Physicists have developed a new mathematical model that shows how time travel is theoretically possible. They used Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity as a springboard for their hypothetical device, which they call a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (TARDIS).
Read more:
http://bit.ly/2FyqiWV
What do you think about time travel? I personally think that it’s quite possible after reading this.
Wishful thinking.
Indeed, there is no future to visit. I adore- ADORE - time travel stories. Just love them and am not overly fussy about the science involved. I readily embrace whatever flimsy “ framework “ that allows for time travel in works of fiction. It’s just my thing.
That said, I also embrace rigorous science in the real world. There is no future because many animals including Homo sapiens are endowed with free will.
I can take the W train to 34th Street/ Herald Square in New York City. Walk up the steps to the concourse level and turn left, walk the hallway to the turnstiles and exit one of them. As I turn right and head towards the 35th & 6th Avenue exit stairs, I encounter a 22 year old Latina with a baby in a large and complex stroller. As is my wont, I offer to grab the front rail and help carry the stroller and baby up with her. She’s appreciative and we work out way up, taking our steps carefully and I slide the stroller to the sidewalk, accepting her thanks with a smile.
I walk forward, past the coffee/ bagel street cart always parked right there on the curb. As I walk past the cart, an Uber car swerves violently to avoid a cyclist, rams into the cart which shoves into me as it is driven over the sidewalk into the side of the building, crushing my spine and fracturing my skull. I’m dead in less than 5 minutes from the damage. Debris strikes the mother, slicing through her right arm deeply but not mortally. The baby is unscathed.
Except that I’m aware that I’m out of breath mints that morning and stop at the newsstand on the concourse level and in less than 120 seconds I transact. Pick out some peppermint Altoids, pay and walk towards the turnstiles.
Those 120 seconds keep me underground. I don’t die. The woman with the stroller is waiting at the bottom hoping for help. She and the baby are fine.
There is no predestined future to visit. And if there is no predestined future to visit, how can we go back in time for, say, 24 hours and then effort to return to a future that cannot possibly exist because no future is established and set in stone. Or foam core. Or mush. I can no more go back in time than I can go forward in time.
Because while the past is an established framework, I cannot for one moment believe that the construction of a time machine as detailed in that article could return me home.
If I cannot return home, because there is no future to return to, how could I exist to go back in time in the first place?
A lovely theoretical construct. I call bullshit, however…
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
More than “shows” it looks like a mathematical model that, devoid of any real life restrictions, can the the desired result.
“Bending the universe” and “faster than light” are no proof.
Also, I’d be supremely bummed if the scientists who actually do time travel to it with a machine called TARDIS.
My view is that time travel is scientifically interesting either way. Either it’s possible, which has all sorts of possible ramifications; or it’s impossible and whatever natural laws make it impossible will have their own interesting aspects.
My personal suspicion is that it’s impossible. However the fact that theoreticians keep coming up with ideas on how to do it that have to be shot down reminds me of the period before the discovery of the laws of themodynamics. Back then people kept coming up with ideas for perpetual motion machines that had to be analyzed to show why they wouldn’t work, because the laws that described why they would work hadn’t been found yet.
I suspect that there’s some as yet undiscovered physical laws that outright forbid time travel; probably with all sorts of interesting ramifications of their own. But until they are discovered people will keep coming up with ideas on how to do it that look possible at first.
It seems to be a common scientific view that the passage of time is an illusion, and both the past and future are and always have existed and been fixed.
Free will is an illusion. Just because you’re trapped in the present doesn’t mean there aren’t events out there waiting to happen. You just haven’t caught up to them yet.
Nice story, 'Verse but it all rests on the assumption that you have free will. There are those who disagree.
Now, I don’t buy the argument the philosophers are putting forth* but I can’t be sure my objections are caused by what they are saying.
OTOH, even if the OP’s article is correct, there are some non-trivial materials and engineering obstacles to overcome.
*I have looked askance at the field of philosophy ever since in my intro book, the author took a page and a half to say you can’t always believe what people tell you. Logorrhea runs rampant among its practitioners.
Here’s the problem with your story. Suppose for the sake of argument that the future is absolutely predetermined – that the state of every neuron in your brain was known, and in the brains of everyone else on earth, the state of every single air and water molecule and every bit of matter on earth and in space around it – suppose that all those things were known, such that the outcome of your story could have been predicted with absolute certainty.
Suppose that this were the case, instead of the “free will” that you believe in. How could you possibly tell the difference? How could you, a mere biological creature capable only of subjective judgments, tell whether or not everything you were about to do, and the future of the entire universe, was already predetermined?
The question of a predetermined future could be an interesting question at the intersection of philosophy and information theory were it not for the fact that quantum uncertainty introduces unknowable true randomness at sufficiently small scales. But “free will” is just a subjective illusion of consciousness, not a governing principle of the physical world.
BTW, I share your love of time travel stories – and good sci-fi in general.
Can someone un-bit-ly that link? I’m not clicking on a disguised link from someone I don’t know.
This is a claim unsupported by objective evidence.
That said, I’m not onboard with the OP either, albeit for a different reason; “mathematically possible” is, well, wishful thinking. It’s mathematically possible I could lead the American League in home runs this year.
This isn’t new. There have been several theoretical models of time travel derived in the very same way, by finding loopholes in Relativity. But none have been practicable in any way.
It’s hard to tell from a vague layman’s summary like that… but it looks like all they did was to take the Alcubierre metric and Lorentz-transformed it. Which is something trivially easy to do, once you have the Alcubierre metric, which has been known for a quarter of a century. And similar things can be done with any other proposed FTL mechanism, some of which have been known for far longer (wormholes, for instance, have been known for over a century). There’s nothing new here.
The catch with all of these “time machine” designs (or, equivalently, FTL drive designs) is that they all require the use of matter with negative mass. We’ve never found any evidence for the existence of such matter, and if it were possible, it should naively be very easy to produce and detect it, so the absence of evidence probably can, in this case, be taken as evidence of absence.
[Moderating]
Also, since this thread is about science fact, rather than about fictional depictions of time machines, it’ll fit better in GQ than in CS. Moving.
Reported the OP as a spammer.
I am also unhappy with the OP.
I am not a big fan at all at indirect links such as URL shorteners in this context.
Just put in the original link!
I am very hesitant to click on a link that I can’t see the full URL directly. Especially from a new poster.
Putting free will aside, the question of whether the universe is predetermined also depends on whether or not God does, in fact, play with dice. If the universe does indeed feature a random element at the quantum level, then there’s no such thing as “the” future. A billion billion billion different futures, maybe, but not just one.
There’s a mechanism in Bit.ly to allow you to preview the URL : just add a + sign at the end of the short URL.
Here is the resolved link. I am not vouching for it, just providing it.
Oh, look, it’s the same “bored-ninja.tk” site as OP’s last (locked) post.
Also, this news is not news. It’s nearly a year old.
Thus spake Cartooniverse:
“Indeed, there is no future to visit. I adore- ADORE - time travel stories. Just love them and am not overly fussy about the science involved. I readily embrace whatever flimsy “ framework “ that allows for time travel in works of fiction. It’s just my thing.”
Have you seen Triangle? Not a big budget film but kind of a cool TT movie. One of my faves.
Is it better than the first Bill & Ted film? That, to me, is the gold standard of time travel movies.
(I’m not kidding - it’s a surprisingly rigorous film).
Just to let you know I’m rooting for you!!! 