ok. seeing as the short 'brawl' has thankfully been deleted, i say that we should agree to disagree. you won cattle origins debate, but we can either bring this one to a draw, or continue...possibly veering off the edge of sanity along the way (this stuff is very 'heavyweight').

oh, and sincere apologies for my childish behaviour (referring to deleted posts).

*offers handshake*

*shakes back*

I would be keen to continue, but the ball's in your court right now ;)



On another note, this (the original topic) has come up in the latest New Scientist. The energies involved in each particle collision are about the same as that of a mosquito in flight, but when compressed down into the scale of subatomic particles, the energy levels may, according to one theory (the one widely and inaccurately reported) be enough to warp the fabric of what General Relativity describes as "spacetime" into tiny wormholes large enough for subatomic particles to enter. Or possibly black holes of a similar size, the physics here are very similar. I'm going to have to buy it to elaborate further, but it does solve a lot of the issues with time travel that people here have voiced, such as the one about no time travellers having (noticeably) come back to visit us. All wormhole models of time travelling methods do not allow one to travel back further than the moment that the wormhole was first created, many several years after (as it takes that long to achieve the desired time dilation, by attaching one end to a spacecraft travelling close to the speed of light).

However, if it were possible to bend time specifically to each end of the wormhole, rather than just space, travel might be enabled immediately. You could arrive at your destination before you even leave.

If in the future we have... well, survived, but also become technologically advanced enough to enlarge and maintain wormholes and bend spacetime when creating them, it might be possible to link them to any wormholes created in their past, the first of which may be produced in the Large Hadron Collider.

Though I don't imagine that stepping out into the midst of an active particle accelerator is the wisest thing t do. Not least because it would ruin the experiment and the equipment, and such future wormhole technology that allowed this transportation in the first place might be built upon the results from this very research.

Whoah...
I actually believe we can travel in time if we move fast enough.
But think of the disaster... We shouldn't fuck with that...
RUSSIAN MAFIA!

well if your willing to continue BM, i'm happy to oblige.

your theory is a very common one, and is true to the original theory;

but your implication of 'changing the future' whilst in the past, i beleive is not necessarily true, as described in this quote.

but it does make you wonder if we will receive a visit from a future inhabitant of Earth using the 'speed' technique, at any moment, as there would no longer be the problem of being unable to travel back in time before the 'time machine' was built. but this technique would most probably lead to the inability to return to the future time that the traveller was originally from.

I think that if indeed time travel is possible, changing the past would either:

Make the future (the time you are from) the way you remember it. You actions in the past were responsible for the outcome you remember.

Or, set the timeline onto a new track in the quantum multiverse. Your time still exists, but you will no longer be able to get there travelling through time alone.

Although the latter has complications with causality that I don't like, and may make it impossible.

Stephen Hawking postulated that going back in time would create something of a temporal feedback loop that would eventually result in the time machine never having been built, thus acting as a sort of space-time immune system.

Haha! I bet they'll actually make this time machine, go back to the time of dinosaurs, and make them become extinct!

I think that she was referring to Professor Branestawm's theory that if you can travel from point A to B in ten minutes by going at 50kph, then going 100kph will get you there in five minutes. Eventually, if you speed up enough, you'll get there more or less the same time as you left and if you go any faster than that you'll get there earlier. Of course, that would involve going faster than the speed of light, so you'd be a body of inifinite mass. Just like your mum

I used to believe that theory myself for an embarrassingly long time. I always figured that Einstein was just making it up as he went along and clearly hadn't read the Branestawm books.

yes, that's what i meant (i've just looked at my quote and realised it contrasts with my statement, very embarrassing). i personally dont beleive this theory myself, or have really even considered it, but travelling backwards in time using speed as the main element may make it possible for a 'time traveller' to come to our time, now, thus no time travel 'barriers' linked to the date that the machine was created (going by the crude theory of a ship that can withstand speeds that send the vessel back through time, and dont obliterate organic matter contained inside).

call me ignorant but i personally found this a potential possibility. seems to make basic sense.

this does not contradict my previous post, because if you move onto the neccessary branch of the multiverse after attempting to change 'history', it flows, therfore you never changed anything, because your now living in the 'new' present. but what makes me wonder is, would the new multiverse branch decided by the time traveller's objective begin the instant they arrived back in time, once the objective was completed/in the process of, or before they even reached their past destination? (did they even travel back in time?).

Well we're going to die, and before Smash Bros. Brawl is released in Europe too. Thanks alot, scientists.

Does anyone else ever get the impression that their efforts make zero impact on the people around them?

Anyway, I saved this response to MA ages ago before it was finished, and I just found it again.

^That's where I have problems with it. If you imagine the quantum timeline like a tree, where the timeline splits into two or more to play out every outcome of a quantum event (and human decisions, if they are quantum in nature) then you have an effect in which you have "pruned" a timeline from the tree, and thus should be inaccessible anyway.

If I may explain (and this is original thought, so it's probably bollocks anyway) going back in time is like taking a branch from a tree, curving it back on itself and expecting it to seamlessly fuse with the preceded branches. This would be your personal timeline within the timestream as a whole.

1: Hawking's feedback loop. Essentially you have created a loop in which effects have been taken back in time (via you, your memories etc) to a point preceding their cause. This then changes the cause, and therefore the effect. Which changes the cause. And the effect. And you can see where this is going. So you can imagine that each time the events between arriving in the past and leaving the present play out, they do so differently. This might even create even more loops if the effect causes you to go back to a different time. Eventually the effect will occur that causes the time machine to either never be built or never be used, thus breaking the cycle, and we all continue on none the wiser.

Or so I understand it. It is a paradox, and I might have missed something here, but the result is that paradoxes prevent themselves from occuring, thus rendering this time travel impossible.

2: The other one (I haven't a name). This is the one in which what you did when you went back in time caused you to go back in time in the first place, thus there is no feedback nor changing history. The simplest way to explain the problem is that there is nothing that causes the loop in the first place, it just always existed. But this is (so far as we know) an unnatural state for a timeline to be in, there is no reason to suggest that it would just appear to be that way. Maybe the existence of a time machine would distort the timeline in such a way, but it could not exist if the timeline were not there to begin with. Imagine time as a tree again, branching at each event with multiple outcomes. Tree branches do not spout from the ether and fuse into the nearby tree, which is what this would be like. Branches split as they grow, only this particular split cannot occur without prior and improbable input from another branch which already resulted from this very split. Trees cannot grow this way, and I don't think history can either. Although the loop, once it exists, is stable, there seems to be no way to create it in the first place.


Come to think of it, these are all just reiterations of old paradoxes and proofs against the possibility of time travel. Damn.

Isn't science fun?

*Has AB-SO-LUTE-LY nothing else to add to the thread, since he quit his Physics study over a year ago*

many a time.

you have absolutely annihilated me, sir. i, for once, agree with your statement 100%. there is nothing for me to argue against, bloody good show!

i think BM 'owns' this thread, unless anyone objects...

I object.

I think a more accurate statement would be that BM owns your arse.

"alright alright, calm down calm down!" Scousers, Harry Enfield.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=W7VspOs3Qt0

the heat in Jerusalem must be sending your head funny.

Then I guess there's nothing more to say, but...

heh heh, thats gonna' get some +rep.
most definitely.

And a average person traveling at that speed would create quite an air resistance....

Not if it happened in a vacuum.

Jeeze, I don't think it would even be possible in any medium. Certainly nothing would be left after mere moments.