Time travel (Explain This To Me!!)

Originally posted by RBTGJNS
If time travel could happen there would be tampering with the time line and modification of events. Time ia an abstraction of the biological function of aging.It is a product of awareness and in reality does not exist. Time travel is mental conumdrun full of fun and not to be take as fact or even potential.

Thankyou, to those coming to the conclusion that time is an illusion. I agree almost entirely. If backwards time travel were possible and the current universe were to remain in existence it would have to result in the creation of a new/parallel universe or the complete reversal of the current one. The world, matter, energy, the universe does not age, it simply moves, changes. There is no forward and backwards through time, just a now constant, involving motion.

The notion of time is created from our recognition of the cycle of birth and death, the minds perception of a journey from a beginning to an end.

"Time exists in our memory and anticipation. Discount human thought in relation to time and you will see that everything you are made of has always existed and always will. It is energy that created you and energy that will destroy you, but all that you are has always been and always will be. It is difficult to prove something to which we have no comprehension. The concept of time comes from birth and death. It is at our birth that local time begins and at our death it ends."
Brendan Burke
www.kitada.com

So in a sense time travel is possible under certain circumstances. For instance, if every particle or bit of energy returned to it's previous location. Though there is such an enormous improbability to this scenario that it doesn't occur. This i believe is due to the infinite nature of god/universe(everything in existence) and the reason our lives evolve. Because of the limitless possibilities the chances of such a reversal are next to nothing and hence things change, our lives move in an alternate direction.

As for travelling into the future, we already have the sensation that we are. Yet time is only in our minds and stems from the ability to create a shortlist of possible outcomes or scenarios that havent happened yet(ultimately death). This is our only future, and when we move and arrive at our destination we are still in the now.

As for travelling far into the future, this would work in the same way(the future still being only our minds projection of possible future outcomes), with the inclusion of some form of maintenance and preservation(deep freeze?) and you'd undoubtedly be carrying a one way ticket.

Here's a half decent documentary on the topic.
Julian Barbour - Killing Time

There's also a great recent interview with david icke on this subject available in mp3 format from winmx and titled 'beyond the matrix'. And i'm assuming it's also described in his latest book 'tales from the time loop'.

PS. The amount of obtainable pleasure from back to the future series does not decrease with this information or belief. 88mph. Oh Yes!!

www.geocities.com...

Originally posted by pantha
wouldn't the light from all past events, obviously those that happened outdoors , still be radiating out into space somewhere? Wouldn't it be amazing if we could recapture them somehow.
I'm probably totally wrong about that though, I'm not much of a scientist.
can anybody answer the question of what happens to the light? Would it just bounce around in the atmosphere and get jumbled up?

It's still there, but it has scattered to much to make a picture of it. The problem is that the light is moving away from with the speed of light. If you can't reach that speed, you'll never catch up with the light.
Some light gets through the atmosphere and some light gets reflected. It depends on the frequency of the light. If I remember it correctly, UV doesn't get through the atmosphere. It's a bit like glass. Visible light gets through glass, but infrared doesn't.

Originally posted by IndridCold
xn why at the speed of light does time stop i dont understand. All that would happen is you are moving very fast and everything normal. Please explain this lol sorry I just dont understand

It's caused by the Lorentz transformation of time in special relativity. T' = T * sqrt( 1-v^2/c^2 ), where T' is the time of moving person, t is normal time, v is the speed and c is the light speed. If v reaches c. You get T' = T * sqrt( 1-c^2/c^2 ) = T * sqrt( 1-1 ) = T * 0.

Originally posted by MrJingles
Even light has a mass and experiences friction, so no light is not the fastest possible speed. It is however an ideal speed.

The light speed in the speed of light in vacu�m. What could be causing the friction if there is nothing to cause it. The idea for friction of light is also a bit weird. Light can only be totally absorbed or let through, you can't take a bit of the light's energy.

Time travel forward in time is possible. We do it all the time, you're even doing it right now, and we can speed it up by going really close to light speed. There is no way to get past that speed. Theoretical 'warp drives' require matter with negative mass that doesn't exist.
Travelling back in time is impossible, it would violate causality and you would have to find a way to get past the light speed, something that requires more than infinite energy.

Special Relativity predicts doom for anything with mass approaching the speed of light from a slower speed due to length contraction and time dilation, but it does allow for speeds greater than the speed of light. Consider the speed of light as a barrier. Special Relativity allows for existence on both sides of the barrier, but neither side can cross over to the other.

The first postulate of the theory of special relativity is:
The laws of physics hold true for all frames of reference.

The second postulate is: The speed of light(669,600,000 miles/hour or 186,400 miles/second) is measured as constant in all frames of reference.

Many creative minds have wondered that since time slows down as you approach the speed of light, if you could find a way to travel faster than the speed of light, could you travel back in time?

If I am to believe that special relativity is correct, then I am also to believe that the following events would occur. In order to travel faster than the speed of light, I assume that you would at some point have to travel at exactly the speed of light. For example, you can not travel 51 miles/hour without having traveled 50 miles/hour at some point, of course, this is providing that you were traveling 50 miles/hour or less to begin with. Now SR(Special Relativity) tells us that at the speed of light, time stops, your length contracts to nothing, and your resistance to acceleration becomes infinite requiring infinite energy (as observed by a frame of reference that is not in motion with the system). These conditions do not sound very conducive to life. Thus, I conclude that time travel into the past, using the concepts of SR, has some severe issues to overcome.

More Info:
How Time Travel Will Work:
science.howstuffworks.com...
How Special Relativity Works:
science.howstuffworks.com...
How Light Works:
science.howstuffworks.com...

alot of people believe time machines work... they forget the earth orbits the sun!

You can always see into the past - look at the stars. The nearest ones are probably 100 light years away, and a number of the ones in our night sky have been extinct for centuries yet their light continues to reach us.

It is extremely easy to travel forward in time, since there is no universal clock (twin paradox). It's going backward which is a bugger. I also kind of agree that time is a concept - in certain respects. An interesting point was raised to me the other day - we are constantly aging and therefore moving forward in time all the time. It is impossible to travel back through time, while still going forward isn't it? Just a point someone raised.

As for the whole space-time thing (instead of 4 separate dimensions), it is also said that time dilation may be possible by bending the space-time continuum. Several theories suggest ways of doing this, a couple including black holes, one including moving one end of a wormhole around really fast at one end so that it is further in time, and the final is a chamber of neutron stars being spun so fast that their imense gravity pulls the very space-time around them, distorting it.

Just a few ideas about time travel.

speaking of time travel, has anyone else seen The Butterfly Effect? i saw it yesterday and was very impressed with it's original depiction of time travel. GREAT movie. im gonna go see it again tonight

Speaking of Time Travel does anyone have any further information on this? www.abovetopsecret.com... This seems interesting to do further research on. I can't find much on Dr. Wen Ho Lee.

Mr. Mulder

Lets go back to the topic here. HYe asked how its possible to go throu time if u go faster or slower than light

lets say that you go to a far away planet and beat an image of a close star exploding to the planet by a couple of hours and u then tell them that in 2 hours time that star will explode. its happening to them right now because nothing can ACCELERATE faster than light, so therefore it does now matter that it happened say a couple of years ago, because the effects of it wont reach them until the light gets there or even after,(e.g radiation etc., because radiation does not travel faster than light(or it might travel same speed in some cases)

Yes its wierd how if you were to go back in time, then you would still be going forward in time to get there?

anyway if you were closing in on the speed of light, and you had mass, you wouldnt quite have infinite mass, but you would have a whole load of it. Wouldnt that make u like dense as and warp space time in the similar ways a black hole does?

Maybe time is just a whole network of data. Black holes are said to warp time, because nothing past or on the event horizen can communicate and effect anything anymore, im sure it still exists, but it has no impact whatsoever on anything else, as it cannot transfer the data. btw i dont get something, if the universe had accelarated to the speed of light at the big bang, then wouldnt it have infinite mass? and it requires more energy to accelarate the closer you get, but mass and energy are the same, so you would also have close to infinite energy aswell. So there is no problem in continuing to speed up right?? I mean there must be a point where there is infinite energy required to speed up that tiny bit more b4 u reach the speed of light. neone have ne ideas on what that is?

If you want to know how time travel WILL work, check this out, science.howstuffworks.com...
If you want to know how Special Relativity works, science.howstuffworks.com...

Marshall Brain can explain anything in laymen's terms. And his stuff is just plain old fun to read.

Also, it's already been proven that light speed varies. And that light can go faster than the speed Einstein said it travels at. news.bbc.co.uk...

yes but i dont think well be able to use that practically

Wow thanks everyone for sharing your information it really helped me understand better. Thanks.

ok, its a bit confusing but...
light is the fastest you can travel, so thats the ceiling. photons exist at t=0, making all things moving at the speed of light simultaneous. photons can reach infinity because they move at the speed of light, but it takes them no time to get there, so they havent traveled because no time has elapsed. it also isnt possible to get to the speed of light, since at that point, ur weight increases immensely, making ur speed asymptotic at c.

HOWEVER, it hsa been proven, mathematically, that you can in fact go backwards in time. wormholes are practical things, and can even occur naturaly. the problem is that if one were to be natural, the universe would self destruct (a little energy would go through, so in the past there is more energy. thus, with a higher energy density, more energy would go through, and on and ond creating infinite energy which isnt good if ur trying to exist). manmade ones could be achieved, if only for a short time, and would be very hard to 'aim'

going back in time, your best shot would be black holes. u can hang out around the event horizon (assuming u stay intact) and time passes much much more slowly because space is very very bent/curved. hang out for a bit, come back, and hey, things have elapsed by 10,000 years, not 1. if u read an older post here, it mentions element 115, which could be used for practical space travel by imitating black holes, allowing u to go forward.

Quantum wormholes could carry people...

Quantum Wormholes

My unscientific WAG.

Instead of traveling through time ourselves, what about just sending & retieving information.

If we could send a particle beam filled with info faster than the speed of light today, we could retrieve it in the past if we had the ability to retrieve it at the time it arrives.





[Edited on 8-2-2004 by outsider]

Originally posted by outsider
If we could send a particle beam filled with info faster than the speed of light today, we could retrieve it in the past if we had the ability to retrieve it at the time it arrives.

The problem is that you can't send particles faster than light. At least not with the physics we know.

Originally posted by EmbryonicEssence
Also, it's already been proven that light speed varies. And that light can go faster than the speed Einstein said it travels at. news.bbc.co.uk...

Isn't this just like a shadow moving at more than the speed of light? If you shoot a laserbeam at the moon and you move it to the side really fast, on the moon the dot will move faster than the speed of light. The problem is here that the dot isn't a real object. Nothing in this situation actually goes faster than the speed of light.

the thing is, i heard this thing about this dude who got a cold fusion generator to spin a wheel or somthing up to like 1/4 1/2 the speed of light(probably around the circumference or something) which had a laser or somthing attached to it. When it was at the highest possibly speed he shot the laser or somthing out and the end of it went faster than light. The principle in this is that if u have a stick stuck to a wheel and u spin the wheel at 10mph , the end of the stick thats attached to the wheel, will have to travel further than the inside, but in the same amount of time.

So if we could do this and with a solid object attached to the wheel or wateva what would happen(apart from the probability that the thing u attached might break, bend resistance etc.) ?

Originally posted by amantine
The problem is that you can't send particles faster than light. At least not with the physics we know.

I may be wrong here, but I thought a read an article within the past couple years that someone had done this at one of the particle accelerator facilities. (I'll try to find it - it may have been BS)

Assuming they can't reach that speed maybe there's way to cheat, like a shortcut through a wormhole etc.

I guess the key here is your statement At least not with the physics we know. I agree we still don't know most of what there is to know.

Still, if some sort of time travel was possible, I believe it would take far less energy & less technology to send information rather than a living being. Kinda why were sending robots to Mars instead of ourselves.