Time travel paradoxes

spankingtexan

spankingtexan

spankingtexan

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First off what are your thoughts about time travel?

The parodox...
You travel back in time before you were born and meet your mother, you then kill her,
What happens next? Do you cease to exist at the very moment you kill your mother? and if so then wouldn't your mother be unable to give birth to you in the first place making it impossible for you to travel back in time to kill her?

Of course travelling into the future is possible if we could reach speeds near to the speed of light or faster. What are your thoughts on ecxeeding the speed of light or even bending space (worm hole) for instantaneous travel?
And no I aint mad...YET.:D
 
I don't think killing your lineage will cause you to vanish all sci-fi style. I think if that scenario were to physically happen, travelling back in time would be impossible if not already.

Time travel is already possible. If you were to orbit a supermassive black hole at the point where you would not be sucked byond the event horizon and stay in that orbit for a few years the people inside the capsule would travel slower in time and we would speed up compared to them, who would slow down in time. Anyone know what I'm on about, I saw it on a documentary once.... effects of mavity and all that. Satellites in space have this effect being out of sync with earth's mavity and their clocks go faster, causing dramatic effects on GPS if not adjusted.
 
It depends if you you went back in time to the same universe.

For example, you time travel from universe A to universe B and killed the version of your mother who lived there, you'd still exist as your mother from universe A would still have borne you.
 
I see where you're coming from when you say:-

Of course travelling into the future is possible if we could reach speeds near to the speed of light or faster.
Click to expand...

but that isn't really the case.
The faster you travel the slower time advances relative to you and so once you slow down again it may 'appear' as though you have travelled into the future, but really you've just slowed time relative to you.

As for travelling faster than light, although there are phenomena that can effectively affect distant paired particles instantly (ie, the effect occurs more quickly than it would take light to travel between the two particles), this is at a quantum level and is a physical impossibility on a large scale.



(Disclaimer, I am not even remotely educated and the above is my poor understanding of things I've read so may be completely wrong)

I'll keep an eye on this thread for the clever peoples responses :)
 
Chris [BEANS];22527645 said:
I see where you're coming from when you say:-



but that isn't really the case.
The faster you travel the slower time advances relative to you and so once you slow down again it may 'appear' as though you have travelled into the future, but really you've just slowed time relative to you.

As for travelling faster than light, although there are phenomena that can effectively affect distant paired particles instantly (ie, the effect occurs more quickly than it would take light to travel between the two particles), this is at a quantum level and is a physical impossibility on a large scale.



(Disclaimer, I am not even remotely educated and the above is my poor understanding of things I've read so may be completely wrong)

I'll keep an eye on this thread for the clever peoples responses :)
Click to expand...

Yes of course time slowed relative to the traveler, i see what you mean.
 
Iv watched a lot of star trek and have become an expert on these paradoxes.

To (badly) quote the worst captain (janeway) "its best to not think about these things too much"

Basically I like to think time travel can happen, but only in if there are an infinite number of uni(or multi)verses to accommodate such annoyances. That or the Pratchett method that history just sort of carries on around you (the night watch paradox that he teaches him self to be who he is).
 
Spook187 said:
The Higgs Boson will open these sorts of doors one day i'm sure.


The speed of light can't be broken though.
Click to expand...

All I shall put forward there is Clarke's laws:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Click to expand...

Sooner or later, we will break the lightspeed barrier, I think that's almost a certainty.
The more interesting question is what would happen with the time dilation. The main problem as I understand it with time dilation currently is mavity's relationship to time. Now, if we are able to eliminate or for that matter control the external gravitational forces which influence this time dilation, then we stand a much better chance of controlling speeds.

Time travel is the more interesting one TBQH, that all depends on what you consider time to be. If we take the classic grandfather paradox (The first post is just rehashing of that), then in my opinion, the most likely outcome would end up being a branching timeline.

By this, the assumption I'm most comfortable with is that time is a basically linear thread, constantly unspooling. Now, if we go back and look at, or for that matter interact with this point, but the end point always remains where we are, and the newly created timeline then branches off into *somewhere*.
Whether it'd be possible to visit this new timeline is possibly almost as an interesting question as the original grandfather paradox :)

(Disclaimer- I'm not a physicist, I just write SF)

-Leezer-
 
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If there are an infinite number of universes that exist on a seperate but unlimited plane hence when we time-travel back are we in fact in a different universe or the past? Is every second that has past just a time in space that may of happened before, is the future part of another version of a multiverse? but in a different or infinite universe things may happen in a different or odd way.


Sod it I'm off to fap.
 
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I suspect that if you could travel back in time what you would essentially do is "fetch" a reference frame from the past and start a new timeline, what you changed from then on would not affect the timeline we are currently on in any way.
 
I have read somewhere that if a time machine was invented the furthest back in time you could go was to when the machine came into existence.

It may have been on "Mock the Week",not read somewhere,I will just nip back in time to check!!
 
MCMLX said:
I have read somewhere that if a time machine was invented the furthest back in time you could go was to when the machine came into existence.

It may have been on "Mock the Week",not read somewhere,I will just nip back in time to check!!
Click to expand...


Yes that is correct.hence why you couldn't go back and kill Hitler:(
 
MCMLX said:
I have read somewhere that if a time machine was invented the furthest back in time you could go was to when the machine came into existence.

It may have been on "Mock the Week",not read somewhere,I will just nip back in time to check!!
Click to expand...

Theres no factual reason why, if would just be the limiting factor if time travel was made possibly via a system with 2 pre-determined end points.

EDIT: Also to travel back in time would require you to either roll back everything in this universe (so everyone travels back in time so to speak) and so much data has been lost as time marches on about what action caused what reaction and how that you'd be unable to do so with any degree of accuracy or you'd have to split off entirely into a new timeline/universe with an exact copy of everything at the point you want to "resume" from.
 
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