SCI: Time Travel 101: A How To Guide

Originally posted by MAC269
reply to post by tauristercus

Several times through this thread I have noticed that you say that you do not believe we can change history. In our time line not taking into account String or M theory.

I have come to the conclusion that you are right. I will try to explain why.

Simply put because what ever you do when time traveling the affects of such you knew before you left on your travels.

For example we know that JFK was killed in Dallas so let’s say it is our quest to alter that outcome. We jump into the TM and head back to a time before the shot was fired. If we where successful and JFK returned to Washington that is what history would reflect. Nothing happened. Therefore you would not in the future set out to change the event.

In other words what ever you do on your travels has become history and that is what we have grown up with. That is an example of deliberately trying to affect history.

Now in this instance having returned you may indeed be able to alter the future. However what ever knowledge that you return with has already become history for future generations.

Therefore it is written, it is a plan free will is nonsense and all time has already happened.

String and M theories just don’t seam to take into account where all the extra MASS comes from.

I would love every one on here to let me know where I have gone wrong.

You're correct that I have stated on many occasions (probably to the annoyance of some ) that I PERSONALLY believe that even though we might be able to do "thought experiments" or do "what ifs" about time travel, that the reality may actually be that for very good reasons, nature will ABSOLUTELY PROHIBIT any kind of time travel into the past.
Obviously there are many ways (most suggested in this thread) of ways we could "assist" travel into the future e.g. worm holes, FTL travel, black holes, etc and I don't have ANY problems with that.

Now, from what you've written, I can see that you're beginning to see one of the major obstacles that I believe is primary to backwards travel ... namely that having knowledge of something that has already happened and taking that knowledge back with you, immediately creates two catastrophic situations.
The first one of these being that we have no choice but to admit that "free will" is an illusion and does NOT exist leading to the inevitable conclusion that all of history (past, present & future), everything that has and will happen and EVERY choice and decision that you and I make is essentially pre-scripted and we're just acting out our lives.
The second one is even worse (if that's possible) ... we would have to also admit that quantum mechanics is entirely baseless and also an "illusion". QM theory completely hinges on the total unpredictability of events at the quantum (atomic and sub-atomic) levels and the fact that no matter what we do, we simply cannot predict how a quantum event will transpire.
But the moment we go back in time to an event that we know has happened and that we also know the outcome of, then we are essentially PREDICTING with 100% accuracy how a supposedly "unpredictable" set of quantum events turn out.
For examples of these 2 scenarios in greater detail, please go find my earlier posts and have a read.

And as far as I can tell, there seems no way at all to avoid or side-step around these 2 scenarios.

[edit on 13-8-2009 by tauristercus]

reply to post by tauristercus


Dear tauristercus

Naturally we will not be able to alter the future either because although it is are future it is also someone else’s past.

So you have figured it out and so have I the hope now is that no one else dose.

Because that means there are one good guys there are no bad guys it is all just a bad play acting experience.

So human guilt goes right out of the window. Imagine that in the wrong hands if we are wrong??

In previous posts within this thread, I've tried to make a convincing case as to why I personally believe that time travel into the past is not simply impossible BUT actively prohibited by nature itself.

For those interested in my reasons, please locate earlier posts within this thread where I make use of 2 examples to strongly illustrate my conviction.

I'm always trying to come up with logical and hopefully scientifically sound examples such as the above 2 that I just mentioned, and believe that this following "new" example should help to make my case a bit stronger.

In the early part of the 20th century (around the 1920's), a German physicist by the name of Werner Heisenberg made one of the most important contributions to early Quantum Mechanics when he derived an equation that basically stated that when measuring 2 properties of a particle e.g. its position and momentum, we can NEVER ever know with any degree of precision both its position in space AND also its momentum at the instant that we make a measurement on the particle.
This equation has become famously known as "The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" and has solidly stood the test of time and is considered one of the main foundations of QM theory.

Basically what he was saying was that if we wanted to know say, where the particle was at a given time, that we would have to give up trying to accurately estimate it's momentum. In fact, the more accurately we were able to measure it's position, the vaguer was our knowledge of it's momentum. And the same goes the other way ... the more accurate becomes our knowledge of it's momentum, the less accurate becomes our knowledge of its position.

By now you're probably asking so what ... what does this have to do with not being able to time travel back into the past ?

If my explanation so far has made sense to you, then the following is why ...

Lets say that you decide to conduct an experiment to measure to incredible accuracy the position of a particle at a particular point in time. You know because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that you may as well forget about getting any accurate info on the particles momentum at that same point in time as it's not going to happen because nature doesn't allow it. You can get one or the other as accurate as you wish but you can't get the same accuracy on both at the SAME time.
Anyway, we're happy enough to get a very accurate value for it's position.

You now jump into your time machine and go back to the beginning of the experiment but this time you decide to measure the same particles momentum at the very same point in time that you previously measured it's position ... and again, you get an extremely accurate measure of it's momentum but have no chance of getting an accurate position fix.

But that doesn't matter because having measured the SAME particle at EXACLY the same point in time, and having done the experiment twice, you now have the information that the HUP stated was IMPOSSIBLE to obtain from the one particle ... namely an accurate value for it's momentum AND an accurate value for it's position.

And yet here, after a spot of backwards time travel, you now apparently have both !!

Now the above scenario was based on the premise of a single time line but even if we allow the possibility of multiple branching time lines, we should still be able to carry out the position measurement in one time line and the momentum measurement in another time line and we would STILL arrive at the same two accurate values for position and momentum.

So what conclusion can we infer from this ?

Either that QM theory is inherently flawed OR that time travel to the past MUST be prohibited !

one thing that fascinates me is that if time travel is actually possible, and we will assume that is. that no matter how far into the future, no matter how long it takes us to develop the technology... it has always existed.

does that make sense?

because we would be traveling back through time from the point of origin in the future. which may explain some of the "ancient astronaut" theories.

this is something that i always like to talk about. it's an idea that occured to me one day and has fascinated me ever since.

reply to post by tauristercus


Hi tauristercus and thank you for your coments.
As for the “infinite time lines” theory I would like to give you some thoughts.
I don´t think there are different universes where our different time lines are proceeding.
I don´t think our time lines split or branch because we do or don´t do something.
There´s one time line, one planet, one human race, and what we are doing we are simply doing, and that´s our time line and the only one we have.
The coin will fall the way it will. That will depend on different factors that will take place and that´s it.
It could have fallen differently? Yes, but it fell ONE WAY.
If the dentist canceled the appointment, then that´s what happened, there´s no other universe where the dentist didn´t cancel. Could there have been circumstances where the dentist wouldn´t cancel? Yes, but they didn´t take place.
Those other options or possibilities are just that, different possibilities, but just because we can be aware of their existence, doesn´t mean there has to be an alternate universe to accommodate them.

As far as the Multiverse idea. I love it. It´s an excellent answer to that terrible “conundrum” of what was there before the Big Bang? There simply isn´t a beginning, it´s a cycle of universes interconnected that continuously recycle each other (If I understand correctly). But I don´t think there are copies of any one of us in other universes.


[edit on 13-8-2009 by rush969]

Just bumping this thread so it remains current ... just too much good stuff has been posted here to let it fade away into obscurity.

truely said .

by the way we are all time travelers .... its turning around .... twice.... thats the trick.

reply to post by gimme_some_truth


Time travel has always been a bit confusing for me.. The idea of travelling faster than light to go back in time just seems, well... nonsense.

Let me try to explain...

If John says to Simon that he is going to go to a city and the only way he can get there legally is by driving for 2 hours at 30mph.. Simon thinks it's the best option for safety and everything.

1 hour after John has left Simon realises that John has left something very important behind. Simon gets in his car and travels at 60mph for 1 hour and arrives at exactly the same time as John. If Simon had traveld at 65mph then he would have got there before John arrived and could have played all manner of mind games on John..

I can't see how travelling faster than light will make any difference. If you do travel faster than light what would you expect to happen?
I assume this would happen;
Firstly you would notice that as you were travelling at the exact spped of light you will see illuminated objects in front of you, you would see blurred objects to either side of you but and lights behind you too.

If you go faster than light then you will still see lights in front of you, blurred images on either side but you would not see anything behind you but darkness as that light has not caught up to your speed.

But here is the dilema. If you travel faster than light in any direction then you would have to travel beyond the length of time that light has travelled to not be able to see any light behind you. The light you are speeding away from has already reached the points you are travelling to, so in practice that light still exists and is constant. Therefore you would not be travelling in time. Only faster than light and only going to where light has already been ... but if you travel long enough then you will reach a point where no light has yet reached and will leave you in total darkness.

You can't travel back 8 hours ago as you would literally have to rewind the universe to put Earth back into the correct position that you want to travel to. Otherwsie you'll find yourself gulping vacuum

I feel we have to reconsider the whole idea of travelling in time using lightspeed. We get confused with the idea of time being something physical that we could travel.

The moment you stop travelling faster than light is the moment that time, and light, catch up with you pretty damned fast.

Now, if you asked "How to travel into history or the future?" then that opens up a whole new concept.

The universe is literally nothing more than information, including time.
Data basically..

Let's have a look at this thread from a couple of weeks ago..
Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light
Now that is a bit more like it.. This is where I feel we should be going.
The transmission of data to a particular moment seems far simpler than 'time' travel.

Time waits for no man, but the data of everything is everywhere.
This is where we get into the sci-fi of Star Trek and teleportation.

It would seem more logical to teleport a person (break the entire person down into particles, transmit them and re-assemble) to a particular frequency in time, then we might get a bit closer to the ability to go forwards or backwards in universal events.

Time could very well be a frequency range a bit like radio rather than having any relation to light.
We can see light, but we can't see radio.
We can record a movie (light) onto a DVD and playback any time..multiple times but all we have really done is record data.. a burst of a frequency.

When we get down to paradox's, then we are talking something quite out of the ordinary. I feel these things happen all the time.. every second of everyday.. even right now.. jusy by these words i am typing is causing a paradox. Our lives change with every single thing we do. But our lives are in harmony with everything else. There is no determining factor that could cause a paradox. Going back to kill Hitler would not change anything for us, but it would make an alternative history for another frequency range..
ie. an alternative dimnesion.

I could say something right now.. but then i might not.. that alone is a paradox and has just changed the entire outcome of this sentence, or this thread.. But i have continued so life goes on.. nothing changes for you until you read this. Once you have read this then your reality has changed. You've just taken a step into another possibility.

It's a bit like closing a door... does the world still exist outside the door. It's not until you open the door and step out that you are able to see any changes.. these changes you now see are another reality.. data that has been changed..

I can here everyones brains ticking along to the story of the movie 'The Matrix' right now

Originally posted by Extralien
reply to post by gimme_some_truth

 

Time travel has always been a bit confusing for me.. The idea of travelling faster than light to go back in time just seems, well... nonsense.

Excellent post with a good deal of thought behind it

But before I get into details, it's important for you to understand that within our current scientific paradigm based on General & Special Theories of Relativity, that NOTHING can travel faster than light. The best that ANY object can hope to achieve is to come as infinitely close to light speed as imaginable BUT it can't EVER ... let me repeat ... EVER ... reach light speed itself.
The reason being that to increase an objects velocity, energy must be used ... now as the objects velocity increases to a significant percentage of light speed (e.g. 50% or more), the objects relatavistic mass beings to increase significantly. This is a direct result of the Einstein equition E=mc^2. As you can see from this equation, because the speed of light (c) MUST remain constant, that means that as the objects velocity, hence it's total energy (E) increases, that the mass (m) on the other side of the equation MUST also increase proportionally.
So, the end result is that the closer the object gets to light speed, the greater it's mass becomes and consequently more and more energy would be required to push it even just a little bit faster. Eventually you reach the point , just under light speed (99.9999999999%) where the mass increase has become virtually infinite and therefore would require a correspondingly infinite amount of extra energy to push it even just fractionally closer to light speed.
So as you can see, we can theoretically come as close to light speed as we wish but can NEVER reach light speed itself.

I can't see how travelling faster than light will make any difference. If you do travel faster than light what would you expect to happen?
I assume this would happen;
Firstly you would notice that as you were travelling at the exact spped of light you will see illuminated objects in front of you, you would see blurred objects to either side of you but and lights behind you too.

If you go faster than light then you will still see lights in front of you, blurred images on either side but you would not see anything behind you but darkness as that light has not caught up to your speed.

Let me try to give you a mental image of what would happen as you get closer and closer to light speed. We'll assume that you're in a spaceship.

At velocities way below light, you'd basically experience nothing out of the ordinary. Looking infront of you or looking behind, you'd see stars shining just the way you'd expect them ... their light has no trouble in reaching you.
But lets now increase your ships velocity to say, 50% of light speed. At this velocity, looking forward you'd see something unusual happening. Every star that wasn't already shining blue, would begin to change colour and start to become more and more bluer. Looking behind you would be just as weird because those stars would appear to be changing colour to red.
This phenomena is due to an effect called Red & Blue Shift.
As your ship travels faster and faster, the frequency of the oncoming light is compressed resulting in a shift UP the light spectrum into the blue region. In contrast, the frequency of light coming from stars behind you begins to get stretched resulting in a shift DOWN the light spectrum into the red region. The overall effect then is that stars infront of you get bluer and brighter whilst the stars behind you get redder and dimmer.

Now, lets assume that your ship is now travelling ALMOST at exactly light speed.
The oncoming light frequency gets compressed so much that in the blink of an eye, the universe infront of your ship becomes pitch black ... no light whatsoever ... reason being that the light frequency has shifted up into the ultraviolet and way beyond into the xray and gamma ray spectrum. Without adequate shielding, you'd be COOKED by the hard radiation slamming into your ship !
Look behind and you will also see every star disappear as their light continues to get shifted way below red and into infra-red and below. The universe behind you has also now disappeared !

So travelling at essentially the speed of light ... the universe around you would be ABSOLUTELY dark ! No stars ... no light ... nothing to see at all !

Let's have a look at this thread from a couple of weeks ago..
Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light
Now that is a bit more like it.. This is where I feel we should be going.
The transmission of data to a particular moment seems far simpler than 'time' travel.

Sorry, but the above article was completely misreported and totally innacurate in it's claims.

Here's a quote from Ian Higgs (one of the projects research assistants) regarding the published article:

"I am the undergraduate student (in fact, the only person at the moment) working on the hardware for this project at the Los Alamos National Lab. This article poorly represents what we are doing, and is very outdated to boot. John Singleton was not allowed to review this article before it was published, so it contains a number of falsehoods that would lead people to believe that this whole concept is pure quackery. I assure you, no radio waves are traveling faster than light. What we are hoping to demonstrate is a MASSLESS moving polarization current which sources electromagnetic radiation, creating a superluminal emission spectrum. I am currently working on our 72 element antenna and software which we will use to test the theory. If you'd like to know more, I can refer you to documents about the physics behind this (extremely high level stuff!)"

So basically ... no faster than light travel possible (at our present level of understanding) and therefore, NO resulting backwards time travel.




[edit on 18-8-2009 by tauristercus]

reply to post by tauristercus


Thank you so much for cleaning up my thoughts and shedding some further 'light' onto my post.

The way I see it now reminds me of how TV and radio signals are travelling into space.

Effectively, if we could, we could jump into our little space ship...fly out in any direction and 'tune in' to any TV or radios signal ever sent by Humans.

We could listen in to all the chatter as Armstrong stepped on the Moon.. We could watch the very first BBC broadcasts.. relive Saturday morning Swap Shop with Noel Edmunds.. just by picking up on the radio and TV signals that are drifting through space.

The universe (or multiverse) must have some form of similar pattern with which we are able to tune into and drop off at any point. It might not need faster than light travel.

The Northern lights that people see when there is solar storm is, in a way, a frequency change in the way things are.. Even ghosts and apparitions could be nothing more than a frequency change.. This could explain why some ghosts seem to repeat a certain moment in time.. a bit of data recorded by the universe that just happens to be stuck in one place.. Each time the Earth rotates or circles around the sun and reaches that exact moment then the ghost re-appears.. This could explain why many ghost stories seem to have an anniversary for each sighting.

How that explains how some ghosts are able to interact with their surroundings or respond to living peoples requests is another matter, but their does seem to be some form of 'transmission' going on that enables this contact.

Again,. the idea of travelling into time cannot be correct.. travelling to a moment in our recorded time is more accurate. Discovering the frequency (whatever you want to call it) that these moments are on is possibly the answer. Even then, travelling may also be incorrect.. we might find that we don't have to 'move' anywhere. It could be just the flick of a switch... who says you have to move? If you are changing to a different frequency then the new channel you choose will pop up around you.. rather than you move to it..

A bit like changing channels on your tv..

If you wish to travel to 13th century Paris, how will you get there? You could arrive 5,000 feet off the ground.. and 200 miles short of your target.. but if you changed the channel, you wont move and could find yourself watching some major event happen on the streets of Paris..all from your very own living room in Outer Mongolia somewhere...

In a way, we already are time travelling. We have been since the early nineteen-hundreds, when Saint Albert (financed by guess-who) bestowed his collection of plagiarisms upon us. Has anybody ever wondered why the "scientific community" went all nuts about a paper not even deserving the name "theory" and dealing with nature in a manner not engineerable by humans?
E=mc2 started our journey into the past, where we have now been sitting for over a hundred years. LEIBNIZ formulated E=mc2 in 1648. No wonder there is Saint Albert's famous qoote to always keep secret one's sources...

Read up on it: Einstein treated the test results of the few experiments he was ever involved in "selectively", taking what fit his "theory" and discarding the big remainder.

Proofs? Lead by the US gov't there are a lot of rumours that all the technical progress of the last decades stemmed from - outrageous - extraterrestrial sources! Our so-called scientists were busy praying to the "laws of physics" while others did real science. Too bad the guys doing the real science belonged to the losing team of WWII. Germany was looted completely by the victors. From IG Farben alone they stole patents for over eight hundred paints they didn't even know existed. The pre-transistors used in the infrared sights of the Sturmgewehr 44 had the size of your pinkie's fingernail, while in the US the same functions were executed with 12-inch Clystron tubes. There also can only be one main reason to bring German scientists to the Roswell vehicle in 1947, where they promptly began discussions about the "unknown" drive system.

Counting back, in 1905 we took a step back to 1648 when Leibniz published E=mc2. Now, 104 years later we therefore are travelling through the year 1752. No wonder Obama tells us we're going back to the moon using fifty-year-old fireworks!

There is a possibility to travel to the future, though. Once you find out through intensive research what the real state of the art of modern technology might be (TR-3B anyone?), you are ready to take the first steps to assert your birthright and take up the thread where we were deprived of it by special interests back in 1905. This will not be easy and there need to be a lot of people helping it along. If you fail, it's back to the dark ages again. Yes, it's a crooked deal, you only get to travel backward in time. The future is forbidden for as long as these special interests exist. Therefore, one man's time travelling to the future means another man's withdrawal from business.

Use your computer to spread the information and turn your good old tabletop into a veritable time machine. There lies destruction in this inane institutionalized restriction of human development. And destruction is what these special interests thrive on. We must take the right turn into our future and out of theirs. Humans are destined to be much more than glorified cannon-fodder. Time travellers to the future, for example.

Changing the past could potentially be very dangerous, as it could alter history's time line, and therewith present and future. Why would anybody consider changing something that already happened?

Time Travel and Changing the Past
If traveling to and interacting or communicating with the past is really possible then doing so could also mean that past history could be altered, even when no changes are intended. Any change in past history could lead to a chain of related events that cannot be predicted, and possibly have dramatic consequences. Could there be any reason to justify an intent to change our own past? The dangers are so obvious that It seems unbelievable that anybody would ever be willing to take such risk. What could we actually achieve by changing the known history time line and why would we ever try to do such thing? Would it not be much better to leave the past alone and just learn from it.

Reasons why consider changing the past
All action no brain - Are you unhappy with certain events? Just jump back and change them! And suddenly 911, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq never really happened, Sadam Hussein and Bill Laden were never born. If it would be that simply.... Removing events will cause other events to take place, and could lead to a chain of events that might be even more destructive. An alternative history might not even have humanity in it.


By mistake - What does this button do - oops. As the result of some kind of mistake we could be responsible for many of the mysterious events that took place in the past, without being aware of it. Future experimenting might unintentionally cause the creation of prophecies in the past: The oops syndrome.


Ignorance - Thinking that experimenting with time travel technology cannot really cause changes in our own history time line. And if it does, then you can easily get away with it as nobody will notice . Further to that, possible consequences of time travel experiments are explainable in other terms as well and will not be linked to future science experiments. Do we know of any events in history that we clearly recognize as a future time travel experiment?


Untouchable - Thinking that any changes caused by time travel experiments will not ripple back to the present time of the experimenters. Or alternatively the future scientists believe in some kind of multiverse theory, where changes do not affect the time travelers original present time


No conscience - Potential time travelers or future decision makers could be despot kind of persons without any conscience. They don't care for possible consequences of their actions.


Optimism - The thought that by changing the past you actually can improve the present. Sending messages of wisdom could compensate and balance human nature and help maturing the human race and therewith help humanity to avoid the pitfalls of history.


Automatism - Thinking that any changes are automatically compensated by some time-mechanism, nullifying any negative consequences. You can make changes to the past but over time these changes will be absorbed and nature will take its course. You can evade events and temporally bent the course of history but in the long run it will make no change.


Unbelief - Thinking it can't be done anyway, so trying it can't do any harm.


What could be achieved by changing the history time line, that could be considered useful?
Could you create life before it existed, Going back to an era that life as we know it did not exist and 'create' it there and then by bringing back species of plants, animals etc. from the future and let them then develop by themselves? Could we play god and manipulate life itself in this way?


Could you evade the consequences of disasters by giving an early warning to the people involved? Could you guide humanity by giving hints and guidelines about how to avoid great harm such as the Apocalypse or Armageddon. Events that could wipe out humanity?


Could you change the destructive nature of humanity by giving people a god and religion and teach them moral and ethic values and improve their spiritual wisdom?


If any of the above scenarios would be possible, it would virtually allow us to play god or at least impersonate him, creating life before it existed or manipulating our own course of history.

A scenario I can imagine could be for instance, that if we in a far future (when we also have space travel) find a planet that circles around an old sun which at some stage of its existence could have contained life, we could time travel back to that era, create life and let it develop and evolution from there on.

Looking at the possible consequences of time travel and meddling with our own past it might be better not inventing it at all, but if we do develop the technology would we be capable and wise enough to leave the past alone?



www.time-loops.net...

I have a hypothesis I'm going to add to this thread:

I believe you'd have to change your observation rate to one that is many times faster than the speed of light. I'm talking so fast that everything around you comes to a "screeching" halt. You would be surrounded by particles that aren't moving. This is the important part and it pertains to something that must happen inorder for any traveling back to work.

At this speed, hopefully your frame of reference is "locked in" to the still particle mess you see around you. Then by "moving" in the direction opposite of where all these particles would be moving in real time, hopefully they go back with you in a sense rewinding everything. There's some holes in this idea but I figured I'd throw it out there to keep the conversation going.

Originally posted by Eitimzevinten
I have a hypothesis I'm going to add to this thread:

I believe you'd have to change your observation rate to one that is many times faster than the speed of light.

Wow, it has been a bit since I have posted in this thread so I am a bit out of the loop. Forgive me if this has been explained by you or anyone else.

When you say " Observation rate" what exactly do you mean.

Do you mean, the speed in which you observe things or...how exactly do you mean it in the context of your last post?

One very interesting thought to ponder...

Aliens 10-30 million light years away checking out our planet through telescopes and whatnot, if they have technology advanced enough to see our planet, might be seeing dinosaurs...

they get all hyped, "Yeah! let's go get some dinosaurs for our new zoo!" and get here and see us...


Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com

That just flew the speed of light past my brain! I can't understand it. I supposed reading it a few times and hearing other things, one day I will begin to understand. An interesting thing to think about, for someone like me who can't quite grasp these concepts, is like when you mentioned how we are actually looking at light from years ago when we look at stars. When you look at a mirror, you are looking into the past...

reply to post by Bananarama

... is like when you mentioned how we are actually looking at light from years ago when we look at stars. When you look at a mirror, you are looking into the past...

That's quite true ... any time we look at any object, we are effectively "seeing" that object as it was in the past ... whether that "past" was a minute fraction of a second ago (as when we look at our surroundings) or approx 8 mins ago when we look (very carefully !) at the sun or millions of years ago as we look at the stars and galaxies.
The simple reason for the above is that it takes time (no matter how short or long) for photons that were emitted or reflected from the object we're looking at to have travelled the distance between it and our eyes.

I guess you could call that the "poor man's" method to time travel into the past

reply to post by gimme_some_truth


The speed at which we interpret information regarding our surroundings. You don't necessarily have to consciously interpret at this rate but something has to log information that fast inorder for the whole thing to work. Faster interpretation means you slow your surroundings down to the point in which there is almost no time (read: change).

I for one am skeptical that time travel is even possible either way. The world of trans-luminal physics hasn't really been touched on all that much and even if I'm right about the nature of the physics behind this, there are still three things that must happen inorder to actually pull it off.

First, you need to be able to move in this extremely slow rate of change (brought on by your extremely fast rate of observation) as even a single step forward will be much faster than the speed of light. Then, you need to be able to retrace the steps your body has taken thus putting you physically in the past from a cause and effect perspective. Because your particles are still spinning and moving in a normal fashion (though much faster), you will retain your current form though there may be some aging involved in the process.

Finally, as you retrace your steps, the universe must follow you going back. This is the biggest reach but it can occur in one of two ways: There's either a space-time link that must be preserved so everything goes back with you, or just you go physically back while the universe you left keeps its normal rate thus putting you in your own alternatre time-line.

As of right now, I don't see any way to do such a thing, but trans-luminal (if THAT is even possible) speeds offer the best hope in the whole situation.

I read your explaination of time travel, and it was very interesting. But I have a question.

Okay, let's say you move faster that the speed of sound in a really fast vehicle, but at the same time, a sound is produced, however you are able to outrun the sound because you're moving faster than it. Right, then you suddenly become stationary... after a few seconds you should hear the sound, because it would've caught up with you.

Okay, to bring me to my next point...

If you move faster than the speed of light for 10 years out of space and return to earth, then you should be a significant portion in the future, because you would've been gone for 10 years, but in earth years it would actually be a lot more right? So you should be years in the future. Okay, so what happens after that? Will time again catch up with you, just like the sound would have?

Just wondering what you think.

Thanks for the thread though, it was a really good read.

reply to post by xXUnseenXx


If you travel for 10 years, only 10 years pass. The rate of speed only determines the distance you cover. To travel faster than light, you need to be able to log information much faster than the speed of light and then of course, you need to be able to transfer that information much faster than the speed of light. Matter, EM, and its branch of forces have a limit at the speed of light.

Inorder to pull this off, all your EM properties would have to become shear information that is logged along with everything else and then sent backwards on the path it has already "traveled". I promise you, even considering moore's law, we are still decades at best and milleniums at worst away from having a micro chip that can interpret information at such a speed. We're talking, 20-100x the speed of light. If time travel is possible, I don't see how it could be done any other way.

Its not really something I focus on too much but seeing as the stuff I'm working on can be applied to the idea of it atleast somewhat, I figured I'd chime in.