Time travel has always fascinated people from all walks of life, writers, businessmen, scientists, philosphers, all have wondered. Well, here I am, about to put the record straight:
Is time travel possible?
Yes.
I may go on to tease and say, "Yes, Sir, but not in the way the movies or the books have led you to believe".
The "normal" way to time travel is to maybe build a "time travel machine" using which you can hop from decade to decade as if "time" were some sort of "tape measure" and we could position ourselves at any point along it. Wrong. Fascinating, especially when Robert Zemeckis did it, but wrong.
Time travel is a reality, but to figure out how, the Hollywood version of it has to be forgotten.
Completely.
Allow me to explain forthwith. Special Relativity has equations that tell that the faster a particle travels, the more time slows down for it. This is a real effect and has been demonstrated. In fact, I deal with it a lot since the calculations needed to deflect our nuclear particles would be useless without Einstein's equations, because we accelerate our particles to very near to the speed of light.
Particles that should decay into others often do not decay until after a million times the expected lifetime. From a certain point of view, this means they have time-travelled into their own future.........
...a more concrete example is needed here.
In my last post, about space travel, I said that if we had a spacecraft that could travel near to the speed of light, it would still take 4.2 years to get to the nearest star.
Suppose its speed was 99.9999% the speed of light. It would take nearly 4.2 years to get there, and the same to return. Travel time, 8.4 years.
Yet if you plug in this information into the Einstein equations, nearly 51 years have passed on earth, which means when the astronauts return, they will now be living (51-8.4 = 42.6) years into their future. They have time-travelled!
If you plug in even more exotic values, like 99.99999999% the speed of light, the astronauts will return to a completely new Earth that is now 40,000 years older than when they left.
These two examples show us the power of travelling at near light speed, and are given merely to illustrate what happens nearly every day in particle accelerators around the world. That is, that our particles do indeed exhibit time-travel properties, but as I said, not in the sense as portayed in the movies.
As for travelling backward in time, the physics tell us it forbidden, although some recent developments in the equations of General Relativity seem to suggest that this may be possible in principle, too.
And you don't even need a flux capacitor, much less a DeLorean.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Is Time Travel possible? ~ an Honest Answer
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7 comments:
Dotcomer, somwhere there you lost track in your first comment.
Travelling backwards in time as the current theories suggest, is not travelling backwards into the electron's timeline, Lawny, but into another possible universe where the electron was "substituted" into the past. This, the new timeline is a completely different one from the original.
This is only possible by warping spacetime with something like a black hole, but the physics tells us that you cannot travel further back in time than before the moment when the machine to do this was created.
This does not violate causality or energy conservation.
It is something akin to the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics.
But this is all highly theoretical.
What is "real" is the actual self-time-travel of our particles that we accelerate, made easier to understand by my spaceship example.
Both of you have seemingly missed the point here, that time-travel into the future is REAL!
Dotcomer: I have many, many ideas, but to express them I need viable math and physical justification.
To express them would sound alot like the assholes in the physics rooms.
No proof.
I am a dreamer about such stuff but I do not need people pulling me down because I have no proof or justification.
I prefer to keep my own ideas and opinions to myself.
I am a scientist, experimental, yes, but realistic also.
One does NOT make claims in science without experimental proof.
I do not know WHY time slows with speed, the same as I do not not know why the gravitational constant is 6.667 ...etc.
I just know it is.
I could ask you WHY is the Z-0 boson heavier than any other particle we know. I can answer that. Can you? As to why it is such-and-such grams in weight, I do not know. Do you?
You need to distinguish between physics, meta-physics, philosphy, and religion, but that is just my OPINION!
The z-0 is heavier because it spins faster? You really think so, dotcomer? Just what is the spin? 3 at most. It is a boson, remember, and bosons spin at integral values.
I think you need to understand quantum spin first before making sweeping statements like " The Z-0 is heavier because it spins faster". Quantum spin is a quantum number, and nothing like normal spin that we understand. It is just a word to describe something at the quantum level, and has nothing to do with spin in the real world.
You seem to be a classical person still trying to describe quantum effects from a classical viewpoint. We all gave that up in the 1930's.
Dotcomer - your last comment has confused me completely. I have no idea what you meant by it. Did anyone else, by any chance?
All bosons do NOT have a spin of 1 , by the way. They have "integral" spin, as opposed to fermions, which have "half-integral" spin.
Another "by the way".....relativistic mass has nothing, zero, zilch, nada, wala to do with particle "spin".
Dotcomer, you remind me of what Gratiano said of Bassanio in "The Merchant of Venice"
Gratiano said Bassanio talked "an infinite deal of nothing".
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