Return Styles: Pseud0ch, Terminal, Valhalla, NES, Geocities, Blue Moon. Entire thread

Time machines: A scientific reality?

Name: hail to the chief 2010-09-29 0:57

If we could go back in time, then the universe could have infinite mass, because we could always send people back from the future until there were so many we could shoot them into orbit and have them coalesce into new planets.
So, time machines are the solution to our finite energy problems.
but how can you go back in time? How would you control where in the universe you would appear when you went back in time?

Name: Anonymous 2010-10-03 16:53

According to relativity, moving something faster than the speed of light is akin to it moving backwards through time; however, there are a variety of problems facing this situation.

First, the traveler would still have to hit the speed of light and would become energy upon doing so; hopefully, the "moving backwards through time" affect would undo that.

The second problem is a paradox: after the traveler has started going faster than the speed of light, once it starts moving backwards through time, it will also start moving slower than the speed of light.  It would be like a person standing in front of a restaurant menu, saying they're going to get "this," but then just continuing to study the menu and never ordering; rather than indecision, it would just be physically impossible for the next step to occur.  The best to hope for is that momentum keeps the traveler moving faster than the speed of light while observers see the traveler "undoing itself."

If we got beyond this paradox to the third concern: it would only affect the traveler.  The universe would not move backwards through time, just a localized insignificant "something" in it.  That path would be the reverse of the very same path it had taken to get this far except without other actors affecting it.  Possibly, the journey would stall when those supporting actors are not there or the traveler comes into contact with something that wasn't in its path in the first place.  (On one hand, if the traveler ignored a loss of support or new interactions, it would be lost to the universe anyway and that creates all sorts of new problems; on the other hand, significant mass colliding at the speed of light is not usually a good thing - faster is probably no better.)

This underlines the problem as I see it: any means of traveling through time nonlinearly must involve manipulating some fundamental aspect of the universe.  This requires the existence of some kind of natural transformation algorithm that can spit out the state of the universe an arbitrary number of milliseconds ahead or before what it is now, locally or overall.  Time travel, therefore, presumes the existence of an accessible Akasha Records, an inherent complete history of the atomic structure of the universe.

Newer Posts
Don't change these.
Name: Email:
Entire Thread Thread List