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Is Traveling Back In Time Possible?

Cellmold

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Personally I hold closer to Futurama's version of the Grandfather paradox, or rather Grandmother.
 

Amalie Muller

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Theoretically, yes, it's possible. Practically, who the hell knows.

- - - Updated - - -

Traveling backwards in time is much trickier than traveling forwards, I find. :D
 

Kullervo

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The real challenge would be manually controlling the warp. You not only need to get into the state where you could go backward, you also have to be able to get back out of it again!

Another question is how such travel would affect the aging process. If you moved back in time, then went back to the time period you had come from, would you have aged the same amount that you would have if you hadn't time-traveled, more, or less?
 

Mole

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As we approach the speed of light, time slows down, so that at the speed of light, time stops. This means that a light photon leaves the Sun at exactly the same time as it reaches the Earth. So for the light photon, no time elapses on its journey form the Sun to the Earth.

This is counter-intuitive for us because we only experience time from our point of view not from the point of view of a photon travelling at the speed of light.

So asking whether we can travel back in time is the naive and intuitive question, limited by our point of view, our own limited experience of time.

And asking whether we can travel back in time is parochial and childlike.
 

Bush

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I hold that if backward time travel to the same universe is possible, then the present would be what it is out of iteration. All of the backward time travel that has happened.. well, has happened, and thus backward time travel affects any events, including backward time travel, that'll happen. Bam, spacetime.

Doesn't go a long way in solving time travel paradoxes, but it helps me sleep at night.
 

Mal12345

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I hold that if backward time travel to the same universe is possible, then the present would be what it is out of iteration. All of the backward time travel that has happened.. well, has happened, and thus backward time travel affects any events, including backward time travel, that'll happen. Bam, spacetime.

Doesn't go a long way in solving time travel paradoxes, but it helps me sleep at night.

Even if you did travel back in time and try to kill you great-grandfather, something would prevent this.
 

highlander

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I think it will never happen
 

Mal12345

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I think it will never happen

Never say never! After all, [MENTION=3325]Mole[/MENTION] was tempbanned and a lot of us thought that would never happen either.
 

Bush

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Even if you did travel back in time and try to kill you great-grandfather, something would prevent this.
Yeah, I still need to figure that one out. Experientially, if possible.
 

Avocado

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As we approach the speed of light, time slows down, so that at the speed of light, time stops. This means that a light photon leaves the Sun at exactly the same time as it reaches the Earth. So for the light photon, no time elapses on its journey form the Sun to the Earth.

This is counter-intuitive for us because we only experience time from our point of view not from the point of view of a photon travelling at the speed of light.

So asking whether we can travel back in time is the naive and intuitive question, limited by our point of view, our own limited experience of time.

And asking whether we can travel back in time is parochial and childlike.

COOL! So if photons were intelligent, we could see all of time and space at once?
The rest of the universe would have to be going infinitely fast, and the photon would be frozen in time (Timeless, unaging as it sped through the universe at the speed of light).
 

INTP

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No and everyone who believes that is a fool. In order to move back in time, you would need to move the entire universe(that includes all the light, atoms etc in exact same order) back to the position that it was back in where you would want to go to and then somehow after moving it back, make it start to move again the way they did move. I mean if you push a ball away from you in space, it doesent come back to you, but the force keeps pushing it away till some other force pulls it towards it, so this is something that you would need to deal with as well. Not to mention that if you move the entire universe back, you are moving yourself back too and if you arent, the time isnt moving backwards, but the objects are..

Even with this quantum superposition thing that caused the article to gain that misleading title, you arent actually going back in time, you are just sort of creating an alternative reality, or positioning two similar universes close to each other so that they overlap(if looked from the perspective of multiverses). What they say on the article reinforces my multiverse theory i came up with years ago, not the idea of time travel..

I didnt watch the lecture yet(i might later), but i doubt it will change my position on this.
 

INTP

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COOL! So if photons were intelligent, we could see all of time and space at once?
The rest of the universe would have to be going infinitely fast, and the photon would be frozen in time (Timeless, unaging as it sped through the universe at the speed of light).

What he told about time slowing down when approaching the speed of light and time stopping when moving at the speed of light isnt really true. Time is nothing but a movement of something in relation to something else and light has the fastest speed. If you go beyond the edges of the universe(where light havent gotten yet), thats where time doesent exist(is at zero) because there is nothing moving in relation to anything.

What he is saying about this time not moving for the light and that for it its the same moment it leaves the sun as it is when it hits the earth, is based on studies showing that particles are decaying slower than they should when they move fast enough. But this time stopping for them is just a hypothesis that really has no meaning for anything. The thing is that if you take an atom for example, there is stuff "spinning inside of it", and if you make it move at the speed of light one of the things would need to move faster than the speed of light for the spin to actually continue, but because its impossible to move faster than the speed of light, the spin slows down the closer you get to the speed of light. It doesent mean that the time will stop for the atom, it just means that it doesent spin and thus does not decay and is sort of frozen, but because the atom(or photon in the case of light) is still moving in relation to everything else, the time doesent really stop and the speed of time is not zero. All that stuff about being able to see through time or all space is just people imagination going wild and no, its not possible either. If you move at the speed of light, your eyes dont work until you slow down.
 

Avocado

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What he told about time slowing down when approaching the speed of light and time stopping when moving at the speed of light isnt really true. Time is nothing but a movement of something in relation to something else and light has the fastest speed. If you go beyond the edges of the universe(where light havent gotten yet), thats where time doesent exist(is at zero) because there is nothing moving in relation to anything.

What he is saying about this time not moving for the light and that for it its the same moment it leaves the sun as it is when it hits the earth, is based on studies showing that particles are decaying slower than they should when they move fast enough. But this time stopping for them is just a hypothesis that really has no meaning for anything. The thing is that if you take an atom for example, there is stuff "spinning inside of it", and if you make it move at the speed of light one of the things would need to move faster than the speed of light for the spin to actually continue, but because its impossible to move faster than the speed of light, the spin slows down the closer you get to the speed of light. It doesent mean that the time will stop for the atom, it just means that it doesent spin and thus does not decay and is sort of frozen, but because the atom(or photon in the case of light) is still moving in relation to everything else, the time doesent really stop and the speed of time is not zero. All that stuff about being able to see through time or all space is just people imagination going wild and no, its not possible either. If you move at the speed of light, your eyes dont work until you slow down.
I write Sci-Fi. We writers botch the details sometimes, so thank you for clarifying.
 

st-t-toat

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Never say never! After all, [MENTION=3325]Mole[/MENTION] was tempbanned and a lot of us thought that would never happen either.

huh? what? what! dear Mole tempbanned? well i guess it is possible - in an infinite universe everything has a probability of one - but in his universe? how did this ... happen?
 

Bush

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huh? what? what! dear Mole tempbanned? well i guess it is possible - in an infinite universe everything has a probability of one - but in his universe? how did this ... happen?
Maybe Islamophobia. :shrug:
 

Polaris

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The past is not a location like Italy or the grocery store that you could travel to if only the proper route were open. The past consists of memories, echoes, and afterimages, as well as rust and wrinkles. That's it. If there is actually some location where a duplicate of the past universe exists (as far as anything can be a genuine duplicate) it's a very strange fact of reality for which there is currently zero evidence. Another way of getting to the past would be reconstructing it, which, if done on any appreciable level with any appreciable degree of accuracy, would probably require technology billions of years in advance of ours.

On the other hand, I do think the present shapes the past, just as the past shapes the present. That isn't the same thing as time travel, though, and it generally manifests itself in extremely mundane ways.
 

Mal12345

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The past is not a location like Italy or the grocery store that you could travel to if only the proper route were open. The past consists of memories, echoes, and afterimages, as well as rust and wrinkles. That's it. If there is actually some location where a duplicate of the past universe exists (as far as anything can be a genuine duplicate) it's a very strange fact of reality for which there is currently zero evidence. Another way of getting to the past would be reconstructing it, which, if done on any appreciable level with any appreciable degree of fidelity, would probably require technology billions of years in advance of ours.

On the other hand, I do think the present shapes the past, just as the past shapes the present. That isn't the same thing as time travel, though, and it generally manifests itself in extremely mundane ways.

In other words, the future shapes the present.
 
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