Had this thought while driving. I was thinking of the stupid ways in which alternate dimensions are treated in television and movies. You travel to an ‘alternate’ dimension where everything is just like here except some small difference. Or, you travel through an ‘alternate’ dimension to achieve faster than light travel…
You cannot travel through one dimension without traveling though them all. When you travel through space you also travel through time. This (I believe) holds true no matter how many dimensions they discover. You cannot move through one without moving through them all.
That being the case, events in time are no different than events in space. So, imagine you are traveling through space at 50 miles and hour and someone behind you throws a baseball at your head at 50 miles per hour. That baseball will never catch you, never have any effect on you. So, if you travel into the past and kill your own father so you are never born you will create a change that is moving forward at the exact same rate that you are. Thus that change will never reach you, never affect you.
It’s just a thought in it’s infant stages, but I find it interesting.
Why not? Of course, you’d need a point of reference - e.g. traveling away from earth at 50 mph (all motion is space is relative), but relative speed is unimportant for the example I gave. I could have just as easily said 50 miles per sec, but, it would be hard to throw a baseball that fast
I mean a dimension is just that… x, y, z, t - those are the ‘observable’ dimension (we can perceive them with our senses) but just because other dimensions can not be perceived with our senses does not mean they are subject to entirely different rules, unless the word dimension itself is being redefined in some way.
I’ve had similar thoughts; I think I’ve read at least one sci fi novel based on that theory - you could travel back in time and change the past, but the changes never caught up with the present. There’s probably some physics problem with the idea, but I don’t know it.
More like serial universes in this case. Go back in time and shoot Hitler in 1940, and you create a new version of 1940 without Hitler. But time there still progresses at the same rate, so in a year it’s 1941 without Hitler, while you are still living in a 2012 that had Hitler still alive until 1945. The present is never changed because changes to the past still only progress at one year per year.
ahhh that kind of space. I was thinking ‘outside of the Earth’s atmosphere’ kind of space.
Schrodinger’s damn cat doesn’t seem so complex when you stop thinking of time in terms of the linear.
If you go back in time and shoot Hitler in 1935, then all events moving forward change. People in the future (present) would have no knowledge of your time travel because all future events were just changed (meaning, all people’s present memories have been changed) and there’d be no evidence to the contrary.
Heh.
I used to think that when I got that deja vu feeling, it was really my body warning me that I had gone back in time (to the present) and I had to be very very careful, because in the future I must have wished to go back in time to change something important so here I was, reliving that moment again.
well…to a twelve year old…it made sense. :dubious:
If a crazy explosion that was 10x the size of earth created this um, weird, uh, damn, I don’t know physics lingo force, could it have manipulated space/time and…us ? without obliterating Earth? I know that the Earth spun (rotated?) faster billions of years ago.
sigh I would just love to believe in time “travel”.
My son is six and he LOVES science. I can explain a lot of things, but when it comes to physics, I have a hard time struggling with the language. Force, gravity, things like that - that I can put in six year old terms. But when he starts talking rocketships and space travel, I can’t help that much. And I wish I had more academic lingo to translate it to kid lingo because he loves loves loves loves stories. He EATS up science fiction. When he sees a movie that has some real-life concept, he’s all, NO WAY!
He didn’t believe me that Apollo 13 was real. And then he was afraid that astronauts would burn up when they attempted re-entry (oops…Columbia stories and yes, I just dated myself pretty young) so he wrote a letter to M. Scott Carpenter with this picture of a guy in rocket going around the earth and it was something like, “I think you are very brave!”
anywho, I can usually get some basic physics stuff from the s.o., but it involves pictures and actual physical objects moving around.
Seems to me you still have a basic causality problem.
From the point of view of the past universe, a person has shown up out nowhere to kill a man. The dead man would have gone on to father the killer, but that’s never going to happen now. It doesn’t help matters that the time traveler immediately hops back in his machine to return to his present (where things are just as he left them, we’re saying).
The time traveler is himself an effect with no cause, or any chain of causation, that could ever lead to his existence — as far as the altered universe is concerned.
Yeah, there is the problem of the time traveler ‘instantly’ traveling through time. But isn’t that a problem with all time travel stories/theories? All I’m saying is that IF you could jump around in time you would never have any effect on yourself. You will always be ahead of the changes you make.
exactly. the altered universe’ version of the time traveller will not come to be, but the original time traveller himself is unaffected, being from a different universe.
on the other hand, if you’re working on the premise of a single timeline universe, travelling back in time to alter your past would certainly be more interesting than the alternative, where nothing you do would matter down the line.
There’s a rather amusing theory that states that time travel cannot create paradoxes or change events in the past because, whatever you do when you go back in time (crush an ant, try to kill Hitler, whatever) has, in fact, already happened.
The events that led to the world being like it is and how you don’t like it to be, hence the motivation for time travel in the first place, already include whatever it is you’re setting out to do. And since Hitler wasn’t shot by a time travelling Vatican Assassin Warlock, we can assume that even if time machines are in fact invented at some point, either they’re invented so far ahead that nobody knows who Hitler is nor why he should have been killed, or the time traveller tried and failed.
The problem I have with it is that it’s a pretty bleak, deterministic and fatalistic view of time - basically if you follow the thought to the end it means all of history, past and future, is already 100% set and nothing you ever do can change it.
Still, as a brain-woaaher I like it. I find it more satisfying than the “Trousers of Time” and infinite parallel universes.
No you can’t. The very earth you stand on is moving. Even ‘dead in space’ you have relative motion (all motion is relative). You can say that you are not accelerating, but you cannot say you are not moving.
You can’t do it while you’re alive, and you won’t be doing it after you’re dead. Sitting still isn’t “still” at the micro level. Your body is breathing, heat expanding or contracting, shifting in gravity, shedding skin cells, excreting sweat, and all the other things that bodies do when alive and how they rot after death.
And that’s in addition to the movements through space Hambil mentions. The earth rotates, and revolves around the sun, which revolves around the center of the galaxy which is moving as a whole and as part of a larger group of galaxies etc.
Nothing is ever still. Even at absolute zero there is a quantum residue of movement.
“Motion is relative” does not mean “really everything is moving even if it feels like it’s still”.
It literally means that motion is relative. It’s no more correct to say the earth is orbiting the sun as orbiting the centre of the galaxy as being stationary.
Consider this: temperature is broadly molecular motion. If everything on earth is really moving at thousands of miles per hour, how have they managed to cool substances to near absolute zero? To the point where they become a Bose-Einstein condensate?
Another example, for the OP, is light, which from its own frame of reference moves through space but not time.
force, could it have manipulated space/time and…us ? without obliterating Earth? I know that the Earth spun (rotated?) faster billions of years ago.