Is Time travel Possible?

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Time does not exist. 'Time dilation' is a change in the rate of change in one state relative to the rate in a previous state. Time is an illusion. Perhaps one of the great delusions.

Actually, there is a frame rate to the universe. Time does exist for us.

Explain, please. And in what manner or form does it exist?

Actually time travel happens all of the time all around us in nature.

But, in only one direction- forward.

Bacteria and dust mites curl up into cysts and go dormant for years, and are able to return to life when the environoment is better for them. This going dormant for years until times get better is, in my opinon, a real form of time travel.

SImilarily African lungfish can borrow into lake bottoms when their lakes dry up and hole up in an underground cacooon in suspended anmation for years until the drought ends when they can emerge and live as active fish in the restored lake again. Mammals hibernate- go into suspended animation to time travel through the lean winter to arrive at the next spring.

Humans envision putting astronauts into suspended animation machines on starships in imitation of hibernation so astronauts can sleep the required decades or centuries of travel between stars and then wake up when they arrive at the other star system.

And we already use general anesthesia to allow patients to time travel through the hours of a surgical operation.

But all of these forms of time travel are in the same direction- forward- into the future.

No organism, nor human, can yet travel backward in time.

The only "known" way to go backward in time is to break the light barrier and go faster than the speed of light. Which is impossible.

What is there to go back to? The past does not exist. The future does not exist. And sleeping is not time travel.

I think a large part of the problem is that language deceives us.

That past is as real as rain. If it were not so how could we have the present?

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 29 Jan 2012, 6:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

how would the present be able to recede into the past, if there were no future for us temporal travelers to be carried towards? to where would the arrow of time point, to where would the river of time flow? how can events unfold sans the temporal "space" for them to unfold? where does all the time go? gasp.

there seems to be no way for a mortal to experience a time far in advance of the present. it would take about 1 year (354 days) to accelerate to light speed at 1g (if light speed was possible which it is not), so if one was to accelerate to .9*C at 1g, then it would take approx 318 days.

if one was to dedicate 50 years of their life to this journey, then it would take 318 days to get to .9* speed of light, and 318 days to decelerate to v=0, and then another 318 days to accelerate back to .9C (for the return trip to earth), and another 318 to decelerate to a halt. this is 318*4 days spent in acceleration/deceleration. so one would be traveling at .9C for 46.5 years.

the time dilation at .9C is about 2.294, so about 105 years would elapse on earth while you were on your journey, and since 50 years has elapsed for you, then you would be only 55 years in the "future".

one could not return to the time they embarked on their journey to report anything.

also, it is not really the future that you will arrive in. it is the present (105 years later). if there were some way of seeing events proceeding on earth while you were on your voyage , it would look sped up, and if they could see you, you would look slowed down.

apart from the issues concerning the energy required for the voyage, there is a more basic reality that would preclude such a voyage, and that is that there is almost 100% chance that your vehicle would encounter some obstacle on the way, and that would annihilate the vehicle. there is no chance that i could conceive that there would be not even a speck of dust or a grain of grit in that whole distance.

so i think it will not be possible to "time travel" in this millennium.
i also think that it is impossible to go backward in time in this universe.

we must not let the scriptwriters and sci-fi authors get wind of these doubts, there has got to be a continuous flow of fun time travel stories.

there are plenty of "exotic alternative physics" that show tantalizing ways of circumventing the speed of light,

major problem is they all make huge leaps of faith, such as alcubierres field equation, if you could manipulate negative mass and if the ship could thermally and physically survive the bubble (think conditions of the sun), then it could very well be possible, but already that is two pretty large leaps, we might be able to design something that could survive the sun for a limited period but i doubt we will see negative mass manipulation anytime soon.

then there is travel by stabilized wormhole and quantum teleprtation

I heard you can only travel forward, so if everyone you love in the future dies, you'll NEVER get to see them ever again. Plus you might be without a home...or even a PLANET!

Indeed. And they are void of any empirical corroboration. Theories are cheap. Theories that predict correctly are dear.

A theory without experimental evidence to back it up is pretty near worthless.

ruveyn

agreed,

but you still need a theory to test so in my mind as long as they are upfront about their shortcomings i dont see why we shouldnt at least investigate what we can though theory and calculation.(bar anything that has zero probability of functioning)

talking about "time travel" is to imagine a dollhouse, & the twentieth century is one room in the dollhouse, & the twenty first, another; & you take a doll out of one room & place it in another. presto!

i think what we experience as time is like a wave in the ocean. the water goes up & down, but what passes along is a pattern of energy. can a single wave go against the direction of the other waves? you would have to reverse all of them, & then it would not be different: time would still be "moving" in the same "direction"...

just a thought i had.

on the subject of waves possibly cancelling out other waves, i just remembered something
i gotta ask somebody who knows more than i do about it- why do sci-fi writers tend to write scenarios in which people who time travel, end up getting sick and die if they stay too long in the new time zone? they generally couch it in terms of the time-traveller's body being not of the correct temporal holographic cellular matrix or some other mumbojumbo. you see examples of this in the "all our yesterdays" [featuring the atavachron] episode of star trek or in AI-artificial intelligence. could this have something to do with the antagonistic waves? i'll go back to watching my cartoons now.

i can not see your analogy. time is not compartmentalized in my mind. it is fluid.

i believe a single wave or set of waves can go against the direction of the predominant wave direction. waves are propagated outward from their source, but it is only energy that is propagated in a radially excursive manner and not matter. for example, whatever floats in the water is not moved along with the wave (unless the wave has broken of course), it rises and falls with the amplitude of the wave, but it remains in the same location. compression and rarefaction in oscillating cycles is what a wave is.

if one drops a stone into the water on the face of an advancing wave (non breaking wave (ie. a wave with an amplitude that is containable with the confines of it's vertical limits)), the ripples from the stone will propagate radially outward with a speed that is unrelated to the advancing wave it is dropped into.

well i do not understand what you mean. considering that the medium through which the waves travel is horizontally static (with reference to 2 dimensional waves (like water waves)), then there is no hindrance to the radial speed of propagation, but only an effect on the amplitudes of waves that radiate within a greater wave sequence due to synergism.

three dimensional waves (like an explosion in non vacuous space) like wise confer no material displacement on the radial axes of the wave. there is an outward propagation of oscillation, but the rarefaction always cancels out the compression resulting in stasis when the energy has dissipated.

that is what i think anyway.