time travel is possible. "Anything is possible if you put your mind to it"... ya, that's just a phrase right? Well, it's 100% perfectly true. Time travel has already been done. We didn't learn it ourselves though.
Remember that date everybody.
If this is the same time machine that I heard about awhile ago, then it involves slowing down light via a bose condensate. I thought that the location was Columbia University (though that might be in Connecticut for all I know.
... garbled. Much of the peripherial detail is the same (e.g., the supporting statement from the Dept. head. So I expect that it's the same story filtered through a different reporter. The previous one had a more comprehensible story. But that story didn't contain an estimated completion date. (This fall, huh? Will stocks go up or down at the news of trans-time telegraphy?)
The technical details sound
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Time "travel" is a really misleading term. Instead it should be referred to as slowed or suspended animation. By calling it "travel" you imply that it's bidiretional, which I don't feel it is. You can slow time, perhaps even stop it for an volume of matter, but you can't stop it while causing time for all the other matter in the universe to travel backwards. It just doesn't make any sense.
There are many readers here on /. Surely if this time travel works, one of you will at some point be given the chance to travel through time. If you do, how about you travel back in time and reply to this post.
In line at Back to the Future: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood they said 1.2 Jigowatts...
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
We now have an explanation for what killed the dinosaurs! Bacteria from the future brought to the past by time travellers...
To a shark, you are just another food choice...
I attended a talk a year or more ago given by Steven Hawking. In it, he described why traveling through time would release enough energy to destroy the time traveling object. He summarized by saying that if we could do it, the universe wouldn't allow it to be useful.
IF it is truly the case that you branch into a parallel universe...
I read a sci fi book that dealt with that in a very novel fashion: transmissions from the future came into the device on a probabilistic fashion. It was really very interesting. Wish I could remember the book...
C//
Because some miserable sod from the future would come back and kill the guy for all the problems he caused; we'll NEVER see it!
if it has been this hard to produce time travel can't one say that it has been "encrypted" in a way? and if one could say that then time travel is breaking that "encryption". and if a person breaks that "encryption" then they are in violation of the DMCA right?
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
Be careful when you meet your future self
OK, say you manage to travel through time, via a device located on earth. When you exit, time has passed, or (the opposite) and suddenly you end up in space, alone and unprotected. Why? simply because the earth is NOT in the same place you left it. The revolution of the earth around the sun has occured, and the rotation of the earth around its axis has occured, and the movement of our sun through the galaxy has occured, and the movement of our galaxy has occured, and so on. Therefore any time machine must also be a translocation machine like a transporter in star trek speak. Also it must compute all these variables to place you back at the correct place.
Lousy facepalm.
Hehehe...
Sending garbage to parallel worlds would bring up interesting ethical issues. That's if you definitely know where it's going. Even more amusing if you're not quite sure exactly where it's going.
Many films have tackled this idea anyway. Maybe not concerning parallel universes but regarding other worlds/countries/whatever.
According to the article, his field will swap space and time so that travelling through space will result in a time shift. One problem with pratical time travel is that time and space are the same. "Light speed" is a good measure of how time and space measurements compare. In order to travel one year forward or backward in time, one would need to travel 5865696000000 miles in the time distortion field.
So if I go back in time to kill my parents I will actually be in a parrallel universe? Okay so say I kill them and then I travel back to the present, will I be in a another, 3rd parrallel universe?? So, my bastard ass parents will still be alive after I kill them??
:)
So does this mean I will have to travel to EVERY POSSIBLE parrallel universe and kill my parents??? Or does it mean I have to figure a way to travel back in time but stay on my current parrallel universe, and then chop off their tiny little heads... and then travel back to the present using the same technique of staying in the current parrallel universe???
Thats just a bitch, i'll just kill them tommorrow and not worry about it.
-Bill
-Bill
he has already failed. If he suceeds in sending anything back into the past it would already be history in the present.
BTW..."something or someone from the future to the past" or "something or someone from the PRESENT into the past". Just a thought.
telefragging!@#$!@#$
They have to start again, and you get points for the kill...
There are only two things in this world that smell like fish. And one of them's fish...
Yes thats special relativity, constant speed only, no acceleration, so with special relativity rules only, one cannot turn around. However the general relativity handles it. And there is a difference between the twins. one feels the acceleration and deacceleration and the other not. Another case sitting in the near of masses also slows time down. So one twins sits next to a star while the other stays on earth. They will be different old.
I don't know why different old twins are a paradoxon at all. Just because it doesn't happy on a day by day basis in our lives?
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Somebody needs to filter stories better...
A book about the kinds of technologies that are plausibly in our future, along with details of what is required, and why they have a good chance of happening. Written by Robert L. Forward, physicist.
That will show you that lots of imagination is possible within the limits of how we think the world works.
As for your point, I cannot disagree more strongly. Things do not happen because of some form of magic wishing. No matter how great it would be if we could suddenly rescind the laws of physics, wishing won't make it so. However understanding and working within the limitations of science routinely results in our accomplishing the previously unbelievable. And the process of forming the clearest models we can, and then stress-testing them is the best way we have found of finding ways to make possible what previously was thought impossible.
For instance you deride scientists for taking Einstein seriously. Yet it was Einstein's theorizing that lead to the predictions from which we got nuclear power and lasers. And without corrections which we know we have to make due to Einstein, your GPS unit would fail very fast. (Amusing trivia. The GPS system has to make corrections due to General Relativity (not just special) because of the time dilation effects of Earth's gravity!)
Personally I prefer technologists who understand and work within Einstein's theories, which gives me working CD drives and GPS units, to ones who junk his theories without a decent replacement because they don't want to accept some of his conclusions. How about you? Is stuff that works worth less than dreams of wish-fulfillment?
What a lame-ass!? He's wearing a stupid T-shirt and is in a stupid pose, AND he uses AOL.
Die, lamer, die!
Carl Sagan once stated that, "the most likely explanation (for eventually finding nothing but radio silence in the universe) is that advanced intelligences routinely destroy themselves".
Imagine instead that the reason for the silence is that advcanced intelligences learn time travel and their citizenry empty out of this universe into other, parallel time lines where they can be free to happily manipulate the past/future to their own liking?
- Night
Of course, in the parallel universe the sock becomes dirty again. I believe Einstein described it as "stinky action at a distance".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
At the subatomic level, everything seems to be perfectly reversible. Elementary particles don't seem to care which direction they are going in time, and there are problems which still vex physicists where things seem to happen backwards. All of this breaks down at the macroscopic level. All of these strange behaviors depend on quantum effects that become irrelevant at the scale of a human body, or even at the scale of large molecules. Electrons may bounce off of holes and walls alike, but humans only bounce off the walls.
I saw a speech given by a Nobel Laureate in which he openly admitted that the brightest minds don't really know where to draw the line between quantum and classical, nor do they now how to justify the guesses they use for where it should be. Until that is solved, transporting a human back in time is way more than just an engineering problem. The only luck researchers have had with acheiving quantum dominating effects at a macroscopic level requires Bose-Einstein condensates, which aren't much good for human transportation.
I wish them good luck with those neutrons though. They might well discover some very useful stuff.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I think I might enjoy the Mezolithic. Dinosaurs, warm, sunny weather. Higher O2 concentrations in the atmosphere are nice too.
If you read the article it says that the techonology can at best create a second copy of a particle (or person) from the future to appear in the present. Thus while you might have time travel strictly speaking in that matter is traveling backward in time, you cannot, for example, send anything back to before the technology was made. Looking deeper, you cannot really have use this technology to send any matter or information to any time before yours. What you can get, however, is matter (and therefore information) from the future. Thus the technology in fact lets you peer into the future. The real question this raises in my mind is the H-uncertainty principle issue, that is, if you get measure the velocity of the copy, then wait for the original to 'update', can you then measure mass and get a better momentum measure than you're 'allowed'?
It is strange that this physicist does not see this, and that he hopes to go back in time to see his father when in fact the only way matter could arrive in the past is if someone used the technology in the past. Oh, well, maybe some alien civilization that has it already will be nice enough to bring us back...
Greetings from the future! This guy is a nutcase, he's got it all wrong. 4 years from now, someone will get it right though. If anyone else gets a chance to do some time travel, I don't suggest going to the future. Bill Gates rules the world, and has outlawed all linux-based time travel systems (which is the only ones I ever use). The Windows ZXPQ3Z based systems are downright scary. One bluescreen and you end up 4,000,000 years off of the time you wanted. Not to mention the security problems of MS Time Explorer (TIE), which only a strom trooper would be dumb enough to use.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
If he has his device working in the fall and can send neutrons through time, it shouldn't be too hard to send himself the lottery numbers from the next day.
Twins being a different age from each other is not the paradox. The paradox is that each twin would have to be simultaneously older and younger than the other twin, depending on your perspective.
If you keep relativity intact, then the twins must be the same age when they meet up (relative to each other), because the effect of moving one particle is the same as the effect of moving everything but that particle in the opposite direction.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Doc Brown was able (or will be able) to get a Mr. Fusion in 2015 AD... just wait 13 years for that :)
Special relativity can handle acceleration just fine. It's curved spacetime that it can't handle.
an actual device that could send something or someone from the future to the past, or vice versa
That'd be about useless. The trick is to get someone from the present to the future or from the present to the past.
Dude - it was a Delorean because it has those cool gull wing doors
DeLorean door for sale, FOB Toronto/Ottawa, Canada. Best offer.
Comes with door wiring harness. No glass, no prop cylinders, no inner door skins, no mirror, no lock or latch.
Sheetmetal is perfect, with the exception of a slight dent near the lock cylinder hole; it looks like someone attempted to break into the car, and a mark which looks like it might have been inflicted by a shopping cart.
Came off a 1983 DeLorean being restored to show-car quality, but this door is perfectly well suited to a driver DeLorean with accident damage, or for hanging on the wall. Will fit any DMC-12 coupe from 1981-1983.
Very large and awkwardly-shaped. Shipping will be expensive.
Offers? E-mail me.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
He tells his father to quit smoking... and he does. This guy then has no motivation to make the time machine, and therefore doesn't. And his father dies again. Ummm...
Can anyone tell me where my flaw is? Or, like I expect, is macro-scale time travel logically impossible (for a whole variety of reasons)?
Are you sure he is not from the University of Con-nut-ticut?
my page on Time Travel, in fact and fiction,
is at magicdragon.com
click on "genres" or "if you like this,
you'll like that" and then after 600k text page loads, click on "time travel"
excerpt (text only) follows.
TIME TRAVEL:
time machines, travel to the past or the future
Some important early time travel subcategories, and their first published examples include:
1.Present to Future: "Anno 7603", by Norwegian playwright Johan Hermann Wessel (1781)
2.Present to Past: "Missing One's Coach", anonymous, Dublin Literary Magazine, 1838, sends narrator back a millennium
3.Future to Present: "An Uncommon Sort of Spectre", Edward Page Mitchell, 1879 (or should I count the Ghost of Christmas Future in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" (1843)?
4.Past to Present: "The Hour Glass", Robert Barr, [The Strand magazine, December 1898]
5.Time Machine: 7 years before H. G. Well's "The Time Machine", there was "The Clock That Went Backwards", by Edward Page Mitchell, [The New York Sun, 18 September 1881]
Some other memorable time travel novels are:
1."Flatland" by E. A. Abbott [reprint New York: Penguin, 1986] not actually about time travel, but the key fictional work on the Fourth Dimension
2."Dracula Unbound" by Brian Aldiss (New York: Harper Collins, 1991)
3."Frankenstein Unbound" by Brian Aldiss (New York: Random House, 1973)
4."Time Cat" by Lloyd Alexander (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963)
5."Time's Arrow" by Martin Amis (1991)
6."The Trinity Paradox" by Kevin J. Anderson & Douglas Beason (New York: Bantam, 1991)
7."The Star Wagon" by M. Anderson (Washington DC: Anderson House, 1937) play on the New York stage, got poor review in New York Times
8."The Avatar" by Poul Anderson [New York: Berkley, 1978]
9."Tau Zero" by Poul Anderson [Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1970]
10."The Corridors of Time" by Poul Anderson [New York: Lancer, 1966]
11."Tourmalin's Time Cheques" by F. Anstey [New York: D. Appleton, 1891]
12."The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov (1955)
13."Pilgrims Through Space and Time" by J. O. Bailey (Westport CT: Greenwich Press, 1972)
14."Berkeley Square" by J. L. Balderston (New York: Macmillan, 1941)
15."The Fall of Chronopolis" by Barrington J. Bayley (New York: Daw, 1974)
16."Before the Dawn" by Eric Temple Bell (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1934)
17."The Time Stream" by Eric Temple Bell (Providence RI: Buffalo Books Co., 1931)
18."The Trolley To Yesteday" by J. Bellairs (New York: Dial, 1989)
19."Looking Backward, 2000-1887" by Edward Bellamy (1888; reprinted New York: Bantam, 1983)See the article "Edward Bellamy's Impact on Utopian Fiction", Sam Moskowitz, as "Voyagers Through Eternity Part XVI, XXVII", Fantasy Commentator No.49, Winter 1996.
20."Timescape" by Gregory Benford [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980] the best of the modern time travel novels, even though only subatomic tachyons do the travelling
21."Changing the Past" by J. T. Berger (Boston: Little Brown, 1973)
22."The Fury Out of Time" by Lloyd Biggle [Garden City New York: Doubleday, 1965]
23."Lord Kelvin's Machine" by James P. Blaylock [New York: Ace, 1992] time travel based on the "suppressed" Maxwell's Equation
24."The Complete Time Traveler" by H. J. Blumenthal et al. (Berkley CA: Ten Speed Press, 1988)
25."Doctor Brodie's Report" by Jorge Luis Borges [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972]
26."The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury [New York: Doubleday, 1950]
27."Time and Chance" by Alan Brennert (New York: Tor, 1990)
28."The Gap in the Curtain" by John Buchan [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932]
29."Sphereland" by D. Burger [New York: Harper & Row, 1983]
30."The Man Who Folded Himself" by David Gerrold (1973)
31."Past Master" by R. A. Lafferty (1968)
32."Up the Line" by Robert Silverberg (1969)
33."Our Children's Children" by Clifford Simak (1973)
A dozen novels set in prehistoric times, whether or not visited by time machines, are:
1."An Age" by Brian Aldiss (London: Faber & Faber, 1967): time travel
2."Clan of the Cave Bear" by Jean Auel (19??): anthropology
3."No Enemy But Time" by Michael Bishop (19??): time travel
4."The Shores of Kansas" by Robert Chilson (Popular Books, 1976): time travel
5."Traitor to the Living" by Philip Jose Farmer (Ballentine, 1973): time travel
6."The Inheritors" by William Golding (Harcourt Brace World, 1962): anthropology
7."Speaking of Dinosaurs" by Philip High (19??): time travel
8."Before Adam" by Jack London (Macmillan, 1906): anthropology
9."The Many-Colored Land" by Julian May (19??): time travel
10."The Mists of Dawn" by Chad Oliver (Winston, 1952): anthropology
11."Quest for Fire" by J. H. Rosny-Aine' (19??) and sequels: anthropology
12."Hawksbill Station" by Robert Silverberg (Doubleday, 1968): time travel
Mar 1948 Isaac Asimov's "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" parody of a scientific paper in "Astounding", about a
chemical which dissolves just before you add water...
The definitive book on time travel, its mathematical theory, its possibilities in modern Physics, and its literary exploration is
Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science
Fiction, by Paul Nahin [New York: American Institute of Physics,
1993]. This was a primary (but not exclusive source) for listing
(alphabetically) these short works of Time Travel science fiction:
[remainer of text omitted to avoid the "postercomment" compression filter]
Some slashdot nutjob that doesn't understand by the current law of physic's this can happen. To make it simple, you need two things. A super hi-energy power source, and a strong gravitational field. And poof...you have a time machine. Note that it's easy to go forwards in time...ofcourse the question then you have to ask is...the future that you are in is the true future? Or one of several possible futures? Going backwards in time, requires something else though.
Om, nomnomnom...
Time travel into the future, and time travel into the past are two totally different things. The popularized theory can be summarised ...
... else), which we are quite sure we live in, to be even plausible. In that case, time travel could be extradimensional, or dimensional spawning, for the sake of prevention of temporal paradoxes. An alternative case is that the sequence of events in our universe that would dictate time travel would be under precisely those temporal restrictions preventing paradoxes, or a rule that generalizes such. One such rule is forward-only time travel. Another is energy-barrier historical time travel, such as travelling backwards in time requires as much energy as the universe, or temporal distance barriers, such as travelling back in time requires that for you to return to the origin of your time travel as much time must have passed as you have travelled backwards into, thus to cover the distance to return to your origin your time travel would have been negated.
"Travelling" into the future merely requires acquiring a relative speed close to that of light in a vacuum. Think of the speed of light as a maximum speed by law, and the other principles must bend to suit this rule. When you approach the speed of light, in a relative way, the only possible way to actually attain that velocity is have the rest of the universe pass by faster. If time is not as immutable as the universal maximum speed (how universal is it? e=mc^2, c being the speed of light. Fairly ubiquitous, then.)
Travelling into the past requires a quantum universe (or something
Obviously, with a universe predominantly orbital / field based, the latter might not be so reliable - unless you take into account a gravitational metric and orthogonality that includes a minimum distance not undermined by cyclical astrophysical principles.
I find myself saying that to myself a lot when reading /. comments.
Your idea for a we-don't-know-that moderation category is interesting, but I think that replying to factually incorrect comments is a much more effective form of debate than reducing the "score" of their post from behind the veil of moderation privilages.
(In case you care, Soucheray's show is on AM1500 KSTP from 2:05 to 5:00 PM. This link no longer provides an Internet broadcast of it. Damn union!)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Time is a construct.
You can change the rate you interact with the universe relative to other interactions but you cannot make the universe undo interactions.
You might go through a worm hole and "see" the light that reflected off you before you went through but you are still only in one place. Next time take a picture, it'll last longer.
But here's a chain of reasoning that seems to suggest travel into the past is impossible:
If travel into the past is possible, then in order to preserve causality, the "past" that is travelled to must be a different past in a different reality. Otherwise all the paradoxes that are spelled out in this thread could occur. But, if this is the case, then the aforementioned conservation law would be violated, since the matter/energy/momentum that vanished in this universe would reappear in a different one. Therefore time travel to the past is impossible.
To believe in time travel, we must either throw out the idea of causality, or the idea of conservation, or both. I'm not willing to do either, so I can't reasonably believe in time travel to the past.
Then again, maybe I'm just a stupid human who doesn't understand the universe, along with the rest of us humans... ;)
From the referenced article:
"But Alan Guth, a physics professor at MIT who has studied the theory of time machines, says he isn't sure it's even theoretically possible to travel through time. As far as whether time travel is a possibility, he says: ''Definitely not within our lifetimes.''"
Time travel either exists or it doesn't. Guth doesn't understand this, when he says 'not within our lifetimes', as obviously any technology for time travel would exist throughout time, as it is used.
Sometimes I wonder if these people can actually think at all.
Here's my frivolous use of time travel: Go back in time and recover all 109 lost episodes of Doctor Who. As an added bonus, get the original masters of the episodes, including the missing Pertwee era color masters.
Oh, and when are we going to figure out how to make something bigger on the inside than the outside?
dude, what is your point?
Remember that anytime you think you can pinpoint "not moving" through space in an absolute sense, you are doing something wrong. It is impossible to tell if you are moving or if the rest of the universe is moving around you. If the rest of the universe started moving relative to you and then stopped, you would still feel the effects of the acceleration exaclty as if you were the one accelerating, only in the opposite direction.
Again, the issue is that you can only accelerate or decelerate relative to something else.
The mass issue is different (although I must say, It is good food for thought). There is no paradox inherent in the two twins being different ages; the paradox arises when you see that in order for the twin who "travelled" to end up younger than the other twin, the twin who stayed behind (having "travelled" relative to the twin in the "stationary" spaceship) must also be younger than the twin in the spaceship.
One mass is larger relative to the other, therefore one mass has more effect than the other, the twins can age at different rates, and there is no paradox because one twin is younger than the other, they are not both younger than each other.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Its too bad the Boston Globe article was the only one posted in this story. It does not go into any detail on his actual ideas. I suggest reading:
USA Today
ABC News
Mallett's Personal Homepage
... is that travelling in time will (using basic physics) require a change in time over a period of time as measured by an observer inside the machine.
Just as motion along an x-axis with respect to time is represented as dx/dt, we would see a dt/dt. The top and bottom lines cancel to give 1.
What does this mean? Some say this is one if the major problems with time travel, that people make the assumption that time is just another dimension like x-y-z.
I'm not saying this is necessarily 100% correct, but it does give another perspective on the possibility of time travel or lack thereof.
Well, this guy can explain it better then I can.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Whats the point of traveling in time ... Just the case of traveling backwards would generate a new time line... we wouldnt be afected by that ... so theres no use.. and if the person would come back again .. it wouldn't travel to its original time line in the future..
.. kill hitler, that would start a new and completely story line for me .. but for u guys it wouldn't matter because you wouldn't be aware of that..
.. those terminator plots are really, really a big mess ...
Just imagine.. if i would go back
All i can say is that time travel is a selfish one ticket journey
and one more thing
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
To really prove that he is capable of time travel, all he has to do is say "When my machine works later this year, I guarantee that I will travel in time back to the 6th April 2002 with him sufficent proof (a newspaper from 7th Apirl for example)".
If his machine works - he should appear with said newspaper. If he hasn't (which is my suspicion) then he won't - simple.
If time travel were possible, we would know about it.
--
Dreamweaver and Flash MX templates.
... that he doesn't think so?
I recall reading a quotation from one of his recent books (which I haven't read, so I'm on thin ice here). IIRC it said that he doesn't believe time travel is possible because we haven't noticed tourists from the future visiting us in the present.
Whether or not Hawking said it, I find this argument rather compelling. Suppose that mankind has all of the future (all the way to the Big Crunch, if there will be such a thing) to try to discover time travel. If it were ever discovered, then sooner or later it would become a consumer item, and folks would be taking their kids for whirl through the 21st century.
Seriously, even if the inventors started out using their time machine cautiously, only sending a few people who go unnoticed, eventually they'd be sending more people on trips to the past. From our perspective, we wouldn't be able to tell if they were coming shortly after the invention or later. And we'd notice them. Even if the time travellers were warned not interfere with the course of history, as Christopher Lloyd was always bellowing to Michael J. Fox in the first film, one of them would eventually slip up, and others wouldn't care and would run roughshod over the course of events.
This isn't proof, because it is possible to assume that all of the time travellers have been so careful that we haven't noticed them, at least those who have visited times up to 2002. But this assumption is so inconsistent with the fallibility that is intrinsic to human nature, that I must conclude that time travel is impossible.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I just have to know: have any administrators that you know of actually done "format c: /u" thinking it would do something other than wipe their Win partition clean?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
wtf is a UFT and TOR
I'm guessing Unified Field Theory and Theory Of Relativity.
timid nile swimmers?
Maybe a reference to that venerable old crack, "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt."
I like how he so easily compared TLC with CNN and Goebels. Ah, nothing like the Cable Nazi Network to give us proles the rightthink.
Whadda maroon.
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
Here is a cool picture of Mallett. He's got a little time machine model right there.
In Einstein's theory of General Relativity (which is what predicts ways of building devices allowing travel backwards in time), even stating conservation laws is problematic, and in fact on a large scale in our universe, they appear to be violated.
(Yes, stuff your physics teacher didn't tell you about.)
For a random instance of a possibility that you missed, GR solutions that suggest that time travel is possible also indicate that it is impossible to use such devices to travel to a time before when the device in question was constructed. (Incidentally said devices would be extremely large.)
Given that we have not yet constructed such a device, it would be impossible for anyone to use it to come back and tell us that time travel is indeed possible.
Liberty.
Insert 500th stupid "Back to the Future" or similar joke here.
I think Stephen Hawking said something about this, but with black holes. Black holes emit X-Rays, due to a quirk of quantum physics in which particles and antiparticles constantly form and collapse, but the gravity of the black hole messes things up... But how does conservation of matter fit in?
My theory: These amazing machines, which you can pick up at your local Sears, analyze identical pairs of objects, take a single one of them, and allow the particles to reform as particle/antiparticle pairs... these pairs continually reform and reannhilate each other until black holes split them apart...
Black holes emit our missing socks!
Now where's my Nobel Prize?
There's nothing you have that they can't take away: Absolute zero, Gentle Jack, bottom line.
Heheh... I live in the Twin Cities myself... Can't say that I am a fan of Soucheray, but I'll listen to him tomorrow just for you, Golias...
In the meantime, I'll do both. REPLY to messages AND continue to mod down comments that I think are full of shit.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
If he can even figure out which end of a soldering iron to pick up, he's way ahead of any theorist I ever met.
The only way that we could ever met aliens, the ones that should have filled the universe up by now, is if for some reason they invented interstellar travel but not time machines. As we haven't met them, thus causing the Fermii 'paradox', we have to conclude that it's more likely for them not to exist than to exist in that form. (As their past will change randomly until one of those two things happens.)
Which is why I will be assassinating this guy as soon as possible.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This is how I know that time travel does not exist. Simply that in our past there has been no recorded event of someone or something coming from the back from future to visit. If time travel was ever made possible don't you think that we would be hearing from them by now?
---------
This space for rent. Call 1-800-SIGADVT to place your ad.
The twin paradox is used by some people who don't understand relativity as a proof that it must be incorrect -- because how could they both be younger and older than the other. I'm not trying to do that. I was merely explaining that the paradox is resolved because it is no longer a Special Relativity problem as soon as you have acceleration -- Special Relativity applies only to inertial frames of reference.
h tm l
You are correct in saying that this is not a paradox when the twins are speeding away from each other -- it only makes sense to speak of age from a particular frame of reference. But after turning around and coming home, the paradox is not resolved by them being the same age -- one IS younger than the other. This is an overvable phenomenon. There have been atomic clocks put onto jetliners and flown around the earth and the tiny bit of time dilation has been measured.
http://hepweb.rl.ac.uk/ppUK/PhysFAQ/twin_intro.
However, it is correct to say that the proper acceleration of the travelling twin is what breaks the symmetry and allows him to come back younger. (Though it wouldn't be correct to say that acceleration is the only way to break the symmetry...)
for violating the temporal prime directive...
I just have to know: have any administrators that you know of actually done "format c:
Well, I received a very angry e-mail from someone screaming at me that they "destroyed their computer" by following the instructions on my website.
My reply was that they were welcomed to follow my advice, but since the Internet is a fertile ground of alternative viewpoints, even the remotest inkling of intelligence might suggest that one may seek a second opinion prior to typing the fateful instructions.
Of course, depending on the version of Windows involved, different things will happen. I deliberately tried it on an old Windows 95 installation I had kicking around, and the machine didn't crash but it wouldn't reboot, either. So the number of people who may have followed these instructions is difficult to ascertain by feedback; I would suspect that most of these imbeciles would have a hard time finding the site to contact me afterwards.
I do get 3,000+ Google-inspired hits a day. If 1% of them follows the instructions, then 30 people will have newly-cleaned hard disk drives every day.
I guess it's a good thing for them that they didn't accidentally stumble onto some of the more questionable medical sites on the 'Net.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I'd love to discuss the physics, the possibilities, the philosophies, the consequences, the implications, the new experimental sciences, theoretical physics finally becoming valid experimental science, that could be spawned from this. Could spend a week on this easy. Been hooked on time travel science and fiction since years before I owned a computer.
... you can hardly trust a government to deal with nuclear weapons. You can
hardly trust a government to deal with conventional weapons. You can hardly
trust a government to do anything outside their own self-interest, limited
only (and hardly) by the potential of their public accountability...
:-) ).
But that bit about "there would be government laws" to regulate time travel...
It would be more than wonderful to think that this would be physically possible. Just the physics alone is mindblowingly cool. The possibility of making macroscopic experiments with quantum physics. Is "Time like a river", do observations create copies of universes or are they all already there, does Schroedinger's Cat have millions of millions of kittens? Real Life imitating Art.
But for the love of mercy... we complain about business and government taking over the Internet (spoken as someone in his 13th year online). But...
I found this little gem on George W. Bush,
<http://www.wage-slave.org/scorecard.html >. Read that; about nuclear weapons, the environment, human and animal health, sciences, civil rights, information freedom and privacy... and that's all just this year. Say what you will, but IMO, considering position, power, behaviour, record and reputation: George W. Bush is one of the most dangerous people in all history.
Now: go watch "TimeCop" (and Jean-Claude gets a sudden ratings boost from video rentals all around the world
Then ask yourself if you'd REALLY let the Government regulate Time Travel.
Now, having scared everybody sufficiently... is there some page somewhere that discusses the science in more detail? Preferably with a catch-up primer for the less well informed, please?
Hi All -
I have spoken with Dr. Mallett a few times and trade emails with him. I'm writing a science fiction story based on his ideas, and including him a straight journalism article.
Some comments and jokes about time paradoxes were raised in postings, so I'll hit a few points. Mallet believes that time portals work only from the time they are first opened. If you open a portal this Wednesday, you can receive a visitor from Thursday, but that person can't rush back to Tuesday or Monday.
The only "out" is that perhaps a person could go to a parallel past if there are myraid universes in a multiverse. Then you might get a visitor from Thursday to start your week Monday morning, but because you have no influence on that timeline, I wouldn't bank on it. Then there are issues of conservation of matter and energy to consider, right down to photons even if a person never passes through the portal.
Anyway, Mallett's not a nut. He's a theoretical physicist. Hard to tell them apart, of course, but I'm grateful when new ideas pop up from either.
Erik
We obviously need some more laws of thermodynamics. This is not time travel, as such, but travelling through different dimensions (as has been said).
Since his father, a heavy smoker, died at the age of 33 when Mallett was 10 years old, Mallett has longed for a way to travel back in time to warn him about the dangers of cigarettes.
Obviously, if he were to do so, and return back to our time, our dimension, then he would lose whatever reason he had for travelling through time, and hence wouldnt. So, he obviously travels to a dimension which is a few decades behind ours, but the same in every other respect, and then goes to another dimension, on our time-scale, but where his father has been warned about the effects of smoking.
So, if someone can leave our dimension, and obviously never return, then we need to create a new law of thermodynamics, stating that energy (matter, mass whatever you like) is neother created or destroyed, but can be transferred through the (presumably infinite) dimensions. (Well, if it isnt infinite, then there must be some "Times" that we cannot travel to - or there arent infinitely many possibilities for the creation of our world))
And, if that is the case, then there must be infinite mass/energy (whatever) in existence (all universes/dimensions etc).
c - a blessed +5 grain of salt
Wow, your phone can call other dimensions? ;)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I said very little about what is and is not impossible. If you read carefully I qualified my words with phrases like, "...what we think we know..." Anyone with a solid understanding of the history of science will grasp that there is a huge gap at any time between what we think is true about the world and what we later learn. That is why most physicists agree with statements like, "The ''Laws of Physics'' are not real, unchangeable laws, but approximations that are used until somebody finds something that describes ''reality'' better."
But what turns out to be consistently true is that ignoring evidence because we don't like what it says doesn't work. That kind of selective blindness is a too common human trait; we certainly don't need to encourage it.
Incidentally you picked a bad example with Christopher Columbus. Contrary to popular legend (which arose in the 1800's incidentally), there was no serious question in Columbus' day that the Earth was round. Indeed from the Ptolemaic system not only was it known to be round, but the diameter was known. In fact what happened is that Columbus convinced himself that a known bad value was correct, and convinced himself that Asia stretched considerably farther than it did, so that it would be within reach of direct sailing.
He was wrong on both counts. And the only thing that saved his ass was that there was an unknown continent in the way. When he landed there, he quickly realized it wasn't China, and placed it as being India instead. The mistake was later realized, but that is why the natives of the Americas are called Indians to this day.
And Einstein, naive invocations notwithstanding, would understand exactly what I am saying and agree. You simply cannot throw away the existing body of experiment. Your theories must explain why the old theories seemed to work. He did this. (In fact he used the fact that he had to do this as a constraint to help him produce General Relativity.)
The point is simple. The progress that you are so proud of comes from building on and then stress-testing what we have been through before. That you would encourage people to throw it away because you don't like what it says suggests strongly that you don't understand this basic fact. There might or might not be a loophole in the light barrier. However if there is, we won't find it by pretending that Einstein can be ignored. We will find it by knowing exactly what Einstein predicts, and testing those predictions until we come up with something that doesn't quite fit.
Like what Einstein himself noticed, that the laws of electromagnetism predict a single speed of light for any observer. A fact that doesn't fit with Newtonian mechanics...
PS If you think you have removed your dependence on nature, then you have no idea where the oxygen that you are breathing comes from. (Mostly algae in the oceans in case you are curious.)
Mallett's assistant Adam, is doing his girl Eve in the workshop, and BOOM!
Case closed. Thanks for coming.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
This is really old news. I remember seeing this back in June of last year. But since we're bringing it up again, here's a nice article.
BytesTemplar.com
So what everybody is basically saying is that building a time machine, travelling back in time & killing your grandparents is actually the "geek" version of the old redneck classic... "Hey y'all, watch this..."
FORWARDS in time, from April the 1st!!!!
If I could travel in time, I would go back to the day that Confucious was born. Then, I would kill him.
Then, we would not have to deal with the fascist country called China in the 21st century.
(Attempting to continue from the above post)
Any alternate universes will either have the same laws of physics that we do here (Even if we havent figured them all out yet) or will differ somehow.
If they have different laws, some extra ones or are missing a few, then we cannot say anything about the nature of them, so I wont continue with that idea. If there exists another universe with exactly the same laws as ours, then I would argue that it would follow exactly the same path as ours has, and would end up being exactly the same.
IANAPhyscist, but it has usually been my view that on a large scale (looking at the system of the universe as a whole) the universe would run like clockwork. We cant predict very much because we cannot monitor the entire universe with any great degree of detail, and we do not know the initial conditions yet (Of course, thats always a topic for debate)
The only thing which has any unforeseeable effect is living things. (NOTE: I am NOT suggesting that we humans are able to change the universe in any major way, or ever could) Beings capable of making decisions that are not (entirely - or necessarily) based on outside (at least, very distant) objects/events can affect outside objects, but I would say not in a major way. A few different decisions years/decades/millenia ago might change our world today, but our solar system would still be in the same position in the universe.
I would then argue, if alternate universes exist with our physical laws, they would be exactly the same until somebody makes a different choice to what they did in our world. (the first different choice, after that, there is some variation)
That said, IMHO, nobody would make a different choice to what they did in this "reality" unless they had a reason to that wasnt available in this world, which wouldnt happen unless somebody from either: another time, or another dimension came to influence decisions in some way. As I am considering time travel to be traveling into an alternate dimension, then there is only one distinct option.
So, any alternate universes in existence (with the same laws...) would be exactly the same until someone (eg, us) from another universe entered, which would alter it from that point in time onwards.
this story is old enough now that I wont get any karma anyway, so more ridiulous pondering on the matter when I return from my maths lecture, for anybody who cares to read this
c - a blessed +5 grain of salt
Time travel is not that big of a deal, it is simply just the manifestation of doing something over that has already been done. Time is relative to everything, and to have everything condensed to a very small amount to even (if possible) control time is impossible. I admire scientists and especially minority distingushed ones. SO whoever was talking about 'niggers', it really makes no difference. We are all human.
This is great.
Id like to get some new flying cars from the future.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Didn't you guys see Terminator. . . you come back with no clothes on. . .
;)
How do I know? Because we would have tourists from the future visiting us and trying to change it. The fact that Hilter was not stopped before ww2, the World Trade Center is gone, and that some muslim nuts didn't destroy the jewish race starting with Jacob or Abraham shows that he indeed failed. Its that or our universe were are in now is actually modified and much better than the original. Why is it that only our universe that we are in now has no time traveled tourists?
The theory of multiple dimensions is just a theory and has not been proven. There is some evidence in quantum mechanics that show that there may be an alternative universe identical to this one but no real proof of alternate realitites or universes that are different. I believe Steven Hawkings proved that the universe has ways to protect itself from time travel and he showed if I recall that it may be possible to travel into the future but not the past. Perhaps a physics major reading this could explain what Hawking meant.
http://saveie6.com/
If you do happen to listen, see if you can spot another moderation technique they use on the show, called "foghorn words".
Whenever certain commonly misused words are spoken (even by the host), the word is not censored, but a foghorn sounds in the background to call your attention to it. The most common foghorn word to come up is "inappropriate." For example, an educator might say something like "sexual assault on school property is inappropriate," which sort of implies that there is a time and a place for rape. The person should have simply said "bad" or "evil" or something along those lines, but because they are conditioned by our current culture to water down their language, they end us suggesting that there is such a thing as appropriate rape. When presented with such stupidity, a foghorn is sounded, although whoever is speaking will not be interrupted or cut off.
Yet another concept that could be fun to apply to Slashdot discussions.
Perhaps I should write myself a simple blog auto-moderator program, which downloads the stream from /. (or similar sites), parses them through a little Perl script to filter out certain comments (no more waiting for somebody else to dump the more common crapfloods to -1), highlight the foghorn words, etc., and then output the result to my browser. Hmm...
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If you travel at near light speed, you won't go anywhere in time, you'll just go somewhere in space... REALLY REALLY FAST. It makes sense.
And what are your feelings toward Israel and Jews these days thanks to our fine national coverage?
Remember, people are more sophisticated these days, so the techniques used to alter public opinion must be kept in similar trim. Looks to me as though the opinion makers in conjunction with the policy makers are doing a very slick job in whipping up precisely the social forces they want/need.
Goebles would be proud.
-Fantastic Lad
Wow, your phone can call other dimensions? ;)
Yeah, I just bought it from this great new start-up. I suggest you buy lots of shares in their company!
Just the other day, I got this phone-call from my alternate self in another universe. He's a multi billionnaire, great looking, 50 wifes, and just dicovered the elixier of youth in his private labs. Then he started laughing at me a lot.....
An alternative methodology is that the time line cannot be changed, even by intentional events, in fact any attempt to change the time line will be rectified by other actions.
For instance you go back and try to shoot your father before he met your mother.
Your gun repeatedly jams, or you miss, or don't cause significant injury. Or it turns out that your father had an identical twin whose murder he has never mentioned.
Those big things
Give up
trust us
I found this about 10 minutes ago from an article mentioning Ronald Mallet. What a coincidence.
g /t imemachine.jpg
f or a slightly older article.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/wormholes/im
Also try
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/wormholes/
And what about the ethics of changing history?
There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.
Having the US government try to claim hegemony over the entire planet is bad enough without them trying to claim jurisdiction over the past and future.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history - the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later additions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, chapter 15
100 Time Travel Links
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
This is a little too brief for me to get what your point is, but it seems like you are confusing "feeling the acceleration" with "feeling the acceleration in an identical way". If the universe consisted only of the twins, and one twin was 5 Kgs. more massive than the other, and they pushed off from each other, are you saying that the less massive twin is the only one who will feel any effect of acceleration? Obviously, as the mass difference increases, the larger mass will perceive less effect, but that does not mean that it would feel different to the larger mass to accelerate itself, than to have everything else in the universe accelerate in the other direction.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
BTW, this is good discussion. For some reason, people often seem to have trouble debating on forums without flaming each other. This has been a really thought-provoking thread for me (and I may have even learned something). It shows the value of exposing one's ignorance. If I had been hesitant to post my original comment because I was afraid of being publicly wrong, I would not have had this opportunity to reconsider my interpretations. If I had started flaming you in response to your initial debate, then my ego would have insisted that I "win" the debate, which, of course, would be totally counter-productive.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
I think that one has to seriously take astrophysics into account when you travel in time. The reason that we've never been visited by future time travelers is that every single one has ended up breathing vacuum.
Imagine you are in a trolley car, and a time machine sends you 30 seconds back into the past. Where would you be? Exactly in the same place (define place) 30 seconds ago? Watching yourself prepare the time machine? No, you'd be occupying the space a few feet off the ground where the trolley car is due to arrive in 30 seconds.
OR WORSE YET...you'd be where the EARTH should be (taking into account rotation and its orbit around the sun, etc.) 30 seconds before its arrival there.
Imagine if you moved six months? If somehow the center of all motion is the sun at the center of the solar system, you'd be on the other side of earth's orbit, floating around, getting a super tan.
But why shouldn't we also take into account all celestial movement? The universe expanding, etc.?
Time travel probably works. But when you play with "time" don't forget "space."
Given a universe consisting of nothing but two twins, one twin slightly more massive than the other, the more the twins accelerate/decelerate relative to each other, the older the more massive twin will be relative to the less massive twin. And the less the twins accelerate/decelerate relative to each other, the closer their ages will be.
Is this a correct interpretation of what you are saying?
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Another possible theory is that something will always happen to prevent paradox. In the case of him going back to warn his dad not to smoke his dad tells him to f**k off, blows smoke in his face, and croaks on schedule.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Actually, he can send things into the future all the time... it's just into the past. The real question here, is, without actually seeing evidence of time travel, how does one tell if we're in the "real", backwards-time-travellerless, universe or a parallel one, without invoking Occam's Razor, which is not a proof but a maxim.
What's more, one could presume that in every parallel universe into which a time traveller travels, more time travellers travel into the past, because they have concrete proof that it is possible, and access to the technology. Might there not be some bubble universe where man DID live alongside the dinosaurs, simply because enough people travelled into the past while spawning off parallel universes...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Matter/Anti-Matter, its probably the same place Hawkings got his idea for matter emitting black holes. You're a genius in the making.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
If time travel could EVER be possible(it seems physicists agree it is) then there are definitely folks from the future walking among us right now.
I'd like to challenge the common argument of "going into the past to kill one's father" this is a paradox. It is only a paradox if one assumes that time is 1 dimensional. That time is some linear path that has direct consequences and is inescapable.
If time were 2 dimensional one could go into any other possible time path without ever creating a paradox. You can go into the past, kill your father and that is ok because you are not traveling in "your" past. Your 'time zone', the
'present' never changes. If you move in a different direction in time other than in a 1d forward (aka the falling direction) you slip into other time paths. In these other time paths there is still direct consequence but it matters not whether that consequence is linear or circular.
Basically, the act of you going into the past and killing your own father means that in this new time line you would not exist in that new time zones future. You would not see a double of yourself reborn, and that is ok because you did
not come from the future of this new 1d timeline, you came from a 2d timeline parrallel to the current timeline. What is a problem is that if the traveler were time traveling in 1d time he/she would never be able to return to his/her "original" time line. This happens because you would always map any 1d time travel route from your current 2d time to any other point. To return to your original point time travel would need to take place in 2d time... but this is my own theory.
So if at your new present location your future self never existed anymore, it would be impossible to travel to the future you once knew when you would make your machine so you could never return to your original 1d time slice.
[note 1: but you could travel to all kinds of other times and discover all kinds of alternate futures by recreating multiple past events ad infinitum]
[note 2: If you employ the principles of chaos theory the act of moving even an infinitesimal fraction of a second in the past would forever remove you from this 1d time line]
Moving in the past is a very crude way of moving in 2d time. You back up, and then chose a new direction. So basically you are choosing new 1d slices from a 2d plane. There is another option, that instead of transporting back and forth in 1d time that a time machine could allow one to continually move in 2d time without ever needing to revert back to 1d time (but this gets even harder to imagine without experiencing it)
In my personal opinion, we must not forget that we always exist in the present. What we call the past or the future is simply a notion that we use to describe events that were or will be. It's a concept.
3d time travel (or higher) is a a very difficult subject matter that I can only vaguely concieve. I can only make some meaningful arguments on the subject by also talking about string theory, M-planes and about alot of infinity principles.
BTW, his theory is excellent and freshly pioneering, I'm going to read more about it. Thanks!
=)
Sebastian.
(I'm casualy writing a paper on several of the above related topics)
I see two additional problems with this time travel crap:
- you couldn't possibly travel into the future. The future doesn't exist; it's created moment to moment by the actions and interactions of everything from the tiniest particles to the largest galaxies, including along the line human intent and decision making. There is no 'future' to travel to; just the present and the past. Anyone who claims otherwise is stupidly obviating free will, and free will is apparent to even the most clueless of us. If so, please remove yourself from the argument as your nihilist nonsense is boring, pathetic, and incredibly juvenile.
- if a person traveling backwards in time were to either create an alternate timeline (and universe), or simply drop into that alternate timeline/universe, this would invalidate the Laws of Thermodynamics, i.e., 'energy can neither be created nor destroyed....'. Removing yourself from the current universe would 'destroy' the energy for this universe, while creating it for the alternate universe. Both things are fundamentally impossible; were it not so, the basic underpinnings of physics itself would fall completely apart, and as they haven't during the last 8-10 billion years I don't see them collapsing any time soon.
Time travel is a crock. Fun for SF "what if" stories (which I really enjoy) but that's all it is - fiction. There will never be time travel and putting a tiny bit of thought into the matter will not only show you why, but also why this is a good thing.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Fist, see my post on 2d time just below yours.
I agree that the present is the only thing that exists. But don't forget that one can already travel "into the future". The mere act of moving away from the earth moves you into the future by a fraction of a second. Black holes and accelerators can move particles trillions of years forward in time and it is happening ever moment.
Secondly, thermodynamics is a law that applies currently to our universe. If we discover that time is not linear but in fact 2 dimensional it would also be logical to assume that the laws of thermodynamics are also 2 dimensional. Which means that you can take energy from one time dimension and move it to another dimension so long as the total energy in all dimensions remains equal (which it would).
Sebastian.
My theory of time travel is simple and is based on the concept of worm-hole gateways.
:o
To travel through time, you must create both ends of the gateway. Such gateways may or may not exist through the universe naturally, but as we've never been able to spot, let alone capture, one, let's just assume we have to create them artificially.
Now, if the gateways (physical presence) are created on Earth, then they can be sent from Earth into outerspace at no more than the speed of light. Thus, the maximum distance the gateway can travel is related to the speed of light (~300,000 km/s). However, in a Trans-Einstein way, the two gateways maintain simultenaity. Thus, any object sent through the Earth gateway would "simultaneously" appear in the time-space frame of the outer space Gateway.
Now, imagine that we place a Gateway on the head of a photon (and yet let it be big enough to fit a camera and telescope via fibre-optics, perhaps) and send it out into space at the speed of light for one year in some direct tangential vector to Earth. After 1 year, the other Gateway will be exactly 1 lightyear (ly) from Earth. Thus, the light that that Gateway sees will be exactly from 1 year ago -- the day the Gateway was launched.
Because we attached a camera to the outer space Gateway and ran the fibre-optic cable through the Gateway to receive the signal "instantaenously" on Earth, we can essentially see a snapshot of Earth as it was 1 year ago. We have accomplished Time Travel!
Unfortunately, there is no clear way to return to an "Earth" of the past. The Gateways allow you to observe the Earth in a prior state, but as soon as you tried to return to Earth, you would be approaching Earth's "now" and therefore loose the "time-space" differential. In other words, as you approach Earth at maximum speed (the speed of Light), your "1 year" difference would decrease until you arrived home exactly 1 year after you left. This is without applying Lorenz's Time Transforms of course, as we are not calculating the acceleration of each trip, simply the velocity.
Now, what is interesting about this theory is that first, you can't go back BEFORE the first Time Machine was built. What's past is past and always was, what will be we know not because. Thus, it WOULD be possible to build a Time Machine yet not possible to "kill ones grandfather" or "advice onself" on its construction because that kind of Time Travel is impossible IMHO. The area availible to us for Time Travel consists of a light-sphere that is exactly the surface that would be created by a photon being sent in every direction from the point at which the Time Machine was created. That is your "playground" and no more. As time goes on, we can have a pretty big Time Travel Sphere, but it will take years for it to be of any use.
OTOH, imagine such a Gateway system in deep-space exploration: Send a Man-Sized Gateway probe out at maximum feasable speed (much less than the speed of light for any physical object) and when it arrives on planet "X", just send the population through! Only one deep space mission would be required! All subsequent travel can be through the Gateway. If only we could build the Gateway and build it Man-Sized...
Devo Andare,
Jeffrey.
Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey
And statistically speaking, it seems almost impossible for us not to have noticed this if the alternate universe theory is true. Assume the normal universe, in which there are x^3 possibilities of movement in space at any instant (what is an instant I leave to you. In fact, most of this is generalized, but the main point still holds.) Add to that the exponental increase of humanity (more people making more choices as time goes by) and you have some equation for the creation of new universes with a factor of x^5. This is the universe in which we live.
Add to that the freedom to move in another dimension, the dimension of time, and now you have 4 degrees of freedom at any time, not just three. Take the x^4 degrees of freedom times the exponential increase of people and you have a function of possible universes with a factor of x^6. (the actual value of the equation is unimportant for this exercise; all that is needed is that the universes in which time travel is a degree of freedom would increase the amount of possible universes to a higher power)
So what are the chances that we live in a universe that we live in a virgin universe? Well, there are an infinite number of universes untouched by time-travellers, just influenced by our infinite choices. But there is a higher power of infinite universes in which time-travellers have appeared. So take the limit to infinity of x^5/x^6 and you get zero. The infinite worlds theory of time travel would predict that although there are an infinite number of worlds with no evidence of time travel, there are so many more that would have past time travellers that the chance that we live in one with no evidence of time travel is pretty much zero.
So if time travel is possible, we don't understand it. Can he only send the neutron back to the time when the neutron was already in the light doughnut (mmmm, doughnuts)? Is there a mechanism to send things forward? Where does the energy come from to create the neutron, from the light? Lots of questions even if the experiment works. So let this fella poke around with his neutrons, and if it happens, then we got some studying to do.
The existence of parallel universes would not excuse the absence of time-travelling tourists in our own timeline.
Let's say that starting in 1970, time travel is successfully invented in ten percent of all possible futures. In each of these universes, there are an average of one-thousand reverse time machine uses whose destinations lie within the last three decades of the twentieth century.
That means there would be an average of one-hundred time travelers available to arrive in the seventies, eighties, or nineties of every possible child timeline of our parent timeline, starting in 1970.
Even if the "why don't I remember meeting myself" paradox makes it impossible to arrive in one's own past, the chance of being visited by a traveler from some parallel universe would approach certainty! We must assume that either none of these one-hundred or so visits we've had from time-travelers in the last three decades were noticeable, or that this sort of time travel will never happen.
Of course, I have made a few unwarranted assumptions here, like the percentage of possible time-travel futures, or the number of time-traveller visits, but they are only for argument's sake. I just wanted to have a thought experiment to point out another possible hitch.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Have a network card on his pc that can recieve neutrons from the future.
Have a proxy server that forwards responses from external web sites to the past by encoding them as neutrons
Your PC sends http GET requests to the proxy server where they are cached for three years before being sent on to whatever site.
Your PC recieves responses from the future REAL TIME. You can surf the internet of the future!!!
What would happen if a month later, you smashed the proxy server with a sledgehammer? Would you forget everything you saw? Would you instantaneously lose all the money you made off the stock market?
If significant stock trading were done by 'scrying' into the future, nobody would do real research into the health of companies. How would that affect the efficiency of the market?
Time-scryers from the past would be kinda like information parasites. Whoever had an idea, would have it stolen by someone from the past!
Eat at Joe's.
whenever anyone figures out the universe it automatically mutates into something stranger,i.e. time travel starts working/universe explodes->new universe starts->digital watches.
+&x
Here you make the assumption that information can travel two directions and that the future and the present are two independent realities you can teleport between. They are not. For a start: The future is a direct result of YOUR present. Second, you can not teleport from one time to another, you must move there while experiencing an ever constant present, so any activities from the future must be gained through motion.
If you take information from your "current" future and use it you change the "new" future. Your predictions of the future would always be wrong the moment you thought you had them defined because your new future would be crafted using your old predictions. In fact, the inverse would be created. The more you knew about the future the less the future will look like your predictions and any short term benefits would be inconsequential. People do this all the time already. We are naive to think the stock market is some random gambling zone. Certain individuals have a great deal of information at their control and nothing is more real than a planned corporate change. It is far more real and predictable to say "I will" then "I predict".
On another front, imagine a reality where all beings could time travel effortlessly. The competition to change the future would be so intense from all forms of life that eventually a new stability would occur. It could very well be that our universe is the struggle between such time traveling forces that occur at all times and that our 'present' is merely a current balance of these time forces to craft all of time.
I think that's cool.
We need a black Einstien.
=o)
First, how do we know people dont come fromm other universes? Its not like you'd believe it if some guy said he saw a ghost, or some flying saucer, or anything of the sort. You just dont know.
There could be others here from other universes, and time travels but you see, we wouldnt know what the hell they are, we'd call them ghosts, aliens, angels, demons, gods, if we saw them in the past
And if we see them now we'd call them haoxes
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There is no number, there are infinate universes..
which means theres infinate time travelers, does this mean they come to our universe or create a new one when they time travel?
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What you describe what is classicaly known as a teleporter. This is not the same as a time machine.
=)
I may be wrong though.
Time travel creates NEW universes, i never said it travels through old ones. When you time travel you create a NEW fork, a universe where time travel is possible
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Its not stored in a diffrent universe, math is not a storage medium, its a way of sorting information, you can put the information in 2d, 3d, 4d, 5d or whatever you can figure out mathematically.
We do have 4d, 5d + math, and there are people who claim to have weird maths.
zeosync for example, also take into account that you can store information essentially in 2d binary, 3d xyx coords, or 4d,
A good idea but it would take a mathematician to answer it. I do believe we will be able to create information which moves faster than light, which can be stored in 3d and even 4d space, storing information in 3d space = holographic storage which is the best we have, 4d space is debateable, somem say 4d is space itself, meaning all of this space we are contained in, is 4d, such as a 3d plane, and when we travel through space we are traveling through this 4d plane.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
You send them back they are entered into a seperate universe which has no effect on you
they are literally sent back and by them exsistingn in the past they alter the new timeline thus creating a branch and a new universe NOT altering yours
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
If you sent a different one, say a granny smith instead of a red delicious, where did the red delicious come from? Maybe you would need to have the apple in hand in order to promise to send it back and have a copy appear? Would a copy appear if you promised to send the copy back? Wouldn't it eventually rot into dust? Then what would you send back? Eventually there would be nothing left to send, not even a mouldy fruit and you'd have to break your promise. If you sent the original on that iteration, only then would the recursive loop unroll. What a way to age wine!
Eat at Joe's.
1. As regards the theory that travel into the past causes a universe split, and respecting preservation of energy, how much energy would it take to travel back in time if that trip caused the creation of a mirror universe? Obviously far more energy than we have at our disposal.
2. So you've worked out a method of time travel that runs on a reasonable amount of energy. You set the dial for a couple of hours, forward or back, and hit the button. Where do you find yourself? Floating in space. The earth, sun, galaxy, galaxy cluster, have all moved during your trip. If on the other hand gravity still exerts a pull on you, during the time dilation that would have to occur, the magnification of gravitational force would squish you like a bug. So you're either grape jelly or space junk.
3. All of this assumes that time is an actual dimension, rather than a mathematical one, which has never been proven. Even Einstein's theory of relativity dealt with time per a given point as an mathematical effect which could be slowed relative to another point. Defining time as a dimension simplifies the math. Time travel theories take this simplification out of context.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
If some guy appeared at my doorstep wearing bizarre "futuristic" clothing, then proceeded to tell me that he is my son (not yet born) and I will die of cancer from smoking and therefore must stop immediately, what's the the very first thing I will do after slamming the door in his face?
Yep. You guessed it -- reach for a cigarette!
It's bloody well time. I've been reading to much sci-fi books. When do we get FTL? And antimatter torpedoes, and intergalactic war with furry cat like creatures? Come on human race, lets get with it! Time to fire up the ion drives and get outta this modern dark ages in under 12 parsecs. Sheesh..
I am not in this position, either, so I attached an 'I don't know' tag to copies of the URL I just sent to my friends for reasons having to do with intellectual honesty.
All we know assuming the article is accurate is that reputable researchers both agree and disagree with the professor about this.
All your getting modded up to 5 shows is that at least 3 slashdotters didn't stay awake in any of their science classes long enough to catch a clue about scientific methodology.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I haven't read through all the comments, but has any one else noticed that he is potentially setting himself up for a temporal paradox? This is, of course, assuming that time travel is possible in the first place, and that there is only one universe. The artcle states that the reason he got into physics in the first place was his childhood dream of traveling back in time to warn his father about the dangers of smoking and drinking. If he succeeds in doing this, his father might not die, and he would no longer have the dream of traveling back in time, thus preventing him from traveling back in time. All this time travel stuff is making my bean hurt...
It is a time machine in the Einsteinian sense because it allows FTL travel and for someone to be able to affect the universe out of ones time sphere. The time sphere is the sphere created with R=ct, where c is the speed of light and t is the time since the action. Your actions in can only affect the light sphere because in Einstein's universe no information can travel faster than light. Thus, if you can suddenly travel from some region in the light sphere to some region outside the light sphere, you have reached a point before you left WRT the light sphere.
:)
In other words, the "Transporter" can only travel a the speed of light, but the "Voyager" enters at year x but sees the effects on the world from year (x-1). So although he cannot affect the world of (x-1) he is essentially there, in the light sphere of THAT world, not of his own. His own has only just begun to grow and will take a year to reach him. Unfortunately, this "observer's" time travel is not the type we would most like to have but I fear it may be the only one possible. What's more, because the true "Era of Time Travel" doesn't begin until AFTER the "transporter" is built, so one could not, for instance, travel out in space with a big antenna and catch the entire broadcast of "Doctor Who - Marco Polo" as it reaches out into space, because that was boadcast in 1964, many years before we built the "transporter". And that is the only reason *I* would build the transporter since everything is videotaped now anyway!
Mmmmm. New copy of "Evil of the Daleks"...
And yes, subspace communications are simply a plot device.
Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey