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[NT] Thought Experiment

alakazam

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Ok, here's an interesting thought experiment:

You're sitting at a table. At exactly 11am, a note appears in front of you saying "At exactly 12pm (one hour from now), send this note back in time exactly one hour"

So, you do that at exactly 12pm.

(1) Who wrote the note?
(2) How old is the note?
 

teslashock

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infinity-sign.jpg
 

nim

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the table is magical. it was made thousands of years ago by elves. every hundred years or so, the table creates a note by mentally picturing a note appearing on top of itself. the elves created it to do so. the table, being a magical table and thus very perceptive, decides to confuse and to alarm you, as you look like the scientific type. the trick works, and you sit at the table pondering for days after you sent the note, until finally you die of dehydration.
 

tinkerbell

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The note it new at 12 pm, don't know who wrote the note, it doens't automatically follow it was yourself, it could be anyone who hands you the note at 12 noon
 

JustHer

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What the hell am i doing just sitting at a table, anyway... Am I just wasting time or actually doing something?

I'd just leave and do something else.
 

Totenkindly

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"ooooooo... pretttttty!"


How am I supposed to send this note back in time anyway? I can't even get my cell phone to work, let alone a time machine; and I do not even own a DeLorean. is time travel even feasible?

How do I know I did not just zone out for a bit in a fugue state, write the note myself, and leave it in front of me, whereupon I snapped out of things?

Is the note crumbling and yellow?

Hmmm..... it sounds like you know something.
 

alakazam

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The note it new at 12 pm, don't know who wrote the note, it doens't automatically follow it was yourself, it could be anyone who hands you the note at 12 noon

No no no you weren't handed it at noon - it appeared in front of you at 11 and you held onto it until noon when you sent it back in time to yourself, who sees it appear in front of them... etc.


the table is magical. it was made thousands of years ago by elves. every hundred years or so, the table creates a note by mentally picturing a note appearing on top of itself. the elves created it to do so. the table, being a magical table and thus very perceptive, decides to confuse and to alarm you, as you look like the scientific type. the trick works, and you sit at the table pondering for days after you sent the note, until finally you die of dehydration.

Wow. Not what I was expecting, but totally hilarious! And it does, in fact, fit the scenario...

*hi-5*
 

Cloudblue

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Ok, here's an interesting thought experiment:

You're sitting at a table. At exactly 11am, a note appears in front of you saying "At exactly 12pm (one hour from now), send this note back in time exactly one hour"

So, you do that at exactly 12pm.

(1) Who wrote the note?
(2) How old is the note?

(1) I wrote the note, because I was the one who sent it back to myself one into future...
(2)How old the note depends on when it was finished + went it sent back, A+B, multiplied by the number of times I have sent it back, D, but A and B can not be less then or greater than 1 whole hour...
 

sleepy

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(1) Who wrote the note?
No one
(2) How old is the note?
What note?

I dont buy the infinity thingy. It only says you send the note back. Thereby fucking everything up. So what really happens at 11 is that the table goes on fire, and there never was a note.
 

Just another ISTJ

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1) I don't know. All I did was send the note back in time.
2) Possibly one hour old at 12pm if the person who originally wrote it did indeed write it at 12pm. It's going back in time after all...

Maybe they wrote it at an even earlier time and decided to make it appear at 11am.
 

Blank

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I'd just go West a little bit and drop it off in a new time zone.

Problem solved. *crosses fingers and leans back triumphantly*
 

Antimony

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1. The line underneath of this is telling the truth.
2. The line above is lying.

Is it kind of like that?

In this case, the note has always been around, for as long as time, and it is too awesome to be affected by time.

I changed my mind. I wrote the note, and my past self just got it, because I decided to be obnoxious and confuse my past self, and make my past self think about this little trick until they went insane. That makes the results even more interesting, considering I should have been to be too insane to really right that note, so I used my new found insanity to travel through time.

Somehow.

I changed my mind again.

I have just decided that this thought process does nothing but confirm my lack of decisiveness and now I must sit here and ponder something I do not understand.

Mind change again! The house burned down and I just dreamed of the note. OR I only thought I sent it at the right time, but I really didn't. I guess, assuming I could send a note like that through time, it would be as old as those moments...so if that moment was going on forever like that, it would have to be infinite. Just because that moment still existed. There are too many things for me to consider, including wormholes and a legion of monkeys. I want a new question. Monkies? Why is it 'monkeys'? That is better.
 

Scott

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Ok, here's an interesting thought experiment:

You're sitting at a table. At exactly 11am, a note appears in front of you saying "At exactly 12pm (one hour from now), send this note back in time exactly one hour"

So, you do that at exactly 12pm.

(1) Who wrote the note?
(2) How old is the note?

(1) I have no way of knowing. The realm of what's possible in this universe isn't well enough defined to rule anyone or anything out. No one is a possibility as well.

(2) Age is relative to timeline. Given that the note only ever exists in the narrative you present:

With regard to the timeline that we typically speak in terms of when we use terms such as "11am" and "12pm", the note is brand new at 11am and progresses like any other object from there, until 12pm, at which point it hits one hour old and ceases to exist.

On the other hand, with regard to a hypothetical timeline that the note follows with its own time dimension (such that successive 11ams on this day exist*), the question of age would become meaningless unless and until a starting point could be identified. Naturally, if such a starting point were identified, the note's age according to this timeline would be such that:
- given c, defined as the number of 11am-12pm cycles the note has gone through, and
- given t, defined as the current time
Age = c hrs + (t - 11 hrs)



* Such a timeline could be graphed to look something like this:

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// (and so on)

where the y-axis represents the timeline we typically think in with a range of one hour spanning from 11am to 12pm, and where the x-axis represents another time dimension, needed to allow for multiple points with the same y-coordinates.
 

Moiety

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1)Who cares?
2)Who gives a flying duck?


3)Pssst!I've read the ending. Apparently it's all meaningless
 

Scott

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1)Who cares?
2)Who gives a flying duck?


3)Pssst!I've read the ending. Apparently it's all meaningless

Meh, I just think it's fun. But I also don't think there's a super-interesting paradox there, and think it's worth showing that it's fairly straightforward rather than terribly intellectually interesting or something - hence my post. But most of all, I'm a big fan of the phrase, "Who gives a flying duck?" "Oh, go pluck a duck" is fun as well.
 

Kalach

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If I sent the original note to myself:

then the business of devising the note and sending it back the first time is interrupted--overwritten--by the note actually being present "now" while I am coming up with the scheme of sending it back the first time. I must have manufactured the first note, but now I don't have to because I have it already... some serious spacetimeline loop is on the verge of being created. I hope to God I throw away the note that tells me to send it back in one hour and instead write a new one!!! The alternative is the act of sending the note back the first time creates a new spacetime in which the creation of that note never happened... IT JUST APPEARED ONE DAY!

(But that's sort of the same as the case where someone else sends me the original note, so...)

If someone else sent the original note to me:

assuming that one hour later I do send it back to myself, then one hour earlier I receive two notes, the one I sent and the same one someone else sent. That's to say the past--the current present--is altered and the original scenario of one note becomes two notes. One hour from "now" I either send both of them back to myself, or I send one of them, or neither. Thus, the current present is altered again, and the scenario is now either two notes appear in front of me or three do, or again only one. And so on. Chance is introduced each time since there is no guarantee I will always send every copy of the note back each time.

Perhaps however, time-space-physics-something merges these two notes making them somehow into the same note, so that in the current present I still only get one note. In that case, the note is potentially infinitely old. On its own spacetimeline it gains an hour of age each time it sits around on my desk waiting to be sent back.

Perhaps however, that idea is paradoxical: can it travel on its own spacetimeline and incrementally gain age, or does the first act of sending it back sufficiently violates [something] that it is instantly infinitely old?

If that were true--that sending it back like that instantaneously ages it to infinite--then [something important--I don't know what].


Boom. Headshot.
 

Tamske

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Why do you all have problems with this?

There is such a thing like the Second Law of Thermodynamics (2HTH). Or call it the Arrow of Time.
It is the physical law defining things like "old" versus "new". It makes it impossible to unburn a candle, unmix hot and cold air, to let heat flow from low to high temperature.
If you want to send a note back in time, you violate the 2HTH. And if you violate 2HTH (which is possible in thought experiments, but then you've got to bear the consequences), time has ceased to have the usual meaning. Time is more like space then. It's very much possible to send a note from Brussels to Paris and back to Brussels and back to Paris.
So:

1) I send the note. (Note my use of the present time. 11 am and 12 pm have the same relationship as Brussels and Paris; not as 11 am and 12 pm in our 2HTH-influenced understanding of time). It's as easy (or as difficult) to send it from 11am to 12 pm as to send it from 12 pm to 11 am.
2) There is no age of the note. Just like a light particle has no age.
 
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Southern Kross

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(1) I wrote the note, because I was the one who sent it back to myself one into future...
(2)How old the note depends on when it was finished + went it sent back, A+B, multiplied by the number of times I have sent it back, D, but A and B can not be less then or greater than 1 whole hour...
This is what I thought.

To take it further: what if I was the one that sent the note back in time to myself? If I did, theoretically, I would have no choice but to send the note back again ('again' being relative) at 12pm to maintain the causal loop. If I don't send the note back, I will not have previously received the note in the first place, creating a paradox. I personally would be tempted to not to send it back and see if the universe implodes. :devil:

Also, if I did write the note and sent it back to myself, in doing so I have either altered the past (because initially there was no existing note at 11am), and consequently the future, or I have created an parallel timeline.
 
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