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."

Comments

The e-mail I sent to the editor was ignored.

[Cujo]

This guy is a pseudo-scientific moonbat. Please don't waste your time with the not-so-FA.

Re:The e-mail I sent to the editor was ignored.

[slavemowgli]

Note the URLs of the articles linked:

http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm
http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/nasty.htm#Spa ce

(emphasis mine.) That alone should make it pretty clear that this isn't meant to be taken seriously. Oh yeah, and the story got the "foot" icon, too, so even Taco got it. :)

Idiotic

[Zeinfeld]

The guy who wrote the article simply does not understand the question that is being debated by the likes of Feynman et. al.

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.

Re: Really? A tie?

[gunnk]

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

Er am i the only one to notice that...

[kesuki]

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 ;)

CmdrTaco has been scammed by Usenet schizo

[DiamondGeezer]

Dear Rob

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 ...@steel.ucs.indiana.edu (Gregory L. Hansen) wrote:
>In article ,
>Traveler wrote:
>>On 22 Jan 2006 07:55:33 -0800, glhan ...@indiana.edu wrote:

>>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

Parent is right! Article is FOS

[PatSand]

The creator of the article is using superficial logic to show that time is invariant. Of course, when that is the driving dimension of the model (t,x(t),y(t),z(t)) it should be obvious to anybody that you can't alter t! Now if we add some more dimensions, life gets interesting: (w,t(w),x(t,w),y(t,w),z(t,w)) can allow for t to change (BASED ON w).

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?