time travel?

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If we use a wormhole to curve space-time upon itself, we are not actually travelling at the speed of light are we? we simply create a short cut in space-time. So how can special relativity permit time-dialation under such conditions?

I'm not a theoretical physicist, so if my question is flawed, forgive me.

Time dialtion can occur while traveling through a wormhole by accelerating the rotation of one end of the wormhole and the exiting mouth of the wormhole which is rotating at a normal rate . Relativistic time dialtion would occur and the twin paradox. But, wormholes do allow FTL speeds allowing humanity to explore the stars and the development to FTL communications by the use of tachyons. A tachyon is a particle that travels faster than light.Tachyons are only theoretical, if discovered would be a huge step in the development of wormholes. There is a possibility that the use of tachyons you can send information to parallel universes however you cannot send information into the past because it would be a violation of causality.

Reading afew associated wikipedia pages helped me to gain a laymens understanding of a few concepts.

If you allow me to digress, one thing that I've wondering about in my head for a few years is this: if there is the possibility of many parallel worlds, why does my conciousness appear to be trapped within this one?

There is a theory called Quantum immortality. It is a extremely and very controversial and speculative thought experiment and it was first proposed by Max Tegmark.There are many problems with this theory.

Hmmm...well, since time travel is possible to the future by going into a particle accelerator, (because time is relative)
if we had an anti-matter particle accelerator, it would travel the anti-matter speedily backwards in time until it's positron annihilated an electron, forming a photon, which could be eaten by a computer as information.

We could use black holes' supergravity to transform whatever we wanted into antimatter, which travels in reverse out of a "white hole."But before this we'd have to find a black hole that acts as a white hole in the anti-verse, that would eat our anti-particle and spit out a regular particle instantly! A wormhole. We'd then have to feed it back, though, because that's what the future-dwellers did. Of course, the particle and anti would cancel each other, as they are essentially the same time frame; this is why nothing escapes a black hole.

Last edited by Phantasmagoric on 28 Dec 2006, 2:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

Try containing that antimatter.

dimensionaltraveler - I don't know how you got that huge file into your avatar, but could you please resize it :-)

If time travel to the past could ever happen it would have already happened and since it hasn't already happened it therefore cannot ever happen.

But if it were possible for humans to travel as fast or faster than the speed of light, then that means that you or someome could be on a differnet time line than me which means that you or I would be existing in the others past. Right or am I deranged? Of course if you were travelling at the speed of light (requiring an infinite amount of energy to achieve since you have a positive mass) you would be pulverized by space dust and debris.

If you were traveling faster than the speed of light you will be on the same time line because time dilation would not be occurung.

As I posted earlier, the apparent impossibility of time travel does not prevent me from enjoying time-travel stories. Earlier this evening I watched a movie on DVD called "Grand Tour: Disaster in Time", and thought it was most excellent... some thought went into the sci-fi aspects of the story. (Made for cable in the early 1990s.) I highly recommend it for fans of time-travel stories.

I plan on traveling into the past once the technology presents itself, some time after I've become an immortal cyborg. With the ability to travel through time, I'd go back to the earlier stages of humanity (Mesopotamia and all that) and observe them. I'd continue living through time until the current era, which I would skip over, and then keep living from the day after I went back in time.

Who knows, I might be the influence for some of the elder gods! Wouldn't that be swell?

And for all you people who don't agree with time travel, I have a completely ridiculous and likely impossible solution: once you've traveled through time, you become a seperate entity entirely. No longer bound by the laws of the universe, you're free to do as you please without worrying about what effect it will have on you.

not true; any form of FTL travel violates casuality.
I'll be damned if i know why, but here's a file to show you. (hope you have better luck than me at understanding.)

http://www.textfiles.com/science/relative.ftl

(you'll need to set the text only option on your internet explorer to courier new to understand the ASCII diagrams)

It is possible to travel forwards in time and change something, but you cannot alter the past. What if you travelled to the future? Would you be able to return to the past? It would be a one way journey, in theory. I'm not totally sure of what would happen.

If you traveled through a wormhole you would be traveling faster than light. Special relativity only applies locally. Wormholes allow superluminal (faster-than-light) travel by ensuring that the speed of light is not exceeded locally at any time. While traveling through a wormhole, subluminal (slower-than-light) speeds are used. If two points are connected by a wormhole, the time taken to traverse it would be less than the time it would take a light beam to make the journey if it took a path through the space outside the wormhole. However, a light beam traveling through the wormhole would always beat the traveler. As an analogy, running around to the opposite side of a mountain at maximum speed may take longer than walking through a tunnel crossing it. You can walk slowly while reaching your destination more quickly because the length of your path is shorter. Its called a Morris-Thorne wormhole. You are right that currently FTL does violate casuality but out understanding of modern physics is still in its infancy. In 100 years FTL travel will be common as we break the sound barrier today.

Diagram of a Wormhole

Wormhole in 2D space.

Diagram of an spaceship traveling inside a Wormhole




http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw69.html
http://members.tripod.com/QuantumFoam/q-foam.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole
http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/sf/to ... mhole.html
http://www.usd.edu/phys/courses/phys300 ... e/dave.htm

This may be completely irrelevant and entirely incorrect, but would it be possible to harness Zero Point energy (Vacuum energy) to assist in achieving FTL speed, or at least near FTL speed?

On the other hand, CeallachSolomon came up with a rather valid point that set me thinking. Now, this is just speculation I've developed (that I don't even agree with myself, but I believe it could be potentially valid). What if in order to achieve time travel one would be required to become a 'non-entity' of sorts? You would therefor become a being forced to practice non-interference, eliminating the risk of paradoxes. You'd also then have the potantial to have no mass, which would minimize the problems involved with reaching FTL speed, would it not? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's rather late(early in the morning) here and I haven't had caffeine in any form for three days so my brain functioning isn't exactly up to par.