well poo on all of you! I can travel in time any time I want as long as I am on either side of the Bering Strait. Forward one day and backwards oneday. You can even do it by "FLYING ON THE PLANE" I personally myself have done it a million times!





Also you can travel into the future by traveling into the outerspace. When you go into cosmos time on earth flys by faster than it does in the space ship. So you could go off on a mission for a year and when you comeback more time will pass by on earth, at least this is what I read, don't remember where, some sience magazine...

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quote:

Originally posted by Endlesswave Ummmmmmm that "time moving slower" thing is due to the faster you travel towards the speed of light the slower you age (or the faster the people around you age). It has already been proven on an atomic clock that's been put on an aircraft going insanely fast that when compared to the same clock on the ground set at the same time, the clock on the ground was ahead by many seconds/min or something similar. This is the basic premise of the Astronauts travelled into the future in the "The Planet of the Apes" movies. Explain what would happen if you were to go even FASTER on an object while consistently speeding up till you were to hit the speed of light (sure the phsysics behind that would hurt like a bitch, the G Force would be insane, crushing pressure etc but if all of that was taken into consideration then what??).

reminds me of that movie that came out like a year or two ago "Timestoppers" or something along those lines...had 'harry' from 3rd rock in it

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quote:

Originally posted by dEsidEL actually i was trying to defend u in my statement ..

I know, thanks. I'm just being honest with everyone, that's all.


To Dr. Z (and everyone else really, but especially Dr. Z):

There are three very important arguments here, two for and one against time travel:

1. Time may be a human invention, but so is space. Physics, including quantum mechanics, is a contrived science based not on any sort of natural law but on the proof/disproof of postulates formulated by completely insane people. Seriously, almost everyone in Physics History who came up with a groundbreaking theory was considered to be totally off the wall. Planck himself said that most of his own theories were probably bullshit, but look at where we are now? Nobody has ever been able to really PROVE a law of physics (just look at how the fundamental matter-energy conservation breaks down, this was Einstein's widely-known-but-rarely-understood E=mc² equation), but in spite of the lack of proof, they seem to work and make sense so we accept them until we see some inconsistency, at which point a new theory comes out...

2. If any of you ever read Michael Crichton's "Timeline", the man did a LOT of research before he wrote the [fictional] book. It is fiction but it's based on a lot of modern-day theories that haven't been disproven yet, particularly the infinite-parallel-universe theory. Basically, if you believe that reality is really divided into an infinite set of realities (or timelines), not just infinite but an infinite order of infinity, then it might be possible to travel through some sort of wormhole to reach a parallel reality at an earlier point in "time." HOWEVER, this also implies that you can't really "change the past." I'll leave you guys to figure out why, it takes too long to explain, but I will say that it actually resolves a lot of odd issues that come to mind. For example, it would be impossible for someone to travel back in time and erase time travel, because the original universe still exists; however, they could travel to another reality and erase time travel, then travel to another reality which would be a "future" without time travel. Or if someone went "back in time" and killed you then there would be another universe where you were dead, but you would still be alive in this universe. This is all pretty abstract I realize, but you see how it solves many paradoxes that are used as arguments against the possibility of TT. Since there are infinite universes, there are infinite possibilities.

3. Related again to what Dr. Z said, time can be used as a measuring tool just as space can be, so that doesn't really bother me... however, the major issue I see is that our measurements of time are based entirely on light (i.e. the speed of light). Time theoretically "stops" when something is travelling at the speed of light. And yes, this has been proven to an extent by having an atomic clock flown out in space.
[EDIT] - what I said before was wrong.
However, I think this is more due to the nature of aging itself, the process of aging is caused by metabolic process and lots of particles moving around inside the human body (or a clock, it really doesn't matter). When the particles are accelerated close to the speed of light, they are more apt to just "sit there" in a relative sense, as if frozen in time, but again this isn't due to time as a dimension, it's just due to all the momentum of the particles being used up in the space travel.
And light itself seems to be subject to time, very simply shown by the concept of a light-year. So this sort of puts a dent in the theory that going FTL would somehow take you back in time.

None of this is bullshit, there are a lot of possibilities floating around right now and nobody's sure of the consequences. If black holes can exist, then "worm holes" might exist too, we might just be looking in the wrong places... or we might have to create them ourselves...

Last edited by DigiNut on Jan-13-2003 at 17:57

All of you should read "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku, really good book. I read about 1/4 of it, no time to read the rest but I want to get back to it...

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quote:

Originally posted by Dr. Z Yes, people thought certain thoughts were absurd at the times they were in. But the idea of time travel is not the same. Look: When people theorised waves/photons, they were describing matter/reality. They were describing the natural phenomena that occurs arround us. So making new theories is possible, no matter how absurd, you just have to have the proof. But when you talk about something like time travel, you cannot theorise anything. Time is not a natural phenomena, time is a human invention, invented to keep track of changes. Its basically a tool to understand some other natural phenomena, like velocity (speed, meters per second). You cannot theorise/do scientific research on time. Its like saying: There are exactly 100 centimeters in one meter (definition). That is the unit of measurement that we will use. Lets make a theory, If we alter space and make each 1meter(m) = 2m, or 100cm = 200cm. Then all objects will be twice as high. :. Impossible.

time dilation proves that our concept of definite is in fact not as definite as we first thought. Experiments have confirmed that time dilation occurs. You may say we cannot reach such velocities to notice a substantial amount. But dont say cannot...we dont know HOW TO. With the discover of the quantum theory...it shows the world with more chaos than order. Einstein, himself, was not comfortable with this idea and was quoted "God does not play dice with the world" at the uncertainty principle. The string theory is being worked do resolved the grand "unified theory" to bridge the general relativity(macro) and quantum theory(micro) together. Things are coming up all the time. At a time...men thought all the planets revolved around the earth..and no heliocentric. When man couldnt go to the moon because it was just "science fiction". So please dont say its IMPOSSIBLE....refine ur answer a bit and say WE DONT KNOW HOW TO.
I leave you with a quote for the man himself...

"Attempt the absurd, achieve the impossible"
-Albert Einstein

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut 1. Time may be a human invention, but so is space. Physics, including quantum mechanics, is a contrived science based not on any sort of natural law but on the proof/disproof of postulates formulated by completely insane people. Seriously, almost everyone in Physics History who came up with a groundbreaking theory was considered to be totally off the wall. Planck himself said that most of his own theories were probably bullshit, but look at where we are now? Nobody has ever been able to really PROVE a law of physics (just look at how the fundamental matter-energy conservation breaks down, this was Einstein's widely-known-but-rarely-understood E=mc² equation), but in spite of the lack of proof, they seem to work and make sense so we accept them until we see some inconsistency, at which point a new theory comes out...

There is a fine line between definition and experiment.
-One can define something. Ex let x = 5 , or let 24hr = 1 earth rotation.
-And one can experiment. Ex speed = distance/time.
Thoeries come from experiments. Not from definitions.
So you cannot theorise about time. Its that simple...

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut 2. If any of you ever read Michael Crichton's "Timeline", the man did a LOT of research before he wrote the [fictional] book. It is fiction but it's based on a lot of modern-day theories that haven't been disproven yet, particularly the infinite-parallel-universe theory. Basically, if you believe that reality is really divided into an infinite set of realities (or timelines), not just infinite but an infinite order of infinity, then it might be possible to travel through some sort of wormhole to reach a parallel reality at an earlier point in "time." HOWEVER, this also implies that you can't really "change the past." I'll leave you guys to figure out why, it takes too long to explain, but I will say that it actually resolves a lot of odd issues that come to mind. For example, it would be impossible for someone to travel back in time and erase time travel, because the original universe still exists; however, they could travel to another reality and erase time travel, then travel to another reality which would be a "future" without time travel. Or if someone went "back in time" and killed you then there would be another universe where you were dead, but you would still be alive in this universe. This is all pretty abstract I realize, but you see how it solves many paradoxes that are used as arguments against the possibility of TT. Since there are infinite universes, there are infinite possibilities.

This is all bogus jargon.
-First of all, this a theory without applications. So the probability of it being correct is extremely small.
-Alternate timelines are a pure paradox to everything that defines physics. Space/time would be undefinable. Energy related ideas would be thrown into the garbage becauase the idea of entropy would not be able to exist... etc
-The existance of black holes does not have any indications that wormoles exist. Black holes are a perfectly understood phenomena. It is a collection of highly compacted matter. What occurs in a black hole is generaly understood, and it has nothing to do with alteration of space/time. Wormholes are inventions, something you see in star trek/ sci fi movies. Their existance is highly impossible because they would be altering dimentions... which is impossible.
-etc

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut 3. Related again to what Dr. Z said, time can be used as a measuring tool just as space can be, so that doesn't really bother me... however, the major issue I see is that our measurements of time are based entirely on light (i.e. the speed of light). Time theoretically "stops" when something is travelling at the speed of light. And yes, this has been proven to an extent by having an atomic clock flown out in space. [EDIT] - what I said before was wrong. However, I think this is more due to the nature of aging itself, the process of aging is caused by metabolic process and lots of particles moving around inside the human body (or a clock, it really doesn't matter). When the particles are accelerated close to the speed of light, they are more apt to just "sit there" in a relative sense, as if frozen in time, but again this isn't due to time as a dimension, it's just due to all the momentum of the particles being used up in the space travel. And light itself seems to be subject to time, very simply shown by the concept of a light-year. So this sort of puts a dent in the theory that going FTL would somehow take you back in time.

What you describe here is time, a definition coming from the speed of light.
-actually, speed is a function. Speed is the result of taking the distance traveled and dividing it by time. So time has nothing to do with the speed of light.
-matter cannot be accelerated to the speed of light. No, buts, no ifs, no nothing. If you were talking about time travel by objects traveling at the speed of light, you would be false. Matter simply cannot go that fast.
-remember, matter traveling at the speed of light is not impossible because someone said it is. Matter truly cannot go that fast by our knowlege of reality. "If" it were able, all our thoeries, and some definitions would be thrown into the garbage.


On a final comment:
Just because its on TV, or in some book, doesn't mean its possible. And the term nothing is impossible is incorrect. Because, we as humans, have many definitions, we can draw fine lines to seperate different concepts in reality. Alot of things that we define come with possibilites and impossibilities.

Simple math example:
Function y = 1/(x-1)
It is impossible for y = 0 (zero)
or for x = 1

There is no, probability/chance...

quote:

Originally posted by King_Mack time dilation proves that our concept of definite is in fact not as definite as we first thought. Experiments have confirmed that time dilation occurs. You may say we cannot reach such velocities to notice a substantial amount. But dont say cannot...we dont know HOW TO. With the discover of the quantum theory...it shows the world with more chaos than order. Einstein, himself, was not comfortable with this idea and was quoted "God does not play dice with the world" at the uncertainty principle. The string theory is being worked do resolved the grand "unified theory" to bridge the general relativity(macro) and quantum theory(micro) together. Things are coming up all the time. At a time...men thought all the planets revolved around the earth..and no heliocentric. When man couldnt go to the moon because it was just "science fiction". So please dont say its IMPOSSIBLE....refine ur answer a bit and say WE DONT KNOW HOW TO. -Albert Einstein

Sorry, what did you say here?
Don't think you said anything.

i'm just curious but how many of you guys are taking physics in school and how many are basing their information on just general knowledge and self reading ?

(not trying to imply anything here, just wondering where you're getting ur info from!)

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quote:

Originally posted by Dr. Z There is a fine line between definition and experiment. -One can define something. Ex let x = 5 , or let 24hr = 1 earth rotation. -And one can experiment. Ex speed = distance/time. Thoeries come from experiments. Not from definitions. So you cannot theorise about time. Its that simple...

The "Scientific Method", paraphrased textbook definition:
1) Form a null hypothesis (postulate intended to be proven wrong)
2) Attempt to disprove null hypothesis
3) If null hypothesis is disproven, form an "alternative hypothesis" as a new null hypothesis, and attempt once again to prove wrong.
4) Hypothesis is accepted as theory once the null hypothesis cannot be disproven.

Don't try to bullshit me here. Theories come in the END from experiments, yes, but you have to know what you're experimenting on in the first place. You have to have a hypothesis. That's why we have "pre-lab writeups" for every single lab we perform in university.

Since we really don't have the technology or resources that would enable us to perform experiments related to parallel universes or time travel, none of the postulates can be made into theories. However, THEY HAVE NOT BEEN PROVEN WRONG, so you cannot just dismiss them as crap.

quote:

This is all bogus jargon. -First of all, this a theory without applications. So the probability of it being correct is extremely small. -Alternate timelines are a pure paradox to everything that defines physics. Space/time would be undefinable. Energy related ideas would be thrown into the garbage becauase the idea of entropy would not be able to exist... etc

WHERE are you getting this from? First of all, it's not a theory, it's a possibility, a postulate, a hypothesis, whatever you want to call it. Secondly, what you've just said is total bullshit and sounds like it's coming from someone who just began studying entropy in Grade 11 Chemistry. We're talking about quantum mechanics here, probability waves and functions and uncertainty principles, not f-cking entropy, that has NOTHING to do with this discussion.

quote:

-The existance of black holes does not have any indications that wormoles exist. Black holes are a perfectly understood phenomena. It is a collection of highly compacted matter. What occurs in a black hole is generaly understood, and it has nothing to do with alteration of space/time. Wormholes are inventions, something you see in star trek/ sci fi movies. Their existance is highly impossible because they would be altering dimentions... which is impossible. -etc

Black holes are most certainly NOT a perfectly understood phenomena. How can you say that? It's impossible to get close enough to one to study one. Everything we know about black holes is really just HYPOTHESES. Remember that word.

I do not believe that very many Star Trek/Scifi movies ever went into detail with wormholes. And incidentally, a lot of things which originated on Star Trek have come into existence (i.e. voice recognition, nanotechnology & replication).

The existence of a wormhole would not alter any dimension. Not even time if you consider that a dimension. I suggest you actually read the material on what a wormhole is before you start saying things like this.

quote:

What you describe here is time, a definition coming from the speed of light. -actually, speed is a function. Speed is the result of taking the distance traveled and dividing it by time. So time has nothing to do with the speed of light.

And how do you think we measure the distance travelled? Magic? EVERY measurement we take, whether it be visual, sound, X-rays, involves some sort of electromagnetic wave being transmitted and received.

Even an atomic or crystal clock depends on electromagnetic properties to keep track of time. Light and time are very closely related, I believe someone mentioned the unified field theory, well this is what physicists today are WORKING ON. Don't pretend that you know more than they do.

quote:

-matter cannot be accelerated to the speed of light. No, buts, no ifs, no nothing. If you were talking about time travel by objects traveling at the speed of light, you would be false. Matter simply cannot go that fast.

No shit, that's why I said "close to the speed of light" in my original post. Besides which, the point of my original paragraph WAS to say that FTL travel wouldn't result in time travel.

quote:

-remember, matter traveling at the speed of light is not impossible because someone said it is. Matter truly cannot go that fast by our knowlege of reality. "If" it were able, all our thoeries, and some definitions would be thrown into the garbage.

There's the key, "by our knowledge of reality." You say all our theories and some definitions would be thrown in the garbage. How many times has this already happened over the history of science?

quote:

On a final comment: Just because its on TV, or in some book, doesn't mean its possible. And the term nothing is impossible is incorrect. Because, we as humans, have many definitions, we can draw fine lines to seperate different concepts in reality. Alot of things that we define come with possibilites and impossibilities.

I'm extremely offended that you would think I got any of my ideas from TV or fiction. Most if not all of my information came from "real" books written by (not to mention discussions with) people in the field.

quote:

Simple math example: Function y = 1/(x-1) It is impossible for y = 0 (zero) or for x = 1 There is no, probability/chance...

Well, I'm impressed. You used a grade 9 algebra example as proof of your opinion on one of the most complicated and debated questions of modern quantum mechanics. Kudos to you.

By the way, x most certainly can be 1, don't know where you got this from. X is simply a variable, it can be any arbitrary value, just because y is undefined for x=1 does not make this impossible. As for y being equal to zero, this is fairly typical in calculus (which you seem to have forgotten) and refers to the concept of infinity. Y will never reach 0 for any "defined" value of x, but this doesn't mean the function is somehow "unusable" at that point or that the values of x for which y=0 are somehow useless. I can think of several examples where this comes into play, for example MP3 compression. I really don't think this is the appropriate place to be teaching calculus, however.

P.S. dEsidEl, I'm taking electrical engineering at university, 3rd year, and quantum mechanics is part of our curriculum (applications in laser diodes, tunneling effects, etc.) Frickin' Waterloo kids, no wonder corporations get pissy about arrogant co-op students.

*sigh* I don't want to beat this issue to death, but I hate it when people get so arrogant because they know a tiny fraction of what they're talking about. Trust me Dr. Z, NOBODY ever succeeded in science by saying "it's impossible."

To close:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'
Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

lol DigiNut
You've picked up about 10% of what I have said. And your comments comment on things that I have not said.

It seems as if communication in this complex topic is impossible. I will discontinue to comment..

Nothing against you DigiNut, I'm sure we would have had an indepth conversation, but alot of time would be wasted just trying to communicate.

DigiNut, do you know a guy whose name is Jonathan Weisman(not sure about spelling of his last name)?
He's taking electrical engineering at U of T as well...

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