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Is Time Travel Possible?

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Is Time Travel Possible?

will11
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Posted 05/07/08 - 11:24 AM:	#11
Time travel may be possible...but for time travel to happen things should change.As time progresses we are born, we live and then we die. So Time travel is only possible if things start to happen differently, such as we become younger instead of getting old, or we age twice as quickly as we do. If humans can find a way of doing this then time travel may be possible.

doomdragonz
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Posted 05/13/08 - 09:33 AM:	#12
Time travel is a huge question that I have often thought about, I do not know if it is possible but do have some ideas on it. Let's say there is someone that was assassinated ( let's call them George ) by someone who no one can presently name. Let's name this man Bob so we can refer back to him. Anyways, Bob assassinates George in the year 1890. 10 years later, Bob is born...but, at a later time than that he goes back in time and commits this murder. So,it is documented that in 1890 George was killed, and it could even go in text books in school, but all along it was this Bob guy who killed George. So who say's that wars were not started due to someone in the future? My theory is, if time travel is possible, it is impossible to change the timeline, all our memories are apparently permanent. It's not like one day this event did happen, and the next someone could go back in time and change that altogether.

-Jove-
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Posted 05/16/08 - 11:55 AM:	#13
DrNano wrote: So to sum it up I came to the conclusion that time (past, present and future) doesnt exist, so time travel obviously doesnt exist. I agree. Time is a purely our own creation. Try to imagine the entirety of cause and effect not as a series of events but as a single event, in which what happens was always going to happen and, outside of our consciousness already has. Everything is relative after all.

Kamerynn
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Posted 06/03/08 - 02:31 PM:	#14
Wosret wrote: Well traveling any direction in time is impossible. Unless you consider this.........................time travel. Past and future are concepts. Time is merely a dimension of space, we use our primate brains, that retain information to infer a past and a future, but all that exists is real time, and it is relative to your movement through space. Every moment of time is the present, suggesting one can travel to the future suggests that there are two seperate points that one could occupy; the present, and the future. This isn't the case, no matter how you are experincing the time dimention to the universe, you are always existing at the same moment in time as everything else that exists. Prima facie, this must be true. I take a Wittgenstienian approach to explaining what seems to be a general confusion about the use of the word "time." People speak of events as "things that are coming up, "things one has missed," and so forth, just as they might talk about logs passing by on a stream. They seem to be mystified by their use of language, imagining that events are just logs in some physical stream called "time." Of course, when a log passes us by, we can point to where it went. When an event passes us by, it doesn't make sense to say that it went anywhere at all. We certainly can't travel to it. My position isn't that time travel is impossible; it's impossible at best. I believe it's simply nonsense. Wosret wrote: Suppose you build a machine that allows you to approach speeds near the speed of light, and you us this to allow 400 earth rotations to passby, within a few minutes from your perspective. You were never not present for the passage of time, you did not "move to the future", at no time did you exit the present. All that changed was your relative relation to the passage of time. It's passages like "you were not present for the passage of time" that mystify people. That at least seems to make time a physical... object?... that one is somehow outside of. It seems that such situations would be more accurately described by saying something like, "the speed at which you (and your craft) traveled slowed down the rate of change for you (and your craft), resulting in you only aging a few seconds while the earth and everything on it aged 400 days." This clarifies what I would mean by "a different amount of time passed for you and everything else," and points toward how some metaphysical concept of time is unnecessary to explain our observations. As Occam would tell us, we shouldn't unnecessarily multiply entities beyond what we need to explain our observations. Wosret wrote: I am not saying that time is an illusion or anything, it is clearly part of reality as we know it. Nor am I saying that "past" and "future" are not useful concepts, they are, if used properly, in relationship to ourselves in real time. Though they are merely concepts, and do not exist without abstract thought, and minds to arrange events into a chronological order. Otherwise we merely have things effecting other things, in real time. Yes, "past" and "future" are useful concepts. This doesn't make time an illusion; there is certainly a non-illusory sequence to events. Time travel, however, is an illusion: a mirage gazed at by people mystified by careless uses of "time." Instead of some physical thing that we travel through, time is more a measure of change. A hand going around a clock, the earth going around the sun, and everything else changing in a constant flux that we compare to those revolutions - compare to what we call years or hours - as well as other units of time... or units of change.

Larry26
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Posted 06/07/08 - 02:48 PM:	#15
Time is no illusion. The only illusion that resides within the enigma of Time is the concept of time flow. According to the theory of relativity, which gave birth to Minkowsky's Spacetime Theory, Time as the 4th dimension is entirely given. Hence motion and change; flow of time and temporal becomming are magnificent illusions of nature. Thus in order to attempt to elucidate this strange concept that is Time we must search within ourselves and try to understand why we perceive motion where their is none. This is precisely what Hermann Weyl did in "Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Sciences" (Princeton University Press, Princeton 1949)p.116. He says: The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time. This I believe implies that the only possible way time travel is possible is through our consciousness, which , by the same token, refutes the possibility of time travel as a physical reality. If we rely on the theory of spacetime, in order to travel back in time the worldtube of any hypothetical time-traveling particle would have to circle back upon itself. To do so it would have to accelerate up to speeds greater than the speed of light, which is physically impossible. Hence, time travel is also impossible. The only way we can exit the present and visit times past or future is by allowing our conciousness do all the traveling. Although we can recall certain situations that we've experienced or project ourselves upon the future, our minds are incapable of reproducing reality with absolute fidelity, which implies that we can only interact with reality in the present. As St-Augustin said "Their is a present of things past, a present of things present and a present of things future." Nonetheless, when we recall or project, our consciousness does in fact exit the present, which explains why we cannot register any information while we are day dreaming.

Incision
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Posted 07/08/08 - 12:16 AM:	#16
The grandfather argument doesn't work: if TT is possible then (if you killed your grandfather then you didn't kill your grandfather): therefore TT is not possible is invalid. Although if you killed your grandfather then you didn't is an odd statement, it would be true precisely if you didn't kill your grandfather. All that follows from the grandfather paradox is if TT is possible, then you can't kill your grandfather. Following Tad's suggestion, it might be logically impossible to change the past, if changing the past means making what is what's not. But that doesn't mean TT is impossible: if all TT occurs through some predestination paradox, you could go back in time, but you wouldn't change anything.

Larry26
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Posted 07/10/08 - 04:28 PM:	#17
Incision wrote: if all TT occurs through some predestination paradox, you could go back in time, but you wouldn't change anything. For this statement to be true it would imply that TT has not phisical reality. Indeed going back through time without any power of changing anything implies that the actions of this time traveler have no real impact in the phisical world. Hence your traveling self would be nothing more than a specter of yourself; which raises the question of where does your actual physical body go... if anywhere!

The Wizard of Oz
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Posted 07/15/08 - 02:48 PM:	#18
I'm sure there's a way, but there's an obvious consideration which is much simpler in my opinion than The Grandfather Paradox or Spoecial Relativity: -You build a time machine, it works, you go back in time but! the Time Machine will "unbuild" itself if you go any farther back than the time when the Machine was originally built. So, this way, the limit of going back in Time is the Machine's age. What do you think?
I am not bound to please thee with my answers - William Shakespeare

Larry26
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 07/24/08 - 01:50 PM:	#19
The Wizard of Oz wrote: -You build a time machine, it works, you go back in time but! the Time Machine will "unbuild" itself if you go any farther back than the time when the Machine was originally built. So, this way, the limit of going back in Time is the Machine's age. What do you think? By the same logic you could never go further back then your own age. If this time traveling machine works wouldn't it follow you in your travels? Or do you understand it to be some sort of teleporting machine that simply sends you back and forth through time? If so you would then be stuck in the past. However you would still possess the knowledge to build a new machine!

Cadrache
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Posted 07/24/08 - 02:31 PM:	#20
1. Assumption that the wave pattern for the creation of a solid is the exact same item as it was from T-1. ie. If El = x.y.z.t then any change in any of the 4 dimensions technically change the electron. (using . 's since I don't know the relationship between the 4 dimensions in this case) Since each pattern is seperate from the instant previous or from the future, then the "Electron duplication cannot exist at the same time" happen may not actually exist. 2. If this holds true, then "Bob of the future" is different then Bob that is to be born. Grandfather paradox syndrome possibly circumvented, resulting in the stargate time-travel-type scenerio. Achieved by some really odd twists of the universe birthing other universe scenerios. (essentially a temporal-placement universe (cyrogenics), only in existence for a limited amount of time)

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