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All These Things

I smell a great sample for a psy trance track in all of this.

From reading the title I thought for sure it was another Bobby West Virginia thread. Well played!

Bobby WV knows about this for sure.

I made the mistake of watching a good five minutes of this to see where the fuck it was going.

Having spent probably too much time reading about "The Arrow Of Time" recently, it occurs to me that what people call "time travel" would really be "time teleportation" - jumping from one moment of time to another without passing through the intervening moments. I would love to pin a physicist to the wall about this subject and ask a thousand questions, because I find it fascinating and I'm sure I don't understand it fully.

Well they say you can jump forward but not backwards, unless a wormhole is really a thing.

Who's "they" in this case?

As I understand it, and again this could be bollocks, time is essentially the sequence of events from the beginning of the universe to the end. We perceive time moving "forwards" because of causality - events happen after other events because there is a causal chain leading from one thing to another. You couldn't "move backwards" because there is not the causal chain to go in that direction. I could drop a pen on the floor, but I couldn't then get that sequence to reverse because there is no physical impetus to move the pen off the floor and back into my hand when the sequence of events is played backwards.

If it's true we're living in a determinist system where the entire sequence of the universe is inevitable, then I even think the idea that things "haven't happened yet" is an illusion of consciousness. Again, I would love to speak to someone who understands this stuff better, because this is all what I've cobbled together myself from pop-science explanations of these subjects.

Doesn't the idea of forward time travel have something to do with time dilation? Legitimately asking, I remember very little from physics.

One idea about how to travel forward is to use (relativistic) time dilation, yes. In other words, go really fast physically and thus slow down your "local time" relative to everything else.

And something about the nature of the fabric of spacetime. Unless that's all still under that special relativity umbrella? Gravity, string theory, blahblah.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Who's "they" in this case?

Physicists.

quote:

Originally posted by Silky Johnson

quote:

Originally posted by Vector A

Yup. Special relativity.

Edit: idk if anyone has made any breakthroughs in this field since Einstein, my data is a little outdated it seems.

quote:

Originally posted by Silky Johnson And something about the nature of the fabric of spacetime. Unless that's all still under that special relativity umbrella? Gravity, string theory, blahblah.

This is where it gets all fuck-y. Time is somehow related to space and to relative speed of movement. I can rationalise it all so easily up to that point.

The only (I assume a very, very simplified and abstracted) explanation I even begin to understand at all, about why time can "pass quicker" to some observers than others, is the curvature of space time around large objects in space. The explanations seem to usually say that when a massive object "curves spacetime", light that travels in that object's gravitational field (in curved spacetime) must travel a greater distance because of the curvature of the spacetime it travels in. Then, assuming the speed of light is constant for all observers, it must always move in the same speed from any observer's point of view, and someone positioned in that curved spacetime around a massive object must still observe the speed of light to be constant. Therefore, I guess the only way that is possible, is for "time" to "slow down" for that observer in that curved spacetime.

???

Thinking of that, it feels impossible to move backwards in time, unless you count having "fallen behind" from someone else's time, relatively, to be traveling backwards in time. If I'm not a total dolt, this whole thing was the big idea behind Interstellar at least. Things like "timeloops", etc. like in the movie Looper seem much more fun though, but have been overused to the extent that I tend to steer clear of any films dealing with time travel.

Have to admire the people who actually understand any of this stuff on a more detailed level. Even their oversimplified abstractions just swoosh over my head 99% of the time.

Possible spoilers about Battlestar Galactica:

One series that did time travel in a very nice way (at least in my speculations) was the new Battlestar Galactica. The series itself never even mentions time travel, but putting together everything that happened in the series and its "end result" hints it did happen.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I can rationalise it all so easily up to that point.

Well yeah, and this why I am not a physicist.

Subjective reference of time is not the same thing as "time travel" in the popularly imagined sense, though. You're not "jumping forwards," as Kenny put it.

You are correct I think, you don't really jump forward, you slow down your time and everyone else's goes super fast.

I've often tried to grasp some of it by simplifying it to myself by removing "time" to some extent and by thinking: the greater the gravitational pull of an object, and the closer to the center of the gravitational field some other object is, the "slower" all fundamental particles move in that huge object's gravitational field (which probably isn't and doesn't have to be true, since it's just a thinking tool for me to get the faintest idea of the outcome of such a scenario), leading to everything happening "slower". For the observer in that gravitational field, compared to if the same observer was outside of that gravitatinal field, nothing changes. The whole scenario where the clock on top of a tower runs faster than a clock on Earth's surface. The other object just has moved to another state faster than the other. Or something. I don't really know. I just want to leave the office already.

If it was possible to know all variables in a deterministic system and to know how each variable affects all others, couldn't we then calculate the values of those variables somewhere in the distant future and see the state of the system in that "point of time"? And then, if we could do that to the whole universe, "simulate" the values of all variables "a million years" forward somewhere, and then replace our current universe with all that matter that is now in that different state, would that be time travel, or just a different state of the system? Or would the machine elves have set the ball rolling in a way that would never even allow us to wonder if we live in a deterministic system?

Or one might be able to simulate a universe with just enough detail to consistently fool the people living inside it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

I love talking about God.

My dad was so arrogant, if anyone exclaimed "Oh GOD!" he'd respond "Yesssssssss?"

quote:

Originally posted by JEO Or would the machine elves have set the ball rolling in a way that would never even allow us to wonder if we live in a deterministic system?

Assuming all the omniscient stuff you describe was possible, a determinist universe would have to be totally predictable. If it started going off the rails despite us knowing absolutely everything about it, then logically you would get different outcomes if you re-played it from the start, and that means events aren't pre-determined by causality.

Chaos theory teaches us that tiny variables in the starting conditions of a complex system can result in radically different long-term outcomes. Personally, I like to imagine that if the universe were replayed from scratch, there would be just enough true 50/50 outcome events to ensure that everything happened completely differently a second time around.

"It's just a jump to the left"

time dilation is the coolest thing currently illustrated in physics imo. i only recently realised that satellite GPS systems must take both general and special relativity calculations into account.

quote:

Originally posted by JEO Possible spoilers about Battlestar Galactica:

could you elaborate here? pretty sure there's no time travel in BSG.

billions, billions, and billions

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