Time Travel

[volume52]

What is time travel, how does it work, is it possible( why or why not).

[piersdad]

no problem to travel into the future
trouble is you can observe but not touch
short term travel is where you know it is going to rain and you take a coat to work
long term is where you know that if you are stupid and do some boy racing you may prang an expensive car and be poor all your life.

past travel is just as easy
you can see but not alter
as you read this writing you are delving in to the past as ive just written it and now it is in the past for you to observe

[antoniseb]

Originally posted by volume52@Feb 18 2005, 02:30 AM
What is time travel, how does it work, is it possible

Time travel is a plot device for story tellers. It allows them to put some character in times that would be impossible for them to otherwise get to, or to have two of one person at one place at one time.

The way it works depends on which science fiction author is writing the story.

Is it possible in the real world? Probably not, and if it is, it won't be usefully possible anytime in your lifetime.

[dougreed]

As has been presented before in a similar thread, time is not, does not have , can not be a physical something. It is an ABSTRACT. A CONCEPT that exsists only in our thought process to account for the progress of one event to the next. It also makes a good tool for research and getting together with others at the same point in the progression of events. The way we count time, the passing of events, is almost random. Why not use the oscillation of some other type of atom to figure seconds ? Why would a being of another solar system be obligated to count years by the orbit of our planet ? Why even count in seconds? Who decided that 60 make a minute, and 60 minutes make an hour? An ego, convienence, a throw of a dart, a drunken pact ? You will NEVER find ANYTHING with the year date 543AD or 987BC on it. The current year system that most of the earth uses didn't even exsist a few centuries ago! Time travel is no more possible than to meet Harry Potter in person. Both exsist only in the mind, neither occupy any space or have any material/physical properties that can be measured or studied (like light and sound). UNLESS we as physical beings become an idea or concept then we have no way to manipulate the concept and idea of time. We are physical, material, we have the ability to learn and eventually manipulate all that is physical and material. -but it does make for some great sci-fi stories !!!...whew. ..see-ya, dougreed

[biknewb]

The real fun of time travel (stories) is in thinking about the consequences it has.
Personally I never met a traveller from the future.;-)

regards

[gavwvin]

In a sense its possible to go forward in time according to relativity, if you went really fast time would slow down for you and when you returned to earth time would have moved forward and you would still be the same age. However this isn't really time travel in the science-fiction sort of way, as once you were there in the future you couldn't go back.

[ynot]

Yes, alot of nonsense has been speculated about time travel. It seems to me we need to begin a far more rigourous discussion of the nature of "time" to weed out all the evident illogicalities. One correction (in theory): when you approach the speed of light, your time does not slow down, nor does the point of origin's time speed up; your stationary time just ends up further ahead in someone else's stationary time when you return. So have you really "travelled in time" when your own time perspective has not changed at all? "Time travel" is strictly relative. The concept of "time travel" relative to oneself is strictly illogical.

I agree with the poster who says that the concept of time may be entirely abstract. The perception of passing "time" is an entirely necessary pre-requisite for us to connect one thought to another and have any coherent consciousness or discussion at all. Obviously this process, or even the concept of it, cannot truly be objectified or for that matter even be conceived of as flowing "backwards". From the standpoint of ego-consiousness in the present, time is not "movement" along a line or plane whose direction we can measure or compare to "other possible lines or directions". There are no "other possible directions" but forward. (This therefore connects the notion of "forward time" to the notion of "what is memory"?)

Regarding the further nature of "time", the most general clue I can find from other branches of knowledge and perception is the very universal and widespread instinctual sense, traditionally cultivated by spiritual "mystics", in which "eternity" is a perceivable state in which "all time" seems present and perceivable at once, as if rushing by in a great flood, while still not losing a subjective ego-consciousness in a perceivable present.

Perhaps these question are still outside the grasp of physics, but illogicality will get us nowhere. Remember, the greatest breakthroughs, including relativity, have come not from new physical perceptions, but from merely logical re-considerations of outdated assumptions. The empirical facts around us can't be wrong, only our stale, unimaginitive assumptions about them. And the greatest tautological error of science is the denial of the following reality: that it takes consciousness to deny consciousness.

[The Near-Sighted Astronomer]

Hi All,

Nice question.

Imagine a spring driven watch. The purpose of the watch is to tell time. It does this well when it synchronizes its motions with other motions (processes) around it.

The watch works based on expansionary force provided by the spring. It results in motion of the hands and the motion of the hands synchronizes with the motion of the Sun for instance in terms of the day.

To make the watch go backward you would also have to make the Sun go backward in the sky, by reversing the rotation and revolution of the planet, and the solar system through the galaxy etc. That would take a lot of energy to accomplish it would decrease the amount of entropy in the universe just to get the hands on the clock to drive the spring back toward compression - nevermind all else.

For this reason time travel in a negative direction is impossible - it would simply require too much energy to change everything in the universe back to the way it was.

Ah But you can time travel in consciousness. To plan ahead is - in a sense - to see the future. To imagine Helen of Troy is an act of traveling back into the past. To do these things well you have to have great depth of understanding of how things will be in the future and how they were in the past.

This is why we expand our knowledge of ourselves and the Universe so we can move in any psychological reference framework possible - past, present, or future...

jeff

[piersdad]

i have an interesting experiment in the concept of time.
i have a digital clock beside my bed with illuminated figures and the minutes are shown and the numbers change every minute.

now to get to sleep my latest ruse was to wait till the minute changes and start counting in a rythmic way.
now although i feel i am always counting in seconds the actul count befor the minute changes can vary from 65 counts to as little as 45 counts.
to me the count was the same but my concept of the timing of the count was dependant on how alert or sleepy i was.

Ah But you can time travel in consciousness. To plan ahead is - in a sense - to see the future. To imagine Helen of Troy is an act of traveling back into the past. To do these things well you have to have great depth of understanding of how things will be in the future and how they were in the past.

exactly a friend and i decided to mentally travel 20 years in the future and visualis the transport situation.
to this we designed and built a futuristic electric car and well
it was just 20 years too advanced for the then present time and if i built it now it would be as modern and accepted as any other sort of transport.

[400poundgorilla]

I would say no based on what I can perceive about the universe. Time is a constant direction from which everything flows from past to future. It's one of the only stable things that I seem to be able to count on. Sorry, but I think we are closer to reversing gravity than we are to reversing time. But, I'm really interested in the subject.