Time travel...half way

Discussion of theories involving time as a dimension, time travel, relativity, branes, and so on, usually applying to the "real" universe which we live in.

Time travel...half way

Postby Residue » Thu Sep 15, 2005 11:57 pm

So here's my idea. Theoretically, if an object was moving at say 99.9% speed of light for a couple of weeks and then came out and back to normal speed. While it was going, time was much slower for it and therefore it would be years in the future. Therefore, couldn't you say that this is a form of time-travel, it's just not instantaneous? :?
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Postby Dil12a » Fri Sep 16, 2005 12:11 am

who said time travel is instanteous?

i've always considered time travel as where you are moving in a way different to the normal flow of time.
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Re: Time travel...half way

Postby jinydu » Fri Sep 16, 2005 3:16 am

Residue wrote:So here's my idea. Theoretically, if an object was moving at say 99.9% speed of light for a couple of weeks and then came out and back to normal speed. While it was going, time was much slower for it and therefore it would be years in the future. Therefore, couldn't you say that this is a form of time-travel, it's just not instantaneous? :?


Up to some qualifications, that's right. If an astronaut boarded a spaceship, travelled around the solar system at a large fraction of the speed of light, relative to the Earth (remember that velocity is relative) and returned to Earth, he would find that people on Earth have aged more than he has.

However, the phrase "time travel" is somewhat misleading, since it seems to assume that there is a "universal time line", and you're jumping from one point to another. But as Einstein showed, the passage of time is frame-dependent.
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Time Winds

Postby Batman3 » Tue Oct 04, 2005 7:37 pm

What about "Time Winds"? Consider the Grandfather Paradox You go back and shoot him before you were born. So you were never born to go back and shoot him. But you did. A contradiction.
The way the time continuum would get out of such things would be that when you pointed your gun at him, your hand would be pushed around by the Time Winds and you would miss. Or the bullet would be pushed aside. I think though that since you would be the agent, the Time Winds would deprive you of that self-control in stead of the air pushing the bullet aside as the air isn't trying to be the agent."
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Postby papernuke » Tue Jul 11, 2006 5:42 pm

1st of all, nothing but a tachyon can be that fast, and second yes it would be a kind of time travel, but it/he/she would be in the past, not the future, because its going slower not faster
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Postby houserichichi » Wed Jul 12, 2006 2:45 am

No, that's incorrect. In theory one could travel back in time by exceeding the speed of light. Tachyons can only travel faster than light. The slowest they can travel is lightspeed.
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