The problem with time travel as I see it

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.

The problem with time travel as I see it

Postby faranya » Wed Jan 18, 2006 9:28 pm

Ok, oing off into the realm of imagination, say someone did travel back in time. Say he went back and began looking around. How much could he hypothetically alter without causeing any change in the course of the future? I mean, would the loss of 1 blade of grass cause a serious alteration? Would the loss of a tree? How about the loss of a person? If you could travel back in time, what would you actually be able to do? What would be the point if everything drastically changed the future?
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Postby bo198214 » Wed Jan 18, 2006 10:26 pm

The problem I see with time travel are completely different.
Time - Travel. Traveling from time t1 to time t2 (or even from spacetime point x1 to spacetime point x2).
How long does your journey take from t1 to t2? 1 hour, 2 hours?
In which time do you measure the duration of your time travel?
If there is a second time axis, how about time traveling in that axis?

Then altering the future! How long takes your alteration, same question in which time? How would a person living in the present perceive your alteration that you make in the past, for example when he become extinct. Is he suddenly away, or perceives he a change? But then not in the normal time but in the second time? If you kill yourself, cant you then return into your original time? :shock:

You see, these scenarios - as often illustrated in films - are nonsense. The only noncontradictive possibility I can see is those of parallel worlds. Each event, having possibly different consequences, forks the world into parallel worlds, each with one of the consequences realized respectively.

You can then look back and see in a parallel world what an alternative decision made by you had resulted in. And there is a parallel world for each decisions/possibility of anyone and anything. On the other hand, you are then a kind of multiple personality - you in every parallel world. Maybe even this model is contradictive.
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Postby PWrong » Thu Jan 19, 2006 4:36 pm

Before I mention anything about whether time travel is possible, I'll try to answer the question. Let's take the parallel world scenario because it's the only one that makes sense. Assume that time travel doesn't break conservation laws, so when you go back, you don't just appear, you replace whatever else was there (probably a lot of air).
Now if you make any changes, the overall effect depends mostly on how far back in time you are. According to chaos theory, if you sent a butterfly back in time, it could cause (or prevent) a hurricane by flapping its wings. The weather is very sensitive to changes in initial conditions.

As for randomly killing things, the answer is "it depends". If you killed a dinosaur three minutes before the extinction, it wouldn't matter much. But three minutes after, the survivors would be vital to history. Killing one creature might eventually wipe out the species. Anything you do would have much bigger effect on the future.

Then altering the future! How long takes your alteration, same question in which time? How would a person living in the present perceive your alteration that you make in the past, for example when he become extinct. Is he suddenly away, or perceives he a change? But then not in the normal time but in the second time? If you kill yourself, cant you then return into your original time?

Any contradiction that involves human beings doesn't really count unless you're very careful. It's better to imagine simpler scenarios when talking about time travel. Here's the real time paradox:

1. If an object appears inside the time machine, don't do anything.
2. If nothing appears, take an object, put it in the time machine and send it back in time.

Obviously, there's a contradiction here. Did an object appear or not? Apart from the paradox, there's the problem of conservation of mass and energy. If you go back in time, there's two of you. Incidentally, if you can travel faster than light, you can go back in time. And vice versa.

What about a machine that reverses the flow of entropy inside it? All you'd have to do is reverse the direction of every particle. Inside the machine, everything runs backwards. The only difference is, the contents of the machine are confined by the machine, and can't interact with the outside world.

This machine wouldn't create paradoxes, break any conservation laws, or require faster than light travel or wormholes, and you could even build it here on earth (with appropriate quantum mechanics technology). It wouldn't even break the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because the machine could generate an enormous amount of heat to compensate.

Alternatively you could put the whole planet inside the machine, while you go for a trip to the moon. The only question is, will the world have been different if you won't be here?
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Postby bo198214 » Thu Jan 19, 2006 5:34 pm

Before I can understand your paradox, you should define what a time machine is.

As I see it, in the deterministic world we have a static universe with 3 space and one time axis. A particle or body is at least a function of time into space.

In the nondeterministic case we have a directed network/graph of worlds (for simplicity let us stay with a discrete graph), and every particle/body/beeing has a directed path in this network. Probably we can assume that the graph is free of directed cycles.

Maybe there is also a relativistic model, where each thing has its own space and time which transforms in some way from one thing to the other. (For example when one observer sees event B after A, an observer with overlight speed could see A after B). Cannot survey this case completely.

So please explain in that terminology what a time machine or time travel is (for you).
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Postby quickfur » Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:05 pm

bo198214 wrote:[...]You see, these scenarios - as often illustrated in films - are nonsense. The only noncontradictive possibility I can see is those of parallel worlds. Each event, having possibly different consequences, forks the world into parallel worlds, each with one of the consequences realized respectively.

That doesn't get rid of the contradiction, though. Suppose at time A, the world forks into N possibilities, based on what events are occurring. Let's say you are in fork F, some time after time A. Now how would you travel back in time? If you travel back to time A and appear somewhere, you have now introduced a new event at time A, which contradicts the initial conditions.

Unless, of course, you include the possibility of time travel in the set of events at every single instance of time. That would mean that a large number of forks involve things or persons appearing out of nowhere due to time travel from the future.

Now suppose you travel back to the future. Which fork will you end up in? All of them? Some of them? Suppose you did something at time A that changes the course of history, such that time machines will never be invented. Now you travel back to the future: where do you end up? Do you return to the fork you came from (which is a contradiction, 'cos what you did at time A has no consequences), or do you return to a fork where there is no time machine (which is also a contradiction: you couldn't possibly have travelled back in time to do what you did)?

You can then look back and see in a parallel world what an alternative decision made by you had resulted in. And there is a parallel world for each decisions/possibility of anyone and anything. On the other hand, you are then a kind of multiple personality - you in every parallel world. Maybe even this model is contradictive.


I don't see how you can avoid contradictions in any time-travel theory... the fundamental problem is that it breaks the cause-effect chain, and thus the entire causal model of the universe breaks down and becomes useless at predicting what might/will happen. That is to say, you open up to the possibility that some effects have no causes. For example, it would be possible for someone to pop into existence out of nowhere, develop and build a time machine, then jump into it himself to travel back to where he began (i.e., a loop in space-time). Since this is self-consistent if time travel is really possible, we should be seeing things like this every second (well, more than that, but you get the point).

But now that I think about it... maybe this is what is happening at the quantum-mechanical level in vacuum, where things pop in and out of existence within the allowed Planck unit of time. There are so many such events at this level that their consequences even out into the statistical behaviour we observe at the macroscopic scale (that is why vacuum energy is non-zero).

Obviously, because that is the only level where this happens, it implies that macroscopic time travel isn't possible, 'cos if it is, we'd be observing random appearances/disappearances of objects at the macroscopic scale. In fact, such objects could easily replace you by "borrowing" your energy and becoming a "real" person, leaving you as an imaginary person that will vanish in the next instant. Since things like that aren't happening, we're forced to conclude that time travel isn't possible.
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Postby bo198214 » Sat Jan 21, 2006 11:05 pm

quickfur wrote:Now how would you travel back in time? If you travel back to time A and appear somewhere, you have now introduced a new event at time A, which contradicts the initial conditions.

Suppose you did something at time A that changes the course of history, such that time machines will never be invented.


No, let me explain the parallel-world-idea a bit more.
You cannot go into the past and *change* things in this model,
because everything that could happen at a certain node has already
manifestation in some world.
"changing in the past" can be regarded as looking into a previous world following a different path.
Or if only looking is not enough for you, perhaps there is a mechanism that your consciousness slips into your body in a parallel world.

Nonetheless paradoxes may also occur in this scenario.
I didnt thought about it in depth.
But of course this looking into parallel worlds are also events to regard.
Hmm, to lazy to construct an example, your turn :wink:

But now that I think about it... maybe this is what is happening at the quantum-mechanical level in vacuum, where things pop in and out of existence within the allowed Planck unit of time.


Yeah, I am always fascinated that in this microscopic world there is no entropy, it seems as if entropy is merely introduced by statistics. Any arguments against or for this point? (Has also to do with direction of time ... :? )
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Postby quickfur » Sun Jan 22, 2006 1:42 am

bo198214 wrote:
quickfur wrote:But now that I think about it... maybe this is what is happening at the quantum-mechanical level in vacuum, where things pop in and out of existence within the allowed Planck unit of time.


Yeah, I am always fascinated that in this microscopic world there is no entropy, it seems as if entropy is merely introduced by statistics. Any arguments against or for this point? (Has also to do with direction of time ... :? )

I'm not qualified to give an exact answer... but I will present a wild hypothesis that has almost no basis in fact, but it's fascinating. :wink:

< gets on soapbox >

If we look at history, or at any sufficient large group of people, it seems that their cumulative actions can be approximated by statistical distributions, even if there is no way we can practically keep track of each and everyone's actions individually. In other words, on the individual scale, our actions may be very unpredictable (at least relative to a model that has to try to explain everybody's actions), but the cumulative result at the social level is something that has well-defined statistical tendencies.

Now, what if the macroscopic world is really just the result of statistical tendencies of a microscopic world that is far, far, more complex than we'd imagined? Perhaps elementary particles, rather than having no substructure, are almost sentient-like entities, each having its unique attributes, and interacting with others in complex ways that we can't even begin to imagine. However, from our macroscopic point of view, each particle behaves in a statistically-predictable manner - because over the course of hundreds of thousands of microscopic actions that we have no way of observing directly, it all results in the cumulative tendencies that we observe.

The scale at which the "granularity" of the individual actions begin to surface may well be near the Planck scale, where things begin to be "fuzzy" and strange QM features begin to surface.

In fact, individual particles may not even have actual existence, but are merely the result of the statistical tendencies of the system underlying it. Just as water waves may be thought of as energy packets, but really are the cumulative result of the interactions of individual water molecules, so perhaps the matter wave really is just the cumulative result of the myriad interactions of the elements of some unobservable medium. This medium, for all we know, may not even "obey" the laws of space and time: space and time may very well be the statistical result of this medium, which is subject to laws far beyond our capability to ever discover.

So, apparently paradoxical QM interactions such as the collapsing of the quantum wave even over large distances, etc., are really very normal things that arise from perfectly consistent interactions of this underlying medium; they only appear strange because we're falsely assuming that particles and waves as we observe them actually exist as entities in themselves, whereas the reality is that they are merely the manifestations of a system that, due to its internal interactions, always results in phenomena that obey QM "laws", but the system itself is not bound by the observed macroscopic rules of space and time. (As an analogy, think of how an individual in a large group may decide to do something really out-of-the-box and bizarre ("breaking" QM rules), but if most of the others in the group continue to follow the general trend of things, then that unusual action merely pales into insignificance when the cumulative actions of the group are summed up (we never observe anything breaking any rules at the macroscopic level).)

It could very well be that this underlying system, whatever you want to call it, contains actual infinities interacting with each other in ways we can't begin to imagine. Just think of things like the Electro-weak theory, where you have to play mathematical stunts to get around the fact that the sum over all possible paths results in infinite quantities. Perhaps in the underlying system, these paths are actually taken by an infinite number of entities, and some rule exists that causes most (or all but one) of them to cancel out (i.e., have no net effect) so that only the observed possibilities are left.

< gets off soapbox >

OK I have no idea where I'm going with this, but I thought it's an interesting hypothesis. :P
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Postby wendy » Sun Jan 22, 2006 10:04 am

Quantum fluctuations, even on an instant-style scale, ought leave behind a spectral noise that can be detected over long distances.

The state is that we can not detect any noise resulting from the existance of quantum events: we must assume these do not happen as a large-scale event.

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Postby bo198214 » Sun Jan 22, 2006 12:25 pm

@quickfur

Sounds really familiar to me :)
But I can even put something on top of this.
What if the regular and predictable behaviour of things at the macroscopic scale (i.e. celestial bodies) is only due to our limited time of observation (i.e. some thousand years). And in reality (i.e. over some millions or billions of years) they show a much more individual behavior :o

@wendy
"ought" means according to which theory?
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Postby jinydu » Sun Jan 22, 2006 8:52 pm

bo198214, it is possible to observe events from millions or billions of years in the past. Just ask an astronomer!
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Postby bo198214 » Sun Jan 22, 2006 8:56 pm

I know that, but you cannot observe one certain body over the time of millions of years.
Its a difference only to see an old snapshot and to see a specific development.
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Postby faranya » Tue Jan 24, 2006 10:38 pm

Alright, we talked about the going back stuff, now what about the idea of stopping time for everything but you? I know it's a fictional idea, but still, how would things change if you stopped time for everything but you? Would you be able to draw in air? If you threw something, how long would it move for? Could you even move it? Wouldn't the air create huge amounts of friction if you tried to move through it? Sorry about all the questions, but you seem to know some "answers" to them
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Postby thigle » Wed Jan 25, 2006 12:58 am

stopping time for everything but you equals to running time for nothing but you. this ain't fictional idea, psychonauts through all eras have been bringing back accounts of time-experiences ranging from extreme of 'infinite time' or 'eternity', to no time or time-stopping, zero time. check out metod saniga's physics of endotime to gain insight into these modalities of space-times. give a try to some mind-altering methods/techniques to experience clearly these variations in the modality of space-time structure, which is what people like Popper require: a repeatable testing.

space and time are not pregiven transcendental 'objective' forms that format all experience necessarily. space-time structuring is (not only) socially constructed. we should free ourselves from Kantian metaphysics and see how time-space matrix feeds on mutual causation with consciousness.

noone can travel faster than light. and still, many do. :D
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Postby jinydu » Wed Jan 25, 2006 5:39 am

faranya wrote:Alright, we talked about the going back stuff, now what about the idea of stopping time for everything but you? I know it's a fictional idea, but still, how would things change if you stopped time for everything but you? Would you be able to draw in air? If you threw something, how long would it move for? Could you even move it? Wouldn't the air create huge amounts of friction if you tried to move through it? Sorry about all the questions, but you seem to know some "answers" to them


You can make time appear to run arbitrarily slowly for things around you simply by travelling close to the speed of light (relative to those things around you). And unlike the delusions induced by hallucinogens, this effect is real; look up "time dilation".
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Postby thigle » Wed Jan 25, 2006 1:48 pm

also look up "time contraction" that's the other pole to "time dilation"

actually jin, the nature of time has not been fully grasped by whatever science you wanna back up with. it is as probable as not that to understand the timing dynamics in their fullness, your "objective" science of (exo)physics will have to expand its domain of inquiry and action into internal symmetry spaces of (endo)physics. otherwise, it's like trying to understand ocean dynamics from analysis of water molecules (or still subtler elements of analysis).

you seem to be so proud of physics. are you even aware of its shadows ? and what about its edgy fore-runners ? you should take a better look at past and future of the domain you cherish so much. take einstein for exemple, who was not so much of a mathematician or physicist as he was a historian of his chosen disciplines, taking 9 years to synthetize all the bits and pieces he digged from then-obscure literature into his theory - his seeing of the state of affairs in those domains.

look up ENDOPHYSICS on the web, and please finally include yourself in your world-picture.

+: your use of "real" is holo-scientifically inadequate.
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Postby PWrong » Thu Jan 26, 2006 6:13 pm

also look up "time contraction" that's the other pole to "time dilation"

Nope, the terms are time dilation and length contraction.

take einstein for exemple, who was not so much of a mathematician or physicist as he was a historian of his chosen disciplines, taking 9 years to synthetize all the bits and pieces he digged from then-obscure literature into his theory - his seeing of the state of affairs in those domains.

Sorry to be contradictory, but Einstein was a physicist. He wasn't much different from any other physicist, except he was better.

look up ENDOPHYSICS on the web, and please finally include yourself in your world-picture.

A quote from the Wikipedia article on endophysics:
In particular, research focused on mathematical models of the observer and of their interactions with the universe.


My problem with most time machines is that they seem to work inside out. You go inside, and when you come out there's dinosaurs everywhere. You don't change, the universe does. Obviously that's not going to work. Any real time machine has to change things on the inside.

The machine I described before works entirely on accepted physics, and it only changes the inside of the machine. Of course, the inside might be a planet or a solar system.

The only problem is, before you can make something 1000 years younger, you have to close it off from the universe for 1000 years. Otherwise small influences from outside will lead to large changes, and pretty soon entropy will start increasing again.

So you could live in an airtight box with plenty of oxygen, food and water for 20 years, then reverse every particle inside the box. After 20 years, you'll be the same age as when you went inside. Not much point really, is there?
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Postby bo198214 » Thu Jan 26, 2006 6:26 pm

Sorry, PWrong, I asked you for a definition of a time machine and am still waiting. (I think a time machine isnt consistently definable, and in that direction I wanted to point with my examples.)
What you describe is changing the universe to a state that it reached before some time. But actually its in this state at a later time. To define a time machine you need a second time axis.
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Postby houserichichi » Thu Jan 26, 2006 6:57 pm

Could you not define a "time machine" as everything in the same inertial frame of reference as you while you approach the speed of light (and, in all the sci-fi books, surpass it)?

Anyone understand what I'm trying to get at?
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Postby faranya » Fri Jan 27, 2006 12:38 am

So, your endophysics would state that it's possible to, like on TV shows, to stop time and manipulate other items in the universe? Just trying to understand what you mean by it...
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Postby thigle » Fri Jan 27, 2006 2:34 pm

not exactly. firstly it's not 'my' endophysics. people like David Finkelstein and others have coined the term for quite some time.

here are some links you can use as stepping stones if you're interested:

a workshop on endophysics: http://www.ta3.sk/~msaniga/ZiF_05/index.html
2 interesting books: http://www.worldscibooks.com/chaos/3183.html, http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/5947.html
quantum philosophy: http://www.qpt.org.uk/ look for endopysics
also, wikipedia has a simple entry on endophysics.

actually, thinking that you can 'stop' the 'time' and manipulate things meanwhile is contradictory and cannot hold. if 'time' is taken to mean an objective attribute of that what is, then once it stops, EVERYTHING (your timing included) stops. in such a worldview, one single time holds same for all. the famous time-arrow...

however, if this cartesian order of objectivity is understood to be fundamentally incomplete, and the whole of what appears to us is included in our inquiry, we expereince clearly that not only is there so called 'objective' timeflow, there is also multiPliCity of internal timings, from inside of consciousnesses perceiving the timespace. this is what Husserl was apprehendeing in Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness.

the thing is that even though the objective time seems to be irreversible on the physical plane, the perceptual coordination that we bring to the open plenum of existence is nevertheless formatting our experience into a specific modality of spacetime. these geometries of internal/subjective (space)times have been classified already :D check for exemple one of the FOREMOST world authorities on time-related matters: http://www.astro.sk/~msaniga/
this is a Time explorer par excellence. especially relevant to our discussion are :
http://www.chronos.msu.ru/EREPORTS/saniga_psychopathology.htm - on psychopathology of time and its algebraic geometrical patterns
http://www.astro.sk/~msaniga/pub/ftp/nonord.pdf check out page 22 ! (for a classification of a whole gradient of pencil-borne spacetimes)
in WiredNews (may23.2002) under name of Anybody Really Know What Time Is? (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52703,00.html), he states: "Pathology in time is always accompanied with a pathology of space, in a sense that space either loses dimensions or acquires other dimensions,"..."When time seems to stop, people often feel as if space becomes two-dimensional. On the other hand, when the subject feels they perceive the past, present and future (all at once), they simultaneously have the impression that space has infinite dimensions."
...at the first Nature of Time workshop, Saniga described these states as two forms of what he calls a "pure present" experience. In one case the present is indefinitely frozen, while in the other the present seems to encompass both past and future events as well.


this (very roughly summed up) view allows one to discern clearly what usually is radically mixed: objective time and subjective time. 'Proper' physics (which is completely improper due to its massive and obvious incompleteness) would reduce all time into objective time. (actually it reduces EVERYTHING to objective status, before allowing it to officially enter the inquiry-field of physics-domain).
funny thing is that the agent of this reductive action - the generic thinking physicist without fresh paradigmatic upgrade - is reduced to objectivity as well. however, each living subject is an autopoietic system and surely cannot fit wholly/completely under objective label.

because of this inadequacy of objectifying methodics to include all relevant phenomena: for exemple the observer, the living agent of physics, with the aspects of his being (that do not fit the objectivizing paradigm of reductive physics) crossed out, many relevant distinctions has been forced out of focus. that is why physics as it officially stands is so stupid, although (almost) infinitely refined: its makers ignore themselves. thus this officially physics is just exoPhysics: no really real life into physics allowed.

but after all, timing as we experience it, is internal (endo) aspect of manifestation, and all things/entities//eventities/instantatons 'roll' from within. if you check out Herman Weyl's book 'Space Time Matter', you can see even just from the cover where the actual time is: within. it appears outwardly, but that is due to our misapprehension and habitual interfacing... also, old greeks second kind of movement waas circular. this didn't mean (as is usually interpreted) limit of circle or a tautological paradox. this was apprehension of internal feedbacking of time.

to sum up my position, it is useless to try to stop objective time (let's call it exoTime), without first understanding the realm and dynamics of our own internal time - endoTime. our consciousness (which classical physics cannot explain at all) is an interdimensional vehicle - an intraStellar spaceship ! it has a time-travel function on its navigation panels (if you look well).

but though it's not so hard to learn to navigate ourselves through the unseen dimensions of space, it is surely harder to navigate out of lightcones. but not impossible.

internal as well as external time has a projective structure. RP1 are enough for both ordinary exoSpaceTime, as well as for the internal symmetry spaces of endoTimeSpace.

:wink:
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Postby jinydu » Sat Jan 28, 2006 1:14 am

After glancing through the "Wired" article, it seems you have misrepresented Saniga's position. Quoting from that article:

"This week, about 50 scientists gather in the Slovakian town of Tatranska Lomnica for a four-day workshop to explore this issue. Addressing psychological, mathematical, physical and "borderline" research, the event is a crossroads of disciplines and paradigms.

For instance, Metod Saniga of the Slovak Academy of Sciences combines mathematical models and pathology reports of schizophrenic, drug-induced and other abnormal perceptions of time."

In other words, he was studying the ways in which people become deluded into having thoughts and perceptions such as time stopping and space having two dimensions. While this may be interesting to a physiologist or neuroscientist, it says nothing about the true nature of time and space.

Furthermore, thigle, you criticize "objective methods", but offer no serious arguments against it, other than a viscercal dislike. So let me say this outright:

Centuries of scientific study conclusively show that objective methods are fully adequate and entirely appropriate for describing the natural world.

The achievements of "objective science" are immense and form the foundation of modern life: Newton's Laws, Maxwell's Laws, the Laws of Thermodynamics, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics... They have given humanity engines, electricity, computers, spaceships, airplanes; the list could fill hundreds of pages.

Your "endotime" is merely an imperfect, at times distorted, perception of an objective phenomenon known as time. More accurate measurements of time can be obtained using machines such as watches, pendulums, atomic clocks, etc. The way time seems to "speed up" when one is happy has nothing at all to do with the real nature of time and everything to do with the way the human brain works.
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Postby moonlord » Sat Jan 28, 2006 7:09 pm

I think this is as when the same thing jet car pilots said time seems to slow down when they ride. 1100 km/h is way below light speed, so I don't see any relativistic coming in (it would speed up time for the pilot, anyway)...
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Postby jinydu » Sat Jan 28, 2006 8:57 pm

moonlord wrote:I think this is as when the same thing jet car pilots said time seems to slow down when they ride. 1100 km/h is way below light speed, so I don't see any relativistic coming in (it would speed up time for the pilot, anyway)...


1100 km/h is slower than the speed of light by a factor of about 1.019 * 10^-6.

Thus, according to the time dilation formula, the jet pilot will observe time on Earth "slowing down" by a factor of about 1 + (5.194 * 10^-13)

This effect is very, very small, far too small to be detected without special scientific equipment. At those speeds, it would take over 61,000 years for a difference of a single second to appear.

There is a far simpler explanation for why time seems to "slow down" for jet pilots: The human brain's perception of time becomes distorted when under stress.
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Postby thigle » Sun Jan 29, 2006 1:15 am

well jin, as so seldom, you don't get it. :? did you really looked though Saniga's papers or just that Wired glam-news. there is some deep and interesting math there that i though you might appreciate. but whatever.

i mean your inquiry is completely valid. objectivist method is valid. BUT it overestimates the vastness of its domain of validity and thus misapplies itself to questions that are beyond its logical frame. i don't know what's so difficult to understand about that. i am not saying and never did that we should discard the objectivistic method, or abolish it completely. all i am saying is what is so obvious to anyone at least partly aware of his own methodics (in any domain), and that is that from self-reflexive (self-aware) mode onwards, objectivistic paradigm is inadequate for grasping the wholeness of any datum.

and don't forget that apart from all the theories and resulting gadgets and technological extensions of human senses ( which surely are potentially great achievements), the impact of human scientification/technologisation has not only brought a lot of nihilism, logocentrism and many other negative attributes to the general pattern of the internal dynamics of human experiencing process (called often mind - for brevity's sake), but is also deeply endangering the very presence of presence of (diversity) of life on this planet.
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Postby jinydu » Sun Jan 29, 2006 8:49 am

I do not claim that what you call "objectivist methods" (admittedly, I've taken many math and science classes, and I've never heard any professor use that term to describe his work) can answer every question. But I would make two claims:

1) Such methods are more reliable and accurate than "non-objectivist methods". Thus, if they can be used, they should be used; and any conclusions drawn from them should override conclusions drawn from "non-objectivist methods".

2) Questions that cannot be answered using what you call objectivist methods cannot be answered with certainty. It is necessary to either make unverifiable assumptions, allow logically shaky arguments, or rely on vague "feelings" that cannot be understood. In most cases, such questions are uninteresting to me.

It is also true that scientific discoveries have been misused, but the fault lies not with science, but with human flaws. After all, it is politicians who order bombings, not scientists.
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Postby PWrong » Sun Jan 29, 2006 3:59 pm

Thigle, why are you talking about philosophy in a thread about time travel? And posting 6 links to almost irrelevent websites in one post? Still, I like philosophy and some of your ideas are interesting. There's a few things I'd like to say about endophysics and objectivism. I realise this is a bit hypocritical after the "two black holes" thread, but could we split this topic first?

Now, bo198214 asked me for a definition of time travel and it's about time I gave him one (or tried to).
Sorry, PWrong, I asked you for a definition of a time machine and am still waiting. (I think a time machine isnt consistently definable, and in that direction I wanted to point with my examples.)


I think I'd have to agree with you there. There are many kinds of time travel, and the only thing they really have in common is that they're currently impossible.

I'm not sure if my "entropy reversal" idea is new, but to me it seems more plausible than standard time travel. The problem is it wouldn't be as useful as standard time travel. You couldn't actually "go back in time", but you could change an object back to the way it was 100 years ago, by making its entropy (disorder) decrease.
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Postby thigle » Mon Jan 30, 2006 1:41 am

@ jinydu:
_quote: 'what you call "objectivist methods" (admittedly, I've taken many math and science classes, and I've never heard any professor use that term to describe his work)...'

you know, generally, living systems are not aware of their milieu (we don't consider air when it's in its 'ordinary, normal' state (not too humid or hot/cold or toxic, or whatever). in the same way, it is often said that fish don't perceive the water where they dwell for the time of their life.
unfortunately, not too many professors are good at methodological issues, and therefore unaware of the background unconscious habitual structuring of their experience that comes from the enculturisation process.

_quote: 'Such methods are more reliable and accurate than "non-objectivist methods". Thus, if they can be used, they should be used; and any conclusions drawn from them should override conclusions drawn from "non-objectivist methods". '

according to what value-system ? according to what order or hierarchy of importance ? according to usability ? use for what aims ? can you even ponder backwards ? your methodologics are unfounded. but keep it if you like it shaky (though i thought you don't).

_quote: 'Questions that cannot be answered using what you call objectivist methods cannot be answered with certainty. It is necessary to either make unverifiable assumptions, allow logically shaky arguments, or rely on vague "feelings" that cannot be understood. In most cases, such questions are uninteresting to me. '

determinism, certainty, verification (which just a simple level of understanding of Truth), dual logic, and rationality are what you cherish. a child of aristotelian tradition.
that's why complexities and paradoxes of actual (not real, or possible, or virtual) life are unintersting to you. how old are you, btw ? (just curious.)

_quote: 'It is also true that scientific discoveries have been misused, but the fault lies not with science, but with human flaws. After all, it is politicians who order bombings, not scientists.'

i don't want to believe you are authentic and serious with this. :( after all, without bombings invented, noone could order them, right ? the bombings (which is anyway not what i had in mind primarily when accusing western indo-european tradition of logocentrism&nihilism) didn't invent themselves, or self-assembled.
you cannot be serious, you surely are kidding us and yourself as well. i would never say you're sucha tricksta. :wink:

@ PWrong:well, i admit to have (and fancy) some diffused domain boundaries in my knowledge field. but boundaries are where the things start from.
i am an artist. you know, i am not payed by any academy or whatever. i create, collaborate with (more 'social' friends) and live out of that. free thinking, unbound, is my cherished experiential modality. but i am deeply immersed in the cultural oceans of this and past ages of human thought, expression and action.
and these are the times when i think the boundaries between the disciplines will collapse. i personally am working in the collapsed mode almost permanently, i prefer the open field allowing for free transdisciplinary associations.

i mean, there are schemas beyond the domain-specific one. but ok.

definition of time-travel. hmm. depends on what time is taken to stand for. we surely all agree now that there ain't much agreement on what time is. my time-travel conception surely is not mechanistic nor reductivist (changing the time parameter of a 'body' into other than now and acting there to alter 'future'. how a simple simple conception. a prime exemple of misapplying sequential, linear mode of thinking onto non-linear phenomenon.
if time is thought to be open to be traversed backwards, then past present and future must be considered one non-orientable continuum. therefore not only the past have happened already, but all of the time (future included) already unfolded. its flow is then negative suction from the future. you can take the last paragraph to be partly speculative.

your entropy reversal idea, well, Prigogine got Nobel price for work on reversed (negative) entropy (he called it 'dissipative structuring' or something), so it's prolly not wholly new ? . but still 'underground', or off the academic radar.
btw, there is a specific exemple of what you give as an exemple:
some of the medusae living on this planet have been found to be able to 'collapse' their personal evolutionary 'time-arrow' and mutate spontaneously back into their adolescent phase. their genetic ordering is wholly rewritten and they start from their youth againg, all 'anew'. so these organisms are virtually immortal. (well scientist don't know, but they suppose that these medusae might be living possibly hundreds, or even thousands of years, by non-finally climaxing life-cycle. once they reach what might be taken as medusae's old-age, they get young again by mutating backwards 'in time'. now surely we ain't talking exoTime, are we. 'immortal-jellyFish time'. :P
.
also, to cut this ramble of mine, time ain't exclusively linear shit, i claim. it is also a frequency, or a cycling structure. qualitative & parallel rhytms of alocal cultural coherence are abundand thorough the human history and personal histories. cycling invisible abstract structures roll with/on the linear time. time also cannot do without fractality, but that would be considered off-topic by some.

so how do one time-travel in a universe with circular time ?

.

ok not to 'spam' other issue-specific threads with diffused thinking, i am starting a new thread in question & answers, under the name 'nD epistemo-,onto-& methodo- logies and other meta-issues' . :lol:
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Postby bo198214 » Sat Feb 04, 2006 10:03 pm

jinydu wrote: it is the logical conclusion of centuries of science

I gave you hard arguments, why consciousness cannot concluded by observation (i.e. objective methods) and got no answer.
To continue path of ignorance is your choice.
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Postby moonlord » Thu Feb 09, 2006 4:01 pm

I've just seen 'The Butterfly Effect' movie last night and seemed a plausible way of dealing with time travel, however only to a limited extent. What do you think?
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Postby bo198214 » Thu Feb 09, 2006 4:44 pm

moonlord wrote:I've just seen 'The Butterfly Effect' movie last night and seemed a plausible way of dealing with time travel, however only to a limited extent. What do you think?


Unfortunately I didnt see the movie, so I cannot say.
But its a good reminder on the subject of this thread.
So lets discuss our previous topic in the new thread subjectivity/objectivity.
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