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Time Travelers' Convention
usermilk writes "Some folks at MIT are holding a time-travelers' convention. The idea is to make it so famous and so widely-known that even thousands of years in the future, people will still know exactly when and where this time-traveler convention went down, and will all come travel to it at some point in their illustrious time-traveling careers. For those interested in attending, it's on May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC) in the East Campus Courtyard at MIT. 42:21:36.025N, 71:05:16.332W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)."
If no time travellers turn up on May 7th, will everyone stop promoting it after the date?
Personally I would have thought it'd make sense to give a bit more advanced notice than a week, if only to give people a chance to get the word around more beforehand (thus more likely to be archived).
Even if someone time travelled into the past for a few seconds, wouldn't they wind up in the icy cold of space while the planet speeds along on its normal course around the sun?
[o]_O
For a universe in which time travel is possible and the past can be altered by time travelers the only stable state is one in which time travel is never invented. Work it out.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think "Time is an illusion" is an easier way to say it. If you have a picture you and a friend are looking at, and he wonders if the right side can ever travel to the left side and modify things, you'd wonder what he was talking about. I would argue that time is like that: static if viewed from enough dimensions, available for observation (in theory) as one massive N dimensional statue.
If you were really a time traveler, why would you want to show up at a known place on a known date? The government would be waiting with an awesome arsenal of firepower, waiting to forcefully take your tools from you.
Or if you're the big-business conspiracy theory type, substitute "government" for "private mercenaries."
What's your damage, Heather?
Better yet... Time travel isn't possible because time doesn't exist.
We speak of "time" because it's convenient. It allows us to measure our lives and our activities against a single background. We keep track of "time" by observing the predictable patterns of celestial objects, as well as by setting mechanical devices to synchronize with those celestial movement cycles.
But what exactly is "time"? Time is a series of events. Nothing more. You can't undo things in real life. A broken vase can't be put back together just by reversing the event that caused it to break. Why? Because events are irreversible. You can cause a negating event for some things (like turning a light on or off), but you can never undo an event once it's done.
So, simply put, time doesn't exist. It's merely perception of a series of events. The fact that it's perception is made clear by the phrase "time flies when you're having fun." Your brain records images of events into your memory, sometimes with a record of celestial body locations or numeric representations thereof.
The more interested you are in what is happening around you, the more things your brain will record. But having limited processing resources, it will skip the "timestamp" on many of those events. The relative difference between each "timestamp" is much farther apart than is expected or normal, so "time flies."
When you're disinterested in events around you, the opposite is true. Your brain records some meaningless drivel and since it has lots of resources available, it slaps a "timestamp" on every one of those mental notes. Boring stuff seems to take much longer because of this.
Let's see the writers for the next Star Trek series (several years from now, I hear) put this tidbit of time-travel logic to work. It'll at least spare us some crappy re-hashes of Nazis in space (spaaaaaaaaaaaace?).
Think of it this way, the way something happened, is the way it happened.
Buddy, I've got a cat in a box that would or would not beg to disagree.
Problem is, you wouldn't even have to shoot Hitler or anything drastic like that. Just existing for any amount of time could make huge changes happen over time, which is somewhat explained by the Butterfly Effect.
Now, here's the tricky part: what if I decide not to go in the past and me going into the past is part of history? That would change history and oh I've gone crosseyed.
Since I'm not a big fan of predetermined fate, I must assume that no one may go in the past of their own dimension. The two seem to go hand-in-hand as far as I see.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"