Re:Parallel universe theory not an excuse
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Time Travel
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· Score: 1
This is not a logical conclusion. Let's say that time is 2 dimensional. You move back to your imediate past, which is reverse 1d movement and you kill your father. The act of moving into the past has now changed the future. If you now simply sped up time from your new location in the past you would never get to a future in which you would exsist. Worse still, no matter how much you would travel you would never get back to your timeline you once knew. Infact, the more you time travel, the further one would move from your original timeline. So instead of thinking of a tree where the root is the past and the branches are the future, think of it like a tree where you start at the root, the present, and when you move into the past OR the future (ie move through time) you simply move down one of the braches but no matter how you move along the branch, you are still moving away from your original root.
The only way you could return to your original time would be to time travel not in 1d (moving to your direct future or past) but in 2d time. Once you could travel in 2d time you could move accross multiple time layers instead of just chosing 1d slices in 2d time.
1. It wouldn't cost any energy to create a parallel universes already exsist. You would simply move to it. There is a lot of reason to believe that every possible parallel universe possible in the universe is already in exsistence.
2. Again, you assume that time travel = teleportation. This is a common sci-fi principle. I think you need to look at it more like Einstiends theory of relativity. The faster you move, the slower you move through time, but your relative time does not slow down. It is the relative space-time that changes. So there is no reason why moving backwards through time would make you tranport off the earth because at every second you moved back in time you would still exsist in the present and the earth would still hold you in it's gravitational field.
3. Everything is a theory until proven. This 3rd argument simply points out the obvious. =)
Re:Hawking would disagree
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Time Travel
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· Score: 1
No man is pure knowledge. Every man can be wrong. It is our ability to admit limitations to our own knowledge that show true wisdom. Einstien made many mistakes, and he admitted them publicaly. This does not mean that he was not a great man. I find that some of Hawkin's theories are quite possibly wrong or at least short sighted. And I have read much on the subject. This does not mean I value his opinion and contributions any less.
As for exploding time traveling objects or a universe that would make it useless... lets invent it first and then decide it is useless before we draw any conclusions. =)
Re:What is wrong with everyone?
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Time Travel
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Oh come now, not all of us are closed minded. =) There is a 0.1% out there that are willing to believe that the universe has no limits beyond our own.
Re:Parallel universe theory not an excuse
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
To study history maybe? Nothing is as interesting to humans as other humans, so if humans were to travel back in time, it would probably be to visit their own civilization. On the other hand, the technical or energy requirements for time travel may be so vast as to severely limit the total amount of travel. In that case, there would probably be no frivolous attention-grabbing time-tourism.
First of all, we can't assume that the energy required to time travel is vast because like any new technology, the energy requirements might become more and more efficient so it might be one day true that time travel is very easy to achieve.
You should be careful in your assumptions. Humans may never discover time travel, so it would hold that you are never visited. Also, if time is not linear (i.e. if there are multiple parallel time lines) then there is no reason to assume that time travel should ever occur in our timeline. It may very well be that a future person will discover time travel, go to the past and recreate a new future - a future of which our time line is not a part of - a future in which time travel will never be invented - or even a future in which the human race is exterminated.
My whole point is that if time travel is possible, then time must not be linear (1 dimensional) but planar (2 dimensional) if not even multidimensional. So the act of moving into the past doesn't exclude the future, it simply creates a new future. If time is multidimensional then the whole paradox of changing the future is no longer relevant because you are not changing your original future, you are changing a new future. A new 1d slice along a 2d plane.
The whole point of this post was to say that the total number of parallel universes may not matter. It seems to me that if a time traveler went back into the past, it would necessarily be a past whose possible futures include the birth of that time traveler. That would presuppose human civilization, and the possibility of time travel, so the number of universes arrived in must be, even if infinite, limited in scope - so a civilization in any given universe may have a very large chance of being visited, depending on how common time travel becomes in the average universe that includes human civilization.
Again, here you make the assumption that time travel is limited in a linear fashion to visit only the immediate past of one's own future. I would challenge that assumption based on the fact that one persons past is not the same as another persons past. Relativity is crucial here. If I can travel into my own past (which is backwards 1d motion along time) then I create a new possible 1d forward motion through time. But my new 1d motion through time may never include your time. I may move so far back in time that I eliminate your existence (by killing your grand parents for example) but that does not mean you cease to exist. It simply means that in the time line where time travel is possible and in this time line that this -particular- time traveler has created, you no longer exist.
Chaos theory is also very important. Each time I time travel my universe, my traditional 1d timeline would never be the same. Even if I traveled for only a fraction of a second in the past I would never be able to return to my old future unless I was able to time travel in 2d and not in 1d (and we are still assuming 1d time travel).
So if you had two time travelers, one goes into the past 100 years ago, the other goes back 10 years and they both interact in the past (even just being in the past is contaminating the future) then it would be a logical conclusion to say that they could never meet each other again in their old future because they had now both created entirely different future 1d paths based upon their new past involvements.
So, without knowing more about actual time travel, it is probably wrong to assume anything. Maybe people don't time travel because then they could never get home. Maybe people realized that time travel was useless because there was no use in changing the past if you never could return to the present. Maybe people are time traveling all the time but in doing so they are disappearing from the known universe and creating their own alternative universe which is forever separated by our own (and which you could only enter if you had left with that person in the same time machine)... the assumptions and cultural implications are so compounded, so completely unknown that to even say for certainty that time travel can or can't exists is simply beyond me. We are not God, nor are any of us experts on anything really... despite all our fancy theories the universe will continue to offer more and more knowledge until the end of time itself.
I hope we can all stay a little objective. And keep a little bit of that wonder, that "I don't know but I'm going to try" in our minds. That's what dreams are made of. That's how great people come up with great new idea's. The stuff that stars are made of.
=)))
Carl Sagan is definitely cool. Never finished the book (I lost interest before it got good), but the movie was just top notch.
Take care bro,
Sebastian.
Re:Parallel universe theory not an excuse
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
And it could also be that we live in a time line where time travel is not possible. But then as soon as we discover time travel we will also discover time travellers in our past. This would simply reinforce the non linearatiy of time. For to travel in time, time can not be linear.
Einstein already did that. An atomic clock in a train moves slower the faster the train is moving. Grab any book on the subject like Stephen Hawkins "A brief history of time" and they can prove it and explain it quite eloquently. =)
Re:Theory of Time Travel (Too bad no-one will read
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
What you describe what is classicaly known as a teleporter. This is not the same as a time machine. =) I may be wrong though.
I think that's cool. We need a black Einstien. =o)
Re:Download 2005 sports scores from temporal home
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
Here you make the assumption that information can travel two directions and that the future and the present are two independent realities you can teleport between. They are not. For a start: The future is a direct result of YOUR present. Second, you can not teleport from one time to another, you must move there while experiencing an ever constant present, so any activities from the future must be gained through motion.
If you take information from your "current" future and use it you change the "new" future. Your predictions of the future would always be wrong the moment you thought you had them defined because your new future would be crafted using your old predictions. In fact, the inverse would be created. The more you knew about the future the less the future will look like your predictions and any short term benefits would be inconsequential. People do this all the time already. We are naive to think the stock market is some random gambling zone. Certain individuals have a great deal of information at their control and nothing is more real than a planned corporate change. It is far more real and predictable to say "I will" then "I predict".
On another front, imagine a reality where all beings could time travel effortlessly. The competition to change the future would be so intense from all forms of life that eventually a new stability would occur. It could very well be that our universe is the struggle between such time traveling forces that occur at all times and that our 'present' is merely a current balance of these time forces to craft all of time.
Re:Parallel universe theory not an excuse
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
Everyone on this list so far is very pessimistic and conservative... what happened to dreaming the impossible? Dreaming like a child of a world beyond the conceivable? How do you think we are going to evolve? It's not fun to live in a box. =)
If you could travel to an infinite parallel universe and you could do it anywhere in our universe at any space-time... what would be the chance that they would travel to your space and your time? First of all, why would they travel to your space and your time?
Space is big... REALLY big. I mean your body is 99.999___% space of which are trillions upon trillions of particles. The galaxy is enormous, billions upon billions of stars... then we have billions upon billions of galaxies. We are so small its unbelievable. And in the great scheme of time we live for a fraction of the age of the universe that is near inconceivable. Add to that the fact that they could travel to any number of infinitely possible parallel time dimensions and you have a very small chance of being visited.
And besides, who is to say that time travelers haven't already been to Earth many times. You can never prove 100% with certainty that they have never visited the Earth because you have never been everywhere on the earth for all time.
Check out the movie "contact", it's a really cool movie.
Oh come now, this isn't true. The faster you travel, the faster you fall forward in time. Travel at the speed of light and you will be at the end of time (actualy at 'infinite time' to be quite precise).
it would not matter because your present can never be changed by the past. If they change the future they would not change YOUR future, they would change an alternative future. This is the principle in relativities light cone. You can not escape alter another observers space-time outside of your space-time. =)
Re:Problems with time travel
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Time Travel
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See my post above on 2d vs 1d time. Your points are valid so long as time is linear, but acording to some theories, it is not. =)
Re:Chrononauts end up breathing vacuum.
on
Time Travel
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This is only a problem if you assume that time travel is like teleporting. This is a classic sci-fi misconception. Time travel could be just like walking or slowing time. There is no reason why time travel needs to be like a teleporter, you might actually journey in "space-time" to get to your destination time coordinates. If you use the theory of relativity time forward travel is already possible (and proven) because space-time is all relative to the observer.
Your argument is similar to what people used to say when we first discovered that the earth was moving in space. People could not believe it because they all said that if the earth was really spinning and moving as fast as it did, why didn't we all fly off?
Re:two problems with this, apart from all the othe
on
Time Travel
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Fist, see my post on 2d time just below yours.
I agree that the present is the only thing that exists. But don't forget that one can already travel "into the future". The mere act of moving away from the earth moves you into the future by a fraction of a second. Black holes and accelerators can move particles trillions of years forward in time and it is happening ever moment.
Secondly, thermodynamics is a law that applies currently to our universe. If we discover that time is not linear but in fact 2 dimensional it would also be logical to assume that the laws of thermodynamics are also 2 dimensional. Which means that you can take energy from one time dimension and move it to another dimension so long as the total energy in all dimensions remains equal (which it would).
I'd like to challenge the common argument of "going into the past to kill one's father" this is a paradox. It is only a paradox if one assumes that time is 1 dimensional. That time is some linear path that has direct consequences and is inescapable.
If time were 2 dimensional one could go into any other possible time path without ever creating a paradox. You can go into the past, kill your father and that is ok because you are not traveling in "your" past. Your 'time zone', the 'present' never changes. If you move in a different direction in time other than in a 1d forward (aka the falling direction) you slip into other time paths. In these other time paths there is still direct consequence but it matters not whether that consequence is linear or circular. Basically, the act of you going into the past and killing your own father means that in this new time line you would not exist in that new time zones future. You would not see a double of yourself reborn, and that is ok because you did not come from the future of this new 1d timeline, you came from a 2d timeline parrallel to the current timeline. What is a problem is that if the traveler were time traveling in 1d time he/she would never be able to return to his/her "original" time line. This happens because you would always map any 1d time travel route from your current 2d time to any other point. To return to your original point time travel would need to take place in 2d time... but this is my own theory.
So if at your new present location your future self never existed anymore, it would be impossible to travel to the future you once knew when you would make your machine so you could never return to your original 1d time slice.
[note 1: but you could travel to all kinds of other times and discover all kinds of alternate futures by recreating multiple past events ad infinitum]
[note 2: If you employ the principles of chaos theory the act of moving even an infinitesimal fraction of a second in the past would forever remove you from this 1d time line]
Moving in the past is a very crude way of moving in 2d time. You back up, and then chose a new direction. So basically you are choosing new 1d slices from a 2d plane. There is another option, that instead of transporting back and forth in 1d time that a time machine could allow one to continually move in 2d time without ever needing to revert back to 1d time (but this gets even harder to imagine without experiencing it)
In my personal opinion, we must not forget that we always exist in the present. What we call the past or the future is simply a notion that we use to describe events that were or will be. It's a concept.
3d time travel (or higher) is a a very difficult subject matter that I can only vaguely concieve. I can only make some meaningful arguments on the subject by also talking about string theory, M-planes and about alot of infinity principles.
BTW, his theory is excellent and freshly pioneering, I'm going to read more about it. Thanks! =)
Sebastian. (I'm casualy writing a paper on several of the above related topics)
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a logical conclusion. Let's say that time is 2 dimensional. You move back to your imediate past, which is reverse 1d movement and you kill your father. The act of moving into the past has now changed the future. If you now simply sped up time from your new location in the past you would never get to a future in which you would exsist. Worse still, no matter how much you would travel you would never get back to your timeline you once knew. Infact, the more you time travel, the further one would move from your original timeline. So instead of thinking of a tree where the root is the past and the branches are the future, think of it like a tree where you start at the root, the present, and when you move into the past OR the future (ie move through time) you simply move down one of the braches but no matter how you move along the branch, you are still moving away from your original root.
The only way you could return to your original time would be to time travel not in 1d (moving to your direct future or past) but in 2d time. Once you could travel in 2d time you could move accross multiple time layers instead of just chosing 1d slices in 2d time.
Does that make sense?
1. It wouldn't cost any energy to create a parallel universes already exsist. You would simply move to it. There is a lot of reason to believe that every possible parallel universe possible in the universe is already in exsistence.
2. Again, you assume that time travel = teleportation. This is a common sci-fi principle. I think you need to look at it more like Einstiends theory of relativity. The faster you move, the slower you move through time, but your relative time does not slow down. It is the relative space-time that changes. So there is no reason why moving backwards through time would make you tranport off the earth because at every second you moved back in time you would still exsist in the present and the earth would still hold you in it's gravitational field.
3. Everything is a theory until proven. This 3rd argument simply points out the obvious.
=)
No man is pure knowledge. Every man can be wrong. It is our ability to admit limitations to our own knowledge that show true wisdom. Einstien made many mistakes, and he admitted them publicaly. This does not mean that he was not a great man. I find that some of Hawkin's theories are quite possibly wrong or at least short sighted. And I have read much on the subject. This does not mean I value his opinion and contributions any less.
As for exploding time traveling objects or a universe that would make it useless... lets invent it first and then decide it is useless before we draw any conclusions.
=)
Oh come now, not all of us are closed minded.
=)
There is a 0.1% out there that are willing to believe that the universe has no limits beyond our own.
To study history maybe? Nothing is as interesting to humans as other humans, so if humans were to travel back in time, it would probably be to visit their own civilization. On the other hand, the technical or energy requirements for time travel may be so vast as to severely limit the total amount of travel. In that case, there would probably be no frivolous attention-grabbing time-tourism. First of all, we can't assume that the energy required to time travel is vast because like any new technology, the energy requirements might become more and more efficient so it might be one day true that time travel is very easy to achieve. You should be careful in your assumptions. Humans may never discover time travel, so it would hold that you are never visited. Also, if time is not linear (i.e. if there are multiple parallel time lines) then there is no reason to assume that time travel should ever occur in our timeline. It may very well be that a future person will discover time travel, go to the past and recreate a new future - a future of which our time line is not a part of - a future in which time travel will never be invented - or even a future in which the human race is exterminated. My whole point is that if time travel is possible, then time must not be linear (1 dimensional) but planar (2 dimensional) if not even multidimensional. So the act of moving into the past doesn't exclude the future, it simply creates a new future. If time is multidimensional then the whole paradox of changing the future is no longer relevant because you are not changing your original future, you are changing a new future. A new 1d slice along a 2d plane. The whole point of this post was to say that the total number of parallel universes may not matter. It seems to me that if a time traveler went back into the past, it would necessarily be a past whose possible futures include the birth of that time traveler. That would presuppose human civilization, and the possibility of time travel, so the number of universes arrived in must be, even if infinite, limited in scope - so a civilization in any given universe may have a very large chance of being visited, depending on how common time travel becomes in the average universe that includes human civilization. Again, here you make the assumption that time travel is limited in a linear fashion to visit only the immediate past of one's own future. I would challenge that assumption based on the fact that one persons past is not the same as another persons past. Relativity is crucial here. If I can travel into my own past (which is backwards 1d motion along time) then I create a new possible 1d forward motion through time. But my new 1d motion through time may never include your time. I may move so far back in time that I eliminate your existence (by killing your grand parents for example) but that does not mean you cease to exist. It simply means that in the time line where time travel is possible and in this time line that this -particular- time traveler has created, you no longer exist. Chaos theory is also very important. Each time I time travel my universe, my traditional 1d timeline would never be the same. Even if I traveled for only a fraction of a second in the past I would never be able to return to my old future unless I was able to time travel in 2d and not in 1d (and we are still assuming 1d time travel). So if you had two time travelers, one goes into the past 100 years ago, the other goes back 10 years and they both interact in the past (even just being in the past is contaminating the future) then it would be a logical conclusion to say that they could never meet each other again in their old future because they had now both created entirely different future 1d paths based upon their new past involvements. So, without knowing more about actual time travel, it is probably wrong to assume anything. Maybe people don't time travel because then they could never get home. Maybe people realized that time travel was useless because there was no use in changing the past if you never could return to the present. Maybe people are time traveling all the time but in doing so they are disappearing from the known universe and creating their own alternative universe which is forever separated by our own (and which you could only enter if you had left with that person in the same time machine)... the assumptions and cultural implications are so compounded, so completely unknown that to even say for certainty that time travel can or can't exists is simply beyond me. We are not God, nor are any of us experts on anything really... despite all our fancy theories the universe will continue to offer more and more knowledge until the end of time itself. I hope we can all stay a little objective. And keep a little bit of that wonder, that "I don't know but I'm going to try" in our minds. That's what dreams are made of. That's how great people come up with great new idea's. The stuff that stars are made of. =))) Carl Sagan is definitely cool. Never finished the book (I lost interest before it got good), but the movie was just top notch. Take care bro, Sebastian.
And it could also be that we live in a time line where time travel is not possible. But then as soon as we discover time travel we will also discover time travellers in our past. This would simply reinforce the non linearatiy of time. For to travel in time, time can not be linear.
Einstein already did that. An atomic clock in a train moves slower the faster the train is moving. Grab any book on the subject like Stephen Hawkins "A brief history of time" and they can prove it and explain it quite eloquently.
=)
What you describe what is classicaly known as a teleporter. This is not the same as a time machine.
=)
I may be wrong though.
I think that's cool.
We need a black Einstien.
=o)
Here you make the assumption that information can travel two directions and that the future and the present are two independent realities you can teleport between. They are not. For a start: The future is a direct result of YOUR present. Second, you can not teleport from one time to another, you must move there while experiencing an ever constant present, so any activities from the future must be gained through motion.
If you take information from your "current" future and use it you change the "new" future. Your predictions of the future would always be wrong the moment you thought you had them defined because your new future would be crafted using your old predictions. In fact, the inverse would be created. The more you knew about the future the less the future will look like your predictions and any short term benefits would be inconsequential. People do this all the time already. We are naive to think the stock market is some random gambling zone. Certain individuals have a great deal of information at their control and nothing is more real than a planned corporate change. It is far more real and predictable to say "I will" then "I predict".
On another front, imagine a reality where all beings could time travel effortlessly. The competition to change the future would be so intense from all forms of life that eventually a new stability would occur. It could very well be that our universe is the struggle between such time traveling forces that occur at all times and that our 'present' is merely a current balance of these time forces to craft all of time.
Everyone on this list so far is very pessimistic and conservative... what happened to dreaming the impossible? Dreaming like a child of a world beyond the conceivable? How do you think we are going to evolve? It's not fun to live in a box.
=)
If you could travel to an infinite parallel universe and you could do it anywhere in our universe at any space-time... what would be the chance that they would travel to your space and your time? First of all, why would they travel to your space and your time?
Space is big... REALLY big. I mean your body is 99.999___% space of which are trillions upon trillions of particles. The galaxy is enormous, billions upon billions of stars... then we have billions upon billions of galaxies. We are so small its unbelievable. And in the great scheme of time we live for a fraction of the age of the universe that is near inconceivable. Add to that the fact that they could travel to any number of infinitely possible parallel time dimensions and you have a very small chance of being visited.
And besides, who is to say that time travelers haven't already been to Earth many times. You can never prove 100% with certainty that they have never visited the Earth because you have never been everywhere on the earth for all time.
Check out the movie "contact", it's a really cool movie.
Oh come now, this isn't true. The faster you travel, the faster you fall forward in time. Travel at the speed of light and you will be at the end of time (actualy at 'infinite time' to be quite precise).
it would not matter because your present can never be changed by the past. If they change the future they would not change YOUR future, they would change an alternative future. This is the principle in relativities light cone. You can not escape alter another observers space-time outside of your space-time.
=)
See my post above on 2d vs 1d time. Your points are valid so long as time is linear, but acording to some theories, it is not.
=)
This is only a problem if you assume that time travel is like teleporting. This is a classic sci-fi misconception. Time travel could be just like walking or slowing time. There is no reason why time travel needs to be like a teleporter, you might actually journey in "space-time" to get to your destination time coordinates. If you use the theory of relativity time forward travel is already possible (and proven) because space-time is all relative to the observer.
Your argument is similar to what people used to say when we first discovered that the earth was moving in space. People could not believe it because they all said that if the earth was really spinning and moving as fast as it did, why didn't we all fly off?
Fist, see my post on 2d time just below yours.
I agree that the present is the only thing that exists. But don't forget that one can already travel "into the future". The mere act of moving away from the earth moves you into the future by a fraction of a second. Black holes and accelerators can move particles trillions of years forward in time and it is happening ever moment.
Secondly, thermodynamics is a law that applies currently to our universe. If we discover that time is not linear but in fact 2 dimensional it would also be logical to assume that the laws of thermodynamics are also 2 dimensional. Which means that you can take energy from one time dimension and move it to another dimension so long as the total energy in all dimensions remains equal (which it would).
Sebastian.
I'd like to challenge the common argument of "going into the past to kill one's father" this is a paradox. It is only a paradox if one assumes that time is 1 dimensional. That time is some linear path that has direct consequences and is inescapable.
If time were 2 dimensional one could go into any other possible time path without ever creating a paradox. You can go into the past, kill your father and that is ok because you are not traveling in "your" past. Your 'time zone', the
'present' never changes. If you move in a different direction in time other than in a 1d forward (aka the falling direction) you slip into other time paths. In these other time paths there is still direct consequence but it matters not whether that consequence is linear or circular.
Basically, the act of you going into the past and killing your own father means that in this new time line you would not exist in that new time zones future. You would not see a double of yourself reborn, and that is ok because you did
not come from the future of this new 1d timeline, you came from a 2d timeline parrallel to the current timeline. What is a problem is that if the traveler were time traveling in 1d time he/she would never be able to return to his/her "original" time line. This happens because you would always map any 1d time travel route from your current 2d time to any other point. To return to your original point time travel would need to take place in 2d time... but this is my own theory.
So if at your new present location your future self never existed anymore, it would be impossible to travel to the future you once knew when you would make your machine so you could never return to your original 1d time slice.
[note 1: but you could travel to all kinds of other times and discover all kinds of alternate futures by recreating multiple past events ad infinitum]
[note 2: If you employ the principles of chaos theory the act of moving even an infinitesimal fraction of a second in the past would forever remove you from this 1d time line]
Moving in the past is a very crude way of moving in 2d time. You back up, and then chose a new direction. So basically you are choosing new 1d slices from a 2d plane. There is another option, that instead of transporting back and forth in 1d time that a time machine could allow one to continually move in 2d time without ever needing to revert back to 1d time (but this gets even harder to imagine without experiencing it)
In my personal opinion, we must not forget that we always exist in the present. What we call the past or the future is simply a notion that we use to describe events that were or will be. It's a concept.
3d time travel (or higher) is a a very difficult subject matter that I can only vaguely concieve. I can only make some meaningful arguments on the subject by also talking about string theory, M-planes and about alot of infinity principles.
BTW, his theory is excellent and freshly pioneering, I'm going to read more about it. Thanks!
=)
Sebastian.
(I'm casualy writing a paper on several of the above related topics)