Ponderings for today

[Brettus]

Not sure quite what was going on in my tiny little mind today but I had the idea that "What if Planet of the Apes and Transformers are just future versions of our solar system" this came after the revelation that Mars is the only known planet in our solar system inhabited solely by robots. My thinking was that the idea of the fully evolved planets was just a thought or broadcast from a future time that was picked up by someone.

Thoughts could be broadcast, or perhaps wouldn't need to be, if time doesn't necessarily flow the way we perceive it then perhaps all time periods are "next to eachother" in this dimension and thoughts might not be bounded by them. Perhaps they transcend this from time to time and whilst we are hardly adept at telepathic communication perhaps we are at the stage where we are attuned to our own thoughts and from time to time pick up thoughts from ourselves from other times (Deja vu could come in to play here, I don't buy the hemisphere delay explanation)

The other way of looking at this is were prophets just the fiction writers of their time, a time before we knew what fiction was?
Technology imitates science fiction in a sort of big magnet on a gantry attached to the car pulling your car along sort of way. One cannot exert force on the other without an equal force being exerted in the other direction for that but perhaps not so for creative thinking.
Or are science fiction writers the prophets of our age with better storytelling mediums?

Then I got on to wondering about leaps in development of things, Einstein and Tesla etc, what if their breakthroughs were brought about by future thoughts ending up in the past and taking hold there, the subsequent development or thinking time negated by it's arrival in the past. Immune from the paradox, the tangent it was spawned by ceased to exist and a new tangent created the current "true" timeline.

OK think that covers my daydream, thoughts and comments appreciated and no, no illegal substances, just think I hit the magic ratio of alcohol (from last night) to caffeine this morning :smt098

[Geodude]

Hmm.. im no where near clever enough to reply, so here's a picture of a kitten ;)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xhH3TLfVrr4/UJaN9WCffrI/AAAAAAAADd0/eMNBKgoHXzs/s1600/3925_416080395113060_1643519421_n.jpg

[ophic]

Immune from the paradox
how?

[Brettus]

how?
My thinking at the time was not that the event never happened to create the thought, just that the timeline gets split earlier down and the line that we perceive time on and the (now) tangent that it came from dies out (or just drifts off into the other alternate realities perhaps.


If thoughts aren't (always) limited by time, ie they can hop from one point in time to another then can a paradox happen for something that doesn't experience time in a linear fashion that we are used to?

[ophic]

My thinking at the time was not that the event never happened to create the thought, just that the timeline gets split earlier down and the line that we perceive time on and the (now) tangent that it came from dies out (or just drifts off into the other alternate realities perhaps.


If thoughts aren't (always) limited by time, ie they can hop from one point in time to another then can a paradox happen for something that doesn't experience time in a linear fashion that we are used to?

You can't get around causality. So even if the cause of something was a thought, and the effect being a new timeline, the old timeline still has to exist or the new timeline can't exist as it's cause has gone - so events would revert to the original. Also there's never been any indication that effect goes in any direction other that forwards. Cause then effect, even if from some perspectives they appear out of order.

Thoughts are generally considered to be neurons activating in your brain, a flow of electrons perhaps - why would they obey any different laws from any other physical matter? Why would the smallest barely detectable event be more likely to be less limited by time than anything else?

Does it work in reverse? Like the reverse of deja vu, when you get to the kitchen only to find that you've got no idea why you went there? Perhaps those are the thoughts that pop up without warning at another time, like when you're hungry even though you've just eaten?

[Brettus]

You can't get around causality. So even if the cause of something was a thought, and the effect being a new timeline, the old timeline still has to exist or the new timeline can't exist as it's cause has gone - so events would revert to the original. Also there's never been any indication that effect goes in any direction other that forwards. Cause then effect, even if from some perspectives they appear out of order.



Hmm good point, you'd think we'd have noticed and obviously this is just speculation and thought provoking but what is to say our perspective is correct?

Thoughts are generally considered to be neurons activating in your brain, a flow of electrons perhaps - why would they obey any different laws from any other physical matter? Why would the smallest barely detectable event be more likely to be less limited by time than anything else?



But as things get smaller they seem to behave differently, sometimes counterintuitively as we get to quantum level (this is seemingly defined as the point at which people give up debating as currently we know so little that "anything goes" it seems)

My thinking was leaning towards those electrons causing an electrical field which might just behave differently too. We measure brain activity inside the brain by detecting these changes without a direct connection so the possibility of them being transmitted and picked up isn't completely out. Just on a level we cannot detect.

Does it work in reverse? Like the reverse of deja vu, when you get to the kitchen only to find that you've got no idea why you went there? Perhaps those are the thoughts that pop up without warning at another time, like when you're hungry even though you've just eaten?

Thoughts do seem to appear and disappear as you say, the brain is a weird thing. Complex beyond our understanding.



Just to point out I'm only indulging in some thinking, I've studied nothing and my education stopped at GCSE. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, just stimulate some thoughtful discussion :-) Im more than happy to learn too!

[ophic]

And I didn't get a lot of sleep last night so I was just rambling.We obviously can't travel in time yet so even the scientists have no hard facts, just speculative theories.

There's a number of good works of fiction about it tho. I highly recommend "The man who folded himself".

[Brettus]

Ooh, sounds like something I'd like, just about to finish "The Martian" by Andy Weir, very cool book and I've just started Desperation by Stephen King for my commute but I'll add that to the list of ones to get!


And besides, there are no qualifications in speculation so who can say if the theories bandied about on internet forums are any less likely than those speculated by people in chalk dust encrusted coats? ;)

[BanannaMan]

Most peoples ideas on time travel are based more on science fiction than on science itself.

Lets have a look at the actual science of time travel.
It's likely not what you'd think at all.

According to Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc² , time travel is possible, at least in one direction and that's into the future.
Going the other way, back to the past, presents a trickier challenge though some physicists say just because the feat may seem impossible, doesn't mean it is.

We have a hard time perceiving how time can bend just like other dimensions, so Einstein's predictions do seem strange to us even today.
Part of the 'strange world' that Einstein explained in 1905 in his theory of relativity is that time and space are joined in our universe as a four-dimensional fabric known as space-time. Stranger yet is the concept that both space and time warp as mass or speed is increased.
Travel fast and time moves more slowly. Increase the mass around you to near collapsible levels and you get the same effect.
This phenomenon has already been proven, albeit at minute scales.

In 1975 Carol Allie of the University of Maryland synchronized two atomic clocks and placed one on a plane and flew it around for several hours and left the other on Earth. When the airborne clock was returned to Earth, she compared its time with the one that hadn't moved and found that time had moved a fraction of a second more slowly for the clock on board the plane.
In other experiments, scientists used particle accelerators to speed elementary particles to nearly the speed of light. They found the accelerated particles decayed slightly more slowly than ones that remained sitting in the lab.
As for the effect of mass on time, scientists have measured the ticking of atomic clocks at the top and base of skyscrapers. They found the clocks at the base, closer to the mass of Earth, ticked ever more slowly than those perched high.
Why does all this mean time travel is possible? The same principles that make the clocks tick slower on planes and low on Earth, should also work at extremes.

In the movies, a time traveler catapults through time by activating his hand crafted time machine. Physicists believe true time travel might require something more along the lines of a very fast space ship.
By riding on a spacecraft that can travel at speeds of two hundred million meters per second, or about four hundred and fifty million miles per hour, a passenger would experience significantly slowed time.

The slowed time would not be noticeable to the traveler the same way riding an airplane doesn't feel any different than sitting on Earth. But once the traveler returned, he'd find that those who remained on Earth had aged at a faster rate.
Time passed at its regular cadence on Earth, while to the spaceship traveler, it crawled. So the traveler's return to Earth is, in effect, a trip to the future.

Our current record holder for time travel is Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev who was in orbit for a total of 748 days during three space flights. Avdeyev's prolonged travel made him a younger man by about one-50th of a second than those of us who have remained on Earth.
That may not seem like much but as mentioned, we need much greater speeds for appreciable time travel.

There are, of course, significant obstacles, namely building a spaceship that can travel at speeds close to the speed of light. The task would require an intense level of energy that we currently can't achieve.

Then again, even if we manage to bolt into the future, there remains the tricky issue of how to, or if we can, return by traveling to the past.

According to Einstein's theory, approaching the speed of light would theoretically slow time, traveling at the speed of light would make it stand still and traveling faster than the speed of light would reverse time.
But Einstein also showed that traveling at or faster than the speed of light is impossible because mass at these speeds becomes infinite.

However other scientists think there may be a way to find "shortcuts" to the past.In the late 1980's Kip Thorne of the University of California at Berkeley suggested that objects known as wormholes exist in space.
These objects would essentially be two connecting black holes whose mouths make up a tear in the fabric of space-time.

By finding a wormhole and stretching it so one mouth extends light years away from the other, the wormhole could provide a passageway to a past or future point on the undulating river of time but the actual theory still has significant problems.

Besides locating a real wormhole, scientists would also need to find a way to keep the wormhole's entrances open long enough for a person to pass through. Due to quantum mechanics, the field of physics that governs the mechanics of the inner world of atoms, forces would cause the time potral to instantly squeeze shut.

Some have proposed solutions to this problem, including filling the wormhole with large amounts of negative matter, but the solutions would require enormous energy and ingenuity.
It would also require that scientists find a way of merging Einstein's law of relativity with those laws governing quantum mechanics into a so called 'Theory of Everything'.

So yes, time travel into the future as Einstien proposed is not only possible but proven and documented.
Time travel to the past still has a ways to go but who knows what technologies might appear in the next few hundred years.

[ophic]

Nah relativity isn't really time travel. It's just normal time being experienced at different rates. It doesn't break causality. You could argue that we're all travelling through time, just in the same direction, and we can't change it. Real time travel involves more than just riding the rules of relativity. What you describe is just waiting.

And wormholes come firmly under the speculative theories I mentioned earlier :p

[BanannaMan]

Nah relativity isn't really time travel.




Perhaps, but its the only theory/ form of time travel science considers to be possible.

[ophic]

Even for thoughts? :-)

[BanannaMan]

Have to wonder if we had an Einstein or Tesla today what they might could accomplish with today's resources and technology.
Time travel might be only as far away as the next genius.

[ophic]

Don't know. Big conceptual leaps aren't the same as evolutionary science. It wouldn't surprise me if Einstein was quite average in today's world, or even unsuited to the nitty gritty of modern research.

[Heorot]

In 1970, Poul Anderson wrote the novel Tau Zero that was about a ship travelling faster and faster going closer and closer to the speed of light with external time proportionally getting slower and slower. Time passed normally within the ship but external time got faster and faster. All based on Einstein's theories and demonstrating different frames of reference as per his theory. One of the classic hard science fiction stories. Well worth a read if you can find a copy.

[keith_d]

There is one more problem with a space ship going at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Every time it hits an atom there would be a burst of gamma radiation, and striking a pebble the size of a marble would result in a huge explosion.

[ophic]

That's why you use warp engines to generate a spacetime bubble and ride in that. And raise shields obviously :-)

[Trev B]

As per the Starship Enterprise,who by the way have now branched out in Carhire!!! Sorry lads thought it was getting a bit heavy for me there.

[BanannaMan]

I've always thought time travel would be a real blast.