Could Time be on a loop?

Not sure if this is the right place to post, so feel free to move this thread mods.

I have been thinking about this for some time. Supposedly the reason time travel to the past cannot be possible is because of "the grandfather paradox", I'm sure your all aware of this paradox so hardly worth me explaining it, but for the few who don't know what it means I guess ill go ahead and explain.
the Grandfather paradox is the idea that if for some reason you went back in time and killed your grandfather, you would never be born to go back in time in the first place. Meaning you cant go back in time because it would change the future, possibly so much so that you may eliminate yourself from ever being born, therefor rewriting history.

Well to solve this paradox, science came up with the multiverse theory, stating that it still may be possible to go back in time but instead of going back to the universe you have already occupied, you would instead go back to a slightly different version of the same universe, like a clone version. You could show up in this clone or twin universe, but you would have another version of yourself in the same universe. So rather than changing time, you would simply be visiting a different version of your universe and so on, therefor you couldn't change anything in your timeline, making this form of time travel pretty pointless at any rate.

So I have a different idea. One that can solve the grandfather paradox and where you can still go back in time, in your timeline. What if time is like a vinyl record. think about it, the planets and the galaxies all revolve in a circular rotation. What if time does the same thing and what if time has a beginning , middle and end.

So lets imagine an old vinyl record, being played. if you lift the needle you can place it anywhere on the vinyl. The needle will simply play over again what has already been played, it wont rewrite any information but it will revisit and play the exact same information. In fact a record is a form of time machine, as it records and stores information that can be accessed at will, just as I state.

So lets say you can go back in time, view what has been viewed already or even live as you have already lived, but you have no memory you have done it all before. So we could all be time travelers, but our consciousness is so designed, that we simply cannot know about it, we are simply like the needle, replaying our lives without any knowledge of it. could this be where de ja vu comes from???

Secondly what if you put the needle on the record and accidently you scratch the vinyl, causing a deletion of some of the information, so when the record plays there is an obvious audible gap and a jump. Well we can compare this to the Grandfather paradox. because if we go back and edit or delete some information in time, perhaps there is a gap left behind, but if time acts like a record, then even with an obvious deletion, the information on either side of the edit still stays the same.

So lets say you have a time traveler who goes back in time and kills his grandfather. The Time traveler still exists, but so does the grandfather, even though for an hour or more?? the grandfather is deleted, he simply reappears again in the timeline. this would mean everyone's memory of an event like a retro causal murder would be forgotten about. In the back to future movies, Marti seems to travel to parallel universes, because he is able to significantly change, what appears to be his parents future, especially as he also is conscious of the changes he has made..we also see a twin of his appear throughout the back to the future movies, making it obvious he has traveled to parallel universes as opposed to travelling back into and changing his own time line.

So to examine weather my theory might hold water, lets look back and see if there are any "gaps" obvious gaps or jumps in our history, where we just accept that we knew things up to a certain point and then we have a gap, but carry on with our knowledge afterwards.

Now to add a bit more substance to this idea, here is a personal story. Some years ago, I bumped into a couple of old school friends, whilst i was out with another guy from my old school. the two friends i ran into recounted to me a story involving me, which was so outlandish, i was certain i would have remembered it if it was true. i turned to the guy I was with and remarked how i thought these guys must be mistaken, how i would never do the things they said i did, but instead of denying the story my good friend looked at me shocked and said he couldn't believe i couldn't remember. For what its worth i cant recall what the story was now, but i remember being absolutely shocked at hearing it, with zero memory of it, as it was so out of character, yet all three of my friends recalled it because it was so memorable to them.

I have had other times, people who i never met before said they had met me..one insisted id been to the grand canyon, a place i always wanted to go but have never been.

has anyone else had anything like this happen, which might suggest time has been altered, leaving a gap in our memory.

I tried digesting your thread, didn't FULLY understand what you were saying, but I just wanted to point out in case you forgot that information on a record or CD is still linear (same as a time line -- start, more, end), it just happens to be that it's rolled up in circular grooves/tracks. Unless you meant how the record head/needle will go back to the start of the record often after it's played. Or maybe you meant that time is rolled like this (in this physical layout), and whatever processes time can SKIP to an adjacent area of the data, etc.?

reply to post by TheBlackHat


No gaps except for periods of blind drunkenness in my youth!

Like your thinking though. I have often pondered the nature of time myself and have also wondered whether it was in a loop. Our distant past being our future maybe, but not quite the same as your analogy.

Good stuff.

Sure, time loops back in on itself, but not all at once. Just in little tiny bits and pieces that go through "holes" (not wormholes) in the fabric of spacetime. Maybe that's enough to trigger a quantum "pre-memory." I don't know.

reply to post by AkumaStreak


The record has two directions so can be played in reverse too, but would not make sense to us as the information would not be in a recognisable sequence. mehA

reply to post by FlesyhTwonk


Well I mean could the "missing link" be an example of an edit. lets say our ancestors in the future originally evolved from apes, then came back in time and decided to speed up evolution by adding human DNA to primitive apes. Leading to a "jump" in evolution. So in this idea, we have edited our own evolution and left a gap in it, a gap we cannot find today. If this turned out to be true, it would prove my point, about the information on either side of the edit remaining the same, with a missing gap. and if you leave a gap on a record the information on either side is still the same the only difference is you have removed something and sped up the record, without actually changing anything in the future, so nothing has been added to the record just a portion deleted.

I did a debate on the Grandfather Paradox last year, and in my research discovered a maths proof as a solution.

Debate here: Persuasion Match: adjensen vs Druid42: The Resolution to the Grandfather Paradox (TT Series, Part 2)

The maths proof here: Novikov self-consistency principle

And an experiment that proved it here: Closed timelike curves via post-selection: theory and experimental demonstration

In a nutshell, you can't kill your grandfather, because your existence evidences that you did not.

reply to post by adjensen


I think consciousness has been forgotten about in the whole time travel scenario. That's my real point. Every argument about time travel depends on people remembering they did something. What if people forget, what if the whole of human consciousness can be reset. Nobody ever calculates this idea or adds it into the debate.

What if yesterday was different to how we remember it? What if our memories are not real? I know it's a long shot and hard to grasp or contemplate...but what if the only thing that cant record time travel as having taken place is our own consciousness. Just an idea.

What if our conscious memory of events gets rewritten to account for things such as the grandfather paradox? What if someone goes back and kills their grandfather, maybe the time traveler does delete himself entirely and maybe the memory of him and all the things associated with him simply get edited out of the time line, leaving anyone who knew him with no memory he ever existed anyway.

Either way the grandfather paradox can be solved, by editing the conscious memory. if you cant remember it, it never happened.

Time travel is possible your just not prominently in the picture.

It's like in A Christmas Carol.

Scrooge goes back and forward in time but can't alter anything in it. He can only observe.

Time doesn't exist, it is a Human invention to describe things that have happened, and may happen later.

There is absolute proof of "time travel", however. Research astronauts, and their time devices when they return to Earth.

There never will be any significant "time travel" into the past, though. The evidence is that we would have time travelers appearing all around us, but they aren't here.

Maybe into the future, but never into the past.

Originally posted by Signals
Time doesn't exist, it is a Human invention to describe things that have happened, and may happen later.

There is absolute proof of "time travel", however. Research astronauts, and their time devices when they return to Earth.

There never will be any significant "time travel" into the past, though. The evidence is that we would have time travelers appearing all around us, but they aren't here.

Maybe into the future, but never into the past.

Sorry but all signals and or wavelengths whether visible are still existent.

If you wanted to say that 1900 to now is one fragment of one wavelength whether we can see it or not and we can because we are apart of it.

The obviously it can be traveled. What makes this obvious?

The fact that we traveled forward!

I don't know if anyone has ever suggested this before...but some events really resonate with people and it's as if we are missing something when they occur...quite possibly this feeling of missing something, might be down to the time line having been altered???

For instance the JFK assassination and 9/11...two of the biggest conspiracy topics ever. But maybe there is something else going on. Could these huge, world changing events, be retro causal edits? they certainly feel like it, like a much deeper element of reality has been changed. Maybe that's why these events will never feel like they have been settled or explained properly. Not to make this a 9/11 thread however, but another example of a possible edit or jump or missing gap, could be the collapse of building 11.

Originally posted by Signals
Time doesn't exist, it is a Human invention to describe things that have happened, and may happen later.

There is absolute proof of "time travel", however. Research astronauts, and their time devices when they return to Earth.

There never will be any significant "time travel" into the past, though. The evidence is that we would have time travelers appearing all around us, but they aren't here.

Maybe into the future, but never into the past.

Yes, but what if time travelers are all around, but just look, dress and act like you and I. There would be little point in drawing attention to themselves...Anyhow that wasn't my point, my point was possible edits in time, ones we cant detect because our consciousness gets altered to account for the gaps..A bit like if you put a big rock into a river, the water flows around the blockage. There could be huge edits in our time line, but instead or recognizing them as edits, our consciousness just flows around them, in a sense we don't recognize them as edits, just historical events that were destined to happen anyway.

Let me put it another way...Have you ever had something happen and you felt it was destined to happen. like love at first sight...Something like that.
Well other times something happens and you feel like it wasn't destined to happen, you get a weird feeling that it happened but should not have happened...maybe this is our consciousnesses hinting at an edit in the time line. Just a theory.

reply to post by TheBlackHat


The best your going to get is something that some would consider spiritual intervention.

What some consider spiritual communication or universal connection could just be time travelers uploading or communicating through the ethereal veil that they are hidden behind.

Imagine Scrooge using technology to try and communicate to his past and future self. But obviously he couldn't see himself.

Unless there was a way to time travel as an astral projection then you could see yourself.

Originally posted by TheBlackHat
Let me put it another way...Have you ever had something happen and you felt it was destined to happen. like love at first sight...Something like that.
Well other times something happens and you feel like it wasn't destined to happen, you get a weird feeling that it happened but should not have happened...maybe this is our consciousnesses hinting at an edit in the time line. Just a theory.

When those things I felt like wasn't supposed to happen happen I generally meditate on them later on find out that they in fact was supposed to happen.

If time didn't exist distance wouldn't exist. Because time is distance in this since time is navigable.

The velocity of the universe is probably moving at the speed of light so in order to travel back in time you would have to be able to travel faster than the speed of light.

Wait but if the entire universe is moving at the speed of light perhaps the point in the past you would like to visit is actually no longer in this universe. Does that make any sense?

reply to post by TheBlackHat


Yes...Glitches in the simulation.

As far as forgetting people from over 8 or 10 years ago, yes I can forget people from that long ago. I remember meeting one girl in particular who insisted she knew me. I had no memory at all about her. I assumed I had very little interaction with her which is why I couldn't remember her. After all I've met thousands of people over several years and I am not going to remember a vast majority.

What I have found is that some people can't even seem to remember me from one week to the next while some claimed to remember me from over 18 years ago. A month or two ago I ran into a girl who hugged me and said it had been two years since she's seen me. I chatted a little bit with her. The following weekend I ran into her again at the same place and once again she claimed it had been two years since she saw me. I was thinking what a goofball. I told her that's what she said last week. I told her I talked to her just last week. She persisted claiming it had been two years. I gave up on the argument thinking she must not have remembered last weekend. I have met people who have awful memories.

I usually blame other people working different shifts or days when someone comes up to me whom I haven't seen for months and they ask me where have I been? I've been routinely visiting the same clubs at roughly the same time the whole time. Every time I hear the question, I think about asking them where have they been? I think I will ask next time.