I’m a huge fan of your column, Cecil, and I thought I’d add something on your time travel column - an alternate, but equally impossible, method of going through time. According to Einstein, as you go faster, time passes slower. At light speed, it stops. Theroretically, if you could someow exceed light speed and NOT get squished by the infinite mass and other factors Einstein pointed out, time should go backwards. True? Could someone check this out for me?
Sorry 'bout the double post, but I can’t edit the post for some reason… Here’s the article’s link.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_181.html
:smack:
Sure. Just wait a minute for me to get up to speed and…
…warning. This is a message from Fuure Me. Dont attempt time travel because…
…is a violation of the Temporal Order. Repeat: THis is an arrest warrant from the Time Police. This action is a violation…
…are getting very sleepy. When you awake, you will have forgotten all the above posts. You are getting…
At least, going backward in time.
I am me. Suppose I go back in time to some other point in my own life. Now, there are two of me: the “me” that went back in time, and the “me” that exists in that time already. So which one am I? Do “I” sense everything that both of me sense? Do I sense myself (the other me, that is)?
Now my head hurts. Both of them.
That one’s pretty easy. The “contemporary” you is the one that was originally in that time frame. It will be the you at that age, and you will experience being you then. The “displaced” you is also you, just at an older age. Thus the you at that age will experience that you. So the older you will have memories of being the younger you, but will be experiencing the older state. Whereas the younger you will be experiencing the younger state and will interact with the older you as if it is a completely different person, except perhaps with a striking resemblance and a similar personality. And if you introduce yourself, an academic knowledge that he will someday become the older you.
And wouldn’t that be neat, to experience the same event from two different perspectives?
Hogulus, many people have conjectured the same. It isn’t provable, and causality seems to be the big question mark.
Don’t worry about going back in time and meeting yourself-worry about going back in time and floating in space forever. If you consider speed the Earth is rotating, the speed it is revolving around the sun, the speed the solar system is travelling within our galaxy, and the speed the galaxies are travelling away from each other, the chances of you being anywhere near Earth if you backpedal timewise even five minutes are slim to zippo.
Actually, it is provable. Any method of getting from Point A to Point B before light could get there can be used for time travel. It doesn’t even matter if your FTL method is actual motion, or a wormhole, or a magic carpet. As long as it complies with Special Relativity (as we assume all things do), it’ll work. Currently, most folks consider a wormhole to be the most plausible means for FTL travel, but if you can think of any other way to do it, it’ll work just as well.
In fact, the fact that FTL implies time travel is the reason why most physicists believe FTL to be impossible.
Chronos, you’re saying time will go backwards. While I agree getting there before light gets there is a form of time travel, I don’t think it constitutes time reversal. That was what I said about unprovable.
Czarcasm, depends on how your time travel works. It could, perhaps, have a means of geolocking to track to the Earth. Hey, as long as we’re making it up, why not make it up right?
What I mean is that if you have a warp drive ship, you can go shake hands with Abraham Lincoln. No “sort of” or “maybe” about it. It can be proven, and I’ve actually written about it before in GQ.