Time, Mass, Energy, Perception vs. Reality, etc.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Technically Primer spooled off new timelines every time someone time-traveled. There are 9 distinct timelines noted:
http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2011/ ... or-primer/

That infograph has been around for quite a while now. As I said, they did go to lengths, it is a very intricate and detailed shell game.

For me, it's a simple conservation of energy illustration that makes it clear it will be next to impossible on that aspect alone for same time-line back travel. And. . .it also includes MWI scenarios.

Take a bar of gold back 48 hours in time and put it in a safe. Come back to the current time. Open the safe, take the gold out and travel back 36 hours and place it with the bar of gold from 48 hours back. Come back. Retrieve two bars of gold. Go back 18 hours. Come back. Find three bars of gold ... so on ... you get the point. Where's that mass (E=mc^2) coming from? Obviously, the time traveler's machine has to foot the bill.

I somewhat doubt their gadget, some home depot PVC, tarp and a DYI Faraday cage, is going to generate more energy than it takes to run every city on the planet for a year.

[MrTwosheds]

Well putting aside the obvious issue of time travel being a nonsense. It could easily generate infinite amounts of energy, by destroying time lines, every time they altered time, whole Universe's of now not happening stuff would become available for other uses, given that you already have the ability to tap into the space time energy in order to do your time travel in the first place, a few bars of gold here or there are really quite insignificant, and frankly of no value whatsoever, so why would you bother to do it when you have already become godlike?

[Psychedelic Rhino]

That is just an illustration showing that at least one variable, that being a mass/energy balance, is required.

I didn't touch on the other conservation of energy aspect that is just as important, a balance of potential energy back and forth depending on the launch point.

When you "go back in time", not only do you need to know the time desired, but just as important, the location . . . or you find yourself in the vacuum of space somewhere well outside the solar system, if the time jump is anything over a few months. Even a few seconds back in time puts you in the vacuum of space. Arguing that the individual travels the same spacial vectors are not valid since all mass have multiple different centripetal components. Plus your potential energy must balance depending how deep you are in a gravity well or you turn into a plasma or freeze to close to absolute zero upon exit. A portal on both ends solves half the problem.

Time travel may someday be possible, but probably for nothing more than elementary material carrying no information. BUT, the amount of material and frequency sent could be used to transfer information, so that is also very unlikely.

[MrTwosheds]

The history of science is an unbroken series of revisions, or to put it more bluntly. Being wrong. So none of us here can claim to
think we know what is possible or not, what is almost certain is that whatever we think we know now will turn out to be wrong.
Personally I think reverse time travel is not possible, We/our Universe quite simply cannot not work that way. Forward time travel may be a different matter, depending on how fussy you are about how it happens.
The current space/time model/concept seems to me to depend on an insistence that the Universe conforms to our perceptive limitations. I strongly suspect that it does not, and that our perceptive abilities are just limited by our own nature.

but just as important, the location . . . or you find yourself in the vacuum of space somewhere well outside the solar system

This for example assumes that "a location" is a fixed point in space/time. But that point is not definable.
You could conceivably measure the planetary/solar/galactic/super clusters motion and try to figure out where that location was but the Universal motion cannot be quantified. Space/time is a perceptive construct created by you from the relativistic observations you make.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

You'll rarely see me trying to second guess technology more than 30 years out. But what we can safely conjecture are several considerable technical problems that will occur, and issues the instant after a speculated backward time jump occurs. . . paradoxes not withstanding.

As to forward time travel, I think it's agreed that's occurring all the time, everyday. However it's a bit like everyone standing on a trampoline pulled so tight it's similar to concrete. . . it's hard to see who is making a bigger depression at any given moment.

[MrTwosheds]

I don't think its correct to look at it as a medium through which we travel at all, there is no option of another state within it. Time/space is a construct of the mind, created by memory and an expectation of continued awareness. The Universe is just energy in motion, the past just a pattern that has changed, the future, patterns yet to be formed. Awareness is an essential precondition to the space/time concept but not to the Universe itself.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Are you the one I told to jump out of a plane a couple years ago... at night ... in complete blackness... and decide for yourself when to pull the ripcord, if time is just a construct of our own mind?

[MrTwosheds]

Probably, try it yourself without parachute, you will (not) find out I am right when you hit the ground.
The Universe and its motion is not a construct, your perception of time "passing" is, it is what defines your existence.

[Nielk1]

I always though the idea of time as the 4th spatial dimension was preposterous. I prefer to think of time as a 1 dimensional construct and space as a 3 dimensional construct, where in one of the few stable alternative is 3 dimensions of time and 1 dimension of space.

Traveling back in time causes the same matter to occupy the same time, but not the same place, which does make you wonder, do you really end up in parallel universe, or do you end up in your own past. Might the grandfather paradox simply be a case of limited thinking, where you don't create a parallel universe per say when you eliminate your own grandfather but instead create a brief knot in the fabric of space in a single universe?

Why am I writing this, I don't know, I sort of got lost in a train of thought...

[Psychedelic Rhino]

If I follow MrTwosheds philosophy of reality, I believe it may be similar to the concept this is all a simulation ... of sorts. A rather detailed simulation, down to the basic structures of reality.

And there is indeed an argument for it when trying to grasp the 'spooky action at a distance', i.e, the two-slit phenomenon and the EPR thought experiment. Quantum investigation has shown the current top intelligence on this planet (humans) simply don't have the faculties to fully appreciate and grasp our true reality.

If you follow the intricate physics of wave function collapse (the elementary aspects of time travel), I think you'll find that we know it should be possible, (at least in some MWI variation), but the energy required is far beyond our capability to the point of virtually reconstructing another space-time. HERE'S a fairly new perspective on wave function collapse and reversibility and the problems it plays on FTL and time travel.

[Zenophas]

I recommend Dredd 3D.

[MrTwosheds]

If I follow MrTwosheds philosophy of reality, I believe it may be similar to the concept this is all a simulation ... of sorts.

No not really. Its just a recognition of how the brain actually functions to produce this "reality" in your head, accepting that it is a mechanism limited by its evolutionary needs and that what goes on elsewhere does not need to conform to its perceptual abilities. We perceive time, because we are evolved to observe the continual changing of the pattern, without us there is just pattern, unobserved, unremembered, unpredicted and unaware. "Time" is a function of Life, a subset of the energy and motion of the Universe, non of which gets "quantified" until there is Life to do that.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

No not really. Its just a recognition of how the brain actually functions to produce this "reality" in your head, accepting that it is a mechanism limited by its evolutionary needs and that what goes on elsewhere does not need to conform to its perceptual abilities. We perceive time, because we are evolved to observe the continual changing of the pattern, without us there is just pattern, unobserved, unremembered, unpredicted and unaware. "Time" is a function of Life, a subset of the energy and motion of the Universe, non of which gets "quantified" until there is Life to do that.

Nah, I tend to believe, there were plenty of sounds of trees falling before there were higher lifeforms to hear them.

[MrTwosheds]

Depends how you define sound, vibrations in the air, or the conversion of them into neuronal signals.
Before the evolution of ears was there sound at all? Obviously the air still vibrated.
Might need a split here, were hijacking the Movie thread.

[Nielk1]

2Sheds is correct, sound has 2 definitions, one requires it to be heard, the other simply requires oscillations in a medium within the audible frequency range.