Slashdot Mirror
How to Build a Time Machine
frank249 writes "The September issue of Scientific American has an article discussing the possibility of time travel. They say that it wouldn't be easy, but it might be possible. It could be a while until we can expand worm holes and tow them to a neutron star but didn't someone say that if it is possible it will happen. If it is impossible it will just take a little longer."
Of course, this induces the potential for paradox, causing great cosmological and philosophical consternation. I don't know what will happen if/when someone goes backwards through time, but here's some ideas:
- The universe forks in two when a paradox is induced.
- The universe forks in two at the instant the traveller enters history (because at a micro-level, paradox is induced as soon as they appear).
- Paradox induces a cascading feedback loop of self-modifying universes (each inducing a time-traveller who goes back and causes another chage) until the sequence halts with a universe in which time travel is not developed. My bet is that if time-travel is possible, then this is what has happened, because there is no evidence of time travel.
Forward time travel is of course possible right now, requiring only some patienceCrispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase
is first outlined by physicist Kip Thorn and widely accepted by the scientific community as a real possibility. It is a method which utilise the ability of keeping worm holes open and high speed travel IIRC.
:)
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outragous Legacy by Kip Thorn is perhaps one of the best science books I read, though I didn't really read that many of them.
geek page at KY speaks
I believe that travelling to the past would merely let us perform certain travelling at speeds faster than light.
...
.. quirks of worthy pursuit.
...
Or, put another way, the time required at maximum velocity to return to your point of origin is at least the amount of time you travelled back in time. I believe you must sacrifice time or sacrifice position.
Position may or may not be in the way we expect; I suspect it is based upon your "depth" in the gravitational field, and as such, you would travel towards or away from heavy celestial bodies, such as the sun. Travelling towards them requires velocity. By the same token, you can temporally return to the beginning of the universe if you travel far enough away from the centre of it (assuming that the gravitational "depth" continues to decrease with distance, and the exponential energy increase required to travel as such is not unreasonable)
Binary stars and other equilibrium comes to mind, but I conjecture that "free" time travel in perfect equilibrium would be impossible; your relationship with time can only be altered in respect to changes in the gravitational depth. However, they may have
So goes a theory
The best thing about having a working time machine would be pushing all who find this fascinating into it and sending them elsewhen.
If time proves to be a complex number, while I would find that fascinating I wouldn't tempted in the slightest to project the terms "backward" or "forward" into a polar coordinate system.
If there's any virtue at all to a discussion about time travel, it's that you can't determine whether mathematics or linguistics is taking the worst beating.
Your post intrigues me, but if you're really looking to prevent World War I, I can suggest people more culpable than Princip:
Grand Admiral Alfred Tirpitz: Led the drive to create the Imperial German High Seas Fleet, which aggravated tensions with the British Empire (the Naval Race and all that).
Colonel General Alfred von Schlieffen: Chief of the German General Staff before the war, architect of the Schlieffen Plan to attack France and defend against Russia, which included the violation of Belgium.
Bringing the British into the war was the real disaster. Had they stayed out, it is quite probable the France would have lost the Battle of the Marne and therefore the war. Germany would then have teamed up with Austria against Russia far earlier, and it is entirely conceivable that the war would have been over before the leaves fell, as the Kaiser had promised his troops.
A quick end to the war would have left the Central Powers dominant on the Continent, Russia in the throes of revolution (I imagine that defeat in the war would cause collapse), and France diplomatically isolated. Not a wonderful situation really, but nothing to lead to the Second World War.
Of course, the above is an exercise in what-if history, which generally gets dismissed as quackery...
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
- It is (theoretically) impossible to accelerate to the speed of light, because it would require an infinite amount of energy to do so, so the best we can do is approach the speed of light.
- The closer you get to the speed of light, the harder it is to accelerate, because of said energy requirement.
Wouldn't time distortion then simply occur because things simply could not happen as fast? Your aging, your blood flow, the chemicals flowing between your synapses (this altering preception), the rate at which something burns, the rate electricity moves at, etc. all happen slower than they would if the object where traveling at a lesser speed, because the whole process takes more energy, correct?If this is true, what happens when an object comes to a complete halt in space, the absolute zero of velocity, if you will. Could that make a black hole or something?
IADNAP.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?