Is Time travel Possible?

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androbot2084
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26 Jan 2012, 7:13 pm

If we took a Bussard Nuclear Ram Jet to scoop up the fire of The Sun and exhaust the plasma out of a nozzle. And if we kept it continually orbiting the Sun as it gained momentum. Could we since we have access to virtually an unlimited supply of fuel reach a speed that would allow time dilation to occur?

shrox
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26 Jan 2012, 7:28 pm

Forward time travel is a real phenomenon brought on by increased speed. What you propose has a problem, the faster you went, the more angular thrust would be need to stay in orbit. Eventually you just would not be able to remain in orbit any longer.

ruveyn
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26 Jan 2012, 8:12 pm

androbot2084 wrote:

You are overlooking the relativistic increase in mass. No material object can go from rest to light speed. That would require an infinite amount of energy and it would take infinite time to acheive.

ruveyn

goodwitchy
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26 Jan 2012, 9:00 pm

I accept that forward time travel is possible. I wonder about backward time travel and paradoxes. I like to think about these things, but my knowledge is so sophomoric and limited; I'm way out of my league.

Maybe by using the "velocity" of a black hole (a vacuum)?, but no matter can get close to a black hole without being incinerated or imploding.

The next version of alchemy: how to change matter to an energy wave and then reconstitute and reassemble it as matter.

okay, I'll get back to my day job now.

:alien:

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AstroGeek
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26 Jan 2012, 9:24 pm

ruveyn wrote:

androbot2084 wrote:

I don't think androbot was talking about actually reaching light speed, just an appreciable fraction of it so that time dilation would become substantial. In theory the answer is yes, but in practice there are some major challenges.

auntblabby
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27 Jan 2012, 3:50 am

goodwitchy wrote:

you aren't the only one, it is way above my pay grade also. :oops:

paradoxes would also occur if you travelled into the future and changed something, only they would occur in your present-day future. regardless of when these illegal changes occur, it is at these points that the choice of "all that is" is to a] allow a paradox to mess things up wherever/whenever they occur, or b] to create a divergent timeline/reality refererent to each incident. if you were the metaverse [master universe or intelligent universal entity, which action would you choose? if the metaverse is just a giant computer [with software/hardware made by the master programmer/master control program or whatever], wouldn't it handle such things by making an alternate new file [existential timeline] with a "B, C, D, etc." suffix each time? just a thought. :idea:

now i will go back to watching "the 3 stooges" :lol:

naturalplastic
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27 Jan 2012, 11:09 am

auntblabby wrote:

goodwitchy wrote:

you aren't the only one, it is way above my pay grade also. :oops:

now i will go back to watching "the 3 stooges" :lol:

Traveling forward is not very problematic. You could go forward in time a centurey- locate your great grandson, and shoot him to death- and then return to the present ( or even stay in that future) with no problems ( execept with the authorities if you stayed in the future). But if you went back in time and shot your great grandfather to death- then he wouldnt beget your dad who wouldnt sire you - so you couldnt then make the trip back in time to shoot your great ganddad- which would mean- he WOULD be able to beget your dad...so..!

goodwitchy
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27 Jan 2012, 1:59 pm

auntblabby and naturalplastic,

It blows my mind to think about
All of your thoughts on this are much more advanced than mine, still, I like the smell of neuron-fire.
(i.e., I can't help my fascination, even though I don't have the smarts for the subject).

Time is relative(?) but is it always relative? If an astronaut travels forward in time, and he only achieves a one day advance, his present day self (relative to Earth time) shouldn't be on the Earth. He's in the rocket. So, if there is no possibility of parallel universes or alternate realities, I can definitely see how these paradoxes could occur if there is only one unique version of every entity.

Wasn't there a movie a long time ago with a butterfly getting stepped on in the past, and this event changing the future? I can't remember.

shrox
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27 Jan 2012, 5:48 pm

A time machine could be built, but it would only go back to the moment it was switched on, and forward to the moment it is switched off.

jackmt
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27 Jan 2012, 8:08 pm

Time travel is not possible. Every moment of the past and future would have to exist simultaneously with the present. The future and the past do not exist. There is only the evanescent now.

Furthermore, we are being hurled through expanding space. The place that we were a year ago, if it exists at all, is in a different place than we are now and in a different place than it was then and distorted in form.

Time is an illusion; an epiphenomenon at best. The system created to account for the regularity and predictability of change gave rise to the illusion, and our minds have created fantastical reasonings about that which does not exist.

shrox
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27 Jan 2012, 8:19 pm

jackmt wrote:

Well, space travel IS time travel. Look it up.

Too late, I already did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilat ... ace_flight

Apple_in_my_Eye
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27 Jan 2012, 8:29 pm

ANyone interested might want to google "kerr time travel." There's a solution to Einstein's GR equations that were found by Dr. Kerr in the 60's. His solution is for a rotating black hole (that rotates so fast that it turns into a ring of neutrons). Apparently, you get access to weird space-time behavior without a singularity in the center (so you don't inevitably get crushed) that way.

http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Jo ... metrav.htm

Quote:

So what do Einstein's equations tell us, if pushed to the limit? As you might expect, the possibility of time travel involves those most extreme objects, black holes. And since Einstein's theory is a theory of space and time, it should be no surprise that black holes offer, in principle, a way to travel through space, as well as through time. A simple black hole won't do, though. If such a black hole formed out of a lump of non-rotating material, it would simply sit in space, swallowing up anything that came near it. At the heart of such a black hole there is a point known as a singularity, where space and time cease to exist, and matter is crushed to infinite density. Thirty years ago, Roger Penrose (now of Oxford University) proved that anything which falls into such a black hole must be drawn into the singularity by its gravitational pull, and also crushed out of existence.

But, also in the 1960s, the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr found that things are different if the black hole is rotating. A singularity still forms, but in the form of a ring, like the mint with a hole. In principle, it would be possible to dive into such a black hole and through the ring, to emerge in another place and another time. This "Kerr solution" was the first mathematical example of a time machine, but at the time nobody took it seriously. At the time, hardly anybody took the idea of black holes seriously, and interest in the Kerr solution only really developed in the 1970s, after astronmers discovered what seem to be real black holes, both in our own Milky Way Galaxy and in the hearts of other galaxies.

This led to a rash of popular publications claiming, to the annoyance of many relativists, that time travel might be possible. In the 1980s, though, Kip Thorne, of CalTech (one of the world's leading experts in the general theory of relativity), and his colleagues set out to prove once and for all that such nonsense wasn't really allowed by Einstein's equations. They studied the situation from all sides, but were forced to the unwelcome conclusion that there really was nothing in the equations to prevent time travel, provided (and it is a big proviso) you have the technology to manipulate black holes. As well as the Kerr solution, there are other kinds of black hole time machine allowed, including setups graphically described as "wormholes", in which a black hole at one place and time is connected to a black hole in another place and time (or the same place at a different time) through a "throat". Thorne has described some of these possibilities in a recent book, Black Holes and Time Warps (Picador), which is packed with information but far from being an easy read. Now, Michio Kaku, a professor of physics in New York, has come up with a more accessible variation on the theme with his book Hyperspace (Oxford UP), which (unlike Thorne's book) at least includes some discussion of the contribution of researchers such as Robert Heinlein to the study of time travel. The Big Bang, string theory, black holes and baby universes all get a mention here; but it is the chapter on how to build a time machine that makes the most fascinating reading.

Vigilans
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27 Jan 2012, 8:31 pm

I am posting from 2013
And yes; this means the world isn't going to end.

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VIDEODROME
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27 Jan 2012, 9:01 pm

Okay your personal clock time seems to slow down the faster you go right?

I want to know if it's possible to do the simple opposite. I mean right now we're all sitting on the earth whirling around the sun and moving along through the galaxy. What if you could a achieve a state of being significantly slower then the people on Earth?

You get off the planet out of the solar system and wait for the Earth to go around the Galaxy and come back to you? Yeah I know that's a long ass time, but would Earth's clock be so much faster that they go into the future faster and leave you behind?

goodwitchy
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27 Jan 2012, 9:29 pm

Apple_in_my_Eye wrote:

Awesome!

Einstein <3

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ruveyn
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27 Jan 2012, 9:33 pm

AstroGeek wrote:

Time dilation as one moves faster will not produce backward time travel.

ruveyn

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