Theories - Time Travel, Parallel Dimensions, Etc.

[FortyTwo]

What do you subscribe to? I don't care how psuedoscientific it is, or how crazy it seems, I'm always interested in hearing what people think.

I'm pretty sure I believe in the Self-Consistency Principle as far as time travel goes. I don't think wormholes are possible for more than a mere moment, and I think teleportation would probably kill you.

Thoughts?

 

[Blobbenstein]

one problem with time travel is that it would change the total amount of energy at specific points of time, within the whole Universe, ie that if you send a 1kg block of metal back in time then the universe at that time has 1kg more of matter/energy in it, and the present has 1kg less.


Maybe it isn't a problem, it just seem like it might be.

 

[FortyTwo]

one problem with time travel is that it would change the total amount of energy at specific points of time, within the whole Universe, ie that if you send a 1kg block of metal back in time then the universe at that time has 1kg more of matter/energy in it, and the present has 1kg less.


Maybe it isn't a problem, it just seem like it might be.

Ah, but the self-consistency principle solves that. Because you can't "rewrite" history as in some fictional works, that means the universe perfectly preserves the mass. Not to mention that block of metal still might be around somewhere, and when you send it back in time you're simply correcting what was unbalanced. Because all of time is happening at once, anything that balances the system is physically possible, as long as it is resolved at some point because the universe cannot lose energy/mass or gain it. If it disappears in the future, it appears in the past. If it appears in the past it must have disappeared in the future.

 

[Blobbenstein]

what about if you sent a block of metal back in time to a place under your floor boards, and in the future you pull up the floor boards to get the block of metal, and then that is what you send back? Then where did that piece of metal come from?

Similarly, if you time travel back a couple of years, and then you exhale some CO2 which later is absorbed by a wheat plant which turns it into starch, which then ends up is some bread which your earlier self(the one that's pre-time travel) eats, and his body turns the starch into glucose which stays in the body and is sent back in time, where upon it is burned by the body and turned into CO2.......where did those carbon atoms in that cycle come from, forever in an eternal loop?

 

[Amy SF]

I believe Elvis Presley was cloned 25,000 times in the year 1000 B.C. in a distant galaxy. All these clones (and the original) were then sent to Earth the following year, and then they all traveled forward in time to 1952 A.D. The original then returned to his home galaxy in 1977, but his clones remained behind, which explains why people keep seeing Elvis everywhere, including all those impersonators in Las Vegas and the Flying Elvi.

 

[FortyTwo]

what about if you sent a block of metal back in time to a place under your floor boards, and in the future you pull up the floor boards to get the block of metal, and then that is what you send back? Then where did that piece of metal come from?

Novikov solved that, too. One might think that this creates a paradox - for example, if you went back to the past and gave yourself a watch, and in the future you gave that watch to your past self, it would eventually have to accumulate enough wear and tear that it ceases to be a recognizable watch, or is at least different from the watch that was received in the last "loop". The simple answer to this is that it didn't happen. You clearly didn't give yourself the same watch, or the watch somehow managed to avoid all wear and tear. That's the only way it is physically possible in a consistent universe, which I believe in.

Another option is that the watch (I'm using watch instead of chunk of metal because it's practically the same scenario with a more classical setup) does accumulate wear and tear, but operates off my other theory of time travel involving parallel universes (not my theory per se - I thought of it independently but later learned that someone else came up with it first, I'd hunt the link but I'm too lazy). By traveling back with the watch you'd actually be crossing to another dimension in which you gave that exact copy of the watch, with the wear and tear that it had accumulated, to your younger self. They'd then go on to do the same thing as you, except they'd land in a parallel universe where they gave the more worn-out version of the watch to their younger self due to wear and tear. The cycle would continue, and be entirely physically possible because each time it'd be happening in a different but consistent universe until eventually it got to a point where it never happened at all or the lack of a tangible or workable watch would prevent the motivation needed to go back in time in the first place.

Similarly, if you time travel back a couple of years, and then you exhale some CO2 which later is absorbed by a wheat plant which turns it into starch, which then ends up is some bread which your earlier self(the one that's pre-time travel) eats, and his body turns the starch into glucose which stays in the body and is sent back in time, where upon it is burned by the body and turned into CO2.......where did those carbon atoms in that cycle come from, forever in an eternal loop?

The probability of these being the exact same atoms is so slim that it can be ruled out as impossible in a consistent universe. For a solution involving a series of consistent universes, see above, replacing "watch" in the appropriate instances with carbon dioxide and whatnot.

I believe Elvis Presley was cloned 25,000 times in the year 1000 B.C. in a distant galaxy. All these clones (and the original) were then sent to Earth the following year, and then they all traveled forward in time to 1952 A.D. The original then returned to his home galaxy in 1977, but his clones remained behind, which explains why people keep seeing Elvis everywhere, including all those impersonators in Las Vegas and the Flying Elvi.

Is this the One Sentence Story thread?

 

[Blobbenstein]

The probability of these being the exact same atoms is so slim that it can be ruled out as impossible in a consistent universe. For a solution involving a series of consistent universes, see above, replacing "watch" in the appropriate instances with carbon dioxide and whatnot.

By my calculations(which maybe a bit dodgy), if the time traveller converts a kilo of fat, glucose,or protein into CO2, after he goes back in time then over 100million of those atoms would end up in the food the pre-time-traveler ate to put on that fat, or protein, or glucose......maybe I'm wrong, but if this chap goes back in time a few years, long enough for his breath to mix with the atmosphere, then that's a lot of carbon atoms that are doing an eternal cycle, and who's origin can't be accounted for, and unlike a watch wouldn't wear down, although maybe proton decay would act like 'wear', if that process is real.

 

[Blobbenstein]

It's strange thinking about the watch. If it were a cheap dial watch, then the time between arriving back in time, and leaving the future would have to be an exact multiple of 12hours, so that the dial was at the same place each time....that is until it wore out.

And the same would have to be true of the carbon atoms, with any of its mechanisms.....seems all wrong..


You might like Cosmoquest, FortyTwo.......it's a science forum with a recently aquired stupid name(after a merger). It used to be called BAUT......they talk about this stuff all the time.

http://cosmoquest.org/forum/forum.php



.

 

[FortyTwo]

Checking out the Cosmoquest forum, thanks!

As for the CO2 I'm not sure how to answer that. The atoms had to come from somewhere, they were present at the beginning of the universe as were the rest of them.

It's also entirely possible that, as long as the universe is consistent, matter can appear to be destroyed and created, as long as it is created at some point and taken out of the universe at another (these two events being directly related to each other).

I doubt that backwards time travel will ever be achieved, though, so we're probably not going to find out. Forward time travel is entirely physically possible through time dilation, though, and presents no paradoxes.

 

[Digger]

What do you subscribe to? I don't care how psuedoscientific it is, or how crazy it seems...

Oh good... that includes me then.

 

[beancounter]

I think that theories involving time travel, Parallel dimensions, etc are little more than mental masturbation used to justify research grants.

 

[FortyTwo]

I think that theories involving time travel, Parallel dimensions, etc are little more than mental masturbation used to justify research grants.

Well forward time travel should get research grants, but parallel dimensions at this stage are speculation at best.

 

[sleepydvdr]

I don't believe traveling back in time is possible. If it were, surely someone from the future would have done it by now. However, traveling forward into the future is happening right now (at a rate of 60 minutes per hour). Speeding up that process may be possible. From a single human's point of view, cryogenically freezing that person would be a form of time travel. As for the traditional sci-fi traveling to the future goes, I'm not sure if that is possible. I place it in the same category as traveling back in time.

 

[FortyTwo]

I don't believe traveling back in time is possible. If it were, surely someone from the future would have done it by now. However, traveling forward into the future is happening right now (at a rate of 60 minutes per hour). Speeding up that process may be possible. From a single human's point of view, cryogenically freezing that person would be a form of time travel. As for the traditional sci-fi traveling to the future goes, I'm not sure if that is possible. I place it in the same category as traveling back in time.

According to natural law, we don't even need cryogenics.

 

[Blobbenstein]

there is also gravitational time dilation, which brings me to my non-mainstream opinion, that there are no event horizons, or singularities to collapsing objects, ie there are no real black holes, just eternally collapsing objects(ECOs).

When stars collapse, they just experience more and more gravitational time dilation, and so they collapse at a slower and slower rate. so that an event horizon never forms, and would never form.....I would guess that there is some form of evaporation, and that they would dissapear eventually though.

As they collapse, I think that they would exhibin more and more self-lensing, self magnification, so that they appear close to the size of the Schwarzschild radius, but never get any smaller.

Here is a diagram of self magnification I made on a crude computer program:

Anyway, that's my against the mainstream view.

 

[FortyTwo]

I guess I can see that. I'm also one to believe that the laws of physics are less complicated than they appear, and that what we try to put in little boxes often ends up being the same phenomena that we already understand, but on a larger scale.

 

[nog]

There is no evidence for time travel (as in moving from time A to time B while not passing through the intermediate times), nor is there any evidence for parallel universes or other universes. It's speculation that makes for sometimes okay sci-fi.

When I was younger though, I conjectured that the standard 'little grey aliens' existed and were actually humans from the distant future. So distant that somehow they've evolved in different conditions (say in space or underground). They figured out how to time travel and came back to inspect humans in our current state of evolution.

I do not subscribe to that idea, but it's funny to think about.

 

[nog]

there is also gravitational time dilation, which brings me to my non-mainstream opinion, that there are no event horizons, or singularities to collapsing objects, ie there are no real black holes, just eternally collapsing objects(ECOs).

When stars collapse, they just experience more and more gravitational time dilation, and so they collapse at a slower and slower rate. so that an event horizon never forms, and would never form.....I would guess that there is some form of evaporation, and that they would dissapear eventually though.

As they collapse, I think that they would exhibin more and more self-lensing, self magnification, so that they appear close to the size of the Schwarzschild radius, but never get any smaller.

Here is a diagram of self magnification I made on a crude computer program:

Anyway, that's my against the mainstream view.

I subscribe to that view too. I've stated as much on VB before.

 

[FortyTwo]

There is no evidence for time travel (as in moving from time A to time B while not passing through the intermediate times), nor is there any evidence for parallel universes or other universes. It's speculation that makes for sometimes okay sci-fi.

When I was younger though, I conjectured that the standard 'little grey aliens' existed and were actually humans from the distant future. So distant that somehow they've evolved in different conditions (say in space or underground). They figured out how to time travel and came back to inspect humans in our current state of evolution.

I do not subscribe to that idea, but it's funny to think about.

By that do you also include time dilation? Because that definition applies (based on which point of observation is being considered) and time dilation is a proven fact.

ETA: Though I suppose you do pass through the intermediate times with time dilation even if it doesn't seem so from the point of view of the one whose clock is sped up.

 

[jeneticallymodified]

elvi