Time Travel

[kkeggie]

Was watching back to the future on TV last night and i suddenly thought "is time travel possible"

i was thinking if it was, surley we could only travel into the past BUT once you got there you would not be able to get back as the future at that point hadnt happened OR you would dissapear as your future hadnt happened and therefore you wouldnt have been born.

What are other ABers thoughts on the possibilities??

[Space]

I don't understand "surely we could only travel to the past"...
I don't understand "the future at that point hadnt happened" ... we are constantly travelling towards the future although it hasn't happened ... 

It is possible to travel to the future. It is also possible to accelerate our travel (see theory of relativity ).
I don't think it is possible to travel to the past unless you don't modify anything in the past. In other words, we could only "see" the past, without interacting with it.

[Loosehead]

Well it's a theory of course and BTTF touched on it, essentially every possible combination of events exists as a parallel universe so there are an infinite number of universes. So go back in time and shoot your dad before you where born and you disappear right? Well that's the conventional time paradox but what this theory says is that there is a valid universe where you don't exist for whatever reason, ie your mum and dad never met. So essentially by going back in time and changing something you are simply altering the path of time at that point so, like changing the points on a railway that time line is changed. It's only a theory and it's not mine and I'm not saying I support it but the time travel paradox's are often explained like this.

[kkeggie]

it was just my thoughts and views really! Fair enough if you dont understand them!

If you think it is possible to travel to the future (which i personally cannot comprehend) do you think that particular time travelers present time (i.e 2005) will keep going.....i.e. is each frame of time a different reality?

[kkeggie]

Loosehead, i like your thinking and explaination.....

Do you think time travel HAS been accomplished? wonder how it would be proved?

[Space]

kkeggie, I don't understand what "particular time travelers present time" means ... neither the last bit of the question ...

Do you realize that you are constantly travelling towards the future yourself ?

[jake-the-peg]

I believe that mathematically you can consider a positron (anti-mater electron) as an electron moving backwards in time.

This might imply that were you to travel backwards in time you would effectively become anti-matter with pretty explosive results.

Personally I would not consider there any posibility that a human could travel backwards in time. But what is far more intriguing is the possibility of a signal being sent backwards in time.

If this is possible it may be that our descendants (if they exist) are trying to contact us - perhaps we should not be looking for alien ife in the stars but rather alien life in the future.

Don't think you'd get a research grant though

[Loosehead]

No kkeggie and the reason often given is that there would be no bookmakers! there are bookies so QED no time travellers.

On a more serious note though, if the above theory is correct and time travel had taken place then that time line would change so it in itself would seem as if time travel had not taken place. I mean in BTTF 2 Biff finds a sports almanack and goes back in time and bets on results. However if a new time line is started then it is not certain that the same results will occur and indeed in close events or long shots those results could be different. As the ashes are now topical consider the 1981 "Botham test" imagine you went back in time to the last day and got a bet on at 500-1, just suppose that the new time had botham on a bad day. you would be certain of the outcome but you're in the wrong universe, doh, just another mug punter on the 500-1 shot.

[georgit79]

woa brain freeze! Thinking about that just totally messed my head up...

[ugly_bob]

As far as I understand it - and I think it's been proven with atomic clocks and planes - the theory of relativity says that if you travel faster, time slows down for you relative to other stuff. Ultimately, at the speed of light, time stands still. So, if you travel REALLY fast, you will experience less time than others and effectively travel forward in time.

[Dagman]

If time travel was or will be possible, there'd be people coming back from the future to the present, but they aren't so until someone appears from another time then you can consider it never to be!

[Space]

Sorry to be the devil's advocate, but...
there are a few shortcuts in Dagman's reasoning...

Just because you have not heard of people coming from the future, doesn't mean there hasn't been any.
If I was to travel in to past, I would make sure nobody sees me.

Also:
Just because something didn't happen, doesn't mean it's impossible !!!
" If we could have a global nuclear war and anihilate mankind, surely we would have done it already ! So a global nuclear war is impossible."
There are several possible reasons why something doesn't happen, other that "it's impossible". For example: "It's dangerous", "It's immoral", "It's too expensive", etc.