What's With Time Travel?

[N1ghtw0lf]

Alright I Have a Few Questions...

After seeing so many movies about time travel i am starting to think time travel contradicts itself beyond belief...Back to the Future, The Time Machine, and Donnie Darko are among these movies and all of them have there own perspective on Time Travel...

Back to the Future Typically Has the basics of time travel, like you go into the past and effect the future...then in part II they go into the future...Now in part III Doc says "the future isn't written yet, you can make it whatever you want it to be"...but that completely contradicts part II because if the future isn't written yet then how can you go into the future? Though this may not be the best example because it's a family film it still confuses me...

Now in Donnie Darko, Donnie is seeing a thing from the future yet it hasn't happened yet and then it eventually happens. In this movie they present the statement "everything in time is on a set path" but when he gets sent back something changes dramatically saying that it's not because it didn't happen the first time he was in that time...They even state stuff about hawkings and einstein and their theories but the end of the movie apparently he found a wormhole and they never explain how...

Is time travel even possible? because if you go into the past and effect something that isn't written yet then you would either go back and your world would change or you wouldn't be able to go back because time isn't written for the future wether your in the past or not...and then what would happen to everything if you changed the future? would everything just dissappear and change or would it be like another dimension...just thought i could start a conversation taht would confuse the hell out of me once again but I'm really interested in hearing some opinons...

Boltmann i have a feeling you can explain this much better considering your serious woohoo'iness in this science stuff...but I'm still completely confused

__________________

[Yeloazndevil]

I have no idea if Time Travel is possible, I wish it did so I could save that precious person that was in my life.....

__________________

Nintendo Network ID: Yeloazndevil

[Boltzmann]

Time travel is a rather complex subject, and I've already written many things about it here in Ngemu. I'll search for my old posts and put them here for your viewing pleasure

BTW, you should add another option to the poll: "It's a possibility, although unlikely". It would be my choice

__________________
"Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
- Wallace Stevens

Me on Twitter

[N1ghtw0lf]

thank ya very much...i think about it all the time and i have no idea why...i think i just have too much free time

__________________

[DarkAurora]

Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross have the most accurate information on what would most likely happen if you time-traveled.

[N1ghtw0lf]

frog people and big machines?

__________________

[Boltzmann]

Originally Posted by DarkAurora

Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross have the most accurate information on what would most likely happen if you time-traveled.

Although Chrono Trigger avoids some paradoxes it's far from being accurate. The mechanics of time travel on it are impossible. And it encounter some of it's own paradoxes too..

BTW, it's hard to find old threads. I'm having a little difficulty locating my old posts.

__________________
"Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
- Wallace Stevens

Me on Twitter

[DarkAurora]

Chrono Cross is about the paradoxes that they created from the time-traveling in Chrono Trigger.

[N1ghtw0lf]

I'm in no hurry ...just thought it would make a good discussion...have you ever seen donnie darko boltzmann? It's like one of my favorite movies but i had to watch it like 6 times before i actually got it and then the directors commentary and such

__________________

[Boltzmann]

I never saw Donnie Darko, so I can't comment on it. But I'll add it to my list

__________________
"Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
- Wallace Stevens

Me on Twitter

[N1ghtw0lf]

It's quite an interesting movie that didn't get enough attention IMO...i watch it this day and its still great...it has to do with teenagers in the late 80's, time travel, and depression...but i'm just slow (which is probably it) or there are a few loose ends...but the time machine i never got the comment on...but i wasn't fond of the movie but heard the book was great

__________________

[Regulus]

Time travel CANNOT BE POSSIBLE!!! If it were, we would be bombarded with visitors from the future. I believe it is fantasy, but it can be done, in a sence. Theoretically, (according to Einstein), If you were to travel at the speed of light and traveled to a star 5 light-years away and return to earth, the earth would be 10,000 years old, while you would have aged 10. But keep in mind this is just a theorey.

__________________
SEGA owns you

http://www.exemu.net

[N1ghtw0lf]

yes we may be bombarded with visitors from the future...but if the future isn't 'written' yet then how would we come from the future? we could right now be doing something that inadvertantly leads to the non-existance of time-travel...who knows..that's why i said...Time Travel is one big Freakin Contradiction

__________________

[Boltzmann]

To ROMstein:

No, no, no, no

Don't distort Einstein's theory so much. The problem you're describing is related to Fermi's paradox and is dealt with philosophically.

And don't insult relativity by saying "it's just a theory". Although it's a theory it's a very sucessful one, and the phenomenon of time dilation (and Lorentz's contraction) was experimentally verified a thousand times.

Just wait for my more technical posts. They're on the way

__________________
"Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
- Wallace Stevens

Me on Twitter

[N1ghtw0lf]

here it comes...shield your eyes!

__________________

[Regulus]

Dude, you are facking smart.

>>And don't insult relativity by saying "it's just a theory".

Well, in a way, I agree with you. But it IS a theorey because it hasnt been proven. NOBODY HAS EVER TRAVELED TO THE FUTURE. (I'm talking just about the light-year star-travel thing)

__________________
SEGA owns you

http://www.exemu.net

[Boltzmann]

Well, I'll be pasting my old posts from this thread here:

Originally Posted by Boltzmann

Time travel is by itself a great subject. I've read Gott's book "Time Travels in Einstein's Universe" and it's very helpful in clarifying the subject.
I believe the past is bound by a Cauchy horizon so it would be impossible to come back before time machines become feasible (far, far in the future). Or maybe Gott is right in his paper entitled Can the Universe Create Itself? and time travels were possible only in the beginning of the universe and now our entire future is bound by a Cauchy horizon.
If you want to see an interesting site that uses the time travel theme to get money look at: http://www.timetravelfund.com/
In a nutshell: it asks you for ten dolars. They'll put your money into a fund, and thanks to compound interests you'll have more than 40 billion dolars in 500 years. Sounds promising, not?

Originally Posted by Boltzmann

Someone quoted Stephen Hawking about time travels, but I should warn that the quotation used was before Kip Thorn's work in black holes, worm holes and time travel. As I've said before, maybe our past is bound by a Cauchy horizon, so we cannot visit it (and travelers from the future cannot come here). Only after time travels are allowed the time-period will be available to time-travelers (e.g. after the first time-machine is built).
Personally I don't believe time-machines will be feasible in the next 5 thousand years (just a figure of speech), given the EXTREMELY HIGH requirements to create a distortion (like a rip) in time. And maybe our entire history is bounded by a Cauchy horizon in the beginning of the universe. If this is the case then time travels are impossible, period.

Originally Posted by Boltzmann

>>BTW.I'd belive that you move faster than light you'd move faster than time and therefore distort space and time allowing you to move backwards in time

In a certain sense, if you travelling faster than a photon than you're going back in time (you can return before you've ever left). The problem is: no one can travel faster than light (according to Einstein's relativity).
I know that many of you've heard about tachions, so you'll think that I'm wrong. But I must put two objections against tachions:

1. They're hipothetical particles, no one has ever seen a "real" tachyon. They're allowed as some solutions to Gordon-Klein equations in general relativity.
2. Even though one tachyon could theoretically travel faster than light it could never transmit information faster than light locally. Furthermore, we have the problem of Cerenkov radiation with ever-accelerating transcedental tachyons.

But there is a way to circumvent this: worm-holes. This is not the place to go into detail about the physics of worm-holes, and there are many good books about worm-holes (e.g.: Gott's, Thorn's, Hawking's, Krauss'). Any kind of time-travel solution using worm holes must involve exotic matter (with negative energy), so it's currently imposible (we don't even know if such exotic matter exists). And all this will fail in the end if we're bounded by a Cauchy horizon in the beginning of the universe (I've said this three times by now).

Originally Posted by Boltzmann

As far as the physicists today know time-travel via worms would not break any known laws of physics (nor would exotic matter or chargeless tachyons). Worm holes would be the only safe method of time-travel, but they would require HUGE (and I mean HUGE) ammounts of matter (on the order of 10^26 g/cm3) to create an adjustable time machine. Natural stable worm holes can have lesser requirements, but you would never know where you would be taken.
But as Paul Dirac has stated in 1928, given the laws of quantum physics everything that's not explicitly forbiden will happen, given a reasonable amount of time (and space).

Originally Posted by Boltzmann

First, it's true that Maxwell's eletromagnetism equations (they are four diferential equations) are time-symmetric (all physical laws are time-symmetric under the CPT-theorem). So, if the laws of eletromagnetism can't distinguish between past and future, then an electron (for example) should (in average) send half of the waves as advanced and half of them as retarded. But that's not what we observe. We see all waves being emmited towards the future.
One possible explanation, given by the physicist Richard Gott III is that the universe is bound by a region of CTCs (closed time-like curves) in the past, and the waves cannot go to the past or the universe wouldn't be self-consistent. I'll not go further into this as it gets too full of math.
The other possibility was given by Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman and the physicist John Wheeler (yes, the one who gave black holes their name). They say that particles do emit waves in both directions, but they rebound in the past and their past versions then send a half wave to the future, and so on. So we observe full potentials in the present, as it's composed by today's waves and rebounds from past waves (sorry for my poor explanation, my english isn't very good, I'll try to improve this later).

And the waves going to the past aren't going FTL, they're moving at the exact speed of light. It's not as an actual time travel, as you can't send information to the past this way.

Originally Posted by Boltzmann

I don't think we'll have the power of doing this kind of experiment [experiments about time travel] in this century. It requires an enormous ammount of energy, so it's not feasible with our current technology nor will it be for a long long time. In Gott's book he describes a way of traveling in time that needs the transportation of enormous amounts of mass, much bigger than an average black hole (and it's pretty dense, believe me).
The only way we could be messing with time travels would be if we find a naturally stable euclidian worm-hole (which many physicists believe is impossible, but not all - see Kip Thorn and Stephen Hawking in their recent works).
Maybe five hundred years in the future... who knows??

This is my first batch of posts, I'm sure there's other thread where I've said even more. If something looks too out of context try checking the original thread

__________________
"Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
- Wallace Stevens

Me on Twitter

[DarkAurora]

If someone did travel back here from the future, they wouldn't go around blabbing about it. They would get put into an institution and then they would never be able to return to their own time.

[N1ghtw0lf]

>>>Someone quoted Stephen Hawking about time travels, but I should warn that the quotation used was before Kip Thorn's work in black holes, worm holes and time travel. As I've said before, maybe our past is bound by a Cauchy horizon, so we cannot visit it (and travelers from the future cannot come here). Only after time travels are allowed the time-period will be available to time-travelers (e.g. after the first time-machine is built).
Personally I don't believe time-machines will be feasible in the next 5 thousand years (just a figure of speech), given the EXTREMELY HIGH requirements to create a distortion (like a rip) in time. And maybe our entire history is bounded by a Cauchy horizon in the beginning of the universe. If this is the case then time travels are impossible, period.

i don't think it would even be possible to create a 'rip' in time...because i remember on Donnie Darko they said It would be an 'act of god' to find portal (can't rmemeber what they called it so im saying portal) but they even metnioned back to the future in Donnie Darko and specified that you had your portal and your vessel and that it has all the time travel basics but there are so many theories and ideas about time travel its hard to believe any of them

__________________

[Regulus]

well, if they did, they would have come back form WAYWAYWAYWAY in the future. They might be able to blank our minds from noticing anything. and plus, somebody would HAVE to slip. If ppl are traveling back in time forever into the future, chances are, at least one of them would slip. I still dont believe all this bullcrap, but that answers what you said.

__________________
SEGA owns you

http://www.exemu.net