Time Travel In Theory
|
 | |  | Published by Ark del KAOS on 20.10.2006 at 23:52. |
|
|
Many in the scientific community believe that time travel is highly unlikely. This belief is largely due to Occam's Razor. Any theory which would allow time travel would require that issues of causality be resolved. What if one were to go back in time and kill one's own grandfather? Also, in the absence of any experimental evidence that time travel exists, it is theoretically simpler to assume that it does not happen. Indeed, Stephen Hawking once suggested that the absence of tourists from the future constitutes a strong argument against the existence of time travel—a variant of the Fermi paradox, with time travelers instead of alien visitors. However, assuming that time travel cannot happen is also interesting to physicists because it opens up the question of why and what physical laws exist to prevent time travel from occurring.
|
Small Travel
|
| | | Published by DaggyStyle on 20.10.2006 at 13:55. |
|
|
Today, the only way to "travel" to the future cannot be used to travel over long periods of time -- only less than a single second. It is so insignificant that it is usually not mentioned at all. And the only people that have used this method have been astronauts. Basically, the longer a person is in orbit around the Earth, the younger the astronaut will be in relation to observers on Earth. So far, the record for traveling farthest in the future using this method is held by Sergei Avdeyev
. That means that for Sergei Avdeyev to time travel just one whole second into the future, he would need to orbit for approximately 102.47 years. A common misconception was that the Apollo astronauts traveled faster, so they held the record -- they did travel faster, but not long enough (only a few days).
|
Types Of Time Travel
|
| | | Published by rubicon on 20.10.2006 at 20:10. |
|
|
1.3 Any event that appears to have changed a time line has instead created a new one. It has been suggested that travel to the past would create an entire new parallel universe where the traveler would be free from paradoxes since he/she is not from that universe
1.3.2 The new time line may be a copy of the old one with changes caused by the time traveler. For example there is the Accumulative Audience Paradox where multitudes of time traveler tourists wish to attend some event in the life of Jesus or some other historical figure, where history tells us there were no such multitudes. Each tourist arrives in a reality that is a copy of the original with the added people, and no way for the tourist to travel back to the original time line.
2.1 The time line is extremely change resistant and requires great effort to change it. Small changes will only alter the immediate future and events will conspire to maintain constant events in the far future; only large changes will alter events in the distant future.
There are also numerous science fiction stories allegedly about time travel that are not internally consistent, where the traveler makes all kinds of changes to some historical time, but we do not get to see any consequences of this in our present day.
|
Time Travel, Or Space-time Travel?
|
| | | Published by thorpe on 20.10.2006 at 23:12. |
|
|
The classic problem with the concept of "time travel ships" in science fiction is that it invariably treats Earth as the frame of reference in space. The idea that a traveller can go into a machine that sends him or her to "A.D. 1865" and step out into the exact same spot on Earth ignores the issue that Earth is moving through space around the Sun, which is moving in the galaxy, and so on.
So, given space-time as four dimensions, and "time travel" referring to just "moving" along one of them, a traveller could not stay in the same place with respect to the surface of Earth, because Earth is a moving platform with a highly complicated trajectory. A vessel that moves "ahead" 5 seconds might materialize in the air, or inside solid rock, depending on where Earth was "before" and "after."
In the 2000 AD comic Strontium Dog, Johnny Alpha uses "Time Bombs" to propel an enemy several seconds into the future, during which time the movement of the Earth causes the unfortunate victim to re-materialize in space. To really do what filmmakers make look so easy in films such as the Back to the Future series and The Time Machine, the device might have to be a very powerful spacecraft which could move across large distances in space to compensate for the offset of position associated with the change in time.
A possible rebuttal to this criticism is the fact that cars and airplanes manage to move around the surface of the Earth with it, despite the surface itself moving with an astronomical speed. One could postulate that a time traveller experiences a combination of spatial temporal inertia that makes him move along with the Earth.
In the 1957 Robert Heinlein novel The Door into Summer Heinlein essentially handwaved the issue with a single sentence: "You stay on the world line you were on." In his 1980 novel The Number of the Beast a "continua device" allows the protagonists to dial in the six (not four!) co-ordinates of space and time and it instantly moves them there—without explaining how such a device might work. The television series Seven Days also dealt with this problem; when the chrononaut would be 'rewinding', he would also be propelling himself backwards around the earth's orbit, with the intention of landing in the same place (in space) that he originated.
|
John Titor
|
| | | Published by yoyo on 20.10.2006 at 23:20. |
|
|
John Titor was the name used for a purported time traveller from the year 2036 that posted on several time travel-related forums during 2000/2001, making many ambiguous, but seemingly falsifiable, predictions about events in the near future and giving an account of his supposed native time period. Whether or not John Titor was a hoax has been a topic of controversy on web-based paranormal discussion boards.
The postings claimed Titor was a serving military soldier assigned to a government time travel project. He was supposedly sent from 2036 back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer which he claimed was needed to “debug” various legacy computer systems in 2036.
Along with the prediction of World War III, another notable prediction is that of a civil war in America, which was predicted to begin in 2004, around the time of the presidential election, and would escalate until 2008, which, according to Titor, “[is] a general date by which time everyone will realize the world they thought they were living in was over.”
When asked about the mechanisms of the time traveling, Titor replied that he was no engineer. When asked to use the time machine to do something paradoxical (i.e., kill his grandfather) he replied that that would only affect this universe, but not his. He appeared to imply that there were many “worldlines”, and his ship could not control its outgoing destination, but could return home easily. Some have speculated as to whether the predictions made by Titor were predicting only one course of the future, suggesting humans may have created an alternate future by going about things differently.
|
John Titor & Time Travel
|
| | | Published by boblu on 20.10.2006 at 23:10. |
|
|
These web sites and the story may be familiar to some web surfers, but
Ill explain a little anyway for those who need it. Keep in mind there
are many people who believe in this story and many who think it is a
complete waste of time; I, myself, am keeping an open mind.
John Titor (a.k.a. Timetravel_0) was
a message poster in a few forums some years ago, and he had many
different discussions about the future time he came from, being 2036.
To put his story in a nutshell, the future he came from was a United
States of America, post nuclear holocaust. Yeah, I know, it sounds
crazy and impossible that anyone could have written that (including a
local mental patient, sorry gramps). Just bear with me.
Like a
modern-day Nostradamus, Titor gave cryptic descriptions of this future
but some of what he had to say was downright explicit. The United
States would suffer from a civil war, not of the North vs. South
variety, but of those who wanted security against those who wanted
freedom. so it was pretty much a city vs. country, government vs.
militia, civil libertarian vs. oppressive regime, war that would rage
for years. If that is not enough death and destruction for you, than
wait until you hear what happened next! Russia sided with the American
rebels and released its nuclear arsenal (drop the n-a-l off the back
and you have the Australian version of ass, sorry I just had to), upon
Europe, China and the USA. This was seen as a great thing by the rebels
in America as the nukes targeted the cities, the location of their
enemies, giving them the opportunity to take back their country, which
they did.
|
|
|
