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.
Define "Working Mockup" :)
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
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.
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 |
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.
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.
This could be a first post!
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
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
Hasn't this story been posted before?
0xB
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
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.
Don't you mean "Could send me forward to the first time you have sex"?
0xB
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.
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*
man[3] wouldn't have to build the time machine the second time around, since man[2] was never killed by man[1].
Everyone is making the same point, and it was addressed in the article. He basically believes that every time you moved back in time it would create a "branch" so to speak, that would continue on in the altered way. It would be impossible to affect your own timeline.
It'd sorta be like if you had a game of Civilization that you'd saved every 100 years from 100 A.D to 2000 A.D. Then you went back to 500 A.D. and made different choices and again saved every 100 years. The stuff from 100-500 would be unchanged, and there would be two separate histories from 500-2000. You could repeat this indefinitely, making branches off the branches and so forth.
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.
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
They're called "canadians".
My HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE is on DRUGS.
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.
"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.
This whole interpretation of time travel and the many worlds theory was used quite skillfully in the novel The Proteus Operation by James. P. Hogan in which an american team travels back (from a world where Nazi Germany controls most of the world) to foil Hitler's development of the A-bomb.
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
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
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.
Maybe we nuke ourselves out of existence before we get it working.
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.
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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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...
"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."
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
I've always believed that if you traveled back in the past, you'd merely participate in it, not change it.
Because simply existing in the past and displacing molecules around you would be enough to cause paradoxes, let alone killing your grandfather. So, unless paralell universes are created, you simply can't make any changes to the past. If you try to kill your grandfather, something will prevent you from doing.
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.
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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...
Maybe he's from an alternate universe created by Universal - a monstrosity where you don't own the CDs you buy, and you can't make backup copies, so he came back in time, and ventured into our universe, but he's ALMOST TOO LATE, so he's building another time machine to go back even further, to a better day, like 1995, before copy-protection existed, but after the only CDs to copy were the New Kids on the Block and Milli Vanilli.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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!"
To everyone else, it captures the imagination with the tantalizing possibility of time travel. The only problem is that Mallett's time machine would work only from the time that it is actually plugged in and turned on. That means it could never take you back to the Stone Age or the Roman Empire. And that means, despite all Mallett's work, he will never be able to go back and save his father.
So his time machine only works from the moment you turn it on. Interesting.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
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
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)
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.
No one or aliens from the future can ever come to this universe because there are INFINITE parrallel universes, time traveling just creates a new onee.
Basically, anything that can happen, is happening,
anything imaginable, has happened and will happen, maybe not for a hundred trillion years in our universe, but eventually.
And in some universes its happening now.
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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?
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!"
literally he could instantly know all that is, was and ever will be, and control the whole uniiverse.
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Dark moves faster than light, meaning invisible pockets in space
black holes, void, dark matter, gravity
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Good question, conciousness would be the first time traveler.
You can imagine any possible future, or remember any possible past.
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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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
unfortunately, this has been posted already.
Sorry to disappoint everyone.
I speak seven different body languages fluently, including ToughGuy and Swinger.
A much simpler explanation for why he hasn't gone back in time to tell himself: If he's able to succeed on his own (that is, without interference from himself), he wouldn't need to. If he isn't, he would never be able to.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
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.
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.
"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.
"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..."
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
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.
My favorite, is one of his short stories, where they send someone back to assasinate Hitler. The time traveler arrives, only to be caught by the SS, as "one more of those damn time travelers". Seems everyone attempts the same thing. So Hitler being the nice guy that he is, decides to convince them that he's not a bad guy at all, just trying to rebuild his nation, and play nice. Time traveler doesn't buy it, grabs an SS pistol, and blows his head off. The Nazi's are in panic, what do we do, what do we do... "We must bring in his double, even if the guy is a little bit nuts, we can't let the world know Hitler is dead, or all will be ruined!". The end.
Don't let this fool you. Hogan kicks ass for hardcore non-Star Trek ("oh no we must defibrilate the iso-crapulaton ray fields, or we'll fall into iso-metatonic instability!") scifi.
Thrice Upon a Time. (good one)
The Giants series (though it isn't realized as time travel until the 4th book, or was it 5th?)
Someone help me fill in the blanks here, he's had several more.
Looks like I'll have to get the Proteus Op, never read that one... hope it's as good as the others.
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.
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.
[...] 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, 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 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.
I would argue that the further back you send them, the morelikely it is they will fcsk up the timeline. You send someone back 6M years, and they step on a bug that is the ancestor to all humanity (or all bugs, or whatever).
The further back you go, the more significant the little things are.
Reality has a liberal bias
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
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)
Yes, This is common belief that I have heard and read before. Logically, if you have a device that is capable of sending you back in time, you would need an entry point in the point of time you are traveling to. If no device is capable of time travel in this past point in time, then there would be no time travel and therefore impossible. There are many arguments against the possibility of time travel, one of which intrigues me. That is that if matter cannot be created or destroyed, how can you travel back into time without adding more matter to that point in space and time.
There is no
Its simply too late. I invented the time machine first, went back and made sure the patent office wouldn't give him the patent.
That's why they won't accept patents on perpetual motion, time machines, etc...
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.
Oh, I see. But what exactly do you mean by "first"? Couldn't he just go back in time a bit further and beat you to the patent office?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
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.
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.
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
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.
The time machine variations I have seen (ie. massive rotating cylinder, toroid black hole and a few more) only allow you to travel back in time to the moment the machine was set up - and only forward until the time it is dismantled.
It all has to do with creating closed time-like loops, loosely a path through space that allows you to return to the same position at an earlier time. Want to go back further, go around another time. Want to go forward, loop in the other direction. In other words, the 'machine' itself does not move through time. Only you do, by following specific paths around it.
Most time machine conecpts involves extremely dense objects (think neutron star matter or singularities) moving at sizeable fractions of the speed of light. I wonder exactly how much power those lasers of his generate?!
On the subject of forking universes, paradoxes etc., my understanding (IANAP, IAAP-groupie) is that there can be only one time line, which must be consistent. When you apply quantum mechanics to a system with closed time-like loops, the probability wave functions sum to zero for any events which would be paradoxical. So, you can't kill gramps. Think 12 Monkeys.
Oh, and some believe (about 50/50 among those I have spoken to) that the probability waves will sum to infinity for all non-paradoxical events, creating infinite energy densities and blowing up any time machine even as it forms. Hopefully not taking the city/planet/universe with it.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
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.
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));
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.
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?
I find if funny how people make pseudo-philosophical research into time travel and determine that it's not possible. Especially the "I can't comprehend it so there for it can't happen".
:)
Most prevelent theory is that a time traveller cannot travel back to before when time travelling was invented. There for we can't be visited since we can't time travel.
I point to experiments where clocks run more slowly at high speeds or further away from the gravity of earth. I think this somwhat shows that time is a "thing" and not a concept or a measuring of events.
Of course I've never studied intently into physics, though I did love the mind bending stuff.
Of course the guy that wants to do this experiments says that his experiment is based off of the theory or relatively which does not take into account quantum mechanics, which may mean that his experiment will likely fail. But it doesn't hurt to try now does it? As long as my universe is still intact after he's done
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
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.
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
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
Here - teenager says that the 23rd century sucks.
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.
Well, he does not understand his own theories.
But he just needs to go back before the Patent Office started and start it himself... but then anyone can. Really, he needs to go back to the start of time and open a patent office.
On a serious note, I don't see why people think time exists at all. Is there any evidence for it being anything other than a convenient way to measure change?
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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//
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.
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.
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
By the by, did I mention this is all bollocks?
sic transit gloria mundi
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?
Dude - it was a Delorean because it has those cool gull wing doors
DeLorean door for sale, FOB Toronto/Ottawa, Canada. Best offer.
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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.
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.
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... ;)
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
... 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
Liberty.
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.
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
You still stay in the time machine. It's just like sitting in the room you are right now. You are moving around the earth's axis, around the sun, around the galactic center, etc, all while in your room. It is just like that except the room you are in happens to be in warped time, that's all.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
No. Why would anybody think that? The neutron isn't world-hopping; it's time travelling. If it really goes into the past, it will run into itself. Forget about that crap with the parallel universes. Nothing in General Relativity forces time travelers into a parallel universe. They go into the past of our universe. And that's what time travelling is supposed to be.
[Shrug] I really couldn't say whether or not it's possible. The problems of conservation and the usual types of paradoxes seem insoluble, but...
Dyolf Knip
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/
Maybe we'll finally get to learn what REALLY happens when matter materializes INSIDE OTHER MATTER.
Personally, I believe that the matter is displaced towards the nearest empty area while taking 3d6 damage, but my proof is insufficiently rigorous to post yet.
There is a FANTASTIC time travel story by Poul Anderson that I bust out and read about once every 6-9 months. Amazingly I forget the title, but it is in the "Past Times" anthology. The story is basically this:
- Guy invents time machine.
- Guy sends automated probe ahead about 100 years. It doesn't come back.
- Guy bravely hops into his full-sized model to check it out. Probe is not there. Hometown all different... house burned down, etc.
- Guy starts going backwards in 10 year steps. He finds the probe with its batteries dead.
- Guy learns a surprising physical law: you can't go BACKWARDS in time more than about 30 years... the energy required starts to rise to infinity. Uh oh.
- With nothing else to do, guy goes on ahead -- maybe someone in the future will know how to help him.
- Won't give away the end, but he goes forward hundreds, thousands, millions, BILLIONS of years... stopping now and then... trying to get help... learns it isn't possible to go back... gets caught up in all kinds of things...
The whole story is highly improbable, especially the ending, but REALLY neat.
PS Hogan does indeed rule like few other authors!
That's all we do for any other dimension in space-time - Measure change.
I'm not sure. If I measure the distance between two independent points (or objects) what change am I measuring, if nothing has moved?
On the other hand, if an object has moved, it is convenient to say that 'now' is different from 'then', and introduce the concept of time, but that doesn't mean that time has to actually pass. Things just change, and it's convenient for us to plot that change on an imaginary 'time' axis. 'Time passes' = 'change occurs'. If nothing ever changed, then firstly we wouldn't exist, but secondly we'd need no concept of time to explain things.
That's how it seems to me, anyway...
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
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)
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?
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?
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?!
I understand what you mean but I think you misunderstand me.
What I'm saying is that perhaps, if you travel back into the past, you were, for lack of a better word, *meant* to go back and do whatever you end up doing. History are you see could not have happened if you didn't travel back into time and interact with things as you did/will/are.
By participate, I mean, you aren't making "changes"... you're just acting in history as you were always destined/meant/fated/etc to be.
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.
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?
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
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
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The past is changed because of you!
you come from the past into the future
your memory of the future modifies the past, you can never return to the same past.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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
I don't believe in free will. However, since we are only able to travel forward in time at the "normal" pace, we experience an illusion of free will that is indistinguishable from the real thing.
As long as you have no knowledge of the future(from your current position in time), as far as you are concerned, you have "free will".