Time Machine

Its an oldish topic, but I feel I need to say something.

When we think of timetravel, we usually think that a certian point in time is our destination and to achive time travel we 'travel' to that destination.

But the points in time are not places. In fact, the whole concept of time is.. off... by alot. Time is a unit of measurement. There is no past, because by the time your done with the past your in the present and theres no way to get back into the past. There is no future, because by the time you get to the future you'd be in the present.

Unless you go into the theory of multiverse and teleportation you cant really go time traveling. You can read about this in a fictional book called Timeline by Michael Crichton.

Also, some people might be afraid that when they go back in time, they might alter the events in history. Or they might be afraid of paradoxes, like, say, I built a time machine and used it to go back in time before I built it, then kill my past self, meaning I never made the machine meaning that I never really traveled back.
What people dont realize is.. these things simply dont occur. You cant alter history, because its solid. You cant create paradoxes, because the fact that you've never gotten killed means just that, you never got killed. If you were to go back in time, you cant kill yourself. Many things might come up, such as, you find that you cant bring yourself to pull the trigger, you might get hit by a car along the way to your house, so many things might happen before you get the chance to even see your past self.

So yeah.. I'm not sure if your idea of the mirror would work. I guess it might.. but since light travels as particles, then.. well, the particles might have a hard time hitting your eyeballs from that great a distance.

Ok just found a very informative site about time travel:

Time Travel In Simple Terms
A More Detailed Explination Of Time Travel
The Maths Behind Time Travel
A Method Of How To Create The Enery Needed For Time Travel
Time Travel FAQ

k i got the basic story on the orginal time travel project: "The Pheonix Project" basicly they got a big arse air carrier (think this was in early 50s might havta review my sources its been awhile) and put a ton of high tech frequency based and radiology devices into it(once again need to check my sources this is from memory) at first i left for an hour and when it returned the crew members were fused to the deck because the field generator that they put on to protect the crew crapped out so they put a backup on the second trip. they were gone for 3-4 hours this time and had gone up til 2012 but for some reason its imposible to go past that point (some EBE fourth density crap that i wont get into) so something is supposed to happen to all of humanity in 2012 ( once again can't remember exactly wat) so time travel is possible just the devices used for it aren't quite portable yet. if you wanna buy books and plans bout some of this futuristic tech and weaponry vist www.futurehorizons.net happy hunting!

P.S. aussies rule
P.P.S. LOVE & PEACE!

Hm interesting. I found this on a Google search:

"Other experiments included time travel. No one has picked up a tangible future beyond 2012 AD. There is a very abrupt wall there with nothing on the other side. A working time vortex was created to the future."

Taken from www.crystalinks.com....

Ok 2012, I've heard that year before. Does anyone think this could be tied to the John Titor apparent 'Hoax'?

No the Montauk Project is a real project based on Time Travel, but also a project for genetic manipulation, and Mind-control and Programming.

Visit www.stewartswerdlow.com as he is a montauk survivor.

Yeah I've read that when a group of people tried to see into the future, they could only see up until the year 2012, after that it was all like a dream. Apparently this has something to do with the whole world becoming enlightend in the year 2012, that's why it looked like a dream to these people, because they wern't enlightend.

The way I figure it is you are better off finding a method to move matter around you as opposed to you moving. Traveling faster than the speed of light only remains a possiblity in the next few years; according research obtained from Los Alamos, Area 51, and the ABT complex in Idaho.

Once you've atomized yourself and created the information neccessary for such a process, what do you do when your time machine breaks down, or if you have no control? Of course the answer is nothing. You are in control of time itself and will be in the realm of power capable of taking all the time you need to make any modifications. How amazing it would be to be the first time traveler; all the power, knowledge, and control, but yet at the same moment lost. The subject seems to border on the thought of being a god.

Well, once one of you young Einstein's has discovered the fountain of youth, please drop me a line.

Is it true that the faster you go, time slows down? To the point when you hit the speed of light there is no time. If this is true, then when you go beyond the speed of light surely time will be in reverse? Could this not be a possiblily of time travel, but not until we can reach those kind of speeds. I can imagine it gets a bit complicated after reaching the speed of light because there would be negative matter with infinite mass right?

Will there ever be the chance to travel the speed of light do you reckon? Is it humanly possible?

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is the key to understanding this question.

To make an object accelerate from rest to any speed, we must expend some energy (by using a rocket engine, say). For low speeds (much less than the speed of light --- 186,000 miles per second; all all humans have traveled only at very slow speeds compared to that of light), an increase in the energy expended results in a reasonable increase in the speed of the object. However, as the SR theory says, when the object is traveling at very large speeds (a fraction of the speed of light), then an additional expenditure of energy will not result in as large an increase in speed as it would have at lower speeds. In other words, we have to expend quite a bit of energy to increase the speed by only a little bit, if the rocket ship is already traveling fast. If the rocket ship is traveling at 95% of the speed of light, a trememdous amount of energy will be necessary to make it travel at 96% the speed of light. In trying to make it travel at the speed of light, we would need to expend an infinite amount of energy...

...in other words, we can't make it travel at the speed of light, we'll have to wait until the next life, I'm afraid!

how can time be man made? it has always been here, before man

Yes time has always been here, but mad has created hours minutes and seconds.

Could this work...

Surely one way to go faster than the speed of light would be to make the light slow down. Light in a vacuum travels at a speed 'c' which is a constant. In water or glass light slows down to 'c'/'n', n being the refractive index. Therefore it is possible for some particles to travel through air or water at faster than the speed of light in the medium.

Yea ofcourse thats possible, some particles in water travel faster that the speed of light in water, and as a result there was something called Cherenkov Radiation:

check out this link: math.ucr.edu...

Also this has many faster than light thought experiments, with answers.

math.ucr.edu...


[edit on 5-3-2005 by quiksilver]

I don't see how this can be of any use to us though. Even if we could travel as fast as light in water, when would we ever want to do that?

With the exception of Wendellion, methinks some of us need to take a modern physics course.

Ok, so whats your view on the topic?

Well, considering nothing can travel faster than light (in your example), it's already not possible. Like what'shisface said, read up on special relativity.

Good explanation here.

So there is no way we are ever going to travel in time until we find a way around travelling faster than the speed of light?