Re: Is Time Travel Possible?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
41

Will someone please let me know honestly if I should spend my time reading this post? I actually did stop reading a few sentences after I saw the word theory used in its context in Ceasel’s original post. It’s theory or fact but be aware of what you asking for if you read further, you may not like the answer. It solves the GOD answer as well.
There is no way possible that time travel is possible, by both measures, if with a God or without, but it may affect your belief in God.

  1. It can only be one or the other. If there is a God, there is no, and I mean 100% no chance he can 31st in time. Truly if God existed in time, at any measure, is to say the god has a beginning and and and and thus isn’t a God at all. A God may enter or exist time when they so chose, but cannot exist in time by any measure or must be subject to end. Period. Therefore, a God must exist above a time line, such as looking at a ruler on the space station in midair. Either shape, the time line must be observed by a true God. The question alone is silly since anyone in any time on that ruler is subject to the ruler itself, that is, they must recognize they exist and that they are on the ruler we’ll call timeliness itself. But to navigate anywhere on that ruler, no matter what shape it may be in, cannot be navigated as it would force you to be elevated at a level only God can have the pleasure of enjoying the ability to exist as a God to begin with, and to say we can navigate to a level of a God and that by definition would prevent it from being a true God but rather just a god. So, time travel must be impossible, with or without a God, because…
  2. If there is no god, then all laws subject to any law by definition should be able to go back to theory since mere probability would indicate our entire “known” universe can be chalked up to theories, including quantum mechanics, WITH THEORY EXCEPTION OF MOTION! Since even if your an atheist you have to admit there is a law in motion because even if your time line wasn’t in motion it would have to have the same probability of randomness as all exist of anything anywhere must; therefore, it would mean that the time limit email ruler itself was subject to there having a probability, as slight as it may be, that it would be able to protect itself from non existence and thus subject to any god or God. IDK, that’s just my opinion and if anyone has touched on that in a prior post, I will read every post as all would force me to think. Thanks and after plenty of pleasure reading other threads, this is the first time I have ever joined because I honestly would like my first question answered before I proceed. Thank you for taking the time to read all of mine if you did. I never prepare. I only type as I think and hope auto spell doesn’t mess up. Barney
42

Well, that certainly clears things up. Thanks.

43

Also, the conservation laws aren’t enforced by an agency - they are a description of the inherent persistence of objects, states and forces. I don’t think anyone believes the universe is actually keeping track of things.

44

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Throw enough money, effort, time and ingenuity at a scientific or engineering problem and, sooner or later, someone will almost certainly figure it out. Hell, we went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base in just 66 years. Who’s to say we won’t perfect time travel in 50 years, or 100, or a thousand?

45

I don’t see their persistence as needing an agent, but someting more like Newton’s 3rd law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). So, for instance, conservation of energy is maintained, not as a consequence of the intercession of some Great Omnipresent Decider, but simply as a consequence that existing energy must go somewhere.

I still have a vague feeling that even in regular, measurable, demonstrable (time-dilation type) time-travel, something is amiss with (my) view of simple persistence. For all the cases of sci-fi time-travel I can think of I have no doubt that they contravene that same simple persistence (for reasons I have already stated).

46

Here’s a thought: Time travel is a Schroedinger situation. Each future second is undefined until we experience and collapse it into a known state. This is why we can’t travel forward.

What I would really like to see is someone inventing a way of seeing the past, but not necessarily visiting it. For example, let’s go back and actually video the gunfight at the OK Corral, or the Nicole Simpson murder scene, or Jerusalem 2000 years ago on Golgotha, , or the Cretaceous meteor strike, etc. etc. Sure would give us the answers to a bunch of questions.

47

You do that talk thing more better then I.

48

FTL travel or wormholes would allow this – for example, we could travel out 5 light years (in less than 5 years) and point a big telescope back at earth and we’d see the earth of 5 years in the past. Travel out 65 million light years, and point a telescope (obviously one far beyond current optics) back at earth, and we’ll see the K-T event that killed the dinosaurs.

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I thought we decided that time-dilation effects are exactly that?

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The only problem with time-viewing the past is that unless limited somehow, it would mean that all the information that ever existed in the universe would be accessible, and I’m pretty sure that would bump up against entropy somewhere.

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NM. I just said what someone else said several posts back, and much sooner after the post I thought I was responding to.

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Andy, If in fact you set out to do what you are theorizing, wouldn’t you leave earth, somewhere fast than light speed you are traveling, so you go 5 years forward, grab your optics, look through your optics but you are limited to only looking as far back as your point of origin on any time line, minus any time that has passed between your departure and length of time traveling?
Even if your time line was a basketball in a sponge like state, any God would be truly subject to having the entire basketball in midair thus subject us being able to navigate within it, a God would be able to look down at it and be protected from being subject it’s laws but anything with its content would be subject to the laws of the basketball (timeline) itself, thus making it truly unnavigatable full resulting in it being a theory impossible to check via scientific method so in no way could it truly be done.
If universe has subject of big bang, silly as it may seem, all laws were only theories but 1, motion, as randomness by definition needed a probability, slight as it is, to be random, thus it would be impossible to go back to that time before a law of let’s say, gravity became a law and rather just existed in theory. You would never be able to travel backwards for that very reason, I wish we could, but I don’t see the possibility when my brain looks for it. It’s as though a monkey is very intelligent, much like our species, but although they are subject to the LAWS they can’t comprehend them. We truly are like monkeys when it comes to cognitively debating time travel, as by definition if it were even able to fully become achieved it would be the exact second we became a god and could truly go back and alter the beginning of the universe, as slight as it may seem, but that would make us godlike in having the ability to do so.

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That’s something that occurred to me while still at college. You know, before the earth’s crust completely cooled.

Great minds think alike, no?

54

Can’t parse this. Can you write in shorter sentences, and use clearer paragraph breaks?

55

I like this idea. But I also like Czarcasm’s analogy to a book, except that I think that the book has already been written. Or is being written, or will be written. Verb tenses have little meaning without time as a place holder.

In the short story “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” by Robert Heinlein, the universe was a work of art, created by an artist. We might exist on page 32 but page 1001 has also been written. The universe is both a complex equation and an active work of art.

“Time is an illusion that keeps the pages from sticking together.” Alfred E. Einstein

56

When you travel, you travel in a direction for a duration. When you think about the future, consider each action that can be made as a different direction. If you travel ahead 1 hour, you only have the duration, not the direction. It’s like getting in your car and driving straight for 1 mile, but not in any particular direction. Until you know where you are going, you can’t start the trip, and if you refer back to Clothahump’s post you realize that the destination just can’t be known ahead of time.

57

Even the wormhole does work as posited.
Have an ounce of gold on the coffee table. Go to the future, grab the ounce, bring it back. Now two ounces exist. You created mass in this universe at this time and removed it from the future.

So it would require rejigging the conservation laws to take into account taking mass from one time to another. It is even worse if you can go into past, present and future.

Using time travel in various ways and loops, you can displace almost unlimited mass from one time to another.

I wrote of such a scheme for creating an unending supply of chocolate cream pies in a blog of mine. Dream big!

58

Never explain why something is so, when it isn’t in fact so. We can travel forward. We know exactly how to do it, and we have done it. It’s easy.

It does indeed bump up against entropy, but not in the way you think. All information being accessible is not only not forbidden, it is required.

This is not a violation of conservation of mass or of energy. The conservation laws do not state that the matter or energy content of the Universe is constant. Or, if you prefer, the necessary “rejigging” of the conservation laws is how they are already expressed.

59

I know that QM requires that information not be destroyed, but not all information is useful. Just as energy isn’t destroyed but waste heat is effectively useless, the conservation of information in the “you could reconstruct a book from it’s burnt ashes and smoke if you only followed each and every particle back to its origin” theoretical sense is the equivalent of waste heat. Specifically, the calculations necessary to reconstruct the book would generate vastly more entropy than the information contained in the book. Now maybe this can be done, just as by degrading energy with an air conditioner you can pump heat out of a room to make it cold. But I doubt that non-degraded information can be retrieved by a trivial effort.

60

It’s not the sentence length, paragraphing, and punctuation that is the real problem. Some grammar would help, but the real problem is he needs to add coherancy and sense.

I can almost make sense of what he’s trying to say here. He’s asking if you would be constrained at seeing only the point of origin.

If I travel exactly 5 light years in 3 years, turn around, I should be seeing Earth 2 years before I left, because light is traveling the 3 years I’m traveling, so the time point I left is 3 light years out from Earth, and I am 5 light years out from Earth.

Or something like that.

It’s the next part that gets wonky.

How did God enter this conversation?

God is outside the basketball, so can look down on it anywhere just by moving or by turning the basketball, but anyone on the basketball cannot see down and can only see along the surface, and in order to move around has to travel around? Something like that?

Being stuck in the universe, we cannot look at the universe from the outside, and thus cannot truly test the theories? Um, yeah.

Laws of the universe were never just theories. They are fundamentally different things.

Laws are just expressions of how the universe appears to work. They are descriptions, not prescriptions. Traffic laws, for instance, are prescriptions that tell you how you are supposed to drive and what the penalties are for not driving that way. Universal laws of motion are descriptions of how things are observed to move. There are no penalties, because motion cannot be violated.

We humans try to describe what we see happening. So Newton formulated some mathematical expressions. Those expressions are tested against behavior and shown to be accurate. Where inaccuracies exist, it’s not the universe violating the law, it’s the law being inaccurate or incomplete. E.g. Einstein and relativity.

See, this doesn’t make any sense. I assume you are trying to say, for example, that it would be difficult to travel back in time to a point before the fundamental forces separated, i.e. before electromagnetism was separated from the strong nuclear force. Because it would be difficult to exist in that state. It is unclear whether one teleporting into the universe in that condition would be able to maintain their current state, or if the conditions would be rather like teleporting into the heart of the Sun, only more so. The universe itself is smaller than the volume you currently occupy, you would need to be squished to fit inside it, and thus not able to maintain your current form, and be converted into undifferentiated subatomic goo, just like everything else in the universe at that time. Right? Makes sense. (I can’t believe I said that.)

I don’t know why I’m engaging this - I doubt the effort I’m expending is worth the payoff.