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Forums - General - Is time travel possible?

 

Why we have not seen time travellers?

Time travel is impossible 53 49.07%
 
Time travellers are hidden among us 29 26.85%
 
The world ends before it is invented 26 24.07%
 
Total:108
Spock on 24 October 2013
Roma said:
Spock said:

I can confirm that time travel is possible.

Ever heard of time dilation? If not, review it.

This matter concerns Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. One can move forward through time more slowly relative to another region of spacetime.

Examples are the astronauts who frequent the international space station. These astronauts are a few billionths of a second younger relative to people on Earth because of the gravitational potential differences.

Earth's Surface gravitational potential is 60 MJ/kg.

LEO (Low Earth Orbit) gravitational potential is 57 MJ/kg.

The lower the gravitational potential, the slower time passes.

it's not possible in the sense that you can travel back and forth in it no


when you can do that then you can confirm it not before

Correct.

That's a very stringent definition of time travel not shared by any physicist. 



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swii26 on 24 October 2013

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Kasz216 on 24 October 2013

Depends on your definition of time travel.

Theoretically, all time actually happens at the same time. We simply can't perceive it as such.

So if we were suddenly be able to perceive things this way, it's almost like time travel, as in the past you'd know what was going to happen in the future and vice versa... but since it all happens at once, you couldn't change it.

 

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Weedlab on 24 October 2013

Track down the prop car from Back to the Future and find out. If it works go back 5 years and tell me not to go with my future x girlfriend - that bitch.



 

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Talal on 24 October 2013

Lots of scientists say it's possible, but it requires an insanely high amount of energy or something like that. My average brain can't comprehend how it's possible though. I can see how going to the future could be possible, but going back doesn't make sense to me at all.



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cyberninja45 on 24 October 2013
A_C_E said:
There is no such thing as time, its just a word made up by human beings. I guess people just want time travel to exist but without an actual component there is no rule, and everything in existence is governed by rule, meaning time travel does not exist because it has no rule. All space is governed by rule and you can't change that. You cannot make 2+2 = 6. You cannot make the frame of existence move backwards or speed it up.

Time is not a physical being, you can't see it under a microscope, you can't affect it, you can't do anything with it because it is just a WORD. It does not exist even on molecular or atomic measures. The only way to manipulate something is to grasp it. How can you grasp something that doesn't exist?


So you see time as being something more abstract, like a perception created by our minds.



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Hibern81 on 24 October 2013

If you consider the time it takes to travel then yes.



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reggin_bolas on 24 October 2013

Not possible because time is an instant expression of everything, we just don't see it that we because we are stuck in materiality and thus time appears an illusion to us.

So while it's not possible to travel in time per se, it is possible to view past events like pressing rewind on a vhs tape or dvd. Theoretically, a machine could be built which taps into the akasha, the hall of records, or the universal subconscious as it is also called.





cyberninja45 on 24 October 2013
Licence said:
cyberninja45 said:

 Keeping in trend with vgchartz these days simple question is time travel possible? To me if time travel is possible why have we never encountered time travellers, what is stopping them from coming back into the past (our present).   This leaves me to conclude three logical scenarios.

1. Scientist got it wrong and time travel is impossible.

2. Time travel is possible and there are time travellers ,they just keep themselves hidden.

3. The world soon ends so time travel is never invented.

Is there something I am not understaning that someone would like to explain.

Note when I say explain I mean in your own words ,providing links and large quote trees does not show your knowledge on a topic.

Well, presumably you mean travelling backwards in time. Travelling forward it time is possible - we are doing it even right now (it took me a few seconds to write this reply, during which I travelled forward it time by that amount). Modern physics tells us that we can even travel forward in time at different rates (look up the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox).

On the sub-atomic level, things get interesting. According to Feynman's quantum mechanics, anti-matter (which we have observed and can even create and store) is physically identical to normal matter travelling backwards in time. Whether it actually *is* normal matter travelling backwards in time is of course a good question. 

What quantum mechanics tells us is that if time travel backwards in time is possible, it would probably be different from the "Back to the Future" type time travel where you get into some device and exit at some point in the past. It would be more similar to that movie "The curious case of Benjamin Button", where you would meet someone who seems to grow younger and lose knowlegde as time goes by.


I have read up on relativity and time dialation and I try to picture what this would look like to an observer outside of our universe (hypothetical situation of course). To me an observer outside of our universe would be watching this happen like a roll of movie film with each frame unwinding at the speed of light (each frame being a frame of reference). Correct me if I am wrong.



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cyberninja45 on 24 October 2013
Viper1 said:
cyberninja45 said:
Viper1 said:
Even if time travel were possible, there would be one major quirk in the works that would pretty much kill anything that did.

Any and all transitions from one time period to the next (such as what happens to us constantly anyway) is accompanied by a physical change in location. By that I mean the Earth is constantly moving along many different vectors - rotation on the axis, around the sun, around the galaxy and through space itself. In relative terms, we're moving about 850,000 miles per hour - nearly 400 km every second.

That means that wherever in time you travel to will be in the middle of a vast empty void millions to billions to miles away from Earth itself.

The only way to compensate for the change in location would be to have some means to not just travel in time but through space with incredible accuracy and at speeds well in excess of light. Unfortunately you'd also attain infinite mass and turn into a black hole thereby destroying Earth upon arrival.

But if at somepoint we were actually able to invent a time travelling machine I suppose we would also have the technology to calculate the coordinates of the the earth in space at that particular point in time. It should be an easy hurdle to over come.

You're still missing what I noted in my final paragraph.  Having the coordinates alone is simply not good enough.  You'd also need to travel to that new location immediately.    That kind of immediate travel would require a form of worm hole. 

So we don't just need the ability to travel in time but the ability to generate a worm hole at will and between any two points.   To really compolicate this, you'd have to generate the receiving end of the worm hole in the new time period.

Let's really look at this.  You need to begin a time travelling session.  Then you open a moving worm hole entrance (it must be in perfect sync with Earths own vector or it would immediately get left behind).  Now you generate the receiving end worm hole in that new period all moving at the same vector of the receiving end.    If your calculations are off even by even a plancks length, you're dead.

Travel 1 year into the future or past and you'll need to offset your wormhold location by 7.2 billion miles and the receiving wormhole must be moving in sync with Earth at ~820,000 miles per hour with perfect rotation to the axis, sun, galaxy, etc... Want to travel 1,000 years into the past, 7.2 trillion miles of displacement from origin.  To say nothing of the fluctations in the vectors as affected by trillions of gravitational sources plus the rate of universal expansion caused by dark matter.  And ALL frames of reference are also moving so you'd have nothing to calculate your new location against.


I understand what you are saying destruction of the earth was not my concern.

But as you explained it there I keep picturing in my head my analogy of someone outside our universe observing it. As I said in another post it would be like watching a roll of movie film with each frame unwinding at the speed of light (each frame being a frame of reference). From your explanation and conventional science it would certainly seem like the expansion of the universe and time are one and the same like my movie film analogy.



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