Using a time machine would be more difficult than it seems.
Time Machines
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100 thoughts on “Time Machines”
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Okey dokey. if there is time travel, then any alterations to history would become history. thus they would be imperceptible to everyone else in their own personal timeframe. so it follows that any change to history has already happened, and will continue to always happen. ultimately, everyone’s, especially the time traveler’s, past present and future becomes their immutable past, regardless alterations. in fact, in accomodation of those alterations. so that means that history is not a story which is delicately balanced on events. it is a jigsaw puzzle, with each perception of time fitting together to form a picture, which is balanced not on events but on points of view. read some douglas adams. he explains it better than i
Okey dokey. if there is time travel, then any alterations to history would become history. thus they would be imperceptible to everyone else in their own personal timeframe. so it follows that any change to history has already happened, and will continue to always happen. ultimately, everyone’s, especially the time traveler’s, past present and future becomes their immutable past, regardless alterations. in fact, in accomodation of those alterations. so that means that history is not a story which is delicately balanced on events. it is a jigsaw puzzle, with each perception of time fitting together to form a picture, which is balanced not on events but on points of view. read some douglas adams. he explains it better than i
The earth is not an inertial frame. It is accelerating around the sun. same goes with the sun, or for that matter, pratically ANY object in our universe. However, the relative accelerations are pretty small so it is usually acceptable to estimate the earth as an inertial frame. but yea, you are right in that you’d probably end up only a few hundred feet above (or below) your original location if you only go back a few hours….
The current idea is to turn on a machine that somehow connects through the time dimension in a loop between itself in the future and itself in the past. Things enter this loop in our time and leave it in another time when the machine was/will be active.
It would only work for light at first, restricting its use to the transfer of information, but if we found a way to transport matter it would likely use a similar effect. Spatially, travelers would appear in the same position that the machine is located in that time frame.
If the scientist had travelled through time, but not through space, he probably would have travelled roughly along the same path as the earth, since he would have been in an inertial frame of reference.
If anything, he would have ended up high in the air over the earth.
But if we’re ignoring that little bit of relativistic mechanics, you forgot the fact that the sun is travelling at enormous speeds around the edge of the galaxy, which is, itself, travelling at huge speeds relative to other galaxies around it. But taking relativity into account, the earth should be pretty much stationary as far as the scientist is concerned, unless he moved into the sun’s inertial frame to travel through time, in which case, the acceleration alone probably would have killed him… Bending space, though, isn’t much different from bending time, so if he invented a time machine, I’m sure he could have easily had it manipulate his position in space as well, although it would be pretty unnecessary.
I am not able to know that how it works. In fact I think that is it possible to make that type of imaginary machine. Please get in touch with me.
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William Brown
Sapience
To kill our grandparents ofcourse.
We only know one version of history so far. The victors side of history. Being able to go to the past would allow us to rewrite what we think is history, and actually get it right. It could also disprove or maybe just question many religions and beliefs many people hold as fact.
ah
hehehehe
make another version which takes into account string theory :)
If we built a time machine, why would we go into the past anyway? I mean, we already know how the story goes so far.
perhaps time travelers are walking around right now and history has, in fact, been altered and we just don’t know because its kept secret from everyone that doesn’t need to know. Or maybe we don’t know about it because its not significant enough of a change. Or maybe its because time travelers are traveling to change history. A lot of people assume that time travelers will “right” the “wrongs” and perhaps that’s not the case at all. Perhaps Hitler needed to exist for reasons beyond our comprehension and the same goes for other world leaders that we assume time travelers would kill…. Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Genghis Khan…why not get them all when they are babies? If we really want to consider eliminating evil from our history then it might make sense to go back in time and eliminate Jesus. This way the endless wars and deaths that people caused in his name might never have happened……the
If time travelers are in our present I doubt they are concerned about killing humans that might alter their very existence….why risk it? the earth is still in tact in their present day and well, their technology progressed far enough to create time traveling.
Looks like someone’s been reading Spider Robinson!
He mentions this fact in Callahan’s Con when Zooey uses the Meddlers belt to go forward in time. She ends up just like the guy in the comic. Luckily, she has a daughter who can time travel, so she was saved.
(It’s quite difficult to explain how she was saved, so read the book if you’re curious. It’s a hilarious read, anyway.)
none of you have ever traveled through time. so all of your theories are wrong.
traveling back in time would leave an instantaneous vacuum where you were while at the same ‘time’ instantly pushing every atom apart at your reappearing in the past. immediate destruction of both present and past would result, totally destroying the universe instantly.
Think of “Back to the Future,” where Doc Brown talks of causing perceivable “time” to “skew off into an alternate tangent,” by traveling back in time. At the very moment you kill your grandfather, you’ve created (in a sense) a parallel universe in which you, consequently, don’t exist. This is a hypothetical version of you that may or may not exist in an infinite number of parallel universes that all exist simultaneously.
So, the original “you” still exists, because you originated in a universe where your grandfather was NOT killed.
What I am about to talk abouut is extremely unlikely to a rediculous degree. So keep in mind, this is strictly for explaining a potential how for the purpose of (hopefully) interesting discussion.
I have heard talk about how the universe expands and contracts. And supposedly, once it contracts it explodes out again and restarts the universe. Now… If we suppose that everything happens mostly the same each time. Then we should be reborn every time the universe is reborn.
Now, a further discussion on this expanding and contracting universe is that the force of the contraction and the follow up explosion is so powerful, that it actually stretches back in time and further into the future each time the process starts over. So theoretically, however the universe was originally created, is now replaced with an earlier creation of the universe. (which so far is just another big bang). Assuming this is the case, we have NO idea how many times this has already happened.
Now..If you kill your grandfather in the past, you WILL cease to exist. BUT when the universe recreates itself, there is a chance you will not decide to go back and kill him, so you will continue to exist. You just won’t know that that is the route you took to get there.
So that is idea one.
Of course we know about Schroedinger’s box…
My other idea is that if the universe has defenses against such things from happening, then that defence might be as simple as switching your probability track. In other words, assuming there is a good, neutral, and evil path to every decision when you choose an evil path that was not your original path, you are not creating a new path, you are choosing a different one that exists at the same time. But in order to keep you alive, the universe might choose to route you back to the good path of probability. That way, even though you killied your grandparent, you swtiched to a reality in which they didn’t die or you never tried to kill them and somehow they made it long enough to have your parents. The thing is, we tend to think of that time line as coincidental, but it doesn’t have to be completely coincidental. For example.. In time line “A” your parents were born in 1955, you kill your grandparent in 1950…you should cease to exist..but instead, reality finds a timeline in which your grandparents gave birth to your parents even earlier than 1950, so now you can continue to exist. You are no long part of timeline “A” you are now on a totally different timeline. You might even be a figment of our imagination if you had originally started in our probabilty and now got switched over. But you will be as real to you as we are to ourselves, and its anyone’s guess how many of the people you have met in your life will now be met in your new reality.
Brian/MainFragger
what and u have
Why do explanations of time travel paradox use killing of grandparents as an example.? If you went back to when your mother of father were small kids and killed them you wouldn’t be born. Even if only one parent died the surviving one’s offspring wouldn’t be you. DNA would be different and their life would be different enough to prevent your time travelling exploits. I think i’m correct !
Wouldn’t it be you already attempted to kill your grandafther… But then failed because you’re still alive? I’d think it would be impossible to change the past, because even before you built the time machine you would have already tried to kill your grandpappy.
Source(s):
Star Trek.
Just because something has not been done it does not mean it is impossible. What you have just said is contradicted by many statements made with a similarity. (Ex: many people believed that the earth was flat – foolish – until someone with the guts actually sailed around the earth.) When someone long time ago introduced an idea that has never been heard of – like when Newton said there are forces like gravity constantly acting in the earth’s atmosphere – he/she will most likely be mocked unless proven true. Even now we are the “long time” past of our future and will prove what is right later. Even Newton was probably mocked by some people until he actually proved gravity with solid evidence. The truth is that people do not know if a subject like this is true at all. They usually make assumptions based on their fantasy and wishes for something like this to be true. One or NONE of the theories may be right. Most likely humans will not be able to control time traveling. We’ve yet barely made 2/3 successful patriot missiles. If time traveling was real and possible to create, the future would already have done so.