Time Travel:Need help with a theory

Hello, all! It's been a while since I've posted something, mostly because I was researching this. So, here goes: How can we travel into the future when it hasn't happened yet? And how can we travel into the past when we're there future? Perhaps the future has already happened. But, if future technologies can, infact, bring humans back through time, how come they don't reveal themselves or why don't we see this process happening, as in a human being or other animal appearing out of thin air? Or, a fantastical thought, perhaps we don't exist? can someone help me with this, my brains hurting...?

reply to post by Dragonfriend



All time occurs simultaneously. We can only percieive it in a linear fashion. Time travel is possible (in theory, then) in both directions. Although it maybe to parallel universes and not our own.
As to why we haven't seen evidence, perhaps no one in any other dimensions has invented it.

Just my humble, sick, twisted opinion.

reply to post by mikerussellus


Thanks, Mike! That really helped.

Past, present and future are all about your perspective -- your point of view. You perceive the structure of your existence from a particular point in multi-dimensional spacetime, and in doing so you help define it for what it is. You imagine things to try and make predictions about what will happen from moment to moment, and in doing so you create those probabilities and possibilities. Your memory (and imagination) gives structure to what you see as the past.

To move non-linearly from one point in time to another, you need to change your perception of where you are. It's hard, though, because every cell in your body, along with all the other living things and their perceptions of you in the present, all tend to keep you locked into the present. You live in an overlapping reality, created not only by yourself, but by everybody and every living thing around you.

Now, if there was somehow a way to artificially amplify your point of view so that it could override or cancel out the perceptions of everything living inside and around you, then it might be possible for you to "envision" a place in space and time, then just be there. It would probably be instantaneous, too.

Of course, the problem is that our math and sciences don't have a good way of incorporating an active observer into the equations. So building a machine that could somehow amplify the reality you experience in your head might be a little problematic.

Some people have suggested that UFOs and odd monsters like Bigfoot might be a result of either "us" or "them" restructuring reality through consciousness to allow them to manifest in the here and now, although usually only briefly. Who knows?

My problem with time travel theories are that, WE as humans have a memory, we can remember the past, and make up in our heads the future.

The universe, can not. There is no memory storage holding everything that happened in the past for us to travel back to, if anything, i'd say we could potentially travel forward in time, but backwards, i'm not so sure.

I agree, if a sort of time travel will be available to us anytime soon, ... it will be the sole ability to travel " forward" .... of course I speak of time dilation. .... as time is already moving foward it would be easier. It's the idea of traveling at great speeds, or creating the illusion of traveling at great speeds, ... which allows time to pass slowly for the observer, ... yet very quickly on the outside.

... any other time travel would require manipulation at a quantum level.

The reason that linear time travel either from the past to the future or from the future to the past hasn't been observed is for a very simple reason ... nature absolutely prohibits it.

For time travel to be permitted into our own past or future (not talking about skipping dimensions or time lines) then we have to admit that the concept of free will is a complete illusion. Otherwise if we wish to preserve the concept of free will, then we must disallow time travel completely.

Here's a very simple example to illustrate the point.

Lets say that you want into your lounge room at EXACTLY 5pm, pick up the tv remote control and then toss around in your head which channel to pick. After a few seconds, you decide on channel 5 ... so far so good ... you've exercised your option of free will and made an independent and unbiased decision to pick channel 5.

Now lets skip 10 years into the future and somehow you manage to invent the worlds 1st practical time machine. As a test, you jump into it and decide to travel back into the past to that very day that you chose channel 5. But instead of jumping back to exactly 5pm, you program your machine to take you back 5 mins earlier and also to appear in another room and not the lounge room.

So you press your buttons and pull your levers and it works, you rematerialize back in the past 5 mins before your previous self walks into the lounge room for a spot of tv relaxation. You now wait in hiding until your previous self enters the lounge room, sits down and picks up the remote control. In the meantime you've sneaked unobserved behind yourself whose sitting on the lounge and you watch him (you).
Now here's the problem ... if free will exists, then your previous self should be able to select another channel besides 5, say channel 10 ... and yet you KNOW he will select channel 5 because that's what YOU selected originally all those many years ago.
It doesn't matter how often you jump back to this earlier time from your future because you will ALWAYS see him select channel 5. In fact, arriving 5 mins before he even picks up the remote, you know EXACTLY which channel he will pick ... so therefore FREE WILL on his part was simply an illusion and he was predestined to select channel 5 and will always do no matter how many times you observe him.

So there's the problem ... allow time travel and you have to admit that free will doesn't exist and EVERYTHING is therefore scripted and you follow that script slavishly.
Otherwise, retain free will and give up time travel.

It has to be one or the other ... so tell me, which appeals most to you ?

reply to post by afoolbyanyothername


I dont see a problem there, .... just because the time travel knew the outcome, .... it doesn't change a thing for the original person, .... he is still excercising his free will. Just because you know the outcome doesnt change anything.

Originally posted by IntastellaBurst
reply to post by afoolbyanyothername

 

I dont see a problem there, .... just because the time travel knew the outcome, .... it doesn't change a thing for the original person, .... he is still excercising his free will. Just because you know the outcome doesnt change anything.

Sorry but I think you're missing the point here.
To the original person, his exercising of "free will" is a complete illusion because the future traveller knows EXACTLY what the choice of the channel decision will be. In other words, that channel decision has effectively been carved in stone and will NEVER, EVER change. True free will would dictate that his decision could change but in fact this will never happen.

In fact, to hammer home the illusion of free will and the inevitable "scripting" that would replace it if time travel was permitted by nature, here's another example that would destroy the quantumness of the universe completely.

Lets change the channel scenario slightly and instead of picking a tv channel, the original person decides to conduct a science experiment by watching a number of radioactive atoms until one of them spontaneously decays ... a simple and realistic experiment.
Eventually one decays ... lets say it's radioactive atom number 5 and is observed by the original person.

Ok, years pass ... blah, blah ... invent time machine ... travel back in time and arrive 5 mins before the atom decays. Now which atom is going to decay ? Why, atom number 5 of course ... and why do you know this ? ... because you saw it happen years ago when YOU did the experiment.

Now here's where quantum mechanics collapses in a screaming heap !

You watch (unobserved, of course) the experiment unfold and atom 5 decays ... no surprise there.

But wait !

The spontaneous decay of a selected atom is completely RANDOM, completely UNPREDICTABLE and completely governed by QUANTUM MECHANICAL PROCESSES.
And yet here you are able to state categorically and exactly which atom will decay next. In other words, every quantum mechanical event that happened in the entire universe would have just had to unfold EXACTLY as it did before for that one atom to decay ... the very atom that you knew would decay.

So travelling back in time and watching an event unfold exactly the way it did years ago means that even quantum events are predictable to the utmost degree ... and even worse ... are reproducible each time you travel back to the same point in time and watch the same event unfold.

Let me make it plain ...

!!!! TIME TRAVEL IS PROHIBITED BY NATURE !!!!

Most of the time, when people think of time travel they think in terms of months or years. Those long periods of time make it almost seem possible.

However, try thinking about time travel in a period of only 10 minutes (forwards & backwards). If you do this, you will quickly see that time travel (not time dilation - that's not true time travel) is paradoxical, illogical, and completely impossible.

So just think about it to yourself, with this in mind: You start out alone at 2:00pm with a time travel machine. At 2:05pm you decide to either travel forward or backward in time, no further back than 2:00pm and no later than 2:10pm.

Think about what starts to happen the more you jump around in that time span. Hint: keep track of how many of "you" there are.

You'll quickly see how completely impossible it really is.

reply to post by harrytuttle


And here's a get rich quick scheme guaranteed to work !

Start on Monday by placing a gold bar in a safe that only opens to your thumb print. Now don't open the safe and let the week go by until it's Saturday.

Now, go and open your safe and remove the gold bar. It's there because you didn't open the safe all week. Put the gold bar into your time machine and go back to the previous day (Friday).
Now open the safe and of course there MUST still be a gold bar there because you won't remove until the next day (Saturday). Place the gold bar into your time machine, making it now 2 bars that you have.
Now go back another day (Thursday), open the safe and remove the gold bar. You now have 3 gold bars.

Keep doing this until you end up back at the original day of Monday when you 1st placed the gold bar into the safe. You started of with only a single gold bar and yet you now have 6 gold bars and you're RICH !!!!!

Again, for those that missed it the 1st time, let me reiterate ....

!!!! TIME TRAVEL IS PROHIBITED BY NATURE !!!!!

we believe to live in a 3 dimensional universe + 1 time dimension. What if time itself is actually multi-dimensional? as you can go up-down , right-left , ahead and backwards - maybe the time also has more dimensions . And sure, possible we can understand only one . Once we learn more about the 11 possible dimensions (11 expected by String theorists so far, it could be more) , I am sure we will also understand time better.

Also I have to admit , I never understood why if you would have a spaceship traveling for a few days near the speed of light, when you would turn back to Earth here would be passed millions of years? (classical Relativity )

Great subject, but i guess it requires a great amount of time and mathematical skills to make any sense of it..


Regards!

[edit on 25-7-2009 by Romanian]

reply to post by afoolbyanyothername

Exactly!! One of the rules of nature is that energy can neither be created nor deleted, it can only change form. But a time machine violates that rule no matter whether you are traveling in this universe or parallel universes.

If you travel in this universe your body (matter & energy) must LEAVE what ever time you are in and then be CREATED in another time. Same goes for parallel universes, so it can't work.

I guess my point is that if time travel is possible, then this universe isn't real.

reply to post by harrytuttle


out level of knowledge cannot explain time travel , therefore it does not exist !

[edit on 25-7-2009 by Romanian]

If memory serves me well-which it seldom does, is there not a paradox where there are infinite time lines so you cant change the history you left, but may be creating history in another line, which you can change because you did not interact with it in the first place.

I just read that paragraph back to myself, and as you can see, my observations of time travel make little sense, string theory and fields, thats the way forward, just wish I understood them.

Have you seen that film with bruce willis in, 'Twelve Monkeys'?

Good old brucey goes back in time and everyone thinks he a nutjob! Same would happen if someone travelled back now.

And here's a weird idea... what if people had gone back in time, to say when all of the more successful civilzations were starting out and tried to help them along so they'd advance quicker, but it didnt work out!

Originally posted by harrytuttle
reply to post by afoolbyanyothername

 

Exactly!! One of the rules of nature is that energy can neither be created nor deleted, it can only change form. But a time machine violates that rule no matter whether you are traveling in this universe or parallel universes.

If you travel in this universe your body (matter & energy) must LEAVE what ever time you are in and then be CREATED in another time. Same goes for parallel universes, so it can't work.

I guess my point is that if time travel is possible, then this universe isn't real.

I'm still of the opinion that nature ABSOLUTELY prohibits linear time travel i.e. time travelling within a single time line.

But lets for one moment assume that linear time travel is possible ... then a possible answer to the above posters question is that perhaps moving mass & energy from one time to another (linearly) may NOT violate conservation of mass/energy IF the assumption is made that the total mass/energy of the ENTIRE timeline is still being conserved.
What I'm trying to say is that maybe it makes no difference if there's a YOU in 2008 and a YOU in 2009 ... or you travel back to 2008 and end up with 2 of YOU in that year ... maybe mass/energy is still being conserved across the ENTIRE timeline.

But the above was only a "what if" on my part ... I still believe strongly that nature ABSOLUTELY forbids time travel.

reply to post by Dragonfriend


Look over here friend:
ALIENS, TIME TRAVEL, AND WORMHOLES
www.whale.to...
Also here:
surbrook.devermore.net...

The Montauk boys figured this out a long time ago, and are still using it, according to recent reports about the Sage tower on Montauk Point.

The time travel idea usually hinges on Einstein's relativity equations, which indicate that time is not a fixed absolute, but is actually relative to an observer. But this equation is not understood well by the general public (or most scientists).

If one approaches the speed of light relative to an observer, that observer would see one's time slow down to a crawl, and finally stop when one's speed reaches the speed of light. But what happens when one exceeds the speed of light? Common sense indicates that if reaching the speed of light causes one's time to stop, then exceeding it would cause one's time to move backwards. But that's not what the equation says. Once the speed of light is exceeded, time would progress due to a mathematical formula containing the imaginary number i, the square root of negative one. Negative one cannot by definition have a solution, since every number when multiplied by itself by definition has a positive result.

But if the equation shows i in the answer, then i must mean something, and it indeed does. It turns the answer into a vector instead of a scalar quantity, by introducing a phase shift. look at it this way:

i is the square root of negative one.
i squared is, by definition, negative one.
i cubed is then the negative square root of negative one (or negative i).
i to the fourth power is negative one squared, or one... unity.

From this pattern one can see that each power of i shifts the answer by one-fourth of a complete circle, or 90°. This means that instead of traveling backward in time if one exceeds the speed of light, one would travel sideways in time, at a right angle to the timeline we live in.

Now, as to the implications of this... y'all have fun!

TheRedneck

Sorry if this has been done here already, but there may be proof of at least some time manipulation on this board:
Here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Just to name a few...also in ATS search Death inconcisstancies... there are many examples right here!