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Time Travel

Started by Sabby, May 13, 2011, 08:56:38 AM

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Oniya

I think the explanation of the timeline that I read might be longer than the actual story. *laughs*
"Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women.~*~*~Don't think it's all been done before
And in that endeavor, laziness will not do." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think we're never gonna win this war
Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think your world's gonna fall apart
I do have a cause, though.  It's obscenity.  I'm for it.  - Tom Lehrer~*~All you need is your beautiful heart
O/O's Updated 5/11/21 - A/A's - Current Status! - Writing a novel - all draws for Fool of Fire up!
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TheGlyphstone

And even with the explanation, it's still confusing. Heinlein was great.

Shjade

#27
Quote from: Sabby on May 13, 2011, 02:38:27 PM
I honestly have no clue where your coming from now... I don't know what else I can say x.x
I suspect it's some confusion regarding what happens to the "inert" time. As best I can tell you're saying those events that happen in the "dead" time still happened, they just stop, basically sealed away like a time capsule, and they're done with. Glyphstone seems to be interpreting this as meaning those events never happened, meaning that if you go back in time to a point before you had built your time machine one would have to ask, How did you get there? If those events were only frozen, rather than erased, it's not paradoxical - you were still born and still built your time machine in that timeline, you just won't be born or build your time machine again in this timeline.

He's not saying the lost time "ceases to exist," thereby negating events that took place during that time, only that it stops and is basically set aside from the current progressing time. Is that about right, Sabby?

If that part's accurate, I don't see an issue with paradoxes. I do still think the proximal-branches-have-more-chance-of-similar-outcomes and the everything-in-the-universe-revolves-around-one-person/action/device concepts both sound silly, but I don't see a problem with someone accidentally erasing themselves with this idea.
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Saerrael

I can recall having seen a documentary about where science is now with time-travel (yes, they really do experiment with it <3) Though, as usual, I can't recall where the hell I saw it v.v
What I can recall from it that they have successfully send a particle into the future, but I think it was something like an hour. It's still a question, however, if the particle didn't get disintegrated and then rebuild later.
[/my two cents]

Sabby

Quote from: Shjade on May 13, 2011, 06:53:22 PM
I suspect it's some confusion regarding what happens to the "inert" time. As best I can tell you're saying those events that happen in the "dead" time still happened, they just stop, basically sealed away like a time capsule, and they're done with. Glyphstone seems to be interpreting this as meaning those events never happened, meaning that if you go back in time to a point before you had built your time machine one would have to ask, How did you get there? If those events were only frozen, rather than erased, it's not paradoxical - you were still born and still built your time machine in that timeline, you just won't be born or build your time machine again in this timeline.

Finally, someone gets it xD

Oniya

Okay, but to some random person on the street, all of a sudden this guy shows up with a time machine.  Conservation of matter goes out the window because the bits and pieces that formed the time machine are still in their raw state, not to mention a fully grown human being has appeared without the standard growth process..
"Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women.~*~*~Don't think it's all been done before
And in that endeavor, laziness will not do." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think we're never gonna win this war
Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think your world's gonna fall apart
I do have a cause, though.  It's obscenity.  I'm for it.  - Tom Lehrer~*~All you need is your beautiful heart
O/O's Updated 5/11/21 - A/A's - Current Status! - Writing a novel - all draws for Fool of Fire up!
Requests updated March 17

Assallya

I'm not sure the law of conservation applies in this particular case Oniya.  Matter is neither being created or destroyed.  It is merely arriving from another place in time.

Though, your statement does arouse a question in me.  That question would be concerning the quantum level.  After all, this particular mass already exists in this time line in some form or another; either as a younger version of the traveler or as the constituent molecules that will eventually form into the time traveler.   Would there be entanglement issues?  I don't know much about quantum level physics stuff.

Oniya

No - because in the original time stream, the time machine is built.  In the new time stream, it appears before the point where the raw materials would have been taken from the ground.
"Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women.~*~*~Don't think it's all been done before
And in that endeavor, laziness will not do." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think we're never gonna win this war
Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think your world's gonna fall apart
I do have a cause, though.  It's obscenity.  I'm for it.  - Tom Lehrer~*~All you need is your beautiful heart
O/O's Updated 5/11/21 - A/A's - Current Status! - Writing a novel - all draws for Fool of Fire up!
Requests updated March 17

Vekseid

Quote from: Assallya on May 13, 2011, 01:36:25 PM
I'm curious, in your first thought experiment, what force is it that dissolves the universe in favour of its new path?  Where does this universe go?

Sabby's model of time travel is the physical equivalent of duplicating yourself somewhere outside of spacetime, rewinding all of spacetime to a given point, then reinserting your duplicate.

That said, if this thread is only going to be for promoting one narrow model of time travel, its position in Elliquiy U is a bit dubious. This isn't the only way to solve the paradox issue.

Sabby

Then I hand the keys over :) discuss away

rhev

I think that the biggest problem that humans have with the conception of time travel is that they think of time as linear.

I believe that time is as linear as any other direction or dimension.  Certainly if you take an X axis it's finite from every direction except for one.  You can travel along the X axis as much as you want in any direction.  But the moment you leave that X axis, you've now traveled along a new axis, the Y axis.  Then if you move in a new direction, you're along the Z axis.

Time, and our understanding of it is simply that, it's travel along an axis, one we call time.  So you could say that as a child runs from a slide to a jungle gym, they travel along the X axis (distance), Y axis (width) and Z axis (height), AS the child also moves across the T axis (time). 

Now the popular human belief is that time flows in one direction.  The conception of time travel is such that we can't fight that direction and only move in one way.  But I personally reject that belief.  Since time is an axis that we exist in, and as such is only a construct of our way of viewing reality, I choose to reject the standard conception of time.  I choose to accept that I perceive time in a certain way, and that most of the time when I'm not thinking about it, I travel in the direction of the time flow that everyone accepts.  IE I move 'forwards' through time.

HOWEVER, what happens when I stop and think about what my wife just said to me?  What happens when I look at a photo and recall events from last year?  Doesn't my conscious mind 'travel' backwards along that axis of time?   While my physical body may still be moving in that same forwards time direction, my consciousness is suddenly rooted in what we consider 'the past.'   Hence, everyone, every day, with any memory or fantasy about the future...... is a time traveler.


Shjade

Quote from: rhev on May 25, 2011, 08:13:58 AMHOWEVER, what happens when I stop and think about what my wife just said to me?  What happens when I look at a photo and recall events from last year?  Doesn't my conscious mind 'travel' backwards along that axis of time?
No. Your memory of past events is not a re-enactment of those events. If it were, everyone's memory would be perfect and infallible. You're not traveling back to the past, you're recalling your perspective of some parts of the past, and even those recollections aren't reliable. Your remembering the past is still moving forward in time.
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TheGlyphstone

^what he said.

Calling memories time travel would be like saying it's time travel when you pop in a video cassette or DVD of your vacation ten years ago and watching it; they're both recordings of events, just in different mediums.

Oniya

I believe this may have been the reference that Rhev might have been going for:

Quote'And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.'

'My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth's surface.'

'But the great difficulty is this,' interrupted the Psychologist. 'You can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.'

'That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?'
"Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women.~*~*~Don't think it's all been done before
And in that endeavor, laziness will not do." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think we're never gonna win this war
Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think your world's gonna fall apart
I do have a cause, though.  It's obscenity.  I'm for it.  - Tom Lehrer~*~All you need is your beautiful heart
O/O's Updated 5/11/21 - A/A's - Current Status! - Writing a novel - all draws for Fool of Fire up!
Requests updated March 17

rhev

Quote from: Shjade on May 25, 2011, 03:02:31 PM
No. Your memory of past events is not a re-enactment of those events. If it were, everyone's memory would be perfect and infallible. You're not traveling back to the past, you're recalling your perspective of some parts of the past, and even those recollections aren't reliable. Your remembering the past is still moving forward in time.

I disagree with your assertions.   Now we move into a philosophical argument.  Take the old tree in the woods puzzle.  If we do not perceive something, does it happen?  How can event occour if there is no recollection or record of it?  As human beings we perceive and extrapolate from perceptions, but ultimately it is our perception on existence that is our viewpoint on the world.   If I, sitting all alone in my house move a coffee cup two feet, then move it back.  Then later as I tell someone that I did that, say that I moved it three feet because I 'mis-recollect' does that change the nature of the event?   How would you as the listener to my story ever know?   To you, the story is true because there's no proof to the opposite.


Anyways, this is way deeper then can easily be explained.  But I know you're talking about the classic definition of time travel, IE i send my body or my consciousness backwards through time.  I was just presenting an alternate way of looking at time.  One that most people refuse to accept.

TheGlyphstone

But your definition isn't any different than the 'standard definition' - the phrase "fourth dimension" has a relic of time travel science fiction for decades, so thinking of time as a fourth axis isn't anything new. It's generally accepted that any functional time travel would have to be non-linear, because purely linear time travel would alter your temporal position without changing your physical position, and thus leave you stranded in the empty depths of space where Earth used to be/will be later.

Quote
The conception of time travel is such that we can't fight that direction and only move in one way.
Doesn't make sense either, because that would be necessity be the absence of time travel, not its conception.

If the essence of your arguement is that 'memory counts as time travel, thus all humans are time travellers'...I guess that works. But it's so vastly, radically different than the accepted definition of time travel that it's hard to make any coherent debate or argument with regards to it.

rhev

Quote from: TheGlyphstone on May 25, 2011, 09:48:09 PMBut it's so vastly, radically different than the accepted definition of time travel that it's hard to make any coherent debate or argument with regards to it.

Yes, exactly.  When I said that the thread was talking about the 'classic defintion of time travel' I was talking about the science fiction, back to the future, quantum leap, superman flying around the earth type of time travel.   My definition of 'time travel' is radically different than that, and I only wanted to bring it up as an interesting point.


Here's a discussion I had with a collegue a while ago about time travel and the persistance of human conciousness.
Me - Ok, so if I got in a delorian time machine and took you 1 day into the past, and introduced yourself to yourself... ignoring the paradox that you don't remember that, are you still you, or are you him, or is he you, or are you two different people?
him - Well I guess we are two different people.
me - Why?
him - because I've got a days experience on him.  I know a day's worth of information more than him.  I'm a day older, my cells have degraded, regrown, etc.  I'm different than he is.
me - OK, so would the same hold true if I took you backwards in time one minute into the past?
him - I guess.
me - How about one second, one thousandth of a second, one trillionth of a second?  Basically if there's two of you standing there from different times, no matter what that time is, then aren't you a different person?
Him - I guuuuessssssss, yeah.....  I suppose if there's two of us, then we can't be the same person.
me - but so aren't you in essence, at any given moment of your life a different 'person' than you were at any different moment ?   At what point does the you that exists... RIGHT NOW.... cease to exist?   That's the folly of time travel, to think that it exists only as a single direction river.  If that's the case, then nano second by nano second, instant by instant, the you that you are is disappearing and instantly reforming only to dissappear again.   That's madness.

Oniya

Quote from: TheGlyphstone on May 25, 2011, 09:48:09 PM
purely linear time travel would alter your temporal position without changing your physical position, and thus leave you stranded in the empty depths of space where Earth used to be/will be later.

I remember reading a short-short involving a time-traveler that could only jump forward, and tried to jump a single day - naturally, Earth had moved on a full day, and he was floating in his time-bubble (with limited air, as I recall).  So, he tried jumping forward one solar year - and the galactic arm had rotated around the center.  Each time he jumped to when a new cycle would theoretically end up bringing Earth back underneath him, it revealed a new line of motion that he hadn't counted on.

@Rhev:  Have you read Rudy Rucker's 'The Fourth Dimension'?  A number of the ideas you're bringing in are explored in that book.
"Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women.~*~*~Don't think it's all been done before
And in that endeavor, laziness will not do." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think we're never gonna win this war
Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think your world's gonna fall apart
I do have a cause, though.  It's obscenity.  I'm for it.  - Tom Lehrer~*~All you need is your beautiful heart
O/O's Updated 5/11/21 - A/A's - Current Status! - Writing a novel - all draws for Fool of Fire up!
Requests updated March 17

rhev

Quote from: Oniya on May 25, 2011, 10:02:29 PM@Rhev:  Have you read Rudy Rucker's 'The Fourth Dimension'?  A number of the ideas you're bringing in are explored in that book.

Negative, I'll have to look for it.

TheGlyphstone

I'm not sure I follow. Your scenario is dependent on the caveat that it is a fundamentally different person that exists in every separate nanosecond, and capitalizing on the absurdity of that. But without the intervention of the time machine, there is only one person, and one timeline. There are never two of you at the same time, unless you cause it to be so - any madness is purely of your own making, not a fault of the classical understanding of time. Outside of a purely solipsist universe, time itself must be linear in the absence of an outside force causing it to be otherwise. The invention of a time machine does not suddenly cause the linearity of time to break down, only the subjective perspective of one small element.

Though your definition, bizzare as it is, does have some merit - it's fun to think that I'm time travelling right now as I sit at my computer, because I'm thinking about reading your post and reviewing my own post before hitting 'Post'.

Shjade

Quote from: rhev on May 25, 2011, 09:41:33 PM
I disagree with your assertions.   Now we move into a philosophical argument.  Take the old tree in the woods puzzle.  If we do not perceive something, does it happen?  How can event occour if there is no recollection or record of it?  As human beings we perceive and extrapolate from perceptions, but ultimately it is our perception on existence that is our viewpoint on the world.   If I, sitting all alone in my house move a coffee cup two feet, then move it back.  Then later as I tell someone that I did that, say that I moved it three feet because I 'mis-recollect' does that change the nature of the event?   How would you as the listener to my story ever know?   To you, the story is true because there's no proof to the opposite.
You aren't addressing my assertions. You're talking about something completely different.

If you move a cup two feet and move it back, then inform me later on that you moved a cup two feet and moved it back, we didn't travel through time to learn this information, nor did you relive it in the telling. If you misspeak and say you moved it three feet, my believing you doesn't change history simply because I believe something happened that didn't happen.

Your perception does not unilaterally determine the universe any more than mine does. It's sensory input we interpret. That's all.
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rhev

Quote from: Shjade on May 25, 2011, 11:13:53 PMYour perception does not unilaterally determine the universe any more than mine does. It's sensory input we interpret. That's all.

But that's the philosophical crux of the argument!

What I'm saying is that for literally thousands of years philosophers have argued that perception DOES determine the universe.

TheGlyphstone

Not in a literal sense - if a tree falls in a forest, it does create sonic wave disturbances caused by the kinetic impact of the tree trunk against the forest floor, even if there is no human to hear the 'sound'. The natural and physical laws of the world are independent from our ability to observe them, at least until you get into freaky things like quantum physics.

rhev

"If no one is around to hear it" doesn't necessarily have to refer to a human with ears, hearing the sound.  You could easily change it to "If it is observed in no way, does it cause any effect?"



Oniya

So, that means that the tree is fallen and not-fallen at the same time?  ;D
"Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women.~*~*~Don't think it's all been done before
And in that endeavor, laziness will not do." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think we're never gonna win this war
Robin Williams-Dead Poets Society ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Don't think your world's gonna fall apart
I do have a cause, though.  It's obscenity.  I'm for it.  - Tom Lehrer~*~All you need is your beautiful heart
O/O's Updated 5/11/21 - A/A's - Current Status! - Writing a novel - all draws for Fool of Fire up!
Requests updated March 17