Thread: Time Travel Possible?

Originally Posted by Sir Burr

Consider a train moving along at 100 km/hour. It has a lamp on the front and a lamp on the back, yet the light particles from each lamp are traveling at the same speed, 186,000 Km/sec. Not 186,000 Km/sec plus and minus 100 Km/hour. That's why the speed of light is used as a constant one of the very few found in nature.

Urban Legend I think. That would mean that light speed is variable actually to compensate for the speed of the train. Very unlikely. And we couldn't measure it or observe a difference of 100km/h or even 1000km/h in the overrall speed of light.

It does bring an interesting question. If a spaceship travelling near the speed of light has a light beam, how do you measure it ? and what is the speed of that light beam ? obviously additioning the two speeds is not the right method.

We can't go at the speed of light, but even Heinstein claimed that it was possible to go above it, by some kind of a leap

Originally Posted by Sir Burr

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

I am. But I'm not very smart.

I think the key lies in harnessing light itself & using that as a vehicle.

Fraid that's out too. the reason light moves so fast is that it has no mass.

Light is crazy stuff and takes you into the world of quantum mechanics which is about the weirdest stuff ever.

Consider a train moving along at 100 km/hour. It has a lamp on the front and a lamp on the back, yet the light particles from each lamp are traveling at the same speed, 186,000 Km/sec. Not 186,000 Km/sec plus and minus 100 Km/hour. That's why the speed of light is used as a constant one of the very few found in nature.

Couple of comments:

What is electricity, does anyone know? It has no mass, travels real fast indeed, nobody really knows what electricity is and yet we produce and control and routinely use it. Light may be a step or a staircase further along the road to knowledge, but it's secrets will also need to be explored at some time.

About the train, not sure if I'm on safe ground but if you are travelling at light speed of 186 k mps, then surely you cannot see anything in front of you even with headlights on, because you and the light are travelling at the same speed. So your first sense of something up front must be when you crash into it. Also, using these factors, nobody else can see you because you will become invisible. Intriguing, could you be done for speeding if it's not possible to see you?


Back to...according to Steve Hawking time travel is not possible because otherwise we would be visited by future generations. Decades ago when I heard him say this I thought what utter claptrap, and coming from a such a revered person.

The truth is clear, staring us in the face, and was revealed during a desert chamsin (heat storm) whilst on some incredible stuff in my hippy days, but the snide bastard sneaked off between its discovery and the next day.

Anyway it went something like, if time runs in a timeline like a train on tracks from creation to the end of the universe, then if we were visited by future others there is no way we could possibly know about it because that would change events that had already occurred prior to the visit, and nothing that has happened can possibly be modified. So, in this case if it is possible to visit the past, it must be purely as an observer, with no form or ability to manipulate any event, and nobody in that past could ever know you were there. Could you return to the future with anything, even a breath of our air? - nope, you cannot change something that has already happened...they'll just have to get used to it! Then, which is easier and could you also travel forwards, or only back? Pass, but if forwards is possible with the ability to return safely, then it's prolly fair to assume those in the future must be able to travel backwards.

If as some argue time may be an infinity of parallel dimensions, sort of like saying all that could possibly happen might be happening in the here and now and in our time and space, then not only can it be revisited but there's no reason for that not to be happening right now, and it should also be subject to manipulation. Not sure on this one, but will stand by the timeline thingy.

Gosh is that the time...?

The argument of future generation visiting us is pointless. If it was indeed the case, they could damage their timeline, so the theory would mean that they would be as discrete as possible if they were to visit as to not interrupt any timeline.

There is only one man to this day claiming to travel in time who has been taken seriously by an interesting majority of people. It's Jon Titor, there is a unsuccessful thread I started about him somewhere. He is one of the early Internet Legend trolling message boards with his story. Apparently he has convinced quite a few.

Originally Posted by Butterfly

We can't go at the speed of light, but even Heinstein claimed that it was possible to go above it, by some kind of a leap

Today we can't, but that's because we have no concept of it. Years ago physicians claimed the 4-minute mile is not possible because the human body could not withstand the forces...if you told the pioneer Lindberg about circling the world with thousands of satellites even he may have signed you off as a nutter...how recently did the Patent Office propose disbanding itself because it was redundant because everything that could be invented had already been invented?...even Bill Gates only a couple of decades ago had no conception that a computer might ever need to use more than 64 kb actual memory.

The future's exciting, we won't be there to see it, but we can still scratch away at the surface of what there is to discover.

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

We couldn't travel any faster than a horse not too long ago.

lots of folks do that,, jump off of a balcony in Pattaya and you will get up to 120 MPH just before you hit the ground,, only can do it once tho.

Faster-than-light - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

General relativity doesn't rule out travel that is faster than light, which is widely unknown. However, it doesn't allow for objects to accelerate past the light barrier. Since for an object to achieve faster than light speeds, it must travel at the speed of light at some point, just like if you were traveling at a speed of 50km/h and accelerated to 60km/h, at some stage of acceleration you must have been traveling at every speed between 50km/h and 60km/h. However at the quantum level this rule does not apply, and matter can go from one speed to another without having traveled the median speeds. One such effect is during a process known as Quantum tunneling. This is when there is a probability of a particle such as an electron to travel through a seemingly impenetrable barrier, and appear on the other side without ever occupying the internal area of the barrier, this is because the electrons wave function appears on the other side of the barrier, and this wave function predicts the probability of finding the electron there, therefore the larger the barrier the smaller the probability, and whats more is that scientists have clocked speeds of these electrons traveling at speeds of up to 80% faster than light. Though the electron had never accelerated faster than the speed of light though instantaneously changed its velocity.Thus this phenomena doesn't violate the laws of relativity.

Science is so out there lately, that even bona fide scientists seem to have trouble separating the whack jobs from the brilliant minds.

String theory with its 16 or whatever dimensions, varieties of vibration, etc. sounds a lot like what you might hear from a schizophrenic.

Originally Posted by Sir Burr

Can't travel faster than the speed of light unfortunately.

snip

now , now that's quite a blanket statement ...................


'We have broken speed of light'
By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 16/08/2007

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences.

snip

telegraph.co.uk

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

Einstien was full of shit. That much has been proved.

Do go on. Who proved it? Why has nobody told the scientific world? Is this knowledge only available to manc scallys?

Originally Posted by cujo

Yeah, but who's the source

Try the references and external links at the bottom of the Wiki page.
They lead to scientific research papers detailing theories and experiments conducted like this one:
Conical and Paraboloidal Supraluminal Particle Accelerators - Work - Petar Bosnic Petrus - antigravity and gravifugal force, physics, philosophy, science and short stories

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

Einstien was full of shit. That much has been proved.

Do go on. Who proved it? Why has nobody told the scientific world? Is this knowledge only available to manc scallys?

Could be too hot for the scientists to handle.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

Einstien was full of shit. That much has been proved.

Do go on. Who proved it? Why has nobody told the scientific world? Is this knowledge only available to manc scallys?

Einstien said that the universe was static. That the planets are not moving away from each other in the way that nowadays everybody knows they are.

Who'd have though the Manc scally would be more knowledgable than the Dr?

We should merge this topic with the DeLorean thread.

Relativity does not state that the speed of light is an upper limit for everything, just for energy (including, specifically, information). Quantum entanglement shows instantaneous effects, when one of a pair of entangled particles is collapsed to a particular state the other half of the pair immediately collapses to the corresponding state regardless of distance. However as the initial collapsed state is completely unpredictable no information has been passed and therefore relativity hasn't been violated. I haven't seen the complete paper, just the short version available on arxiv, so I don't really know exactly how their experiment was performed or the exact data that was generated, would be very interesting to see the full article. These two have a long history in supraliminal physics and are always interesting. Funny to think that their previous experiments were only reported in dry-as-dust scientific journals, but this one, their first since the advent of widescale blogging, has gone global.

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

Einstien was full of shit. That much has been proved.

Do go on. Who proved it? Why has nobody told the scientific world? Is this knowledge only available to manc scallys?

Einstien said that the universe was static. That the planets are not moving away from each other in the way that nowadays everybody knows they are.

Are you serious?

Edit: Einstein apparently did propose that, but when proved wrong declared it his biggest blunder.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

when one of a pair of entangled particles is collapsed to a particular state the other half of the pair immediately collapses to the corresponding state regardless of distance.

This is what Einstein referred to "Universe backdoor" and was technically impossible in his mind. The pair properties experiment might be explained by the existence of parallel universe or that strings could be a backdoor communication for all particles, big or small.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Originally Posted by shehiredahitman

Einstien was full of shit. That much has been proved.

Do go on. Who proved it? Why has nobody told the scientific world? Is this knowledge only available to manc scallys?

Einstien said that the universe was static. That the planets are not moving away from each other in the way that nowadays everybody knows they are.

Are you serious?

Are you drunk?

Eienstien stated that the planets were static & not moving away from each other. Since the discovery of 'blue shift' & 'red shift' (I'll assume you know what they are unless you're cutting & pasting you posts) the whole world knows that they are.

What's funny?

Originally Posted by Butterfly

This is what Einstein referred to "Universe backdoor" and was technically impossible in his mind

So Einstein would also assert that Kevin from the 1981 movie Time Bandits was actually a Backdoor Bandit

Originally Posted by DrB0b

your use of the word planets in this context is funny, but maybe that's just me

Use of the word 'planets' to describe planets moving, is funny?

What would be more in context? Would it be better to use the term galaxies, or something? Seriously, what shouldI have said?

Okay, I was a bit OTT in saying he was full of shit - but bear this in mind, Einstien was a firm believer that the universe was created by God. Now that is a load of shit.