ID:193001
 Apr 14 2002, 3:32 pm
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Is time travel possible? There are many therios on this. one is when a star collapses, it creates a rift in space-time, which we know as a Black Hole. However, it is theorized that when a special star dies, it forms a rotating ring of neutrons with such a centrifugal force that it prevents the singularity of the hole from being formed. Thus it literally rips a hole through space-time and leads to times unknown, most likely into a parallel universe. However, there is no current proof. Another way it could be done is to somehow exceed the speed of light. As an object nears the speed of light, space-time is distorted and time will slow down for that object. This isn't noticeable unless going at extraordinary speeds. Einstein proved this when he put an atomic clock on a jet, and when the jet came back the atomic clock was slightly ahead (a millionth of a second) of the one which remained on the ground. In theory, if an object exceeds the speed of light (using infinite energy and withstanding infinite mass), then time will reverse at the velocity the object came. I would like to see intelligent responses concering time travel here.
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Apr 14 2002, 3:39 pm
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Strange Kidd
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ouch you hurt my head to many mathmatical thingys involved here
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yeah too bad that we cant get to any stars besides the sun
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Some don't believe in black holes either. Einstein himself was not a fan. Currently, there are some people proposing an alternative called a gravastar.
Here is a link to a forum of mouthy Slashdot people with a link to an actual article in it: http://slashdot.org/science/02/01/19/0247211.shtml I'm not ruling out either theory. | |
1) Centrifugal force isnt possible only centripical is
2) black holes are mass eating things 3) if you are travelling 30 % faster than the speed of light (which is impossible) in theory you should be going back in time 4) Photons have no rest mass, but have energy so they have momentuem. | |
What about the reversal of orbit? Both planet rotation and planet's orbit in relation to the sun?
LJR | |
I define "time travel" to be a process of removing an object from its correct time and placing it into another time... Either backward or forward...
And by this definition...I don't think that time travel is possible in the least... I don't believe that the "future" even exists yet...so obviously I don't think one can be placed forward in time... And I don't believe that the past can be accessed in physical form...so time travel in that direction is also impossible... In order for one to travel backwards in time... You wouldn't need to control time... You'd need to control everything else...lol Everything in the universe would have to be turned back to the exact state it was in at the point you wish to go to...effectively setting "time" to that particular point... I don't see this as possible... I consider "time" to be a simple measure of the change of the matter and energy of the universe... So "time" isn't a tangible object in my opinion...and can't be bent or controlled... I do believe in the "faster than light" theory, though... But I don't consider that to be "time travel"... I simply think of that as slowing your rate of change (and therefore your "time") relative to everything around you...and then dropping back into regular "time"... It's a one way trip, for one...and you didn't really skip any time... You just let it pass you by at a faster rate than your relative time was moving... It still took place... So by my definition of "time travel"...you haven't accomplished it... | |
SuperSaiyanGokuX wrote:
I define "time travel" to be a process of removing an object from its correct time and placing it into another time... Either backward or forward... Not believing in something doesn't mean it is impossible. ;) Scientific history is full of people doing things no one believed in. I don't believe that the "future" even exists yet...so obviously I don't think one can be placed forward in time... If the future does not exist yet and you travel to the past, making it your present, when did you come from? Travel to the future is easy. We are all doing it already. If you want to travel a hundred years into the future, fund cryogenics research. In order for one to travel backwards in time... You wouldn't need to control time... You'd need to control everything else...lol Everything in the universe would have to be turned back to the exact state it was in at the point you wish to go to...effectively setting "time" to that particular point... I don't see this as possible... I do it all the time! Just load an old save file. ;) To answer the original post: any theories of time travel we come up with are just that, theories. If you want to include time travel in your game, use whatever method appeals to you most and fits the genre. If you want to make it so that one must flip a bicentineal quarter to travel in time, go for it. It's a scientifically sound as climbing into a big box covered with blinking LEDs to travel in time. (Sadly, many people will except almost anything if you wrap it in a blinking box, but reject the idea completely without psuedo-technology. Star Trek is not science fiction in the traditional sense. It is science fantasy.) | |
I don't believe that the "future" even exists yet...so obviously I don't think one can be placed forward in time... A fairy tale land. You do not belong in that past, thus you have changed history forever, and made a entirely new one, thus destroying your own. I'm not sure about one thing though, if you traveled into the past, then it would have already happened in that time right now, so it is history that you went into the past before our time and did something, which has already caused history today. hard to explain. example: A knight is fighting another and is supposed to die, but somebody traveled to the past and changed that so he didn't, then in our time, because that was the past, he was always known that he didn't die. Travel to the future is easy. We are all doing it already. If you want to travel a hundred years into the future, fund cryogenics research. That is basicly freezing yourself and preserving it for the future or to be dumped into the trash like bad leftovers. | |
Well, as some posts point out, I suppose it all turns on what you define time travel as. As commonly understood, time travel is moving through a linear timestream, that is one could affect his own past and future. This is categorically impossible. Why? Because it involves a fallacy that surprisingly few people pick up on. Time is not real. It is an arbitrary measure, much like meters or inches except that it measures the rate of matter decay. Thus one cannot travel through "time" any more than one could travel in "weight". Turning from the semantic argument, the likelihood of being able to "travel" through what time represents is equally problematic. For one thing we have this thing called "reality". Reality exists on a given set of variables that cannot be altered lest the result be modified. Thus linear time travel is again definitionally impossible since any change would produce a different set of variables and, consequently, a different reality. IE travelling to the past would produce an alternate future. Of course, alternate theories have been advanced which may be more plausible. This presume alternative dimensions based on the innumerable combinations of variables that exist in "reality". While romantically appealing (my dead family members might live in alternate realities), the scenario presents problems of its own. The foremost is that it implies limitless possibilities and with it limitless matter and energy. Of course, our universe has never been limitless and it seems odd that such a structure should develop. Indeed, if we are capable of interacting with these other continuums, then they are not in fact separate. The implication of this is that if they are not separate, then they probably cannot exist since their basis is that of seperate lines of reality.
More likely is the theory that such speeds can be approached that decay largely slows, though probably never stops. Interesting to note, however, is Stephen Hawkingss works, which have shown flaws in a number of Einstein's theories on this subject. I think at some point we will realize that these theories on "time travel", "aliens", and like phenomona are a result of our sensory limitations and the limitations of cognitive faculties evolved to survive under a very limited set of conditions. No more than a two dimensional stick man could accurately speculate on our world can we accurately theorize what the totality of reality *really* includes. This is the nexus of myth and science, of fact and faith. Perhaps beyond the stars Azathoth the nuclear entity slumbers to the mad playing of blind pipers or perhaps YHWH sits in judgement of our souls. Maybe there is nothing. We are hairless primates on a rock hurtling through cold space, that much we know. The rest is conjecture. -James | |
I myself have never seen anything to convince me that Einstein's special relativity is anything more than a mathematically interesting viewpoint that can tie a few theories together. All experiments to prove him right or wrong rest on observations affected by electromagnetic forces, which would naturally constrain the results to the speed of light. Hence, any hypothesis derived from special relativity would appear true (at least as far as its relativistic parts were concerned), but not necessarily be true.
I read once that Einstein's theory is actually based on non-Euclidean geometry; it contents that the universe follows elliptical geometry. (As I recall, the central postulate that changes is that instead of straight non-parallel lines crossing once and only once, they can cross more than once.) This is so counter-intuitive it strikes me as deeply wrong. Thus, given no solid evidence to the contrary, I still prefer to believe Newton was right and that general relativity prevails, not special relativity: The speed of a photon is not constant. Of course, under general relativity time dilation vanishes--and so do any chances of using that as a basis for time travel. (My guess: Some other, yet undiscovered force would have to be the key to time travel if it's possible.) Small loss, I say. Einstein's universe would have us pretty much forever trapped in this solar system, because it's temporally infeasible to travel elsewhere. General relativity allows that if you have engines powerful enough and some kind of shielding to protect you from collisions (even small space dust would be damaging at superluminal speeds), you can go as fast as you want. Going back to time travel, I think that if time is something that can be moved through (and not just an illusion), if it's valid as a dimension, then it's linear and interconnected with the 3 spatial dimensions. That means that it's internally consistent, a single construct of 4 dimensions. Thus, the only possible time travel would be of a sort that wouldn't violate that consistency: No paradoxes. If you travel back in time, it will set off a chain of events that will bring about the exact state from which you left. (Chaos theory says that even small changes matter; movement of a few air molecules could cause a different pattern of weather on any given day 4,000 years in the future, even though the overall climate would probably be the same. Think of it like taking two different statistical samples from an infinite population: Different data, same results.) There can be no paradoxes. Some movies follow this rule; others don't. In 12 Monkeys, the rule is hard and fast: The past can't be changed. The Terminator says this isn't the case, and yet the movie is a paradoxical case of the future bringing itself about, which would suggest otherwise. I'm blanking on some of the other examples right now. Many more movies and books follow the idea that you can change the future; I think this stems more from our perpetual human question "what if" than any kind of physical reality. Lummox JR | |
Shadowdarke wrote:
Not believing in something doesn't mean it is impossible. ;) Scientific history is full of people doing things no one believed in. Quite true... If the future does not exist yet and you travel to the past, making it your present, when did you come from? Exactly why I don't think it's possible... There are too many problems like this one... Although Geo's solution of having the future you came from erased once you leave it and recreated based on your arrival in the past makes a decent amount of sense... Travel to the future is easy. We are all doing it already. If you want to travel a hundred years into the future, fund cryogenics research. Both of these methods are not what I define as true "time travel"... You're not skipping any time...you're just letting it pass you by... I feel that to experience true time travel, you need to skip from your time to another...missing the chunk in between altogether... And you also need to be able to go back to whence you came... I do it all the time! Just load an old save file. ;) Heh... I'm not speaking in terms of a game... Anything is possible in a game... I'm speaking in terms of reality...which is what I thought this thread was supposed to be about...lol To answer the original post: any theories of time travel we come up with are just that, theories. If you want to include time travel in your game, use whatever method appeals to you most and fits the genre. If you want to make it so that one must flip a bicentineal quarter to travel in time, go for it. It's a scientifically sound as climbing into a big box covered with blinking LEDs to travel in time. (Sadly, many people will except almost anything if you wrap it in a blinking box, but reject the idea completely without psuedo-technology. Star Trek is not science fiction in the traditional sense. It is science fantasy.) Agreed... If it's for a game...then anything goes... But in the real world...I don't think it's possible... | |
If you had a powerful enough computer and could "save" a person (record exactly every detail of him/her right down to the placement and arrangement of quarks and beyone them even to the things we have not even hypothesized about yet), and you had another computer in the same "time" that you wanted to go to, you would not have to travel all the way to a black hole to go through a rip time-space. You could just "save" the person and transmit the data through the quantum foam, through the gaps in space. Using light as your stream of data since photons are energy and could fit through those gaps, the computer on the other side (assuming that they are now at the computer, since you would not know how to direct where in the fourth dimension the data would go) that computer could record the data and reconstruct the person that was "dissasembled" on the other side. This would require a computer of infinite capability since you would need to record everything about the object sent through, because beyond quarks there are even smaller organizations of matter that we cannot even hypothesize about (although I am not even fully convinced with the theory of quarks either, we do not even know enough about protons, electrons, and nuetrons to by hypothesizing about quarks, nuetrinos, and similar things yet). This idea is dependent on the theory of quantum foam, which, as I stated, I am not even convinced of anything scientists say about sub-atomic matter on this level, because they do not even know enough about protons, electrons, and nuetrons yet.
The only reason I am remotely interested in this theory is because my favourite author, Micheal Crighton, wrote a novel where scientists actually accomplished this. | |
We will never invent a machine that can take us backwards in time.
The best argument I have to support this is that some young punk would have come back in history already to show off his machine to us, and wow us. I mean, don't you think he'd come back and try to sell the patent to Microsoft? | |
I agree with that view, but it is not total proof that it is impossible. For one thing maybe someone from the future traveled through time and found him/herself a million light years from home and died (like in Micheal Crightons Sphere:) ), or maybe they didnt die and they are colonized as we speak on another planet, or maybe they died while changing times from intense pressures from a black hole. Maybe the people of the future have formed into a better and wiser society (I doubt it) and have decided that they should not tamper with us. There are a host of reasons why people could have time traveled allready without us knowing it. Someone from the a distant-past advanced civilization could have "time-traveled". I actually have a few hypotheses of my own that would explain extra-terrestrial life and why sighters of them say they are pale and elongated, and why they fly saucer shaped spacecraft. I will not share my ideas on this subject though as you would probably just laugh at me.
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I do it all the time! Just load an old save file. ;) Heh... I'm not speaking in terms of a game... Anything is possible in a game... I'm speaking in terms of reality... What makes you sure that the two are mutually exclusive? | |
Skysaw wrote:
We will never invent a machine that can take us backwards in time. I doubt the government would allow it to be sold to anyone and would keep all secrets of time travel locked away. | |