Time Travel Theories.

[FishBlast]

This is a kind of sideways step. I've not thought much about it.

If you travel back in time, at the arrival point the mass of the universe has increased. From above, there are now 2 of you yesterday, whereas before there was only 1. The mass of the entire universe is now greater than it was by however much you weigh. That has implications I need to think about.

That only happens when you do it the standard way (in which there would be 2 of you).

If everything is conserved (amount of matter used), then there will not be 2 of you in the past, what you have taken out of the timeline (your material / you) will be missing when you get there (because the material is on you the whole time)
but as a consequence, there will be more stuff missing from that timeline if it contributed to your development (such as that chicken wing / fish / salad you ate yesterday, it will obviously be on you so it cannot be restored without tearing you - the time traveler - to bits).

 

[DrRob]

We're all overlooking the simple answer.

Time travel exists, but the people who have access to it don't want people to know, so they go back in time occasionally to remove any chance of being found out.

 

[FishBlast]

We're all overlooking the simple answer.

Time travel exists, but the people who have access to it don't want people to know, so they go back in time occasionally to remove any chance of being found out.

That is one of the things I suspect too. What with mass deja vu event and some other things that I seem to have dreams of and they happen in the same day (but that may not be entirely related).
Then there was another deja vu moment I've shared with a personal maths teacher. She said that it looked as if we've been through a lesson but again no evidence that we did, the notebook doesn't lie. (odd that it was related to maths in both cases).
And certain other minor events that seemed as if I was expecting them to happen and seen them happen before my eyes, even warned some people about them and got called a jinx for it.

 

[Lateral Line]

I'm not sure I am understanding your last post replying to me. Perhaps you could elaborate.

 

[FishBlast]

I'm not sure I am understanding your last post replying to me. Perhaps you could elaborate.

I was saying that I agree that time traveling might have been done before but there are no traces left since owning the time machine could cause a lot of havoc if it would fall in the hands of someone irresponsible / unprepared / ill-willed.

Especially if the time machine's as dangerous as messing with a whole planet and having the risk of leaving everything in a twisted state where life can no longer run due to all the distortion, in case the machine is used wrongly.

 

[FishBlast]

Here's how I imagine time travel.

Suppose this time traveler is in 2012 and a time machine has been invented around 1930 or maybe even before, but 1930 has a set savepoint, which tells the machine exactly how Earth looked at that time. (minus position in solar system, unless the machine has that much energy, but the amount of energy needed for that would probably require more than material the size of a whole planetary system being converted to energy, moving Earth would probably only require a planet a bit bigger than Earth to be destroyed to give its energy for this).

A 1) the time traveler is that red dot and there is a red line connecting him to the past (and that past is nowhere actually, as it is converted into the traveler's present, all matter is there in the present, under some form or another).
That red line represents everything that had contributed to the body of the time traveler and even the machine's material (knowing that the machine is immune to the effects of reversal, and the traveler being inside it would keep the traveler's material safe too).
The traveler is in 2012.
The green dot is the traveler's grandfather. He holds part of the genetic material that will compose the traveler's parents and the traveler ultimately. He was born in 1930. 1930 is not somewhere else, 1930 has been converted to what is 2012 in matter form. It does not exist somewhere in this universe simply as "the past". The past no longer exists in that form.

A 2) The traveler makes the time machine reverse Earth back to its state in 1930. In reality, it is really 2012. But the Earth will look like it was in 1930. Everyone will think it is 1930 and will act like it is, because their memories are of that time. Even dead people would be alive (note that this example does not follow the idea of life = soul though so at this point a lot of people would probably say "Impossible." so stop reading if you dislike this point of view) because the records state that they were alive in 1930.
The traveler meets his grandfather and kills him. He then waits 82 years, exactly the difference between 1930 and 2012.

A 3) When he ends up at 2012 (assuming he has lived that long), not only that he doesn't have a grandfather or parents or he finds out that he was never born (even though he has an ID card) but he realizes he is actually in 2094 in reality (this because he has only changed matter, time would be irrelevant since he only wanted to see a certain outcome of events in a "what if" scenario).

Now let's take case B:
B 1) Time traveler in his current time in 2012. Had a grandfather born in 1930 but again the past is not "somewhere out there", it is converted into 2012 state. So there is no separate dimension where it's 1930 at this time. It does not exist like that, but the machine has recorded what 1930 looked like and the changes along the way till 2012.

B 2)Traveler does NOT kill his grandpa but only reverts the planet back to its 1930 state just to meet his grandpa.
The moment he does this, he also knows that his genetic material and every other creature that had contributed to building his body by serving as food for him / his parents are all inside his body so they will not be encountered or will not be encountered whole in the new version of 1930.
Again, in reality it would still be 2012, with a 1930 setting (people that died are alive again, wars that happened didn't happen yet etc).
There will not be a duplicate of the time traveler, so even though his grandpa lives and has a child which will be the traveler's father, the traveler's parents either will not have a child or will have a child, but that child will NOT be the traveler. It will become the traveler's brother (that he never had in the original timeline).
After the 82 years pass, when it should be 2012, the traveler (if still alive) will have a brother that will probably be as old as he was before leaving with the time machine towards the past.
The time in reality would be 2094 once again.

In all these examples, the moment the time traveler begins his travel, the 2012 existence of Earth is destroyed and converted to its existence after the model of 1930, with the difference that it lacks the material that the traveler's body and the machine have retained. So it would not matter who he kills in this new 1930, it will not affect him but will create a new 2012 (which in reality, since it is only SPACE that is modified here, is 2094). On the other hand, it matters who avoids getting affected by the machine. So anything that is excepted from the reversal will affect the outcome of the reassembly of a 1930 setting.

 

[Bugdozer]

Fishblast, there are a number of problems with your idea of time travel:
1. It requires manipulating the entire universe and all matter within it, AND energy.
2. Since it uses the premise of there being no real past or future, only the present, there is therefore no "place" for the information on what came before to be stored. Future events are determined by what a particle's current state is, but a variety of past events can possibly lead to the same outcome. For example: a marble is in the middle of a room. It could have rolled there from the left, the right, fallen from the ceiling, anything. It's not possible to ascertain how it got there and thus its past cannot be "detected". If you dispense with time as being a dimension akin to space, you can't know what happened in the past to manipulate it into being.
3. Your theory is difficult to reconcile with general relativity.
4. It would require some sort of extra force to make the changes happen, and there's nothing we know of in physics that can do such a thing.
5. It conflicts with the laws of thermodynamics.

In conclusion, if your theory on the nature of time is correct, then time travel is indeed truly impossible.

 

[FishBlast]

Fishblast, there are a number of problems with your idea of time travel:
1. It requires manipulating the entire universe and all matter within it, AND energy.
2. Since it uses the premise of there being no real past or future, only the present, there is therefore no "place" for the information on what came before to be stored. Future events are determined by what a particle's current state is, but a variety of past events can possibly lead to the same outcome. For example: a marble is in the middle of a room. It could have rolled there from the left, the right, fallen from the ceiling, anything. It's not possible to ascertain how it got there and thus its past cannot be "detected". If you dispense with time as being a dimension akin to space, you can't know what happened in the past to manipulate it into being.
3. Your theory is difficult to reconcile with general relativity.
4. It would require some sort of extra force to make the changes happen, and there's nothing we know of in physics that can do such a thing.
5. It conflicts with the laws of thermodynamics.

In conclusion, if your theory on the nature of time is correct, then time travel is indeed truly impossible.

1. What if there would only be a small area manipulated into this? (such as a city instead of the whole planet). Then you would only need the energy that would probably be harvested out of something double the size of that city you want to revert.
2. What if it is all stored on a compact disc? We can currently store a virtual model of a planet, complete with a lot of little details on a HDD and probably on a mere DVD. If data storage is even more advanced in the future, what stops us from storing information of every little particle (and thus matter as a whole) inside a DVD or whatever storage will be used? (note that this is for limited area change, not whole universe change, some variables will not be controlled in this case, such as other planets' position, sun's state, galaxies, universe's state etc).
3. I wasn't basing it on general relativity though, more like some kind of system restore brought to the real world. Technically this can be done virtually on a computer (a virtual world time travel), but would probably take too much storage or crash weaker computers.
4. The energy itself can be used as that extra force (that's why I said double the amount of matter must be used to get enough energy to manipulate the matter that we intend to revert.) The thing I can't figure out would be what the machine would look like and how it would be able to control this energy on a wider scale. This probably can be done with something the size of a cell right now, but not sure if anyone has ever tried to recreate a dead cell by keeping track of everything that was lost and forcing it back into the cell to basically restore its functionality. However, artificial cells have been created so that is a step further in science...
5. I'm not exactly sure why it would conflict, it's been over 3 years since I've finished high school. Does this mean that the heat that had escaped the enclosure where the experiment takes place will never be recovered to be brought back to the material we would want to revert? (conservation of heat is what I'm thinking about, because no system is perfectly isolated).

I'm pretty sure that someone will some day come up with this theory anyway (and if it does become useful / spawns anything as dangerous as that kind of time machine... forget I even mentioned it when the world becomes a mess of spaghetti swirled into some kind of black hole... LOL!)

Or blame it on the people working at the LHC...

 

[FishBlast]

I've re-checked on thermodynamics laws.

Zeroth law of thermodynamics: If two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they must be in thermal equilibrium with each other. This law helps define the notion of temperature.
First law of thermodynamics: Heat and work are forms of energy transfer. While energy is invariably conserved, the internal energy of a closed system changes as heat and work are transferred in or out of it. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind are impossible.
Second law of thermodynamics: The entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium -- the state of maximum entropy of the system -- in a process known as "thermalization". Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.
Third law of thermodynamics: The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches zero. The entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically zero, and in all cases is determined only by the number of different ground states it has. Specifically, the entropy of a pure crystalline substance at absolute zero temperature is zero.

Zeroth law - why would this matter if I'd replace the lost energy with the extra energy that will not be used to manipulate? It would basically make up for the lost heat (thus it comes from an external source if the manipulated thing is an object or a small area for example).
Like I'd pop an inflated ball with a needle. How does it have to be repaired to be the same as before? The air must be put back into it. That air must also have the exact number of particles in it of the exact same state and the heat that was lost is also put back into it (energy can be shaped into anything, so it's a wildcard here) and whatever remained on the needle that poked the ball should be put back to cover the hole made in the ball.

First law - I'm not trying to think of a perpetual motion system, just of restoring something to a previous state.

Second law - obviously there will not be a 100% isolated system, but if you search for what was lost, if it is still in range and has not yet passed the barrier of what can be changed, you are most likely able to restore the lost heat with no problem. Or maybe it won't matter much.

Third law - I don't think it matters here since it doesn't seem to apply to any case.

The rules that a "system restore" time machine should follow:
1) Do not create duplicates of something already existing.
2) Recreate something as close as possible to the recorded information corresponding to the time desired. By monitoring the whole timeline between points A and B (affecting the area), the time machine must then subtract the items that are to remain immune to the travel (the machine itself and the traveler) and make do with what it has available.
3) Take energy from that external source and pass it through the area of effect in order to restore what is missing. This would require monitoring as much as possible of the escaped material that is not inside the machine. There will be gaps, indeed, but they will be pretty small, probably insignificant and probably could be filled by using the energy as a wildcard (except that it would break rule number 1) - do not create duplicates of something already existing so it should not create another time traveler or material that was taken inside the machine).

If one would break rule number 1, again they'd create something that is NOT the time traveler. It would be a similar person but made out of material that wasn't there in the first place. If it were the time traveler himself, they'd overlap. This is why nothing in reality is identical. There will always be something to set stuff different in reality (even when stuff seems exactly identical, one thing sets the difference: they have two different addresses in space if they are two entities. Thus, not identical 100%).

 

[FishBlast]

A side note: am I the only one who thinks the universe is infinite? (or at least the plane of existence, if there is something bigger than our universe out there).
Because otherwise how would the laws of thermodynamics work if our universe was finite?

 

[Bugdozer]

Fishblast, there are a number of problems with your idea of time travel:
1. It requires manipulating the entire universe and all matter within it, AND energy.
2. Since it uses the premise of there being no real past or future, only the present, there is therefore no "place" for the information on what came before to be stored. Future events are determined by what a particle's current state is, but a variety of past events can possibly lead to the same outcome. For example: a marble is in the middle of a room. It could have rolled there from the left, the right, fallen from the ceiling, anything. It's not possible to ascertain how it got there and thus its past cannot be "detected". If you dispense with time as being a dimension akin to space, you can't know what happened in the past to manipulate it into being.
3. Your theory is difficult to reconcile with general relativity.
4. It would require some sort of extra force to make the changes happen, and there's nothing we know of in physics that can do such a thing.
5. It conflicts with the laws of thermodynamics.

In conclusion, if your theory on the nature of time is correct, then time travel is indeed truly impossible.

1. What if there would only be a small area manipulated into this? (such as a city instead of the whole planet). Then you would only need the energy that would probably be harvested out of something double the size of that city you want to revert.
2. What if it is all stored on a compact disc? We can currently store a virtual model of a planet, complete with a lot of little details on a HDD and probably on a mere DVD. If data storage is even more advanced in the future, what stops us from storing information of every little particle (and thus matter as a whole) inside a DVD or whatever storage will be used? (note that this is for limited area change, not whole universe change, some variables will not be controlled in this case, such as other planets' position, sun's state, galaxies, universe's state etc).
3. I wasn't basing it on general relativity though, more like some kind of system restore brought to the real world. Technically this can be done virtually on a computer (a virtual world time travel), but would probably take too much storage or crash weaker computers.
4. The energy itself can be used as that extra force (that's why I said double the amount of matter must be used to get enough energy to manipulate the matter that we intend to revert.) The thing I can't figure out would be what the machine would look like and how it would be able to control this energy on a wider scale. This probably can be done with something the size of a cell right now, but not sure if anyone has ever tried to recreate a dead cell by keeping track of everything that was lost and forcing it back into the cell to basically restore its functionality. However, artificial cells have been created so that is a step further in science...
5. I'm not exactly sure why it would conflict, it's been over 3 years since I've finished high school. Does this mean that the heat that had escaped the enclosure where the experiment takes place will never be recovered to be brought back to the material we would want to revert? (conservation of heat is what I'm thinking about, because no system is perfectly isolated).

I'm pretty sure that someone will some day come up with this theory anyway (and if it does become useful / spawns anything as dangerous as that kind of time machine... forget I even mentioned it when the world becomes a mess of spaghetti swirled into some kind of black hole... LOL!)

Or blame it on the people working at the LHC...

If just doing it for a small localised area is what you are suggesting, then it's not time travel any more than me getting a clay pot and smashing it and then gluing it back together would be time travel.
With regard to the laws of thermodynamics it's because you'd have to reverse the increase in system entropy to do what you are suggesting.
It's all very well saying you can use energy from XYZ source as the extra force, but that's not the same as saying what that force is and how you use it. For example, I have a beaker of water boiling at 100c, there's a source of energy, how do I use that to make a photon reverse direction or move a molecule at a distance? Energy is not the same as applicable force.

 

[FishBlast]

If just doing it for a small localised area is what you are suggesting, then it's not time travel any more than me getting a clay pot and smashing it and then gluing it back together would be time travel.
With regard to the laws of thermodynamics it's because you'd have to reverse the increase in system entropy to do what you are suggesting.
It's all very well saying you can use energy from XYZ source as the extra force, but that's not the same as saying what that force is and how you use it. For example, I have a beaker of water boiling at 100c, there's a source of energy, how do I use that to make a photon reverse direction or move a molecule at a distance? Energy is not the same as applicable force.

If that area would actually be big enough to cover Earth, there could be a lot of changes done though.
Imagine if Earth was your clay pot. After all, what people want with time travel actually, is to be able to change stuff or see what stuff looked like back then. It will not be 100% accurate in all spots, but, imagine if one city would be destroyed. Such action could restore that city AND allow tourists to see it too. The only things that will change would not be so relevant. Like planets' position for example. But the city will be restored to the smallest detail.

Also, in your case with gluing the pot back together, you can not get all the missing particles that you've lost. It will also show cracks.

There was an example in physics class with making lemonade, where it is said that some of it will be lost due to evaporation for example, so you will not have the full quantity of the lemon juice in it. To cover for that, you add just enough of another lemon and more water and somehow make sure that it is the new lemon's juice and new water that evaporates instead of the intended juice and water. (the replacement is given up for the original to remain whole).

Energy can be converted to matter. Matter can exert force (with the help of gravity, etc).
For example, if we could shape energy into whatever we'd want, we'd form a ball of matter that would move a scale. Thus, the scale will be put in motion with something that would normally not move the scale.
Problem is: matter is a compact form of energy. So the resulting matter is less than the energy used up. Doesn't change the fact that it would move the scale, which is the goal...

 

[Bugdozer]

Moving a scale is irrelevant. Making matter out of energy is irrelevant. You need to stop photons in their tracks and make them reverse direction to do what you're describing and there's no force that does that. I think your problem is that you're not thinking of what you'd need each type of particle in the area you're affecting to do, and thinking "what forces can be employed to make that happen?" You're just saying "I can supply energy or matter so it's OK" which it patently isn't. Say you want to make my kitchen go back in time. How do you get the thermal energy out of the wall of the kitchen, convert it back into a single higher energy photon, make that photon go back towards the lightbulb, gain more energy as it passes through the glass and re-enter the filament of the bulb, converting a tungsten atom into a higher energy state? Going the correct direction in time is no problem as the actions follow as a natural consequence of the laws of physics. What you are trying to describe goes completely against the normal laws of physics. If you are to bypass the problem by NOT making this exact reversal occur, then it's no more sending the kitchen back in time than just redecorating it to look how it did in the past. Either you achieve true reversal of all particles and their states and positions, or it's not time travel - it's just something that LOOKS like time travel. I can redecorate my house to look how it did in 1900, but no matter how precise and exactly I do this, even down to the last molecule, it is not equivalent to having gone back to 1900.

 

[FishBlast]

Moving a scale is irrelevant. Making matter out of energy is irrelevant. You need to stop photons in their tracks and make them reverse direction to do what you're describing and there's no force that does that. I think your problem is that you're not thinking of what you'd need each type of particle in the area you're affecting to do, and thinking "what forces can be employed to make that happen?" You're just saying "I can supply energy or matter so it's OK" which it patently isn't. Say you want to make my kitchen go back in time. How do you get the thermal energy out of the wall of the kitchen, convert it back into a single higher energy photon, make that photon go back towards the lightbulb, gain more energy as it passes through the glass and re-enter the filament of the bulb, converting a tungsten atom into a higher energy state? Going the correct direction in time is no problem as the actions follow as a natural consequence of the laws of physics. What you are trying to describe goes completely against the normal laws of physics. If you are to bypass the problem by NOT making this exact reversal occur, then it's no more sending the kitchen back in time than just redecorating it to look how it did in the past. Either you achieve true reversal of all particles and their states and positions, or it's not time travel - it's just something that LOOKS like time travel. I can redecorate my house to look how it did in 1900, but no matter how precise and exactly I do this, even down to the last molecule, it is not equivalent to having gone back to 1900.

And what I am saying is that I think the closest thing to time traveling we will ever have is this. I do not think that we could go to an alternate universe or that past and future exist at this time as it did in their time.
I think that closest we could have is something that reconstructs the past's aspect, with as much accuracy as possible.

As for the photon being sent back... There are tons of things that could be believed at any time as not being possible, until someone does what seemed as the impossible.

Redecorating a kitchen manually would not be as accurate though, you would not be able to restore stuff you cannot keep track of with the naked eye. But you did catch my point that it would never be back to 1900 because 1900 doesn't exist in that state anymore in the present if there truly are no alternate universes. But the matter that had experienced that year, is now in 2012 and nothing of it was lost, only scattered and in some cases converted to energy.

However, what I was proposing was bringing back everything that would not normally be brought back by a simple redecoration or fixing of an object. I was talking about bringing back everything, including the once living, by finding what was lost, and putting everything back together as it was before, with the exception of whatever cannot be controlled due to the laws of physics (unless there is a way around them that we can't think of due to a limit we might have, or maybe we could put the laws of physics to work out a way to do something similar to this but nobody thought of the right way to do it yet).

Also, I wonder how many people thought the following was possible in the past. They'd probably call it a sorcery if they saw such a thing:

 

[Bugdozer]

Redecorating a house was an extreme simplified example. But what you suggest is merely an extrapolation of the same thing. It's not time travel, merely making a model of the past - an accurate model, sure, but NOT time travel.