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The Possibility of Paradox-Free Time Travel
relliker writes in with word of a paper up on the ArXiv by Seth Lloyd and co-workers, exploring the possibility that "postselection" effects in non-linear quantum mechanics might allow paradox-free time travel. "Lloyd's time machine gets around [the grandfather paradox] because of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics: anything that this time machine allows can also happen with finite probability anyway... Another interesting feature of this machine is that it does not require any of the distortions of spacetime that traditional time machines rely on. In these, the fabric of spacetime has to be ruthlessly twisted in a way that allows the time travel to occur. ... Postselection can only occur if quantum mechanics is nonlinear, something that seems possible in theory but has never been observed in practice. All the evidence so far is that quantum mechanics is linear. In fact some theorists propose that the seemingly impossible things that postselection allows is a kind of proof that quantum mechanics must be linear."
http://timecube.com/ ... obviously.
Am I the only person who has noticed the Authors name? Seth Lloyd = Sith Lord I think we should be very cautious of these findings.
Has nobody anything snarky to say?
They are too busy trying to build postselection time machines. Expect to lose your first post status as soon as one of them succeeds.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
But if I'm going BACK in time, I'm taking some aspirin, toothpaste, deodorant, and toilet paper with me. I hope the machine is big enough.
Don't forget your towel you insensitive clod!
My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
“The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics, and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel was, by its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods of history, but this is clearly bunk. The trouble is that a lot of history is now quite clearly bunk as well.”