How time travel works

[Alientank]

Does anyone know? I've been told if you travel faster then light (if that's possible) that you actually go backwards in time? Anyone know how that works.

[pritch]

You know, it's a bastard. I had the answer, but never wrote it down and forgot it...

[Fredrik]

It's impossible to tell "how time travel works", because no one knows if it does.

[Remilia Scarlet]

Well, if you think about it, we're doing it by living right now. Hell, just existing is proof that we can do it. Just in one direction: Forward.

Then again, are we moving forward? No way to tell unless you're outside the universe. Yes, there's that "red-shift" idea, but what if that's backwards? What if that is what actually happens, and expansion is really contraction, we just don't percieve it that way? We may be going in a "true" backwards direction now, we just see it as forwards.

[Alientank]

That is true. I mean, what if we started out as a highly advanced race and slowly went downhill after killing ourselves over wars, and ended up as egyptians? Never know. Heh my brain is gonna explode.

[Linguica]

The only possible time travel is forward.

[Fredrik]

Define forward.

[zark]

Fredrik said:

Define forward.

Opposite of backwards.

[Remilia Scarlet]

Fredrik said:

Define forward.

Can't unless you're outside the universe. For now, it's all perception.

[IMJack]

Fredrik said:

Define forward.

As t approaches positive infinity.

[/smartass]

[DooMBoy]

ZarcyB said:

Opposite of backwards.

It seems we have a walking dictionary in our midst :)

[fodders]

Linguica said:

The only possible time travel is forward.

the only actually proven way to travel in time is backwards, it's possible to predict the course earth takes through the solar system and where it was x years ago, so in theory you could look towards a point that the earth was at x years ago, and considering the speed of light see what was happening on the planet, millions of years ago. Or fuck it and go watch the new Simpsons episodes.

[Sephiroth]

i dont know. but i have heard gravity and speed play a role in time. planets creat a small bend in space/time, starts creat a bigger bend, black holes make a fucking huge ass dent. anyway there are many theories out there, this is just one of them. personaly i think humans should never mess with time, first it would be beyond our understanding second we are too damn stupid and would end up destroying something.

[Coopersville]

If you can move at -300 000 000MpS, yes, you can travel back in time.
Travelling forward in time is easy, go in a coma.

[Black Void]

Meh, I think traveling back into time as anything more than an observer would be impossible; I mean, let's face it - time will probably always find a way to never change itself.

[Scientist]

As we look up to the sky we seen stars. Well, actually we see the light that has traveled from this star towards earth. If this star is 100 lightyears from earth we can now see the light it sent us 100 years ago. Thus we're seeing what happend 100 years ago.
Of course not every star is 100 years away from earth, so when look at the stars we see countless points in time simultaniously.
"weird..."

This of course does not only apply to stars. Everything we see is a delay from reality. The light from your screen takes a fraction of a second to travel from your screen to your eye. You're looking at something that happend a fraction of a second ago.
We are constantly living in the past!

[EllipsusD]

Crazy, a friend of mine and I breifly discussed this last night. Anyway, it would seem logical that time travel is not possible. Time is a creation of man used to bind the infinate number of actions that occur in all of existence. But in fact the only things that really do exist are the actions. In order for 'time' to move backwards, the sequence of events that occured must go backwards- everything that was done must be undone. Time is not a physical entity, nor is it something that can be manipulated because it is nothing but a description. 'Time' only goes forward because actions can only be taken, they cannot be untaken, and even if they were to be untaken the act of untaking the action is an action in itself and therefor time, by definition, is still going forward. And do you actually think that something as simple as man could possibly conceive a means of avoiding a process of untaking actions if that were ever to happen? Obviously it's beyond human understanding to even try to cause actions to truly be untaken, and without the understanding of how it would happen, how could precautions be taken to avoid it? It can't happen.

In summary: time travel = no.

[VileSlay]

climb in to a TARDIS and find out :P

[Scientist]

Timeworm

Oh brother please. we are born to this world again,
How can we see when we're travelling in time?

Love is the key, and the key is the name my friend,
When will we see that we're travelling in time?

Know that your soul is on fire like a million suns,
Burn like a star and be travelling in time.

-Kula Shaker

[KDarigal]

Apparently most physicists are leaning towards the opinion now that time itself doesn't exist as such.

Time travel, as such, involves a rotation of observer's time relative to "universal" time anyway - so traveling forward in time at faster than "universal" time (as would occur with high-velocity movement) does not mean necessarily that you're traveling into what would have been your future had you remained stationary; likewise, traveling "backwards" through time means you'll be in a separate past, though logically consistent with your being at that point in time and not at the point in time you left.

Have I confused you yet? I confused me (and my new roommates - goodbye, Lisa, you bitch, and everyone say hi to the twins who moved in, Chloe and Sophie, K?).

[Grazza]

KDarigal said:

Have I confused you yet?

I understood what you were saying. Not illogical, but true? Dunno.

IMJack said:

As t approaches positive infinity.
[/smartass]

Ah, but how do you know there shouldn't be a factor of i in there?
[/übersmartass]

[Alientank]

There's just too much to think about and implement. We will never discover everything out there.

[Sephiroth]

time, matter, graivty and energy are all related. though i agree time is not a physical object but a description(like the other guy said) what i find interesting is that matter is a whole shit load of nothing and that its parts are types of energy and shit. physics and shit are cool but i dont have the math to go into that shit. if i had great math skills i would

[gatewatcher]

Hmm, I was listening to Art Bell's radio show over the summer and he explored this issue. One of the subtopics was about a time machine held by the Catholic church in the Vatican somewhere. Crazy, I don't know. Anyway, it's not a "go back in time and change history" type thing, it's a machine that pics up old sound waves and such thus being able to observe past events.

About the more traditional sense of time travel, I have no idea as to whether we can fly a ship through the sun and travel through time like Kirk. I myself find time travel to be a complex issue and change my mind all the time about it.

[Insomniak]

god I miss Art Bell. I'm suprized I didn't listen to his show more when I had insomnia.

Anyways, if time travel were possible, I'd go around creating paradoxes.

[Wobbo]

The question is what effect time has on your mind. for all we know time actually moves backwards and DELETES memories, not vice versa. The brain isnt the end of logic

[Fredrik]

The brain isnt the end of logic

Logic isn't the end of itself.

[Fletcher`]

One word. Langoliers.

Heh. ;)

[mmnpsrsoskl]

ravage said:

One word. Langoliers.

Heh. ;)

Heh, that movie was totally weird :P

And who really gives a fuck whether time exists or not? We exist and that's all I fucking care about.

[Fletcher`]

EllipsusD said:

Time rant.

Belief is a common thing, eh?