Is time travel possible?

[arsenal]

So I found this show today from the BBC, and it discusses if time travel is indeed possible, or if it is a pipe dream.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...arch&plindex=0

I had a huge long post done, but the page refreshed, and I lost everything. So instead, I will let people watch it (its about 49 minutes long), and then we can discuss it.

What I personally found the most interesting, is what was discussed at the end of the video (about 10 minutes left).

I think that part of the video raises some interesting scientific as well as theological type questions, which can be brought up once a few people have watched it.

It could be a fun and interesting discussion.

[Gugstanley]

It said the video wasn't available when I went to watch it.

My thought on time travel is that if it was possible wouldn't someone from the future come back and give us that knowledge or the time machine already? It would be awesome to time travel

[arsenal]

If people are having problem viewing the video. go to video.google.com and search for Horizon. It should be the first video.

Umm, one of the limitations of time travel is that you cannot go back in time before the machine was created. So even if a time machine was created 100 years from now, our future selves would not be able to give us the technology today.

[Gugstanley]

Are you trying to say those Back to the Future movies were fake?

[Flames in 07]

I remember some course from university where they said that time was a function of velocity. IE pilots will live slightly longer than they otherwise would because time slows as velocity increases. (to give you scale I recall the prof saying they'd live like 10 min longer from a lifetime of flying)

I'm not going to research the validity of that, but I have thought about what that prof said from time to time.

[Dan02]

Originally Posted by arsenal

IUmm, one of the limitations of time travel is that you cannot go back in time before the machine was created. So even if a time machine was created 100 years from now, our future selves would not be able to give us the technology today.

Thats kind of a convienient way of getting around that issue isn't it? Maybe thats some sci fi writers opinion of things. Of course the long and short of it is that time travel in all likely hoods isn't possible. Atleast in terms of traveling both forwards and backwards in time at will.

Originally Posted by Flames in 07

I remember some course from university where they said that time was a function of velocity. IE pilots will live slightly longer than they otherwise would because time slows as velocity increases. (to give you scale I recall the prof saying they'd live like 10 min longer from a lifetime of flying)

I'm not going to research the validity of that, but I have thought about what that prof said from time to time.

This is true, the closer you get to the speed of light the slower you "age" but is that really time travel?

[REDVAN]

The last I heard, according to our current beliefs about physics, time travel is NOT possible. Of course, neither is going as fast as the speed of light, and since they can do that on Star Trek, I am pretty sure we'll get there eventually.

[Jiggy_12]

Originally Posted by arsenal

Umm, one of the limitations of time travel is that you cannot go back in time before the machine was created. So even if a time machine was created 100 years from now, our future selves would not be able to give us the technology today.

Hrm, couldn't you bring the 'machine' back in time with you? If a person could go back in time, why couldn't a device?

[arsenal]

that part is true. The Russian cosmonaut that was in space for months on end in the space station, is i think .005 of a second ahead of the rest of the planet. The GPS station in Colorado has to deal with this as time moves faster for the satellites in orbit than it does for clocks on earth.

[arsenal]

Originally Posted by Dan02

Thats kind of a convienient way of getting around that issue isn't it? Maybe thats some sci fi writers opinion of things.

Well.. another civilization that has created a time travel device, could let us "borrow" it. So if they had created the device say 10,000 years ago, we could theoretically travel back 10,000 years in our time.

It wont work for us if we create it. that's all they where saying.

[Kidder]

That was very interesting. Thanks for posting. I'm too brain-drained to post anything intelligent at the moment, so for now I will only say that I could beat every single one of those physicissssts in an arm-wrestle.

Take that science!

[FireFly]

Well if you're allowing people to invent time travel, you'd likely have to regulate it.

For example, if I'm the government, time travel regulations require that if you do time travel, you cannot give the past the device (or any invention from the future) or the current will be different. In addition, you cannot make noticable changes in history. So, it's possible people are already time travelling, we just don't know it.

[burn_this_city]

The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time progresses relative to everyone on earth.. We are travelling at a fixed rate, so time moves at a fixed rate.. If we take a spacecraft up to a speed faster than earth travels, time slows ever so slightly.. If you get really close to the speed of light, its alot more pronounced.. If you could spend 50 years moving at that speed alot more time will have passed on earth during the same timeframe..
Travelling back will only be possible if you can bend light into a circle.. Theres a lab called CERN where they are attempting this with mirrors.. Essentially if you can make a laser go in a circle, you could pass particles through the void created in the center.. The thing is, you can only send them back to a time after the "portal is open".. I read a bit about this, and that was the theory

[Dion]

The worlds most famous time traveler. As per Coast to Coast AM

http://www.johntitor.com/

[burn_this_city]

Originally Posted by Dion

The worlds most famous time traveler. As per Coast to Coast AM

http://www.johntitor.com/

haha that stuff was hilarious.. A few of my friends were convinced.. didnt the "device" turn out to be a cold war radiation detector or something??

[Jiggy_12]

Originally Posted by FireFly

Well if you're allowing people to invent time travel, you'd likely have to regulate it.

For example, if I'm the government, time travel regulations require that if you do time travel, you cannot give the past the device (or any invention from the future) or the current will be different. In addition, you cannot make noticable changes in history. So, it's possible people are already time travelling, we just don't know it.

Plausible, but its very hard to believe this ability wouldn't be abused or used immorally.

[arsenal]

i don't think time travel through a machine is plausible. The amount of energy required to power it would be astronomical. Unless you are able to open a worm hole ala stargate style.

For me.. the most plausible theory presented in the video is also the most controversial one. That theory is the simulation theory. Where none of this actually exists, and we are all living in a simulation, ala matrix style.

[Jiggy_12]

Originally Posted by arsenal

i don't think time travel through a machine is plausible. The amount of energy required to power it would be astronomical. Unless you are able to open a worm hole ala stargate style.

For me.. the most plausible theory presented in the video is also the most controversial one. That theory is the simulation theory. Where none of this actually exists, and we are all living in a simulation, ala matrix style.

That theory holds water simply because we have no logical way to disprove it. At least this video didn't show that, maybe somebody already has.

[FlamesAllTheWay]

Interesting video, thanks for posting. I had heard of some of the theories before, other ones (especially the last one they leave you with based on computers) I hadn't.

Personally, I will never discount the possibility of time travel. There's far too much we don't know for people to say it can or cannot be done with certainty. One of the biggest snags I see at this point is that we simply do not have the technology to match our ideas. As they said in the video, the amount of energy it would take to test and/or realize the validity of some of these theories does not exist even on our planet as a whole. That's for way down the road, for now we're just going to have to work, for the most part, with the purely theoretical, which is ever changing.

They all basically said that you are restricted to traveling only as far back as the time the machine was used though. So that shoots the whole "there'd be time traveling tourists walking amongst us" theory down it would seem.

I thought they'd do a bit more regarding Quantum Physics, but the video's a bit dated I suppose. I find it interesting that the incredibly small parts of the universe (ie: a photon) are subject to completely different laws of physics. Like how a photon can be a wave and a single point at the exact same time, or the same photon can interfere with itself at two different points. Stuff that further down the road may lead to some breakthrough theories on time travel. I am no expert but one of the theories involved with Quantum physics is that the universe is constantly splitting into billions of parallel universes. Something like this would begin to help us understand what would happen if you travel forward or back in time and say, kill someone important? This has always been a big issue for me because your actions in the past or future would have an effect that would need to be resolved somehow. Like that Halloween episode of the Simpsons where Homer keeps going back in time to the dinosaurs and subsequently wreaking havoc on his present in many hilarious ways.

Aage Nost is our best hope for time travel.

[arsenal]

I don't think there is any way to prove or disprove any of the theories presented in the video.

What I found most interesting about the simulation theory is that it fits quantum theory, parallel universes nicely. All that is needed is to create a new instance of the simulation.

That being said.. if the simulation theory could be proved, through science, would then science in a way disprove itself? And that everything we know, is in fact created by an intelligent designer (ie God)?