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No Time Travel, Sorry
MOBE2001 writes "The bad news is that time does not change. Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt. Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical. As simple as that. In other words, no time travel to the past or the future, no motion in space-time, no wormholes and no hanky-panky with your great, great grandmother. There is only the changing present, aka the NOW. The good news is that distance is an illusion and we'll be able to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere."
How else could people post articles in The Mysterious Future?
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
That's weird because I could have sworn when I went to bed last night it was yesterday and now its today.
Nevertheless...this is fun. Looking at the equation from which all his arguments flow, it seems he is only demonstrating that it doesn't make sense to talk about one's velocity through time. I would agree. If I hop in my time machine and zip off to tomorrow, it doesn't make much sense for you to ask how long it took to get there. Or if you and I both have time machines and we decided to race to 1:00 pm tomorrow it would be always be a tie. But this is a far stretch from demonstrating that it is impossible. By this same logic we could define slope as the change in x over y or s = dx/dy. Does this definition make it impossible to move along the y axis because then the slope of our movement would be dy/dy? No. but it does say that if you move along the y axis your slope will be a constant.
Every once in a while when I come across something that I dreamed of years ago, and that something plays back exactly the same way as it was in my dream, I can't help but thinking maybe there is a scripted future in the... future.
So while science may prove that physical time travel is unpossible, we may still manage to "see/communicate" with the past/future through other means (like The Mysterious Future! plum).
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
(Seriously. It's like he read Zeno's Paradoxes and it blew his mind, man.)
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
There is no spooky action at a distance because there is no distance between particles. This is not the same as saying that the distance is zero; distance simply does not exist: it is abstract.
Ah ha! So that is how to Tolan's were able to communicate so quickly with the Knocks from Earth after thier world had been destroyed!
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
But in all my readings, I have learned one thing about physics. Nothing is "as simple as that".
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
This guy is a pseudo-scientific moonbat. Please don't waste your time with the not-so-FA.
Helium balloons want to be free.
... because we already know everything there is to know about the universe
As Ford Prefect put it, "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED
Do they use the Back to the Future method or the Bill and Teds method of time travel?
Also, did they attempt to spin the Earth backwards on its axis? I heard that works if there is a lady in distress.
I know my calculus.
It says U+Me=Us
Why does time need to have a continuous change in direction? Call backwards time t_b and let's say t_b = -t. Then d(t_b)/dt = -1. Backwards. I am not a physicist or mathematician, so please debunk this if need be.
The author does very little to back up his assertions. He just states them and assumes they are true. He also calls String Theory crackpottery.
"The good news is that distance is an illusion and we'll be able to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere."
That is *good* news? I can think of a few ways that could be abused....
I'm sorry, but if you're going to put up a web page in which you call all the foremost theoretical physicsts in the world frauds, then you'd better have more evidence than some undergraduate-level pseudo-calculus and verbal smoke screens.
The t-axis or time-axis velocity component is 1, a dimensionless number. Now there are relativists who will insist that it is perfectly acceptable to express velocity in time with a dimensionless number but the rest of us with our head on our shoulders, know that it is not true. We know that a dimensionless number such as 1 has absolutely no meaning in as far as expressing velocity.
Not true. Normalized velocities are perfectly reasonable things to express. Mach 1.25 is a perfectly well-defined speed that does not violate any laws of physics, and what do you know--it's a dimensionless number.
I'm sorry, but this page is really quite embarassing for the author's parents and any physics teacher's they've ever had. This sort of reminds me of people that read things like A Brief History of Time, a perfectly excellent book, and then try to tell me that the physics is really great and it would be so much better unencumbered by the mathematics.
I don't think real time travel, a-la Dr. Who is physically possible. But the "arguments" on this web page don't really make sense, much less prove all those physics wrong.
Craig Steffen
Ph.D. Physics, Indiana Unversity, 2001
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
Heh, I'll stick to journals like Science and Nature.
HA! Take this from a person who has been in a long distance relationship... The distance is a reality, the relationship is the illusion.
We really outa get these theoretical scientist types out of a lab for a beer.
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
That's it. I'm going to write a letter of complaint to Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd to express my disgust at being deceived for the past 20 years.
Please?
I am glad to hear it. It's about damn time.
A Deloreon, a flux capacitor, 1.21 gigawatts of power, and enough road to get up to 88 miles per hour.
Corporatism != Free Market
The bad news is that time does not change. In other words, no time travel to the past or the future, no motion in space-time, no wormholes and no hanky-panky with your great, great grandmother. There is only the changing present, aka the NOW. The good news is that distance is an illusion and we'll be able to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere."
Those are contradictory statements. If you can travel from anywhere to anywhere instantly, then you can also travel from any point to any point in time instantly. Why? Because it's just another dimension of space-time.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... when this turns out to be another one of those, "people used to believe the Earth was flat" scenarios.
Going forward is easy. The hard part is not dying.
This also means that the universe will last forever in steady state, so that mankind has a chance to be immortal. And if mankind can be immortal, you or I can be immortal.
But ya gotta make it to a future where medicine can keep you alive forever. And that aint the case now.
May I suggest cryonics?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Discounting the obvious fact that each and every one of us are traveling into the future at one second per second, time travel into the future is a proven fact-- if you define "time travel" the right way. That is, if you define "time travel" as "moving at some velocity significantly different from one second per second through time", rather than "instantly POOFing from one time to another", "time travel" forwards is as simple as traveling at high relativistic speeds.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
So, I can start up any old domain and post some random crap, and it'll get posted as the truth on Slashdot?
Of course "time travel" is possible. Of course in one's own frame, their time will always be the "present". But, other people have different frames, and if you move relative to them, your "present" won't match up with theirs. So, if you leave the Earth at a high speed, turn around, and come back, you'll be in the Earth's future, but it will still be your present.
Thanks for the bullshit links, though, I'll be sure not to read them.
From Mr. I'm-my-own-grandfather.
I'll keep dreaming, if you don't mind.
-1, Nutjob
www.code-fix.com
I'm from the year 3042. We have found that time travel is real, and would have discovered the time machine in 2048, but scientists were detered by this article.
Dan Church is Wicked Ill
Help Fight SPAM today!
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
Does this mean then that there is no waiting till tomorrow to see what karma your Slashdot post generates, then zipping back to yesterday to fix it, before returning to today to relax knowing what karma your Slashdot post will have generated by tomorrow?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The Vulcan Science Directorate has already determined that time travel is impossible, according to Subcommander T'Phol in the last Season One episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.
I've seen better proofs that 1 = 0.
Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt. Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical.
That would be a lovely argument if changes in position were measured in velocity.
You describe spacial travel as the dx, not the dx/dt. It stands to reason that you would describe time travel with the dt, not as some rate of travel we haven't come up with yet.
Obviously Slashdot has jumped the shark.
We're getting more and more pseudoscience garbage.
If i see incredible claims on slashdot now i just check the posts first to see if its worth reading.
Slashdot is fading into uselessness for me.
Digg is just so much more useful.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Expecting something resembling science, instead I was presented with these waay out of line attacks, following by loony unscientific rambling.
It's one thing to have a useless loony theory and peddle it off as science. But the writer's caustic personal attacks against some of our greatest physicists is certainly not appreciated.
Go into your closet, and bring enough food and water for 5 years.
Now wait...and eat sometimes.
5 years later, exit the closet.
You will find that time of the world has advanced from when last remembered by 5 years.
PS. don't forget to setup an auto-pay for your residential rent/payment. Otherwise your travel may be interrupted, and you will not be able to travel the full 5 years.
The people who wrote this article also wrote this... " I will argue that the messages to the seven churches of Asia are a metaphorical description of the organization and operation of the brain. I will further argue that the golden lampstand (Jewish menorah) symbolizes a seven-node sequence in brain memory." Hmm, it certainly is curious that the author of the article is not revealed. Probably some first year calculus student who was like "Holy guacamole! dt/dt = 1, Einstein and Hawking are crackpots! I must tell the world!"
this is because we live in a harmonic simultaneous 4-day time cube
it's really quite simple:
Religious Singularity is evil,
Academic Singularity is evil.
Singularity is damnable lie,
Educators altered your mind,
You cannot think opposite of
what you were taught to think.
You have a cyclop perspective
and taught android mentality =
lobotomized analytical ability.
Educated singularity stupid -
You can't think 4 corner days.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's just a screensaver meant to trick us or whatever, like the dinosaurs
I don't know about the rest of the Slashdot crowd, but I'll tend to side with Einstein here say "probably not"
Talking about time and how you can move through time doesn't make sense because time is part of spacetime and it is one entity. (Yes, that is exactly why it is spelled together as one word.) So one cannot travel in time if he is not traveling in space and vice-versa. I know, it is simple to say that but perhaps hard to understand, and that why there are people like this guy on the internet saying that "Einstein misunderstood hiw own theory."
A crackpot web page is now material for Slashdot?
I'd better get started...
In reality, there is no time, only events. Some of those events are observed to occur between other events, so one can say that x number of events occur in between y events. The human mind stores the occurance of
events and somehow due to the makeup of our consciousness it appears to be some continuum.
This guy is good, but he's not nearly as entertaining or mind-warping as the TimeCube guy. Four days in one!!!
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
...400 crackpots. Really, why is this a front page /. story?
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/
/Crackpots/ on this server.
...
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access
That's all there is to know about this article.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I've heard that it is also possible with a steam driven locomotive.
It's intuitive and I always basically thought this, but never had the physics credentials to really back it up - even to myself.
Anyway, heard some people with Physics PhDs talking about time travel on the Discovery Channel more than a few times (last time, sending messages back with a laser....), what's the credibility of this guy or article?
It sounds like this is an "awful link of the day" from Something Awful. Let's get this guy into the same room as time cube guy and see what happens!
I don't know, I think I'll believe Einstein, Hawking, etc about this one. Seeing as they came up with the whole thing.
Let's take this little tidbit, randomly selected:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't time travel toward the future as simple as accelerating relative to an observer? Eg. austronauts returning to earth have "travelled" to the future a small amount of time relative to those who stayed on earth - and the amount would grow as they approach the speed of light?
I don't claim to understand this stuff, but I thought that much was agreed upon... if this guy doesn't seem aware even of this, why should I care about even one word he says?
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
"Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt. Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical."
This is, pardon me for saying so, a terrible misunderstanding of what people mean when they talk abobut "time travel"
Of couse for a given person, with their own frame of refernce, time always seems to move forward at the same rate. This may be just the only way humans can percieve time, or it may be a fundemental fact of the universe.
But that's not what's interesting. The question is whether dx/dt equals dx'/dt', for some observer's frame of reference. In other words, while my apparent time always moves at the same rate, do YOU AS A SEPERATE OBSERVER see me as moving backwards or forwards in time?
dt/dt is nonsensical. dt/dt' is not.
However, time travel *is* possible in a theoretical sort of way. Time slows down as you approach the speed of light. This has been proven many times. If you took a ride on a rocket that traveled 3/4 the speed of light and whent in one direction for 6 months, then turned around and came back, you would have only aged a year but time on earth would have gone by MUCH faster. You have in a sense, traveled to the future. Good luck getting home though.....
Quack.
Quack quack.
Quaaaaaaack.
kulakovich
for non-us users - Aflac is an insurance company represented by a Duck with bad luck:Aflac. And has had many clever television commercials.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And helpfully enough, it's ilustrating how the writer is trying to crush Einstein's theories. Nice.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
"There is a foolproof way to spot a voodoo scientist. If a scientist claims to have a theory about a natural phenomenon but is unable to explain the theory in a simple language that the average layman can understand, one can be absolutely certain that he is as clueless about the nature of the phenomenon in question as anybody else. Voodoo science is not about understanding nature but about working at being so incomprehensible or so arcane to one's fellow human beings as to be regarded as brilliant. The weapon of choice of a voodoo scientist is mathematics. The truth is that a scientist's understanding of a phenomenon is inversely proportional to the number of math equations he uses to describe it. Neither Newton's gravity equation nor the equations of General Relativity explain why things fall. But what better way is there to hide one's cluelessness while presenting a façade of erudition than to use obscure equations to erect an impregnable mountain of obfuscation? Voodoo science is guru science."
There you have it. Does your proof involve advanced mathematics? Can you explain your theory in short sentences and small words? If not, it is a certaintly you're a arrogant, vain, brainless crackpot who is more concerned with looking smart than anything else.
This guy must have been picked on by nuclear physicists and molecular biologists when he was a kid, 'cuz he has a major bug up his ass when it comes to, well, the entire scientific community. Welcome to the ranks of Alex Chiu and Timecube, Mr. Savian.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Nice commentary, but no solid proofs. Nothing to see here, please move along.
How is it informative reading to present a list of scientists you disagree with and then say each one is an idiot? There was no actual information conveyed by that article that I'm aware of.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
it just says you can't change it.
If you went back in time, all that would mean is that you were their when then was a now.
But your saying, if there is only a now, how can there have been a future to come back from?
In response I can only say "Who the hell do you think I am, F'n Sir Stephen Hawking?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How the hell do you call this "news"? We bitch about the media making stupid arguments; this is just drivel! He calls the people who developed his supporting theories crackpots. CmdrTaco, we demand better /. posts than this. Did you even READ the article? A site which calls itself "rebelscience.org" raises an immediate red flag with me. It doesn't help that the author labeled the directory his article is in as "Crackpots". I'd expect to read about anal probes and alien abductions on such a website. This website was just ridiculous. At least the Uncyclopedia http://uncyclopedia.org/> has humor. This is just psuedo-science at the masque. I really hate this shit, not for the content itself (I know the guy is full of himself), but for the people who'll believe it and then say "Einstein and Hawking are crackpots!" without knowing what the fuck they're talking about. Maybe the "dept." at the top of the posting should read "from the art-bell-was-right dept."
This guy is clearly an Evil Ass Educator aiming to suppress Time Cube,
and only dumb ass students condone such evil. Cubeless institutions are spreaders of evil, and students lack mentality to challenge it.
and:
and:
And here you go, giving his webpage a link completely uncritically. Don't editors have some sort of editorial function?
I think it's funny how people here justly criticize the USPO for not having the required expertise in scientific fields to properly evaluate patent applications for functionality and novelty. If you lack the scientific knowledge to properly evaluate the claims of an obvious nutter like Sevain, *pass that task to someone who does*.
I got it! Time's not a continuum, but a collection of random events!
(some time later...)
I got it! Time's not a continuum, but a collection of random events!
.. is to condemn the entire scientific and engineering establishment as being full of frauds, liars, and crooks because they don't embrace the crackpot's pet theories.
Savain is your typical "since I don't understand it, it must be wrong" crank. Ask them specific questions that require real analysis (and by "real" I mean the sort of math skills and physics knowledge that most bright high school graduates possess) and you quickly realize they're ignorant at best and mentally ill at worst.
So just how did this submission make it past the editors?
...this guy is such an arrogant, self-aggrandizing asshole that I don't actually care if he's right. By virtue of the fact that he's such a prick, his theory can't possibly be correct.
I mean, really, it's physics via Bill O'Reilly. Please.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
If time travel is possible, then why aren't we being visited by people from the future - (i.e. after a time travel device is invented)? And don't say "maybe we HAVE BEEN!" because if millions of people in he future have the ability, then they will iikely use it like we use automobiles. It would be hard to hide thousands, or millions, of time travel incidents.
"Joke" foot on article: check.t mp ace
Suspicious URLs:
http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.h
http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/nasty.htm#S
Check.
Comments taking the article 100% seriously: check.
This must be Slashdot.
The simple fact is we are like infants just learning to walk in this big wide universe of ours and we are a long way from being able to say how everything out there works much less whether or not it is possible.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The closest I ever got to adknowledgement of this in sci-fi was actually in a book on wizards, High Wizardry by Diane Duane IIRC, where the magician attempting a teleport had to create a program to map all of the velocities so that she could teleport to the right planet surface.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
When I was a kid, I asked a Ouiji board 'Will people ever be able to time travel?' The answer was, of course, 'No'. Nothing could be simpler :P.
Louis Savain has been trolling the Usenet sci.physics.* groups for almost a decade now. He personally inspired at least one entry in the infamous Crackpot Index (entry 17). He's known particularly for his profane personal attacks on scientists, which many other crackpots manage to abstain from. You can check out his record on Google Groups, under his own name and others such as "Traveler".
A physical explanation that time travel does not exist is the conservation of mass and energy. Energy and mass are constant through out the universe is a fundamental law of physics. Were time travel to occur to the past, matter would essentially added be to the universe at that point in the past. Moreover the matter you add to that universe is matter that was already present at that time as all matter today has been here for billions of years. That would create a paradox. As for future time travel, we are essentially doing it anway. Moreover, time progresses relative to speed of your reference frame. If travel in space at speeds greater that of earth, time will be perceived to more slowly than those who live on earth. Essentially, you travel into the future but the problem you can't go back in time. In the end, it makes for great movie plots.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
The relativistic 4-velocity is not (1, dx/dt, dy/dt, dz/dt) as claimed by the web page author, but it is instead (dt/dgamma, dx/dgamma, dy/dgamma, dz/dgamma), where gamma is definted as the Lorentz invariant interval: gamma^2 = 1/(1 - v.v/c^2). This page gets attention because he bitch-slaps big names, but his basic math claim gets him an F in any undergrad special relativity class.
doug
TheStandUpPhysicist.com
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
Why is this even on slashdot, other than to annoy people?
This will be after I travel back in time...
I've only done this once before....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This sort of reminds me of people that read things like A Brief History of Time, a perfectly excellent book, and then try to tell me that the physics is really great and it would be so much better unencumbered by the mathematics.
That is funny, becuase I read 'A Brief History of Time' and thought it would have been better if it had been encumbered with (a lot) more math....
As for time travel (backward) being possible, your credentials in physics far outweigh mine, but I will say this: I think humans need to know a vastly greater ammount of math and physics before we can even make a valid conclusion either way. The forward case is probably just an engineering problem at this point...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I mean... it's less offensive than a few 'stories' from the past week, and yet, still... no. It's a little close on a few things, and we know ( really ) little enough that I'm not sure the post or the article is funny. It certainly doesn't *intend* to be funny, and if you're looking for crackpot quasi-scientific rants on the 'net, your surely can find more amusing ones. I mean... do we know space to be really, really empty ? Errr... we know space to have very little in it... we can't create or measure a space that's really, really empty except to say it'll be empty most of the time, and have a particle in it some of the time ( like space between particles... but you could still argue that space is there due to the force of particles, no? )... though this isn't my field, meh, I'm not sure... and regardless of crackpottedness... it's just not funny.
I'd much rather see stories about iPod rumors, Lemmings online, and Intel Macs booting from USB drives, all of which are top-rated stories on um, some other news website today. Nice try, Taco, but it's kinda not such a great story, don't you think ?
9th February, 2005.
I was gonna point out the obvious flaws in the article, but everyone took all the good points.
But did anyone else notice that the word "Crackpots" is in the URLs?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It must be fun to be him.
Lucky for him he is dillusional or some pasionate physicists would reach out and touch him in no time.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Surely the v = dt/dt equation proves nothing!
They're missing out the fact that the two dt's don't have refer to the same variable.
Consider time as a dimension, and you're travelling at a certain speed within that time. We all are currently moving at 1 second per second, a dimensionless ratio number representing time per time.
If you could travel faster than normal time, the world would appear to move faster or slower around you. You can represent the number of seconds you can travel in one observed second as n, dividing this by the number of observed seconds, t, you get v, a time-per-time value.
In this case, velocity in time = velocity in accel-or-decel time / velocity in real time: v = dn / dt. This is a dimensionless number as a ratio between the time you travel through against and the time observed by you.
It's a bit of a lame example, but remember the The Time Machine movie? The trip to the future was observed over a few minutes, but straddled over 1000s of years. The v-in-time value for this would be huge! (5 minutes / 1000s of years = big)
('course I know jack about physics, but the above should make some kind of sense.)
To say time is non-constant, requires explaination. Time is simply the phenomenon that things change and thus time as a quantity is a measure of change. Every "time" keeping device is measuring the change in some object, whether it's quartz, gears, or atomic.
When we say time passes slower in a moving object than in a stationary one (as Einstein did), what we're really saying is that the atomic clock changes more rapidly on while stationary than while moving (to be more precise, if at any point we measure the state of the moving object vs the state of the stationary object, the moving object will have been in a state previously visited by the stationary object). To say time varies universally from moment to moment is completely nonsensical, since by definition, this is impossible to measure. The only way to talk about time (as a quantity) is to refer to two different objects which change with respect to time that exist at the same time.
Basically, time exists, but is not quantifiable without reference to objects within its scope.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
OK, let's say that you and I race to 1:00pm tomorrow. You decide to stay right where you are and wait for 1pm to arrive. I, however, jump in my ship for a trip around the solar system at relativistic speeds and meet you there. When 1pm comes around we are both there, but you've aged like 24 hours while I've only aged a couple of minutes. I would say I have won because it took me less time to get there.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Okay his theory might be right (we don't know obviously), but the way he gets there is WRONG. He's taking pure math and assuming it directly relates to reality, and that everything works along these simple formulae.
I thought the theory of relativity already proved that objects moving closer to the speed of light age less compared to others outside their frame of reference. So if we use warp engines to travel instantly to Pluto and back, about 40 years will have passed on Earth. Isn't this pretty much time travel? (albeit one-directional)
Pretty sure I remember an experiment where they took an atomic clock on a plane and tested it against one on Earth, finding a few hundreths of a second difference after the trip.
but then again, aren't we all?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Everyone agrees that practical time travel is at the very least exceptionally unlikely. But whether our model of the universe excludes the posibility of time travel is another matter entirely.
Note that even if our model of the universe allows for time travel it does not mean that time travel is possible. Not least because we know that our model of the universe cannot possibly be completely right. Quantum physics provides an excelent model of the universe at a large scale, relativity provides a good model at the cosmological scale. The problem is that the two models are incompatible. At leas one of our models must be wrong. Most likely they are both approximations.
The other issue that the writer does not seem to grasp is that the ability for matter to travel through time and the ability of information to travel through time are very different issues. For meaningful time travel it has to be possible for information to move backwards in time and not just matter. Otherwise what would come out the other end would be a random soup of quantum particles, not the time traveller. This is the problem with black hole time travel, the most that can come out the other side is a random soup.
The 'proof' provided by the author only demonstrates that he does not have the slightest understanding of the subject he is pontificating on. dt/dt = 0??? No, all that shows is that the dimensions of the two quantities are the same. Besides x/x = 1 in most algebras.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
It is called Occam's Razor
I did do the nasty in the pasty
Verily!
The author of this article fails to differentiate between spacetime, and time. This point alone shows the author's minimal understanding of GR and SR. That being said, the two one line proofs are ridiculous. Both say the same thing, time is impossible because it is self-referential. Unfortunately the concept of simultaneity (which is an aspect of spacetime) is dependent not just on time, but also on position and frame of reference. So the concept of a time between events is not self-referential, it is depnedent upon both position and frame. Perhaps if the author takes the time to understand SR and GR, he might come to understand what spacetime truly means. Just like the concept of electric and magnetic fields being the same entity, space and time are also inexorably intertwined.
Well i've read the article. The main point is the equation
:-).
;-).
v = dx/dt (velocity). But why does he transform it into v=dt/dt to explain that time travel is impossible?
I a complete idiot in physic but time is dt=dx/v . To get a space travel dt should be "simply" negative? Why is it "impossible" to get a negative value? because there aren't such things as a "negative" distance or a negative velocity?
I'm sure there is something i simply don't understand. (completly illiterate in physic) but I want to understand
Is there any physicians out there to explain all the fuss about it?
Let's go back to my little computer world
Who said there was only one dimension of time? If there can be 11 space-like dimensions why not multiple time-like dimensions?
two points:
one: this is just a simple objection but it seems that the author is putting too much emphasis on notation and how well we are able to apply a given mathematical model.
two: to even begin to discuss time travel a strict definition of what time travel is or means must be set out. the author is correct that, according to his definition, time travel is a meaningless notion. however, all his argument shows is that his definition of time travel is not suitable to to describe the notion we have in mind. time is much more complicated than he makes it out to be (ie just like there is no absolute frame of reference when it comes to space, so it is with time. though really the distinction is only made for clarity of exposition since what we really have is that there is no absolute frame of reference for space-time). one way to define time travel, then, would be to say that there is change in something we can call "personal time" with respect to "everything else" (though this is also a bit of a simplification). at this point his one line proof breaks down since we are talking about change in one parameter with respect to another, which is perfectly acceptable. moreover, this definition captures more precisely what we mean when we say "time travel" (and also will allow us to make sense of racing to some other time [cf a previous response]).
one final point, and this is just a pet peeve: we are not all time travelers since we move through time at 1 second per second since there is no change in our personal time with relation to external time. start with definitions!
He seems to have acquired a great deal of that through which he cannot travel.
bort.
Free, Anonymous surfing: Pagewash.com.
Slashdot, I have traveled back in time seven days to warn you that you will be duping this post. Please make sure this does not happen. Oh, and the post after the dupe is a counter post, which says time travel is possible, and will be used to let you know of your dupe. Take care.
saboola
If you're trying to debate this scientifically, then the joke's on you. OOTH, if you attempt to reconcile this `theory` with the TimeCube or Pataphysics, carry on.
Einstein's theory of general relativity tells us that to you he will have aged 24 hours, but to him you will have aged 24 hours.
I havent RTFA but I guess I see where the argument is coming from, after all, everything travels at the speed of light. If you are completely stationary in space then you are moving through "time" at the speed of light. If you are moving through space at, say, 50 miles per hour, then you are moving through space at 50mph and through time at C minus 50mph. Photons, which travel at C, are not moving through "time" at all, hence they are the same age now as they were when the universe begun. This is why if you travel really fast, you age less than other people (from your point of view).
Since time itself is based upon the speed of light (maybe I'm assuming this, I think it's correct though), then how can anything travel through time. Like the summary\comments say, there is only a changing present.
...Or something, IANAP.
I'm not a physicist, just your average CS student but everytime I think about Time Travel, I think about that Van Damme movie, Timecop I think? You know the one, he time travels and can't touch himself because it'll destroy him. Well, how far off is that?
The Law of Conservation of Energy states:
"The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can change its form."
So, how I see it is that every moment in Time has a set amount of energy. (Could be wrong >.>) If I moved forward or backwards in time, I would effectively be destroying energy at one moment and creating it somewhere else. Seems to break a fundamental law of physics to me...
-SaNo
As a PhD in physics (MIT), ScB in Math-physics (Brown) I am getting pretty tired of these incredibly lame pseudo-science pieces showing up in Slashdot as if they were of any significance. While it is undeniably true that the ultimate nature of space/time (assuming there is some base level understanding and not an infinite regression of more complex theories) is not at hand, some goofy handwaving and English arguments are not going to illuminate things in any significant way. Real physics at this level is understandable by a tiny fraction of real physicists (not me!) doing things like loop quantum gravity, etc. There's no cheap shortcut to putting together a theory that really manages to answer everything about the forces we know, including gravity, testing it somehow with the low-energy phenomena we have access to along with cosmological data, and showing it is correct. THEN you can start trying to interpret the mathematics of that theory in a human-comprehensible way. Good luck (especially since we can't even agree on what to make of quantum mechanics which we all know to be right two umpty-dump decimal places and have for many decades now).
Even it it is my personal belief that there exists no possibility to create a region in space with a deviation of the local metric big enough from a Minkoski tensor to allow a closed curve in time, i do not see a topological reason against that. Some argumenations of the author suggest that he has no idea what exactly he is talking about (why else his "there is no velocity in time" argument, which proves nothin, besides the author having understand a derivative); I admit that one of the major problems would be that "classically spoken" your trajectories lead in a bend region of the universe in circles (circles is *circles in space-time*), wherefore the resulting differential equations would not be "initial value problems", but at the same time be subjected to very strange boundary conditions; last but not least one could argue what happens at the "boundary" of such a region; but vortices have been known for a long time and this boundary is similar to the event horizon of a black hole. (May a qualified physicist speak and correct me..... GR is not really a topic I know very well).
m = s / x
m is the mach number
s is the speed of whatever through the air
x is the speed of sound under those conditions.
s has dimensions of speed (obviously) which are distance over time
x also has the dimensions of speed.
s divided by x, where s and x are the same dimensionality (and units, usually) make m (mach number) a dimensionless number.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
It took less time as you observe it. To use one of the standard ways of explaining relativity: there are two astronauts. One stays on Earth to train, while the other goes on a mission, zipping around the solar system near the speed of light. When he returns, he aged 1 month, while the astronaut on Earth aged 1 year. What gives? Well, the same amount of time "happened." Both spent one year on their individual tasks. The one that went on the space missions feels like one month passed, but that's just because of how he observed time. Time is constant. Time did not pass at different speeds.
Another way of thinking about it is driving along a highway, watching a mountain, forest, clouds, or some other large object at a distance. Nearby objects appear to move faster relative to your car, while the farther away objects appear to move slower. The road sign and the mountain are both standing still, but appear to move at different speeds relative to your car. This is similar to time. You may observe different events at different speeds, or two astronauts may observe the same event at a different speed, but time itself is constant.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
(paraphrasing) "Someday I'm gonna go back in time and kick this guy's ass."
It's one thing if these two sites post the same crackpot stories on the same day, but for god's sake, do some cross-referencing or something when they are such patently ridiculous articles and don't waste our time or space on the front page (spacetime even!).
... safety not guaranteed.
We can take the differences between this guy and the time cube guy as one vector, and the differences between this guy and Archimedes Plutonium as another.
Now that we have two basis vectors, we can define a two-dimensional phase space for crackpottery instead of relying on scalars.
Now that we can apply some basic vector and tensor operations to the field of psychoceramics, think of the new discoveries to be made!
John Titor, the time traveler from 2036 came to visit us in our year 2000 and departed in March 2001. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor
He told us many things about our future, many of which have already started to come true.
U rong, he rite. Ugg smash bad math.
Mach (X/S) * (S km/s) = (X km/s)
S = speed sound
X = speed ugg
Ugg no listen reply. Ugg finger stuck ear.
"Oh I see. A lesson in morals from Mr. "I did it with my own Grandmother". - Prof. H. T. Farnsworth
> Is this story supposed to be a joke?
/ \
,-,
* \ <-- Joke.
0
-|- <-- You.
/ \
Any questions?
"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."
Douglas Adams
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
"Mach" IS the dimension, meaning "speed of sound" or 340.29 m / s.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I just came back from the future and I saw that this post was duped 4 times!!
So much for that crackpot theory...
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Let's talk about that last statement again when we manage to freeze a man and unfreeze him alive a few decades or centuries later.
You just got troll'd!
I couldn't agree more.
There's a nice story on "This American Life" about a guy with a high school education who, in the process of trying to invent something, tries to teach himself Theoretical Physics and "realises" in the course of his autodidacticiousness that all of modern Physics is wrong. He sends letters to Famous Physicists and is annoyed that they Won't Pay Attention to him. It turns out, just for starters, he doesn't understand the difference between energy and momentum. Thus his "one line proof" of the wrongness of Physics is based on not understanding the difference between two fundamental concepts.
This chap has put together an extensive website based on applying what appears to be his rather paltry and simplistic understanding of Physics and a conflation of the term "time travel" as used casually by, say, Stephen Hawking, with "velocity" as more-or-less defined by, say, Newton. (Note that he also claims "Black Holes" are voodoo science.)
If you understand time travel as meaning "things occuring in apparently the wrong order", this is something that is an intrinsic feature of Quantum Mechanics and has been observed many times experimentally (a particle may appear "before" the phenomenon which brings it into being; or to put it more precisely, may interact before the interaction which brought it into being). Does this require motion described in terms of "dt/dt"? The question is meaningless, because the elapsed time is an observation and particles do not observe time passing except in the form of interacting with other particles.
Individuality is great, as long as we all do it together and in the same way!
Watch this space for my new website showing that all scientists and their science to the present is wrong and that I alone, due to my superior intelligence and my avoidence of indoctrination by not getting a university degree, have discovered THE TRUTH! I should have no trouble getting my story posted to Slashdot, making me rich and famous, unless I am burned at the stake by the scientific establishment trying to keep THE TRUTH hidden from Slashdotters.
You have to use Christoffel symbols. Whip out your favorite copy of differential equations in curved coordinate systems, or read up on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curved_spacetime
Synchronize two atomic clocks
Fly one around the world
Leave the other one where it is
Stop them at the same time
The one that travelled will be a bit further back in spacetime relative to the stationary one. What accounts for that difference? It's certainly not Einstein's Special Absolutivity. The concept of absolute is dependant on a point of reference. Since no benchmarks are available, I'll stick with relativity.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Has relativity been discounted somehow? Simply approach the speed of light and then return. You'll have traveled into the future as far as you're concerned.
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dx/dx is perfectly legit and not necessarily 1 if for example one of the x's refers to a train and the other one refers to a car whose speeds I'm comparing for whatever reason.
Of course what this means in a physical sense is not so clear.
That second link: http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/nasty.htm#Sp ace
reminds me of Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card.
Yeah, that's right, I read all 4 of the Ender books all the way through, pbbbt
Funny sigs make your Karma go down.
...with his criticism of Moravec. Simply because I have concrete proof that uploading yourself to a computer will work. I will put forth the concept of virtualization as the prime proof.
;P
1. You have a real physical server with an OS and a set of application based services on it.
2. You copy the entire OS and those application based services to a virtual drive on a virtual server utilizing technology like VMWare or Xen.
3. You take down the physical server and bring up the virtual one to replace it. It "just works" identically to the physical server.
So how is that any different from writing software to emulate a blank human brain in a virtual space and uploading every memory and experience that you contain into it? For all intents and purposes, you would have an identical copy of yourself living in your computer in some kind of virtual space. Considering that the virtual space might seem startling to your copy if it's not exactly like the space you inhabit in reality, I expect your copy would be very confused and worried. So the big question... is it conscious and is it alive? Anyway, I just thought I'd put this out here to clarify any possible confusion on the subject.
Oh. I see. It was a joke. Hmmm... I don't get it.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Well, I've got an N-machine in my garage that I could fire up right now to prove you wrong. Only, I won't because the FBI will come and take it but rest assured that, with the limitless energy of my paradoxically, perpetually turned-OFF N-machine, I could travel in any dimension I choose.
since I always said time was a measurement of astral position (sun, moon, etc). How could we travel in an invention of the human mind? There are cycles that can me measured, evolution as said in the article... But time isn't a dimension... only one of the human mind. As said in the article.
in my travels over the internet I have stumbled over more than one site suggesting that hanky panky with one's great-great grandmother is indeed quite possible.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
dx/dgamma? So if we travel at constant velocity, gamma remains constant. How can we differentiate the varying x with respect to constant gamma? One of us has no clue what you are talking about and my money is on it being you.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
...then decelerate. Relativity will produce time travel to the future for you. Saying that future time travel isn't provided by relativity is non-sensical.
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WILL SAFETY BE GUARANTEED?
I'm from the future!
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Standard general relativity permits a kind of time travel - but only if the universe started out with the right initial conditions. Too bad there's no evidence that it did.
There are lots of possible solutions to the equations that describe spacetime; some are flat, infinite, and empty; some have the topology assumed by standard cosmological models - each spacelike slice is a 3-sphere. But there are other solutions in which wormholes and other weird features do exist. There are some in which there are "closed time-like paths." This means there is a closed path that an observer could follow, which returns to the same *event* they started from. You could get onto such a path, travel for a long time, and get off the path near the place and time you left. Please arrive at a slightly different place to avoid hitting yourself - unless you are a cyclic creature that keeps repeating the same life. Maybe believers in karma have a name for such a thing.
No contradictions appear, and you can't change your own past.
There isn't a way to create such things. In standard general relativity, the topology of spacetime just is the way we find it.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Well, that's a relief. It's nice to know that physical reality can't escape the bounds our mathematical formalisms set for it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You're wrong. For the guy who travelled at the speed close to C time did slow down. Let's say that at the onset of the journey both planted a bonsai tree that grows at 1 inch per month. Upon the reunion, the earthbound astronaut's plant would be 12 inches tall while the traveller's plant would be only 1 inch high.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
A line about great-great-great grandchildren visiting you FTA got me thinking. Most talk of paradoxes is theoretical bullshit involving going to the past, with the speaker/thinker including themselves as the protagonist.
Flip this around. If a distant relative came back to visit you (and you had some sort of verification such as DNA), would you have the balls to cut your dick off just to see if they disappeared right there in front of you?
I think it was in an MC Hawking song..
You mean it took you less time to get then.
You spelled "physicists" wrong! All that edubacation fer nothin'!
Matt
Associates of Arts - St. Charles County Community College.
If my memory is correct it went something like this...
a = b
a^2 = b^2
a^2 - a^2 = 0
a^2 - b^2 = 0
(a+b)(a-b)= 0
(a+b) = 0
a = 0
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
They're obviously caused by editors from the future trolling in the past.
1000 years ago, flying was impossible.
500 years ago, going around the world was impossible.
100 years ago, going to space was impossible.
50 years ago, the home PC was impossible.
10 years ago, residential rocketry was impossible.
1 year ago... we've not made too much progress since 2005.
1 year from now, we still won't do too much.
10 years from now? 50? 100? 500? 1000 years from now?
Science? Psh. I scoff.
$signature_views++;
Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt. Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical.
but, dt/dx is ok.. who says space has to be constant when we time travel?
never_late_for_work = 1 never_late_for_date = 1 never_late_for_anything = 1 never_early_for_work = 1 never_early_for_date = 1 never_early_for_anything = 1 else Print "Time does not exist." end if
"The good news is that distance is an illusion and we'll be able to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere."
Been there, done that...
The twin paradox in a nutshell
2 Twins exist.
One twin hops in his space ship and travels near the speed of light... (this is currently impossible as you would most certainly die(note the parent))
One twin stays on earth.
For the one thats travelling fast, time to him looks like normal time, his watch clicks every second, etc...
BUT, when he looks back at earth, everything is going real SLOW.
The second twin, who's sitting on earth minding his busines, sees time go by normal, his watch ALSO clicks with every second...
BUT, when he looks at the other in the space ship, he's moving real fast...
When the other returns to earth, his watch is ahead of the one who stayed on earth, and is officially older than the other, be it by a few seconds or whatever.
I can't remember what the eqaution for this is, I wrote a research paper on the twin paradox a while back where I explained all this in detail and showed proof through several examples and calculations.
The point is... time isn't necesarily the same at each speed, and to assume the eqaution Dx/Dy is irrefutable truth then you are assuming that time is always the same... Read more about it on http://www.howstuffworks.com/ theres a little there on the twin paradox.
"What happend to just paying for a product without being constantly nibbled to death by Credit Card Ducks?"
Multitasking PsychologyBot Mark IV... (OS Ver 6.92)...
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READY.
RUN
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Author of website was excommunicated from the Church of the Subgenius for getting his bulldada all over Bob Dobbs.
It was called the time tunnel. Too bad it did not work out. In the first episode Dr. Tony Newman had a chance to prevent the Titanic from sinking. If that worked out we would have been saved of the 197 minuets of the drivel of Rose crying about Jack ...to bad.
Of course, one way time travel to the future is possible - take your pick:
1. Approach the speed of light relative to an 'at rest' frame of reference.
2. Freeze yourself in a kind of stasis (most likely cryogenic).
AC
You know, the one in the bunny suit. Oh wait, you guys can't see him.
It must be from these arguments that the so-called "Red Shift" observed by astronomers is a pigment of their imagination.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
All this is based on our current understanding physics and as any intelligent person knows that all our understanding physics doesn't amount to a hill of beans. The laws of physics as we know them is not all there is to know on the subject. So the article is right, with our current understanding we can not travel in time. However in the future we will have more understanding and we might find that we can travel in time. So what is the point of talking about something that doesn't matter? Oh wait I forgot I was on /. that's about all anyone talks about.
WTF?
There is still no physics explanation to why we even view the past as "past" other than our memory, which is a state function. If the article is correct, then time travel (as defined by consciousness of a future state) is a necessity, as particles that have a trajectory "back" in time can affect the world, and thus the mind. Heck, when you allow particles to travel in reverse, as modern physics does, can you really say that there is a strictly defined past in terms of causality?
Hah, I'll just arrive at 12:59, if you're there already, I'll just go back further.
What a newbie.
If time travel is not possible, how does science explain John Titor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor)? On the other hand, time travel could not be possible, because then it would be patented already (as the US patent No.1 in fact, as in the popular Cheapass boardgame).
An interesting question came to my mind: Would time traveling make us able to prevent Slashdot editors from posting dupes, or are the dupes actually a consequence of time traveling of some sort?
If this is meant to be a joke then the author falls woefully short. If it's not meant as a joke then the rest of his site gives solid proof that he is a nut job. Let's start with the blatant attempts to get people to "donate" to him and his site, not all that unusual but it's a good starting point. Next clue is found in part of the URL that leads to the story"crackpots" yeah I think that one is self explanatory. I realize the author was referring to "crackpots" such as Stephen Hawkings and Albert Einstein but he should look in the mirror before tossing that insult out. Then there is the "article" on how the bible talks about Artificial Intelligence. The project that is going to revolutionize the software industry. Problem with that project is that like so many others it comes off as being "to advanced" for anyone but this person to really understand, that is what is normally referred to as Delusions of Grandeur. The whole site and all his ramblings lead me to one conclusion, he is either a woefully bad comedian, a frustrated grifter who lacks sufficient talent to con people face to face, or a a nut job or perhaps a little from all three cloums. If he is indeed serious he belongs in the camp with the people who believe that "intelligent design" is a legitimate branch of science and should be what is taught in school. If it's a joke then I hope he's got a day job.
In the end this is another in an increasing number of "articles" that are nothing more than lame filler here on slashdot. Next thing you know we'll be reading reprinted articles from the National Enquirer and having the slashdot moderators attempt to pass them off as legitimate content. It's sad because the person who runs the site this article was taken from can at least be passed off as a lunatic. However I expect the moderators here to have more intelligence and common sense than the aforementioned loony.
What's that, slashdot karma points??? HA! I got your karma points right here!!
Are my ears the only ones out there to be delighted by these sweet words of obvious common sence? Wake me up, wake me up, it's too good to be real. All I need to hear now is that photons do have a mass and that they are deviated by heavy objects (or even any objects) because they are influenced by gravity like any other object. Oh yeah!! OH YEAH!!!
You just got troll'd!
Somewhere a quantum physicist has hung himself with a piece of string theory.
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
Okay, the author of this article is an idiot. He has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. The worst, though, is when he describes Godel's incompleteness theorem as "the most non-scientific, chicken-feather-voodoo nonsense ever penned by a member of the human species."
WTF? Unlike relativity and other scientific theories, which are developed to be better and better approximations to observable and measurable data, Godel's theorem is pure math. It arises from logic and nothing else (definitions can be stated in terms of logic, and axioms can be stated as conditionals). One can verify that his theorem holds. If he holds Godel's theorem to be false, then he must hold that one of the premises it's based on is false, and that if you trace the structure of proofs of assumptions to proofs of appumptions, etc. you'll eventually find the axioms of the propositional calculus, which I really don't think he disagrees with. These axioms are thing like "For all truth values X, NOT NOT X = X."
How silly. dx/dt expresses the change in x over a change in time period. This can be seen as the relative measure of dx with respect to dt, for purposes of measuring discrete changes in x over time. Fine. dt/dt is a measure of change in time over change in time, which is a normal when t is the same for both. This makes perfect sense. Any variable delta relative to itself is the unity/normal, it MUST be. Nobody taught this guy basic math. It says nothing about the nature of dt or whether a time dimension exists.
But it says a LOT about the Slashdot editors.
If "time travel" just means the usual physics definition of "tracing a trajectory backward" then of course you can regard it as happening all the time. Positrons (anti-electrons) can easily be regarded as electrons traveling "backwards" in time, so that a positron-electron annihilation event is nothing more than an electron traveling "forward" in time, then reversing itself and traveling "backward" in time. Obviously we (traveling steadily forward in time) see two particles with opposite properties converge and disappear. Whoopee.
However, I think what most people mean by "time travel" is something different, a causality loop. That is, they mean you do something (which they call "time travel") and this something lets you become your own grandpa, or influence the outcome of the Civil War, and so forth. Since, of course, those things influence the you that's influencing them (otherwise the story is not interesting), this makes a nice little loop of cause and effect: you influence x which influences you who influences x, and around and around.
Whether or not the physics of the universe allows such a thing, I can't see any obvious reason why it would cause big problems -- or even be interesting. Certainly it could not manifest itself the way it's shown in the movies, in which you see the loop first one way (Marty McFly's parents marry and produce him), and then another way (Marty's parents fail to marry, because McFly travels back in time and interferes with their meeting). That's logically impossible. If the loop exists at all, it must have one unchanging form.
That is, if Marty McFly does go "back in time" he obviously can't (or rather doesn't) prevent his parents from marrying and having him, because they actually did. Whatever he does "back in time" is already part of history. His "changes" already exist, and have always existed. Indeed, they can't even logically be regarded as "changes" because nothing really changed. Although...it's possible McFly, with his imperfect knowledge of the past, could have assumed something about the past was different than it actually was (e.g. he thought his parents met at the dance, instead of afterward, when some strangely-dressed clown introduced them). Therefore, when he "changes" history (by interfering with his parents meeting during the dance, and then "fixing" things up by introducing them afterward), he might be under the illusion that he is really "changing" history instead of simply causing it to happen as it actually did.
I suppose we could now argue about whether Marty's sense of free will (as well as our own) is therefore just a big fat self-delusion, but, ugh, not before a pint or two.
I fully agree with that article, it was my firm belief even before I read it. The other possibility insead of non-dimensional time is no time at all and the world is really just a still picture and we only believe the past really happened. That'd work pretty well though it'd require intelligent design to really make sense (since there'd no longer be causality there'd be no reason for the world to be as it is) and I think it belongs into philosophy (the kind of questions where the philosopher isn't even sure of his own existence) rather than physics.
Another point would be, if there was indeed a dimension that could be called time, what would happen if you were to move through it? If you moved e.g. into the year 2000? What you'd see could be anything but it sure as hell wouldn't be our universe in the year 2000 because our universe is already in the year 2006. When you pick up a cup and move it somewhere else you won't find the cup at its old location anymore. So we'd have to either assume that the universe creates copies of itself as it moves through time and horribly rapes the conservation of mass (and changing the past wouldn't bother the present as that past would only be an afterimage that doesn't influence the present anymore) or we have to assume that the universe already has copies of itself throughout the entire time dimension that include the past, present and future. So the universe is a graph, completely defined from beginning to end. Of course that'd mean the universe is absolutely static if we just increase the scope of what we call universe by a dimension. So it's just a timeless universe with an additional dimension and perhaps infinite mass.
So it comes down to the philosophical question: Do you think time exists?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Surely he is joking? The unit of velocity is meters/second not seconds/second.
Gives you real confidence in the 2008 election, doesn't it?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Stupid stupid stupid. This is not science, nor is what-his-name a scientist. He is a crackpot. The scientists he claims are crack-pots are some of the most important and brilliant minds in History. I can personally dispell %75 of his claims, the other %25 percent would probably just require some reading... and I'm not even done with my undergrad yet. No more articles from rebelscience.com in the science news section. It is not science.
The following was a conversation between my (then) 5 yr old and my wife:
daughter: "mom, is today tomorrow?"
mom: "no, but it was yesterday"
Zen, relativity, and realism from a simplified point of view.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Nope, you can't physically travel in time. :) ;p
But you can visually do it. Just need to travel faster than and in the same direction of the light of the object, and you'll see older light that came from that object...
Just try not to fly against the light, you might be bumping it away
or something like that... lol
Kaetemi
.....check out his other piece on how John the baptist was coding the secrets of A.I. in to the Bible in 95 A.D.! If he was for real he would be king of crackpottery!! Dobo
I beg to differ
If I wanted a link to unsubstantiated accusations and allot of talking out of the ass on the front page, I would just browse Digg.
>
No. You misunderstand the twin paradox: the twin that journeys will age less than the twin that stays behind in the classic "paradox".
The two frames are not inertial frames since one twin accelerates during the experiment. While the result is no doubt peculiar, there actually is no paradox to resolve.
You can read all about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox
Life is short: void the warranty.
But when you move through time at different speeds, wouldn't one of you leave the other one behind? I mean, how come people think that you can move slower through time without falling behind the faster movers when that doesn't work for any other dimension?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
We really outa get these theoretical scientist types out of a lab for a beer.
We can't do that until they split the beer atom.
badda-BING!
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
He's trying to describe 4 dimensions using three. Imagine a stick-figure trying to describe how thick the piece of paper he was drawn is; you can't describe x, y and z with only x and y.
Haven't read the article thoroughly, but the author seems to confuse to concepts in Relativity:
The four-dimensional speed is defined as d(t,x,y,z)/dtau, not d(t,x,y,z)/dt, so the first component is dt/dtau, not dt/dt = 1, as the author suggests
This mistake invalides the whole article.
If it's always now and nothing ever moves relative to something else, then its just our perception that changes and we're all omnipresent. Please.
So in reality, relativity exists. Our relative placement to other objects is ever-changing. Does this mean time exists as we see it today? Not necessarily. Just as people belived for hundreds of years that Newtonian physics were all that was to be said on the matter. But some measure of time relation must exist in order for objects to move relative to each other.
Look at the equation --
dt/dt always equals one, as does x/x and 3/3 and 998/998.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
The Vulcan Science Directorate has investigated the issue, and determined that time travel does not exist. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hey this is just as good an excuse to post this link to Brokeback to the Future.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I find it amazing that that not one mention of Peter Lynds is on any of these pages, since he seems to be the main proponant of a fairly new theory about time/space/movement which has been getting some press lately.
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=622019
Abstract:
It is postulated there is not a precise static instant in time underlying a dynamical physical process at which the relative position of a body in relative motion or a specific physical magnitude would theoretically be precisely determined. It is concluded it is exactly because of this that time (relative interval as indicated by a clock) and the continuity of a physical process is possible, with there being a necessary trade off of all precisely determined physical values at a time, for their continuity through time. This explanation is also shown to be the correct solution to the motion and infinity paradoxes, excluding the Stadium, originally conceived by the ancient Greek mathematician Zeno of Elea. Quantum Cosmology, Imaginary Time and Chronons are also then discussed, with the latter two appearing to be superseded on a theoretical basis.
Great great grandma had her first kid when she was 15.
Great grandma had her first kid when she was 16.
Grandma had her first kid when she was 14.
Mom had me when we was 15.
Now, I'm 10, and great great grandma is 69, and we're watching Hanky Panky. And great great great grandma is here too -- but her urn is on top of the TV, so she's not really watching it.
Fiction, yes, but I'll bet there's more than a few living great great grandmas out there.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
From http://www.rebelscience.org/Seven/bible.html:
;-)
(S)He writes:
"I started working on Animal (around 1995; see history) years before I formulated my biblical hypothesis. As I get more and more confident about the accuracy of my interpretation of the biblical metaphors, I will incorporate my findings into it. I hope to have it learn the game of chess on its own, including the rules of play. If my hypothesis is correct, there is no limit to how competent the program can be at playing chess. "
Do I really need to give a context?
(I hope I don't somehow offend any Christians out there- I've never heard of a denomination that believe's Jesus' real message was how to win at chess...)
Why should a trust a story with a url like this: "www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm"
Second I'm not saying that time travel to the past is possible but reletivity has been proven and if you travel away from earth at a reletavistic speed and return you will have effectivly traveled forward in time. Granted it's not intantanious but time for you reletive to earth-time will have been much slower.
This brings up a very weird concept that time experienced is actually abstract. Adding to your velocity diminishes the time experienced by the individual, compared to someone who isn't moving. It is almost as if the t axis exists, but it isn't actually time. If it takes X years for person a to get a delta-t of X years, but it only takes 1 year for person b to get a delta-t of X years, then time as we perceive it is not time as it exists in spacetime, but rather our perception of time is based on an abstraction away from the underlying mechanisms of spacetime.
... as the Time Cube!
http://outcampaign.org/
So if we do travel through time at 1s/s, we just need to know how animals are so fast. This dog lives about 10 years in my year, so it's living at the speed of 10s/s.
I'd never suspect it...
Crap! I read as far as recognizing that some of the biggest names in physics are being called cranks by this guy.
I believe you're atomatically disqualified from being taken seriously at that point, are you not?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Einstein's theory of general relativity tells us that to you he will have aged 24 hours, but to him you will have aged 24 hours.
Er, no. Once the 'traveller' has returned to the 'stationary' person's frame of reference, it will seem to both as though the traveller has aged less than the one who stayed put. The key is that the traveller experienced an acceleration, while the stay-behind didn't.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
this is bogus, the Starship Enterprise will time travel many times in the future.
and without time travel, how would we have been able to have witnessed this on new reals (aka movies)
quacks!!!!!
No: we actually travel through time at slightly different rates all the, er, time. We just don't notice it because the effect is so small under normal conditions.
The passage of time varies with velocity and the presence of gravitation fields. You can actually measure the difference using atomic clocks. Both clocks will pass through the same points in time, but at different relative times. That is, when you bring the clocks back together you will find they have a discrepancy that is due to the difference in velocities and gravitational fields that they experienced while apart. This test has been done many times and the results are completely in agreement with General Relativity.
Life is short: void the warranty.
Seriously, do a google groups search for the guy and see the long, long history of this particular crackpot.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
This applies to the Size part of his article but if you reword the idea below it can fit any part of it. Of course 'size' does not exist, it is something we have developed to compare the difference in two or more things, therefore one thing cannot have a 'size' but two things can be compared and have relative size to each other.
In "Aztecs", Hartnell states that you cannot rewrite history. Not so much as one word. At the very least, this doesn't violate causality.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You describe spacial travel as the dx, not the dx/dt. It stands to reason that you would describe time travel with the dt, not as some rate of travel we haven't come up with yet.
I *am* a physicist, and this guy just holed the article in one line. Good one!
This line no sig
And thinking outside of the box is essential to understanding some of the aspects of Physics that deviate from our everyday experiences.
The crux of his argument is that in space-time, everything is fixed and can't move. Well, sure, if you think of the universe as a fixed 4D hyperspace and just consider one point in it. The idea of "movement" comes from observing the motion of objects in 3-space while being in motion along the time axis... which is what we DO.
I think what he's doing is mixing up the practical idea of being IN the universe and having a natural fixed (in your reference frame) rate of motion through time, versus the theoretical notion of being outside of the universe and time and just examining it statically.
He complains about dt/dt being dimensionless. Of course that makes no sense. He's stuck on the idea of dx/dt being a measure of motion. It's not. We think of it as a velocity, but think of it as a indication of how much you move along X for how far you move along T. The fact of the matter is, you can compute dx/dy and get a similiarly meaningful result (assuming you have some reference axis for orientation). It just tells you how far you move in X for how far you move in Y. I don't see the problem, other than that this guy is stuck on the notion of T and X having different units. So what? X and Y have the SAME units, yet the calculus still makes sense!
While I agree that time travel is impossible. The explanation given about dt/dt "being one" is bogus. Anyone that thinks that dt/dt is a fraction has flunked calculus. Even if you try to defend it by rates of change arguments it still doesn't hold. Distance only relates to speed in situations where distance is defined. Time is not measure in distance. Travelling in time just means going to the past and to the future and has nothing to do whatsoever with derivatives. His opinion on the scientist is also misguided and what he says about Gödel further proves that the author is an asshole.
If you live in a glass house don't throw stones.
Velocity in time (dt/dt) is nonsensical
...________
../......./l
./......./.l
You are assuming, of course, that time has more than one dimension.
Let's assume for a moment that it is linear (1 dimension). This would mean that you could not move above other things in time, or to the side of other things in time. You can only move forward and backward in time.
If you could move side-to-side and up and down in time, this would be really weird (for lack of a better phrase).
A diagram of space:
+-------+..l
l.......l./
l.......l/
+-------+
A diagram of time:
+---+---+
Now, if time were three-dimensional, things would be appearing and disappearing all the time, because they didn't happen to be in the same place as you at the same time. They would be moving randomly.
However, if time was one-dimensional, all things would exist at the same time, in the same place, at the same velocity.
Also, there was one thing I heard. Things are moving through time constantly, at a constant velocity, like if an object began its existance 500 ft above the Earth's surface. It would fall at a constant velocity until it struck a sloid object: and there are none in time.
From the future!
I too cannot tell if this link is serious. If you want to read a good explanation of the current understanding of time, check out Brian Greene's article "The Time We Thought We Knew" from the 1/1/2004 edition of the New York Times. (note: if you don't want to pay for it from the Times, you can get to it through your local library's website under their public databases, if you have a library card/account.) Greene says, "catapulting yourself forward in time is beyond what we can now achieve, but scientists routinely use high-energy accelerators to propel particles, like electrons and protons, to nearly the speed of light, slowing their internal clocks and thereby sending them to the future. Though unfamiliar, forward time-travel is an unavoidable feature of relativistic reality." He goes on to explain what time is and ends by saying, "And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization."
Nothing can move in spacetime or in a time dimension-axis by definition. This is because motion in time is self-referential
Since time is defined in physics as a parameter for denoting change (evolution), the equation for velocity along the time axis must be given as v = dt/dt which is self-referential.
Uh no. The equation for velocity along the time axis is change in time per change in distance or dt/dx NOT dt/dt. dt/dx is not self-referential.
The idea is that, in order for any physical entity or property to exist, it must exist at a specific position in space. But if a position is a physical entity that exists, it too, must exist
at a specific position.
This argument has an invalid assumption.
IF X exists THEN X has specific position in space.
'Blue', '5 kilometers' and '200 kilograms' are all physical properties that exist...yet none of them have a 'specific position in space'.
-SOMMS
From this, I can prove linear motion is impossible!
We have dx which, obviously, is tied directly to distance, and dt that's tied to time.
Well, if I have, ferinstance, an equation that describes signal power with respect to distance from a transmitter, then I'd have, say, dp/dx, right?
But if I just wanted distance, I'd have dx/dx, and that obviously doesn't make any sense!
So, by these guys' logic, not only is time travel impossible-- ALL travel is impossible!
I hope you're reading this from home and not from the office. I've just proven you're gonna be stuck there for a while. Serves you right for wasting company time browsing Slashdot!
-F
If a time machine were ever to be invented, it would currently be U.S. Patent #1.
If I may say so, life is a game, and there's so much to do and so few turns.
-Reiner Knizia
still debating space-time travel. It's no wonder you were conquered by the Velcroians in 2026.
I lost my sig...
Uh...
Then, he goes on to say
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Only on Slashdot could somebody post a link to timecube.com and get modded both insightful and informative.
Not your fault, sir, but still... Jebus save us all.
Are they sure that it's really slowed movement through time and not some other effect? Like, say, the energy within the things producing lower speeds due to higher energy requirements for the same speed difference?
Because I don't see how we can move slower through time without falling behind unless we are of infinite size in that time dimension (which would give us infinite mass as well).
Besides, what's slower movement through time? Speed has to be measured on some frame of reference so, yes, we'd need a meta time to say we move at a speed through time. Besides, if we are of infinite size (or exist at each point in time simultaneously, as a lack of any meta-time would necessitate) through time, how would you define each object's "now" in order to define a position in time? Even moreso, how can anything be at a point in time now when there is no now?
And why would a further behind position in time be noticeable to others, wouldn't we only see the object's state it has when it finally reaches our time?
I mean, if we exist at each point in the past we have to exist at each point in the future as well (conservation of mass, lack of meta time in which to create the future) so the entire timeline would be already defined and would have been defined from the "beginning" (though there can be no beginning since it'd be a point on our timeline and that timeline has existed even before that beginning). But why would that timeline follow any rules like causality? What reason does a later point in time have to be connected to any earlier point in time when they have been "created" simultaneously (that is, they have been there forever and even that is the wrong term since we no longer have any time as we understand it to refer to)?
I dunno, the ideas that time is a dimension, that "earlier" points in that dimension will indeed hold the past AND that change can happen are one big contradiction in my mind.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
.. this guy must have a bad case of Aspbergers?
Let's evaluate this guy, Louis Savain, as I had required my students to do when writing a research paper. Has he really published? What sort of publication? Peer reviewed or not? Does he supply credentials, example: Educational Attainment and Institution? Does he offer verifiable and replicable experiments or mathematical proofs for his hypothesis?
/. can supply credentials that allow us to make some claim of authority on the subject on which our career path has led. I am finishing a masters degree at a very minor cow college, so I have no great claim to authority even for the field in which I am obtaining a degree.
*Has he really published?
There is no listing in the Library of Congress or much less on Amazon. A search of peer reviewed journals produced no results as well. Louis Savain may be a pseudonim.
*What sort of publication?
Only web pages. Nothing in print.
*Peer reviewed or not?
Not peer reviewed. I constantly reminded students that any "crackpot" to use Savain's terminology can publish a web page.
*Does he supply credentials, example: Educational Attainmenet and Institution?
The overwhelming majority of us on
Mr. Savain, I will make a supposition that he is male given the masculine name Louis, supplies no credentials of any sort.
*Does he offer verifiable and replicable experiments or mathematical proofs for his hypothesis?
Mr. Savain offers no science for his claims. There are no replicable mathematical proofs or explanations. He bases his claims on sophistry and text proofing. For those unfamiliar with text proofing, it is the act of taking quotes out of context to prove your point.
Even if it turns out that time travel isn't possible in the conventional sense; as in, traveling to the past or future within our own universe; it still may be possible in another way.
:)
There was an interesting article in Scientific American several years ago regarding the possible existence of other universes. One element of quantum theory states that anything that can happen, does happen-- Only in different universes. Given that space is theorized to be infinite, that means somewhere, a distance so far from us we're not likely capable of conceiving it, another universe exists that mirrors our own-- Still others exhibit slight differences.
So, it's conceivable, indeed, according to quantum theory, definitive, that somewhere, albeit unimaginable distance from us in our own universe, there's another universe existing right now that mirrors the history of our own; only shifted in time from ours. An example would be that the height of the Roman Empire that existed in our own universe thousands of years ago exists now, today, down to the last grain of sand-- Only in a different universe from our own... Far, far away...
So a way for us to travel in "time" would be to visit one of those other universes that's exhibiting a mirror of the history we had in our own. The two problems would be finding such a universe in the first place, and then having a way to travel the inconceivable distance from here to there.
Touche!
Isn't dt/dt=1, usually meaning YES or ON according to my computer :)
:/
;)
Didn't he just turn time travel on ? Bet he's not willing to give us the key name tho
whew, my plans for galactic domination are still intact
CURRENT_USER\TIME_TRAVEL=1 Woohoo it wor....
TFA *did* have the Einstein logo when I first saw it today. The joke foot was added later.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
One thing I think I should point out about how spacetime doesn't fit the general model of a 4-space, and it's simple:
Object do not pop in and out of existence as time progresses.
If time were simply a velocity in a dimension in a 4-space, that could happen. Instead, we see a continuity in 3-space, where an object might move, but there is a relationship between where it "is" and where it "was" and where it "will be".
So, it makes sense to model spacetime as a 4-space, but not as a general one.
Or alternatively, it is possible, but we never figure it out and in 300 years the Earth is a mass grave of SUV's.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
"catapulting yourself forward in time is beyond what we can now achieve, but scientists routinely use high-energy accelerators to propel particles, like electrons and protons, to nearly the speed of light, slowing their internal clocks and thereby sending them to the future. Though unfamiliar, forward time-travel is an unavoidable feature of relativistic reality."
When a particle reaches "the future" does it call home? How does one know a particle has traveled to the future if one is in the present or past according to this time travelling particle? Does this particle use a cell, if so what carrier? I need reliable coverage like that.
Your all upset because Savian has ruined the future of many Science Fiction movie plots.
Back to your hovels dreamers!
Because, it's not possible YET, dummy. ;-)
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
The BS on the website about AI is totally clueless. The idiot could have googled to read up on how machine learning works. There are numerous people using machine learning approaches to teach a computer "things". It's still in the larva stages, but the idiot doesn't have a clue.
This dude clearly has no idea what he's talking about. Especially when it comes to differential geometry, which is paramount to the theory of general relativity.
He claims (t,x(t),y(t),z(t)) is a 4-manifold, which is just not true. It's actually a 1-manifold embedded in 4-space. The whole point of writing "x of t" is to say that x is completely parameterized by t. So while this describes something that lives in 4-space (you could actually argue that it lives in 3-space since the dependence on t is trivial), it is completely parameterized by t. Think of a function in the plain - a set of points (x,y) such that y = f(x) (or vice-versa). While the function is embedded in 2-space it is only a 1-dimensional manifold: the entire point is that we can completely specify y in terms of x.
If we place that large restriction on our space, then it's no surprise that "dt/dt" (which is basically nonsense, but we'll assume he means the derivative of the identity function applied to t with respect to itself) is equal to 1, and that the dimensions are "seconds per second". What we really care about is the pull-back of the differential form through the t parameterization: dt + (dx/dt)*dt + (dy/dt)*dt + (dz/dt)*dt. Furthermore, this only makes sense if t lies in a connected region and is single-valued. So if we travel in time from t = now to t = future, then the differential fails to exist.
I thought he might just be goofing off, but if you look at the other crap on his website and his slashdot comments, it seems this guy really is full of crap. It's scary that he's asking for money for this stuff.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
I just flip the page. Same with Newsweek.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
_Special_Relativity_ says that two observers moving past each other in unaccelerated reference frames will each perceive that the other's clocks are running more slowly. The observations are consistent. To get the two observers into the same reference frame, one or both of them would have to accelerate, and general relativity conveniently works it so that the paradox vanishes.
In the actual example, one observer is remaining stationary, while the other is accellerating to high velocity, then accelerating to change velocity ("around the solar system") and then presumably accelerating a third time to return to the original reference frame. All three accellerations, plus travelling at high velocity relative to the rest frame, will cause the traveller's clock to run more slowly, as observed by someone in the rest frame.
time dilation can be reproducably created, and in fact occurs on a daily basis, to a slight extent every time someone flies an airplane, or is launched into orbit aboard a space vehicle. technically just 'walking' will create a small bit of 'time dilation' it might be impossibly small to try and detect, or course.
;)
Nasa has done a lot of research on this. if you accelerate a physical object to the 'speed of light' it's 'relative' time stops in comparison to that of the universe, while time continues to flow for the rest of the universe, until that object is decelerated to normal velocity.
So if 'time' can't be traveled through, then what exactly is 'time dilation?' Also, black holes are only useful for traveling 'forward' in time, the 'intense gravity' within a black hole 'simulates' traveling forward at the speed of light, the closer you are the greater the gravity, and thus the greater the time dilation. no one has formulated or demonstrated the possibly to go 'to the past' although if 'gravity' and 'light speed travel' can decelerate ones own flow of time so the future can be reached, then 'anti-gravity' or some form of 'reverse momentum' might perhaps allow one to experience a pocket of time where as one progresses through it the entire universe grows 'younger' the problem with this is gravity and acceleration seem to both follow temeperature and have a common starting point or 'absolute zero' below which it is impossible to go.
appologies to all the great science fiction, but traveling back in time just isn't possible.* (unless of course one travels forward through time throught the end of the universe as we know it, until a new universe is created from the ashes of the old one, assuming that that Does in fact happen, and given the nature of atomic mass to develop in a consistant patter, one travels to the 'future' of a new 'third world inhabited by the evolutionary decendants of apes' before they manage to create time travel, and knowing exactly how the universe unfolds (because of a massive quantum computer and impressive algrythm that can determine the exact course of events Before they happen, again, based on the data it recieved while you were traveling 'forward' in time...) and thus influence the development of a primative world that the locals call 'earth' because everything formed along the same 'predestined' pattern based on the arrangment of molecules in the universe when it collapsed... only you went and went Forward in time, causing the end of the universe to happen differently than when it ended last time, so now you're ona world inhabited by 27 foot tall sentient lizards who think mamals are a tasty snack.
oops. well, you shouldn't have tried to avoid the big crunch to see how the universe would unfold the next time around
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I just sent that out at a joke in my email 3 years from now...
Professor: "Start the ship, Leela! Let's just steal the damn radar dish, and get back to our own time."
d s/3ACV19/27.mp3
Fry: "But, but, won't that change history?"
Professor: "Oooh... A lesson in not changing history from Mr. I'm-my-own-grandpa! Let's get the hell out of here already. Screw history!"
http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/EpisodeSoun
So they found Iraq-us?
I'm sure many of you agree that Louis Savain is just one of many crackpots that have just enough information to be completely wrong in a more spectacular way than the average person. There was a very relevant story from the NPR show This American Life. It's about people like Mr. Savain who have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. You can find the show archive at http://www.thislife.org/pages/archives/archive05.h tml.
The episode concerned is #293 "A Little Bit of Knowledge".
a simple confusion of Newtonian with quantum physics?
If time travel will ever be possible then where are the time travelers? Shouldn't they be visiting us or maybe our great-great grandparents?
Look... This is the future we are talking about. They have robot sex partners that look better than most supermodels today and VR systems that could just simulate the past if they got bored enough to do so.
Why in gods name would they drop all that and come visit us? They won't even give their great great great grandparents even a phone call!
Ungrateful bastards!
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Such an Amazing misinterpetation of general relativity... I'd laugh some more, but I'm too busy crying from laughing so hard earlier... Science Jokes are fun... :/
... of a poor argument. Every second statement seems to be an ad hominem argument. "I'm smart, and I don't agree with X, so X must be an idiot, and therefore nobody should agree with X, because he's an idiot."
When not insulting those who believe time travel might be possible, the author spends a lot of time defining movement as dx/dt, and then says time travel is logically impossible, because dt/dt is 1 (which is meaningless). But dx/dt is not movement, dx/dt is velocity. Movement is dx. In the time dimension, movement is dt.
Velocity is not movement, in the same way that force is not power, nor is acceleration speed. His primary argument is based either on not understanding the difference between movement and velocity, or on the unstated assumption that movement is impossible without velocity. The lengthy discussion of velocity though time is a straw man in place of the real issue, which is movement through time.
Note that some time-travel theories rest on things like quantum jumps, which are an example of movement without meaningful velocity. So even if the article proved that velocity through time is meaningless, it does not prove that time travel is impossible.
In defining movement through time as the meaningless "dt/dt", the author also neglects to mention that many time travel theorists define multiple timescale references (observer's time, traveller's time, etc.). So the ratio is more like "dt1/dt2", which, although unitless, can still be a useful and meaningful ratio.
Finally, the author's argument boils down to the idea that because the author cannot define how "fast" someone can move through time, it is impossible to move through time. This is an argument from ignorance. The fact that the author (or anyone else) does not know how to measure something does not mean that something is impossible. It only means that once we figure out how to do that something, we should also figure out how to measure it. That might require creating new units and new concepts.
There are some good and (in my opinion) logical arguments against "backwards" time travel (even of information), but this article is not one of them. A good argument against "backwards" time travel is the plan to build a time machine, go back into time, and prevent yourself from building the time machine. It's simple and logically valid.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Time is an illusion of the living. Velocity measured in time is perfectly sensible. dt/dt=1. Without an external referance, such as the planet's rotation or orbits around the sun, or one's lifespan, there is no way to measure the velocity of time. When you cease to exist, so will time, and space for that matter.
"Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so"
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Time travel isn't what SciFi movie show them, if a space ship travels back in time, it will basically trace back to its geographical location.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
It doesn't get me any closer to finding Sarah Connor.
Whoever posted this is an idiot, unless they posted jokingly, in which case I'm the idiot. 1) Mathematically, dt/dt does have meaning; it's equal to 1. 2) Saying that dt/dt is the only way to calculate "movement through time" presupposes that there is no time travel. In fact, one of the equations of Einstein's special relativity is T(P) = T / sqrt(1 + v^2 / c^2) Where T indicates the time it takes for an event to occur when measured in the same reference frame, v is the velocity of the observer, c is the speed of light, and T(P) is how long the event takes to occur from the point of view of a hypothetical observer moving with velocity v. You can compute dT(P) / dT. You can also compute dT(P)/dt, where t is a time index used to define v = distance / t. There are a lot of reasonable and mathematically well-defined ways to define travel through time. Lastly, "space doesn't exist"? WTF? Trying to justify that length doesn't matter?
What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the
movie?
Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens
now, is happening now.
What happened to then?
We passed then.
When?
Just now. We're at now, now.
Go back to then.
When?
Now.
Now?
Now.
I can't.
Why?
We missed it.
When?
Just now.
When will then be now?
Soon.
A velocity is NOT a change in location over a change in time... it is a change in PERCEIVED location over a change in PERCEIVED time, hense dx/dt should actually be more like dpx/dpt. If I'm going the same speed, in the same direction, a car will appear to be going 0 kph when it is actually going 120. So, two people can have two different perceived change in locations.
Relativity states that two people can experience two different perceived times, and while this might appear strange, WE'VE SEEN IT HAPPEN. So, The astronaut experiences 3 days worth of time, but we experience 3.01 days (rough numbers). From the Astronauts perception, he/she has gone through time FASTER than us. How would be measure this? dt/dt? No... dpt/dpt:
3 Astronaut Perceived Time Units / 3.01 Earth Perceived Time Units
And there's your measurement of time travel: Perceived Time Units. Why don't they cancel out? Well think of a Perceived Time Unit as an infinity... infinity/infinity != 1.
So, if we were to get REALLY close to a massive gravitational object, and then somehow break away from it, while the perceived time for the passenger would appear to be 5 minutes, the perceived time for all the people who weren't on the vehicle would be 500 years (Again, rough numbers). Did the person travel through time? Well... no, not really, but they APPEARED to travel through time.
Now, even if this idiot were to come forward and say "Appeared to have travelled through time isn't the same thing!" Then I'd still want to smack him around a bit... No one has any firm grasp on EXACTLY what time is... we just have some ideas on how we can muck with it. In order to truly understand time we would need to remove ourselves from it and look at it from the outside... and I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure no one has figured out a way to do that yet.
Just like the world is flat and there will never be any use for more than 512 KB of RAM?
:)
It might not be in my day, but I'll wait and see
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
dt/dt
It would be a partial derivative with respect to time in the context of x, y, and z. The math in the article needs a little work.
Not to say that any of my great-great-great-grandchildren will be coming home for the holidays or anything, but time is a dimension, although I personally wouldn't want to find out the hard way that it isn't by going to sleep and waking up all in the same instant.
Relative time, your clocks and mine, have nothing to do with time movement. In a blank room where you cannot compare here to there, you'd see no space movement. You move, but nothing's changed. So, unless you have some way of relatively telling the passage of time, time seems to stand still. Doesn't mean it does, just means you can't see it.
Am I insane or did this guy call Feynman diagrams "pseudoscience"? And he's calling other people crackpots?
All's true that is mistrusted
I believe that you may be labouring under a misunderstanding of spacetime. I suggest that you look for the text "Spacetime Physics" by Wheeler et al. as it explains this from first principles in simple language and backs this up with (initially) easily comprehensible mathematics. Time dilation occurs and is why synchrotrons are able to produce the high frequency output that they do. It is measurable, repeatable science and is now used for a commercial purpose. We are well past experiment or theory on this. Time dialtion is also critical in the explanation of several observed astronomical phenomenon. But we should be thankful for the website. Any challenge to the accepted is a good thing and allows us to grow in our understanding.
If we stop to think about it, is there a law in nature that requires entities to have a size in other to exist? MATTER has mass and takes up SPACE.
"no hanky-panky with your great, great grandmother." speak for yourself buddy! you don't need time travel for that kinda hot action. LMAO
There is another article on his web site that is quite a bit more interesting on "Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It"
http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/Reliability.htm
I think this article is better reading and deserves another round on slashdot.
"When you cease to exist, so will time, and space for that matter"...this statement from a previous anonymous coward post is dead on!
And yet we have a whole world full of people who have mastered the language of self created complexity in mathematics to measure the unmeasurable and all to explain "Time" in human terms and which is a relative concept to ones own existence!
If time ceases to exist due to ones own demise, how does it factor into any equation?
Does distance cease to exist when one lifes or the existence of any referenced object for that matter ceases to exist? No, of course not, not unless the targets of which distance is being calculated are obliterated and then we are still able to assign fixed points for reference measurement.
Distance, velocity, mass are all physical manifestations of existence, no existence, no manifestation of anything, especially overstuffed equations which gives the mere illusion soemone knows what they are talking about. But what is first to go, time since time is a metaphor for distance. Time is but an unecessary parameter, meaningless to everything but human patience!
There is one conundrum though, measurement of anything without perspective. Imagine a universe devoid of objects hence, no reference points for any measurement. Is your brain smoking yet?
Here on Slahsdot there are those who are now sweating that they may need to pursue other means of earning a living instead of writing bad plots for the Sci-Fi Channels next commercial saturated epic series where there will be no shortage of B actors working to pay that overpriced LA area home!
And all because that maybe, just maybe, Oz has been revealed for what it really is, truly unimaginable and unrealistic!
Get back to work geeks!
Or have we just found the new wookie defense?
(Hey, while not as outright batshit insane as the timecube guy, this at least sounds vaugely plausible for about a minute...or about 55 seconds logner than the average attention span...)
"What? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the constant beeping of my bullshit detector..."
No time travel? Nonsense! Explain John Titor then!
I wouldn't believe everything you read if I were you. ;)
Oops, sorry, wrong story
All is Number -Pythagoras.
It is proven that you can't move in space because dx/dx is constant.
I've seen plenty of bad science on Slashdotbut this one is right up there. First, according to the author's own math not only is it possible to move in time, it is impossible not to. You just happen to do so at a constant rate of 1 s/s.
Second, what the author is really stating (IANAP) is that it is impossible to move at any rate other than 1 s/s (or 1 m/m) within one's own frame of reference. Great work Einstein (was he listed as a fraud by the article?) dt0/dt1 might be a constant other than 1, could vary or could even be discontinuous. In other words, while I may always experience time at a rate of 1 s/s (adjusted for medication of course), the article's math still allows one of my seconds to be 2 of someone else's seconds (eg: special relativity).
hmmmmm... this is really interesting... What if accelerate myself just to see what happens in future.
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
That's not my point. I'm saying that while time appears to go slower, it didn't actually speed down. Sure, the tree grew more slowly, but that doesn't change the fact that time itself did not.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
'nuff said.
Google this douche's name and see the stupidness that comes up.
I for one am glad to see that some douchebag who figured out how to write HTML can finally give me all the truths about physics. I'm glad he's solved all the problems....
After I RTFA two words came to mind: ad homimen.
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
I wonder what his crackpot index would be?
Has this guy actually written these lines? " v = dt/dt " as a "proof" that time travel is impossible? The only thing this proofs is that the write is an idiot. The fact that something is not allowed in our current hypotheses does not proof its not possible, there is always the other option that our theories are not accurate. Anyways, if you want a simple logic argument against time travel: If time travel was possible, infint people from all times would be visiting us right now and and at every other place of interest around.
It really is too bad that dimensionless numbers can't actually be used. I mean that iPod with the headphone amplifier has a gain expressed in terms of V/Vs and since "We know that a dimensionless number such as 1 has absolutely no meaning in as far as expressing velocity or any sort of change." The amplifier therefore doesn't exist and can never exist.
Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt. Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical.
Think again, dt/dt doesn't not tell you "time travel is not possible", it only tells you that the dt/dt=1, that is, its constant!
I you travel 1 year to the future what do you expect the ellapsed time to be 1 second? No, thats one year. But you can represent a travel rate or something like that:
dTIMETRAVELLED/dTIMETOTRAVEL
Btw - Einstein told us that it were kind of possible to accelerate the time (the twins story), from an outsides prespective that would be time travelling. I think NASA already proved that theory.
... their theory is wrong.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I'd like to add that this difference in time is both currently and commonly measured.
Atomic clocks have this kind of accuracy.
NIST has some that are so accurate and precice that if you have two clocks on different floors in the same building, the difference in relative velocity between the two (due to Earth's rotation) is measurable. If you swap their places, the results are still consistent.
It's even more apparent when looking at clock skew of a ground-based atomic clock, and one that is in orbit (such as any GPS sattelite).
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Well, time travel in this dimension is impossible, because as TFA states, time does not change. But what about another dimension? Could that be possible?
Just a thought.
Proudly posting without RTFA.
WTF is the Flux Capacitor used for then moron?
serenity now!
Try a Google search for "nothing moves in spacetime".
Lemme preface this by saying that I'm not claiming time travel is possible - I merely think his argument against what a lot of smarter people think is overly simplistic.
OK, does no one else notice the massive jump in logic here? First he's talking about the theory and its reference to the term 'motion', then all the sudden, as if they're the same thing, he starts talking about 'velocity' Velocity is well defined as the distance traveled relative to time, so of course, if we're talking about velocity, he has a point. But that's not motion - motion is the propagation through some dimension, and has a meaning without measuring the rate at which it occurs.
The only reason 'speed' of motion, or velocity, is measured with respect to time is because when it became relevant, time was considered absolute, so it was the best frame of reference. At its heart though, velocity is a rate - something's change in relation to something else. I could easily define the speed of motion through time with respect to some other variable, like position. I could have dt/dx, dt/dy, or dt/(something else entirely different that I haven't thought of).
To discount the idea of motion through time simply because you have to think a little harder to define speed through time is, to put it simply, just plain stupid.
And you Sir are probably wrong as well. Assuming 2 trees were planted (that is not completely clear, both could be involved in the planting of one tree), the trees could be:
- Both planted on earth,
- Both planted in the traveller's vehicle
- One each planted on earth and one in the vehicle.
Only in the last case would something similar to what you propose be correct. So in all probability you are at least 66% wrong.
If nothing else this article is good for recalling Einstein's and Godel's friendship. I recall reading that Kurt Godel was Albert Einstein's best friend at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton when both were near the end of their careers. The two would walk home together daily (coming in at ~10A and leaving around ~3P). Einstein thought of these walks as the best part of his day. At any rate, though by training Kurt Godel was a logician, he was also an extremely gifted mathematician and when he applied his mind to Einstein's theory of General Relatvity he came to the conclusion that the equations seemed to imply that time travel was possible if the universe conformed to certain conditions. But the more interesting thing is that he interpreted his results as implying that our intuitive notion of time as something that flows external to us is an illusion, that time may not even exist. I won't pretend to try to explain these results for they are far beyond my capacity but it was a fascinating read. I can not find the book I recently read about Einstein and Godel but there are a couple out there. The theories of these real scientists and mathematicians is far more interesting than the incoherent ramblings of these crackpots. I would reccomend browsing Amazon if anyone is interested and has the time.
...from the Vulcan Science Directorate!
Always mod nomDu keyboard down...always. ;)
There, now you ahve to use your time travel abilities for something noble..like winning the lottery and hiring people to mod you up!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is your quantum giving you trouble? I'll work on all quanta, foreign or domestic! I've got a fully loaded Snap-On tool chest, some dirty coveralls, a couple of Schrodinger's cats, an air wrench, and a singularity compressor. You can trust me to treat your quantum with the greatest of care, and I promise I won't put metal shavings in your finite square well transmission when you're not looking. Plus, you'll get the best warranty in the business, valid in all 50 eigenstates!
So, if you see some maintenance on your event horizon, give me a call!
Yeah you're right. I must have gotten the two theories mixed up, it's been a while since I last read The Elegant Universe. ;)
Dear Rob
...@steel.ucs.indiana.edu (Gregory L. Hansen) wrote: , ...@indiana.edu wrote:
I'm sorry to have to tell you but you've been scammed by a well-known internet kook called Louis Savain into slashdotting his junk
If you google for "nothing moves in spacetime" and "rebelscience.org" you'll find lots of references to this particular paranoid schizophrenic (no, I'm not kidding)
He likes to spam sci.physics and sci.physics.relativity with his junk. One of his recent postings is fairly typical:
On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 16:59:17 +0000 (UTC),
glhan
>In article
>Traveler wrote:
>>On 22 Jan 2006 07:55:33 -0800, glhan
>>Repeat after me: NOTHING MOVES IN SPACETIME.
>World lines don't move in spacetime. When people talk about the motion of
>a particle they refer to a succession of points on the worldline, not the
>worldline in its entirety.
Repeat after me: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING MOVES IN SPACETIME!
NOTTHIINGGG!!!!
What this means is that there is NO CHANGE in spacetime (that's why it
was called Einstein's block universe by Karl Popper) and spacetime is
a fictitious math construct with no counterpart in reality. Now, isn't
it a tad weird that your idol Einstein agreed with his friend Kurt
"lunatic" Godel when he announced in 1949 that the spacetime of GR
allows time travel to the past via time-like loops?
Now hold on a southern cotton picking second! Aren't Kurt Godel and
Albert Einstein revered by physicists as two of the smartest men that
ever lived? Yep. ahahaha... One then wonders how they can be so stupid
as to believe in motion in spacetime. ahahaha...
http://www./ rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm#Einstein
ahahaha...
>>> Or that your alien-induced lattice that exists nowhere is
>>>also an abstract model of your invention?
>>Nope. My lattice is not made of abstract crap but of real particles.
>>You crackpots call them virtual photons. ahahaha...
>You have a model that describes a lattice that is not made of abstract
>crap. You're like the screen writer who writes a line like "This isn't a
>movie, you know."
Maybe in your imagination but I know one thing: I am not an ass
kisser. I do my own thinking, than you very much. ahahaha... And
that's the way I like it. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
Physics is so much phucking phun! ahahaha...
Louis Savain
Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It:
http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/Reliability.htm
I would suggest you remove the story
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
That's the whole point of Pastafarianism, to show us how ridicule Creationism really is.
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
We all travel through time. To exist is to travel from the "past" into the "future". What you cannot do is exist in the "now" since by all appearances, now is absolute and not relative.
Of course, consider that to do most so-called time travel you need to be able to dramatically alter your relative velocity both up and back down. What if going into the past is as simple as slowing down so that the time in your current FOR moves faster than your own? So, you would need to get off the earth, out of the solar system, out of the galaxy, etc... so that those influences on you were removed (and you could "slow" down). And it works, because now the light from earth takes a lot longer to reach you, so you can only observe the earth in the past. Unfortunately, what you cannot do is interact with or influence things on earth. You could travel back to earth and in doing so would "catch back up" to the earth's current FOR - essentially traveling from earth's past to it's present.
Why is dt/dt "nonsensical"? It more common cases dt/dt=1. It can be more or less if you compare objects moring relative to one another. How did this get posted it's "nonsenseical" bunk. It mayb e true the time travel is not possable but his reasoning is meaningless
"At least I don't have to compete with the robot unions." This proves that time travel is possible, how else would could he have made such an accurate statement?
I want to be retired when I grow up.
Any questions?
Why is the joke shaped like a penis?
this would be true if we were to live in a 4 dimensional universe where the time dimension doesn't curve back on itself. As we all know, we don't know for sure if there are any more dimensions (string theory comes to mind ...) and we certainly don't know if the time dimension doesn't curve back on itself.
Having said that, great read, nice foot, now go laugh!
Live, let _them_ die
Everyone knows that surviving the big crunch means that you will be reborn as a gigantic humanoid who must feed on the living essence of populated planets to survive!
It seems like someone should have come up with this a long time ago. This is not to demean the poster for exposing a great truth, but to emphasize that time is the attempt to measure change. It's a way for us to abstract change. It doesn't exist. Change exists. Measuring the change of all things at once is silly.
I have to pee.
Thanks a lot.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
"I wonder just how much energy (besides the mass of Marty/Delorean) would be needed to roll the clock back 30 years, if it's calculable."
1.21 Gigawatts, of course.
Little did you know, when making your post, that Congressional staffers quietly changed the definition of Mach on Wikipedia so as to thwart any attempts to advance physics to the point of achieving time travel.
Join Tor today!
Time dilation and the parralax effect are unrelated phenomena.
The parent poster related them by showing that with the parallax effect, the mountain will appear to move at a different rate for someone 50km away and another person 5km away.
Similarly for time dilation, time will move at a different rate for someone moving at 50% light speed compared to 5%.
I will also note that imperfect analogies can be really useful when teaching difficult concepts, as the parent poster was doing.
WTF is this? This might be the silliest and most stupid slashdot post ever.
Not only is it total non-sence made by a 4 year old kid, but it's also not news. Also, it has nothing to 'report'. It's like saying 'My cat is fluffy, and the earth is round!'...
How do I mod the O/P -1: Off-Topic?
-- This sig for rent.
Quoted for awesomeness. There's something I can't stand about Gödel--it seems like he's almost mocking Einstein's theory with that. Or maybe it's his incompleteness theorem. Things like that make grown men cry. So much for Metamath I guess...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
blockquote from that wiki thingy.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I'm uncertain about my position on this...
But since the universe is expanding at such an incredible rate, when somebody goes back in time, it is not to the same place on earth, which is moving at something like 300,000 kps along with the universe, but they stayed right where they were. Just a thought. Everybody always assumes time travel is always tied to a relative location not an absolute one.
Time Cube proves you are wrong! You are educated stupid!
I'm right and you're wrong. If both trees are planted on earth just before the journey takes place, the tree on earth will grow 12 inches while the tree on the spacecraft will only grlow 1 inch assuming the timelines given in the original post. Read up on the "twin paradox" and why it's not a paradox at all but a mere misunderstanding that is very common and was exhibited by the original poster.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
But the whole point is that time did move slower for the guy in the spacecraft. The two reference systems are not symmetrical (you seem to be confused by this fallacy). The time flowed 12x slower for the guy in the spacecraft. Read up on the "twin paradox" and why it's not a paradox at all.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Strictly speaking the partial derivative of the component t with respect to t (that is, d(t)/dt) is 1. But not because dt/dt = 1. It's d(t)/dt. There's a difference. :-)
Hell... x, y, z could be defined in terms of some parameter that isn't t, or is the application of an operator to t... in which case d(U)/dt (where U represents whatever the hell it is) isn't so simple anymore... and you need THE CALCULUS (dunh dunh dunh)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This is Slashdot. All jokes are shaped like penises.
V = velocity of travel in units traveled over time V = [d(unit)]/[d(time)] Let dm = my percieved time delta Let dt = standard time delta V = dm/dt
Aren't GPS satellites in geostationary orbit? If so then they're effectively not moving, relative to something stationary on Earth.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
You must mean JIGGAWATTS!
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
I wonder if any "astonomers" used this same sort of argument when Copernicus established his concept that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. Just because people like Steven Hawking believe in something that wasn't previously accepted doesn't make them wrong. And I don't think one small equation is going to prove them wrong.
Actually you would have lost since you would have seen the other person reach 1pm on his clock in 1 minutes while according you your clock only a minute has past.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
What is the biggest hurdle for traveling backwards in time? 1. Records of the positions of everything in the universe from now till that point in history so it can be compared to the positions today and a non-moving point of reference in order to ensure you don't wind up inside a sun/blackhole. 99% impossible to obtain unless someone else has been keeping records other than Humans. What is the biggest hurdle for traveling forwards in time. 1. Records of the positions of everything in the universe from now till that point in the future so it can be compared to the positions today and a non-moving point of reference in order to ensure you don't wind up inside a sun/blackhole. 99% impossible to obtain unless someone else has been keeping records other than Humans. Unfortunately True. That shoots the concept in the heart because we don't have the computing power.
I for one welcome a change. Fuck you slashdot
I can use a carpenter's level as a straight edge on the surface of the earth and it sits in perfect contact so that means that "The Earth is Flat!.
Period.
Because I said so.
I'm a self important pinhead who has absolutely nothing in my head but math...
Moron.
CmdrTaco must be on vacation, having left his "approve/disapprove" buttons in the hands of a monkey, who hits one or the other at random. How else to explain approving this crap?
-- This sig for rent.
Well, if you want to cause Marty to go back in time for real (and not just think you do), then of course you need to start at the point "back in time" where he arrives (say 1955). At that point, you duplicate Marty. That requires E = mc^2, where m is Marty's mass, plus the mass of his skateboard, clothes, and assorted paraphernalia, plus some trivial amount of energy to give him the right momentum.
Note that you'll need to create a slightly different Marty than the original, because Marty #2 must be identical to Marty #1 when he started time traveling (say 1985). He's physically older, and needs to have different memories -- he needs to "remember" the future. He's not remembering it in the usual sense we remember things, of course, because these events are in his future, not his past. But from the point of relativity, events in our future are no less real than events in our past, and there's no reason in principle we can't run off a few quick calculations on our superdupercomputer, and predict the relative handful of events in his "future" that Marty will need to "remember." (We're assuming for the purposes of argument that quantum uncertainty is not so important that it fundamentally fouls up this calculation.)
Now we create an anti-Marty. He is just like Marty #2, but with the charge, parity, and velocity of every single particle in him reversed. He is actually Marty #1, traveling backwards in time. This, too, takes E = mc^2.
Now, Marty #2 (the one who believes he has come "back in time", because he "remembers" the future) does whatever he's going to do. Meets Marty #1, picks a fight with him, puts him in the hospital with a broken arm, and then impregnates his mother. Whatever.
And time goes on. When we reach the point where we want Marty to go back in time (say 1985), we arrange for Marty #1 and anti-Marty to meet. They annihilate each other, of course, releasing all the energy we put into creating Marty #2 and anti-Marty 30 years ago. Now we're left with only Marty #2, the time traveler, who keeps on going forward.
To sum up, to us the observers, merely traveling along forward as we do, it looks like Marty #2 and anti-Marty were created out of pure energy in 1955. Marty #2 had weird memories of the future which turned out to be accurate in every respect. Marty #1 had the odd property of getting physically younger and forgetting stuff as he got "older." At some point, Marty #1 was born and grew up. As he got older, we began to see that anti-Marty was beginning to look more and more like Marty #1, except for the fact of being made of anti-matter and getting "younger" with time, while Marty #1 was getting older. We begin to see that Marty #1 and anti-Marty are converging, becoming more and more similar. Indeed, they probably start converging physically, too, spending more and more time closer to each other.
Anyway, around about 1985, Marty #1 gets the idea of going time traveling. But alas, at the exact moment when he gets in the time machine and pulls the switch, as bad luck would have it, he comes into contact with anti-Marty and both are utterly destroyed with a huge bang and flash. (We can forgive anti-Marty for not warning Marty #1, because it was at this exact moment that anti-Marty finally forgot everything about his experience of time travel.)
Marty #2, bemused, just takes of his protective goggles and keeps going. He remembers it all differently, of course. He "remembers" being Marty #1, and being anti-Marty, and being himself.
oops, right here....
Marty #1 had the odd property of getting physically younger and forgetting stuff as he got "older."
I mean to say:
Anti-Marty has the odd property of...
First dt/dt means is in the spatial frame of reference of Newtonian physics. So as he travels through time his relative time does not change in Newtonian physics. We already know that in relativistic terms spatial physics in a Newtonian sense is often violated. So as he travels through time his personal timepiece in the "bubble" traveling through time won't read the change in time (hands won't move backwards, etc.) outside the "bubble". Sorry I could not think of a easy name for the smoo consisting of all the volume in three space that would be moving through time differently than the rest.
Second:
No matter when you go, then you are.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
How did this /. article get posted? It seems to have been submitted by the same author of the page. The guy is arrogant and self righteous. His writing is wordy and asinine and, well, he just sounds more like some kind of "I'm right and you're wrong because I say so" politician than anyone who's actually pondered the depths of existence. In fact it reminds me a lot of the writings of religious types for organisations like The American Heritage Foundation and entirely fictitious Pro-Life American Consumerist Peon Weekly.
slashDotScienceRep--;
Truly sad this passed through. Unless it's meant to be a joke, in which case- I just don't get it.
The only reason time seems to exist is because we have physical reference points/activities determined by particles moving around "space" in a "constant" manner. If the earth suddently started rotating faster, we would have a new illusion of what time is and how long it takes to "pass".
That should read d(t)/dt or dt/delta_t (imagine the delta_t is dt with the curvy d representing a partial derivative with respect to t).
In any case you are finding the derivative of the function f(t) -> t with respect to t, which by definition, is 1. Not because dt/dt cancels out. Same result, different reason.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The Vulcan Science Directorate has already concluded that time travel is impossible.
Nobody is likely to ever read this comment. However, I shall make it anyway.
/.. The only good thing that might come of his being posted on here is that his self-acknowledged crack-pottery might be interrupted by unexpected server load. All he's doing is misinforming anybody silly enough to believe his "logic".
What a turd of an article. This loser deserves no free advertising on
While I sympathize with his notion on space-time not being independent of matter, he asserts that all positions are absolute. The problem is, to have absolute location, you need an absolute substrate on which to place. In which case everything is always moving, so you would have to express all position as quadratic vectors.
The universe is indeed a strange place. Physicists are NOT cracked. They know full well that their work is incomplete as they are all in some way or another searching for grand unification. No doubt, it will be the result of newly observed phenomenon which may spawn new forces which will require an even grander unification.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
You wanna solve time with algebra? Care to pick a point on a circle? What an idiot.
The article creator sould look into string theory-they are cruising at 11 (or 10) dimensions (haven't checked lately, may be out of date but definitely down from 26!) for spacetime, so it is quite possible for time to be a function of other dimensions (or be totally bypassed in one or more dimensions).
This is the kind of nonsensical reasoning that the NeoCon Nazis are using and that we were taught to avoid in elementary philosophy (logic course): remember proving 1 = 2?
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
that we are moving through space at dt/dt or one time unit forward for every time unit that passes - thats lucky I'd hate to think we were going backwards or breaking any time (speed) limits.
Now what if we said that we could travel through time. It would only be a matter of finding how to adjust that top dt. dt(a)/dt would be our new speed. Of course the problem with this is that its not instantaneous point to point transfer. If you saw someone walking backwards and talking like a record playing backwards, ask them how they did it. Of course listen hard because chances are they already answered your question backwards a moment before you asked it.
From: http://physicsmathforums.com/
http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=60
Book on Moving Dimensions Theory Due Out in Fall 05
Moving Dimensions Theory
By Dr. E
http://physicsmathforums.com/
Questions Addressed by MDT:
Why is the speed of light constant in all frames?
Why are light and energy quantized?
How can matter display both wave and particle properties?
Why are there non-local effects in quantum mechanics?
Why does time stop at the speed of light?
How come a photon does not age?
Why are inertial mass and gravitational mass the same thing?
Why do moving bodies exhibit length contraction?
Why are mass and energy equivalent?
Why does time's arrow point in the direction it points in? Why entropy?
Why do photons appear as spherically-symmetric wavefronts traveling with the velocity c?
Why is there a minus sign in the following metric? x^2+y^2+z^2-c^2t^2=s^2
What deeper reality underlies Einstein's postulates of relativity?
What deeper reality underlies Newton's laws?
What underlies the laws of Inertia?
Why does general relativity fail at short distances? Why does quantum mechanics dominate at short distances?
Why have so many great minds, Einestin, Godel, Wheeler, Hawking, and Penrose called for a new conception of time?
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
--Albert Einstein
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
--Isaac Newton
Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, felt that the pioneer scientist must have "a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination."
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.
--Max Planck
Moving Dimensions Theory (MDT)
Today I am writing regarding Moving Dimensions Theory--a deeper model for explaining diverse phenomena in both quantum mechanics and relativity.
The General Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
The Specific Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c in quantized units of the Planck length.
Relativistic, classical, and quantum mechanical phenomena, as well as time itself, are emergent properties of this fundamental principle. Newton's laws, the principle of Inertia, Einstein's postulates, and the inherent wave-particle duality of QM may be explained with this model.
A few years back, while surfing a towering wave on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a beautiful thought occurred to me. Suppose the wave I was riding represented a coordinate in a dimension. Then although I was approaching shore, I was not moving in this dimension.
The dimension itself was moving with me--I was surfing the dimension. In a flash I saw that that is why photons never age--they are moving along with the fourth dimension, and thus stationary relative to it. In another flash I saw that that is why a photon's space-time interval is represented by a null vector, or a 0, no matter how far it travels. Indeed Einstein stated that an object's velocity through space-time was always c--even stationary objects are traveling at the velocity c through time! How could this be, were it not for a fourth expanding dimension, which matter could surf as photons, giving rise to our notion of time? And so it is that Moving Dimensions Theory was born as the wave crested and crashed about me, thundering on down, as I fought to remain surfing amidst the foam, facing the setting sun silhouetting the
From: http://physicsmathforums.com/ [physicsmathforums.com]
http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=60 [physicsmathforums.com]
Book on Moving Dimensions Theory Due Out in Fall 05
Moving Dimensions Theory
By Dr. E
http://physicsmathforums.com/ [physicsmathforums.com]
Questions Addressed by MDT:
Why is the speed of light constant in all frames?
Why are light and energy quantized?
How can matter display both wave and particle properties?
Why are there non-local effects in quantum mechanics?
Why does time stop at the speed of light?
How come a photon does not age?
Why are inertial mass and gravitational mass the same thing?
Why do moving bodies exhibit length contraction?
Why are mass and energy equivalent?
Why does time's arrow point in the direction it points in? Why entropy?
Why do photons appear as spherically-symmetric wavefronts traveling with the velocity c?
Why is there a minus sign in the following metric? x^2+y^2+z^2-c^2t^2=s^2
What deeper reality underlies Einstein's postulates of relativity?
What deeper reality underlies Newton's laws?
What underlies the laws of Inertia?
Why does general relativity fail at short distances? Why does quantum mechanics dominate at short distances?
Why have so many great minds, Einestin, Godel, Wheeler, Hawking, and Penrose called for a new conception of time?
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
--Albert Einstein
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
--Isaac Newton
Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, felt that the pioneer scientist must have "a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination."
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.
--Max Planck
Moving Dimensions Theory (MDT)
Today I am writing regarding Moving Dimensions Theory--a deeper model for explaining diverse phenomena in both quantum mechanics and relativity.
The General Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
The Specific Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c in quantized units of the Planck length.
Relativistic, classical, and quantum mechanical phenomena, as well as time itself, are emergent properties of this fundamental principle. Newton's laws, the principle of Inertia, Einstein's postulates, and the inherent wave-particle duality of QM may be explained with this model.
A few years back, while surfing a towering wave on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a beautiful thought occurred to me. Suppose the wave I was riding represented a coordinate in a dimension. Then although I was approaching shore, I was not moving in this dimension.
The dimension itself was moving with me--I was surfing the dimension. In a flash I saw that that is why photons never age--they are moving along with the fourth dimension, and thus stationary relative to it. In another flash I saw that that is why a photon's space-time interval is represented by a null vector, or a 0, no matter how far it travels. Indeed Einstein stated that an object's velocity through space-time was always c--even stationary objects are traveling at the velocity c through time! How could this be, were it not for a fourth expanding dimension, which matter could surf as photons, giving rise to our notion of time? And so it is that Moving Dimensions Theory was born as the wave crested and crashed about me, thundering on down, as I fought to
http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=56
Tied Up & Strung Out: Hollywood String Theory Movie!!! Looking For Extras!!!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ALL TIED UP & STRUNG ALONG, a movie about String Theorists and their expansive theories which extend human ignorance, pomposity, and frailty into higher dimensions, is set to start filming this fall. Jessica Alba, John Cleese, Eugene Levie, Jackie Chan, and David Duchovney of X-files fame have all signed on to the $700 million Hollywood project, which is still cheaper than String Theory itself, and will likely displace less physicists from the academy.
"As contemporary physics is about money, hype, mythology, and chicks," Ed Witten explained from his offices at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, "The next logical step was Hollywood, although I thought Burt Reynolds should play me instead of Eugene Levy."
Brian Greene, the famous String Theorist who will be played by David "the truth is out there" Duchovney, explained the plot: "String theory's muddled, contorted theories that lack postulates, laws, and experimentally-verified equations have Einstein spinning so fast in his grave that it creates a black hole. In order to save the world, we String Theorists have to stop reformulating String Theory faster than the speed of light. We are called upon to stop violating the conservation of energy by mining higher dimensions to publish more BS than can accounted for with the Big Bang alone, and I win the Nobel prize for showing that M-Theory is in fact the dark matter it has been searching for."
Greene continues: "At first my character is reluctant to stop theorizing and start postulating, but when my love interest Jessica Alba is sucked into the black hole, I search my soul and find Paul Davies there, played by John Cleese. I ask him what he's doing in my soul, and he explains that the answer is contained in the mind of God, which only he is privy too, but for a small fee, some tax and tuition dollars, a couple grants here and there, and an all-expense-paid book tour with stops in Zurich and Honolulu, he can let me in on it. And he shows me God in all her greater glory, as he points out that we can make more money in Hollywood than writing coffee-table books that recycle Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Feynman, and Wheeler. I am quickly converted, and I agree to turn my back on String Theory's hoax and save Jessica Alba."
But it's not that easy, as standing in Greene's way is Michio "king of pop-theory-hipster-irony-the-theory-of-everything- or-anything-made-
you-read-this" Kaku, played by Jackie Chan. Kaku beats the crap out of Greene for alomst blowing the "ironic" pretense his salary, benefits, and all-expense paid trips depend on. "WE MUST HOLD BACK THE YOUNG SCIENTISTS WITH OUR NON-THEORIES!! WE MUST FILL THE ACADEMY WITH THE POMO DARK MATTER THAT IS STRING THEORY TO KEEP OUR UNIVERSE FROM FLYING APART, OUR PYRAMID SCHEMES FROM TOPPLING, AND OUR PERPETUAL-MOTION NSF MONEY MACHINE FROM STOPPING!!" Kaku argues as he delivers a flying back-kick, "There can be ony ONE! I WILL be String Theory's GODFATHER as referenced on my web page!! I have better hair!"
But Greene fights back as he signs his seventeenth book deal to make the hand-waving incoherence of String Theory accessible to the South Park generation, senior citizens, and starving chirldren around the world. "Kaku! Kaku! (pronounced Ka-Kaw! Ka-Kaw! like Owen Wilson did in Bottle Rocket)," Greene shouts. "It is theoretically impossible to build a coffee tables strong enough to support any more coffee-table physics books!!!"
"Time travel is also theoretically impossible, but there's a helluva lot more money for us in flushing physics down a wormhole. Nobody knows what the #&#%&$ M stands for in M theory ya hand-waving, TV-hogging crank!!! Get it?? Ha Ha Ha! We're laughing at the public! We're the insider pomo hipsters! Get with the gangsta-wanksta-pranksta CRANKSTER blin
I would not say that time "has a different rate of passage for different people" though. "Rate of passage" of time is a tautology.
Instead, it seems to me that time and distance vary according to other factors not including an observer.
Bill
anyone else realize this guy is trying to get people from the "everything is relative" thinking, to the "everything is absolute" thinking?
http://www.rebelscience.org/Seven/bible.html
Just to discredit him, he believes in ID.
I still enjoyed seeing his perspective.
So anyway, has any one of the thousands of slashdotters identified this guy. He writes a lot os stuff that could make sense, but seems to be invented in his mind. The physics stuff is a neat philosophical idea, but current theories seem a bit more informative. his bible brain connection made me smile. I attended a jesuit university so I was forced to read the bible. I am still pretty much convinced that it is just cult propaganda, but it would be neat to show that it contains usuable knowledge.
he says in his site that he is an AI developer. anybody heard of him or his "work"?
Otherwise, why do we say that astronauts lose time when they are travelling at relatively high velocity in space? Because their time travels more slowly than ours: dt1 is less than dt2.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Time is what a clock tells you...it is defined via observation.
I work for the Department Of Defense in their weapons research program, I've been working here for seven years. We have built a radio that can receive messages from the future via photons that travel back in time. This technology actually isn't new, and there's been much research and experimentation on the subject since the 1990s.
I've been sending messages backwards to myself on a regular basis for a year now. I perform these sessions during the work day, only giving it a break for lunch. It is rather interesting to send news and information back to yourself. It really makes work easier, and my life easier to manage. If I had had this technology before 9/11 I would have been able to save lives. The question is if it is right to do this, and would we be able to change an event so large and what consequences would that have? Would the U.S. have failed to react to Al'qaeda in time to stop something even bigger from happening? Would we have destroyed the Taliban, or would Afghanistan still be a safe place for the terrorists?
There are two problems with our approach, as time elapses we are experiencing a discontinuity between our communications. We've been accurately tracking the time periods at which we send each other a message. For example, at 10:42:03 AM on November 8th, 2005 I sent a message to myself on 12:36:58 AM on Novemeber 3rd, 2005, when really it should have been 10:42:03 at each temporal zone. Sometimes the time will be close, and other times it will be rather different. It may be that some natural phenomenom is responsible, or we've been timing the transmissions inaccurately and its beginning to snowball.
Suffice it to say, I don't believe in travel to another arbitrary time. You could not travel back to witness Jesus on the cross or experience the time of the dinosaurs. It may not even be possible to transmit the vast amounts of matter it would require to reconstruct a human being. And, then there's the problem of how you reconstruct them. I suppose if you had technological advantages from hundreds of years in the future you could pull it off, but we're stuck here and now and we don't have that knowledge.
I think everyone can feel safe knowing that no tourists (or illegal aliens, ala Southpark) from the future are going to come back to bother us.
x/x=1, but dx/dx does not, since dx is a differential unit. As x goes to 0, x/x becomes indeterminate (0/0 = k, where k is some indeterminate real number).
v=dt/dt isn't nonsensical. dt is the limit of t as t goes to 0. Thus, as t goes to 0, v goes to k. Or, v is indeterminate. It's something, but we don't have the mathematical framework to figure out what k is. Thus, TFA has told us that there *is* some velocity along the time axis, but we just can't compute it.
No physics problem here, folks. Just our inability to adequately model the physical universe with our current mathematics. We can fully expect some future Important Physics Theory to give us the math needed to get past this roadblock, much like relativity gave us the mathematical framework to explain gravity.
There was an old bore named Gore
Who wanted to tax the poor.
When he screamed, "I won"
They toasted his bun
And he was never heard from no more.
Bill
Hmm, I'm not sure why it took people so long to realize this - I mean, I figured that time doesnt really exist over a decade ago (I'm only 29) - it's just a means of measuring change. Basic common sense. HOWEVER - you CAN see into the past.. we do that every day looking at the stars. :)
For my next trick, I'll make my pet fish breathe air! Oh wait, that's already been done...
By now you'd think we'd know if time travel was possible. Surely people from the distant future have had plenty of time (ie, forever) to make a journey back to the 20th century. If people were able to go back in time I'm sure that by now someone from the future would've let it slip that time travel was possible.
The only reasons why this hasn't happened are:
(1) time travel IS possible but we never manage to invent it,
(2) sometime in the future we get wiped out before time travel is invented,
(3) people who are allowed to time travel are infinitely better at keeping secrets than we currently are,
or (4) time travel isn't possible.
Yes. Everything in the universe has been set in motion from the moment of the Big Bang.
Me, you, your dog, my cat are all moving very quickly in the universe.
(Unfortunately, we only see but a snapshot of it before we are gone.)
All of this is theoretically measurable so whether or not the Universe unfolded, turned itself inside out from the previous Big Crunch or was created by the Breath of God, it really doesn't matter.
The Universe is measurable and predictable. (Except for that Dark Matter stuff)
Check out: Cassini http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimed ia/Cassini_Multimedia_Collection(Search_Agent)_arc hive_1.html
The Cassini program, from the ground up, is a nice example of practical "theoretical" physics at work.
The author should stop chasing Schrodinger's cat. Time Travel? Only into the Future. And its always a one way trip. Moving without "moving" ? Someones been into getting into the the spice again.
The mere fact that some site rebelscience.com posts to the effect that there's no time travel does not make it so.
The justification for the results are extroardinarily lacking, and I fail to see how one can rationally conclude the validity of the final conclusion.
Until one has an experimental result reflecting your theories about time, it seems a fairly ludicrous assertion to make that something like time travel is impossible, etc, etc; considering the very real possibility of oversights, misunderstandings, or plain old fashioned error.
Who's Louis Savain, anyway, and how do I know I can trust his writing? I tried to google his name to see if he has an online VC posted somewhere but failed to find any mention of his name.
Now, if he's not a physicist or a recognized scientist, his attack on established theories looses solid ground. I'm not against radical thought, but I want to know it doesn't come from some crack pot. Sorry.
Go this nut's homepage. Click on the link for "AI From the Bible". Brace yourself for a serious display of mental illness.
Kook, folks. Nothing to see here.
You are correct on the idiot part... further to that, check out his post on sci.physics! The guy is basically making fun of the /. crowd:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics/browse_ thread/thread/95c2425f94932e45/d654a904f9ac58ba#d6 54a904f9ac58ba
Lawyers show again and again that an expert does not know what he is talking about.
Ah sorry but if this is to be taken as a norm, then that is not my experience.
Lawyers do not tend to show an expert does not know what he is talking about. Rather lawyers tend to play word games better than an expert plays word games. The lawyer of course does not understand the subject of the experts expertise, but that does not matter, because the expert finds himself in the domain of the lawyer with no other option but to play the game for which the lawyer is a highly paid professional.
Lawyers will take the most trivial flaw in an experts findings, opinion or methods, found through the lawyers own paid experts and then harp on it and others in court until the expert seems less credible. I have witnessed first hand that it is NOT who is correct, rather it is who is most convincing. You can have experts on both sides, both making technically correct statements and the winning side will be that which has the lawyers and barristers which make their experts seem credible and the others not so.
And what's more, when lawyers really DO show that an expert does not know what he is talking about, it is ONLY because of another expert. NOT the lawyer.
Zeno posted this same thing, like, 2500 years ago.
Yup, I couldn't agree more. The guy definitely needs at least an editor, if not a deeper understanding of what he's talking about.
I was particularly amused by the fact that travel through time was impossible, due to the reliance on time to judge velocity through the "dimension," but his breakthrough revelation that spatial dimensions were fictitious, and particles could zap from one point to the other without passing through any intervening points.
I read that right, didn't I? Why must temporal relocation, then, pass through all intervening points ...?
My reply to this so called "article": "Oh, haha, how very fucking funny you are. Now go back to picking your ass with a stick while us homo sapiens continue on the task of actually finding out more about the universe we live in, to better our lives, instead of making fun of everyone with an IQ higher than our own."
There, I said it, you're a fucking monkey. Have a nice day.
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
... ok, this guy is really nuts!
Thanks for coming guys. Only on Slashdot would people take this seriously. I've seen some interesting articles on the Reptillian Conspiracy, that the CIA faked the moon landings, and I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
What about Doctor Who? And the TARDIS? It can travel through time and space...
Seriously, I think the author is not being serious and it's just a joke or hoax. And can't you have dt1/dt2 (the 1 and 2's are subscripts)? The author didn't think of that.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
time travel is conciously anticipating the future!
some people consider themself in the present.
they talk about time travel.
some people consider themself living in the past.
they can time travel. it's a point of view.
Your "pausing the VCR" idea essentially means that you repeat twice those sections of the tape where time travel occurs, first with the original version, then with the modified one.
But doesn't this mean, that the God is then stuck to iterating the same 1950..1985 part of the tape over and over again? Because each time you reach 1985, it's a bit different (because of Marty's actions), and Marty's actions when he goes ("again") back to 1950 change a bit.
And once you take it to the logical conclusion, it seems that the only way time can go on from 1985 without the need for "pausing" is when the 1950-1985 reaches an equilibrium, and Marty's actions in 1950 produce exactly similar 1985 as it was when Marty went to past. Which is essentially the whole "you cannot alter the past in new ways" -concept we started with: Marty can only change the past to create exactly the kind of world he left from (and is this in a way forced to go to the past to do it).
Of course, there's the scenario where equilibrium would not be reached, and this would loop forever, but wouldn't God want to avoid those?-)
And when there are more than 1 simultaneous jumps back in time, the whole VCR thing starts to become really complicated - if two people leave from 1985 to 1900 and 1950, which of those realities you tackle first? What if the guy who went to 1900 goes then to 2100, and the other from 1950 to 1800?
http://codeandlife.com
I'll add that in this scenario Marty travels back in time in front of the mall and never reappears. He leaves that timeline and moves to a new one. Doc presumably dies because that Doctor Brown never received Marty's warning about the terrorists and didn't wear a bullet proof vest.
The movies did contain one thing that seemed inconsistent with reason. When they left Jennifer on the porch of the house that WAS her's in the original timeline, she should have stayed in the town ruled by Biff.
Of course, that was governed by the rule of "It's really hard to write Jennifer into the 50s comic book plot and the BTTF 3 plot, so let's just leave her on the porch."
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The universe is an illusion of your perception. That perception is created within your own mind.
Yes everything is real. But the REAL universe is very different from the image your mind constructs. We think of matter as something real and tangible. In reality we do not see matter at all. If we could, there would be virtually nothing to see. Everything would be transparent. We see and percieve FORCES and ENERGY, not matter.
And if you're schizophrenic, you also notice god talking to you all time
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
So who are you to say which one of them travelled at nearly lightspeed and which one didn't? Isn't speed relative where each see the other one moving and himself as stationary?
Is it not the acceleration that causes time dilatation and not the actual end velocity?
Lamest discussion, too.
Quick, someone make another joke!
I have yet to see a good argument for the existence of time at all.
Where, should one ask oneself, is its ontology if not in the minds of the self?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
From: http://physicsmathforums.com/ [physicsmathforums.com]
http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=60 [physicsmathforums.com]
Book on Moving Dimensions Theory Due Out in Fall 05
Moving Dimensions Theory
By Dr. E
http://physicsmathforums.com/ [physicsmathforums.com]
Questions Addressed by MDT:
Why is the speed of light constant in all frames?
Why are light and energy quantized?
How can matter display both wave and particle properties?
Why are there non-local effects in quantum mechanics?
Why does time stop at the speed of light?
How come a photon does not age?
Why are inertial mass and gravitational mass the same thing?
Why do moving bodies exhibit length contraction?
Why are mass and energy equivalent?
Why does time's arrow point in the direction it points in? Why entropy?
Why do photons appear as spherically-symmetric wavefronts traveling with the velocity c?
Why is there a minus sign in the following metric? x^2+y^2+z^2-c^2t^2=s^2
What deeper reality underlies Einstein's postulates of relativity?
What deeper reality underlies Newton's laws?
What underlies the laws of Inertia?
Why does general relativity fail at short distances? Why does quantum mechanics dominate at short distances?
Why have so many great minds, Einestin, Godel, Wheeler, Hawking, and Penrose called for a new conception of time?
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
--Albert Einstein
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
--Isaac Newton
Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, felt that the pioneer scientist must have "a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination."
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.
--Max Planck
Moving Dimensions Theory (MDT)
Today I am writing regarding Moving Dimensions Theory--a deeper model for explaining diverse phenomena in both quantum mechanics and relativity.
The General Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
The Specific Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c in quantized units of the Planck length.
Relativistic, classical, and quantum mechanical phenomena, as well as time itself, are emergent properties of this fundamental principle. Newton's laws, the principle of Inertia, Einstein's postulates, and the inherent wave-particle duality of QM may be explained with this model.
A few years back, while surfing a towering wave on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a beautiful thought occurred to me. Suppose the wave I was riding represented a coordinate in a dimension. Then although I was approaching shore, I was not moving in this dimension.
The dimension itself was moving with me--I was surfing the dimension. In a flash I saw that that is why photons never age--they are moving along with the fourth dimension, and thus stationary relative to it. In another flash I saw that that is why a photon's space-time interval is represented by a null vector, or a 0, no matter how far it travels. Indeed Einstein stated that an object's velocity through space-time was always c--even stationary objects are traveling at the velocity c through time! How could this be, were it not for a fourth expanding dimension, which matter could surf as photons, giving rise to our notion of time? And so it is that Moving Dimensions Theory was born as the wave crested and crashed about me, thundering on down, as I fought t
it has become obvious that I was mistaken. My apologies.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
it has become obvious that you are correct and my post was mistaken. My apologies and thank you for spurring me to learn more about dimensionless numbers.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
VCR stands for Virtual Creation Resequencer, not Video Cassette Recorder silly!
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I have seen more convincing arguments for why the earth is flat, evolution is bogus, and we never went to the moon. Not that I believe those 3 arguments, but they do a lot better job than this guy. (Starting off by calling some of the greatest physicist of the last century crackpots is not a good way to start. I didn't do my research, but who is this guy?)
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
LOL Why is Jack Sarfatti on the list of scientists? Anyone who has hung at sci.physics or any remotely related Usenet group has come across his ramblings about quantum non-locality and how it grants the human mind magical properties (a belief he admittedly shares with Roger Penrose, but he is at least published and doesn't make nutty crossposts on Usenet).
All this conversation stemming from an article written by the same author that says g0d has hidden the secrets of A.I. in the bible?! http://www.rebelscience.org/Seven/bible.html
Seriously, this article was on digg about a month ago, and everyone tore it, and the author, a few extra orifaces. Now it makes slashdot, and history repeats itself... not to mention the fact that using grade 10 physics equations to "prove" time is immutable, and simultaneously calling every great physicist of our time a crackpot, is a combination of stupidity, and audacity, the likes of which I have never seen.
I want to downmod the entire story. Who's with me?
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
Missing are any credentials, mathematical proofs, or experiments. It appears all of his "theories" are mind exercises not coupled with observations of the universe, and are merely thought exercises made by a person who passed physics 120.
I couldn't even find a byline.
No. And I'm definite about that.
Saying that time travel is represented by dt/dt only demonstrates a total lack of thought about the process. The time traveller is still moving forward on his personal timeline at the normal pace whilst moving backwards (or forwards more rapidly) through other people's time. So if I enter a time machine and go back 50 years, the actual formula would be dt1/dt2 where dt1 is -50years and dt2 is however long the trip takes me (let's say, for sake of argument, 5 seconds). So I (and my machine) will be 5 seconds older, but everything around me will be 50 years younger. Then we can get into all the other things that make time travel impossible/impractical, such as the fact that 50 years ago, the surface of the Earth was not here where I am sitting, so a travel strictly through time would leave me, at best, in space. So a time machine needs to also travel through space relative to the planet/solar system/galaxy. Then, if I actually get to this relative position 50 years in the past, then I can start worrying about creating a paradox simply by being there, much less actually doing anything.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
A worm can only see the bit of apple in front of him. That is the now. The apple-meat beyond that is future, the apple-meat in the digestive tract is memory, the walls of the tunnel are the past.
The meat engine that is a human* is only capable of certain direct perceptions, like the meat engine that is a worm. We cannot experience the totality of what is; our physical equipment instead grants us access to a series of slices of reduced complexity, and allows us to retain further simplified analogues of those slices as memories.
*alternatively, the meat engine that humans inhabit. The nature of consciousness and the existence or non-existence of the soul is a separate discussion.
Well, one of the possibilities, as referenced in my earlier post, would be some kind of chronal intertia. Much like how jumping straight up on Earth leaves you in the same position when you land, I could see it being possible that one would carry the inertia of movement while traveling through time. That would also account for the relative velocities of your body. *shrug* It's all theoretical in the end, of course.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
There's some fairly indepth research being done within the Quantum Physics arena here in Australia that deals with the theoretical modification of past events. That is to say, you MAY not be able to "travel back in time" but in theory it is possible to change the past to put a positive spin on the present. Of course, it's pure theory however I believe this whole thread is based on theory. I only know of this particular study being done as I'm close friends with a few of the researchers. :) Just my 2c.
Why can't particles jump several Planck Lengths? Or is it axiomatic? "They just can't."
Is the stuff about tunnelling true?
Thank you, Real Physicists!! GuyIf you're not wasted, the day is.
...was rejected.
Oh well.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity (and, by extension, the general theory) very explicitly permits a kind of time dilation that would ordinarily be called time travel. The theory holds that, relative to a stationary observer, time appears to pass more slowly for faster-moving bodies: for example, a moving clock will appear to run slow; as a clock approaches the speed of light its hands will appear to nearly stop moving. The effects of this sort of time dilation are discussed in the popular "twin paradox" which asks the question, "If two twins are moving relative to each other, they will each appear to the other to have aged more slowly. But when they reunite, how can each twin be younger than the other?"
A second, similar type of time travel is permitted by general relativity, where a distant observer sees time passing more slowly for a clock at the bottom of a deep gravity well, and a clock of an object lowered into a deep gravity well and pulled back up will indicate that less time has passed than the distant observer's clock. However, these effects allow "time travel" only toward the future: never backward. This is not typical of the "time travel" featured in science fiction, and there is little doubt surrounding its existence. "Time travel" will hereafter refer to travel with some degree of freedom into the past or future.
If one were able to move information or matter from one point to another faster than light, then according to special relativity, there would be an observer who sees this transfer as allowing information or matter to travel into the past. Additionally, faster than light travel along suitable paths would correspond to travel backward in time as seen by all observers. This results simply from the geometry of spacetime and the role of the speed of light in that geometry.
Time travel is possible. Here, let me show you. I'm going to travel into the future and prove it.
[waits a minute]
I have arrived. Remember that post you made about time travel not being possible?
Darryl L. Pierce "What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"
Seriously, what the fuck is Taco smoking.
The bad news is that time does not change.
Let's ignore this statement for now, as it's up for both scientific and philosophical debate.
Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt.
Where x is a vector, not a scalar.
Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical.
Well, besides the fact that dt/dt=1 (dt/dt = d[t]/dt = 1), dt/dt is NOT "velocity in time." Besides, velocity is a vector defined expressly in dealing with spatial (non-temporal) measurements. To use "velocity in time" requires a new definition of the word. In any case, the position in spacetime of a person may be expressed as a vector A(x,y,z,t). Thus, you would never take a derivative in that way; instead, we would have the partial derivative of A, which is A_t(x,y,z,t). This is not the same thing as dt/dt, and if you claim to know about this type of science, you'd better fucking know what a PDE is.
As simple as that. In other words, no time travel to the past or the future, no motion in space-time, no wormholes and no hanky-panky with your great, great grandmother. There is only the changing present, aka the NOW. The good news is that distance is an illusion and we'll be able to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere.
I honestly think this guy wrote some bullshit to prove that anything will get posted if it uses enough "science". It's like a junior high school student smoked some pot and read a physics textbook! "Hey, man. You know stars? Well, they're probably just like...mann....I'm so hiiiiigh..."
Too bad for u, who ever posted this, because it is possible when the quantum computer comes out and when the quantum teleportation become available!! While travelling between two Quantum computers it is possible to reverse back in time. Sounds great, but the problem is, who is going to turn you back from the stream of energy to your self again?