Time Travel

[BreakABone]

TV, movies and comics all love the concept of time travel in one fashion or another.

IT just gives me a headache to be honest but curious what is everyone's thoughts on time travel.
Is it possible?
If it is what school do you believe in a fluid time where one event effects another or a fixed path where life is unchanging?
Do you believe that events that happened because someone time travelled will always have happened if the person never time travelled.

I don't know just something been thinking about since a certain show returned. ;)

[Teuthida]

As far as I know the most plausible way to time travel is to open a worm hole and then sometime later open a connecting one which should allow you to travel back to the point the first one was opened. Other than that I'm not sure about going further back or into the future. Well I suppose you could go into the future through that same wormhole if someone opened a connecting one up later on.

I think there are infinite timelines based on every little change leaving the future as fluid. So say a psychic can accurately predict something, one should be able to change that future from happening.

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Getting rid of time travel was the best move Heroes ever made.

[Nighthawk]

You invent a time machine, go back in time and kill yourself, but that means you have never time traveled because you were dead, so you never actually came from the future and killed yourself, so actually you did invent the time machine and intended to kill yourself, you killed yourself in the past, but that means you have never time traveled because--

[Bube]

Ok, so think about this:

Remember when Daniel told Desmond the coordinates (or something) back in the 4th season, and wanted him to pass it on to the past-Daniel? Then Daniel uses those coordinates to come to the island. But how could he have learned the coordinates without ever going to the island in the first place? And how could he have got to the island without knowing the coordinates?

And there was also something about the rat in Dan's lab as well, but can't remember it right now..

Time travel sucks.

[Bond]

Time travel sucks.
I agree. Time travel gives me a headache every week when LOST airs.

[Bube]

I agree. Time travel gives me a headache every week when LOST airs.
lol, i agree :D That was the reason I said it sucks :)

[BreakABone]

Time Travel in general gives me a headache.

Heroes seems to follow a fluid belief of time travel where you can prevent the past to change the future which means there has been a lot of time travelling and showing what may or may not happen.

Also we have sight seers so you have people trying to prevent fates they know by avoiding them but running smack into them. Would it have happened if they didn't know?

X-MEn which I'm sure Heroes took its cues from also suffers from a similar fate which is made even worse when you got parents hanging out with their future offsprings.

[manasecret]

Future time travel is definitely possible. We all do it everyday, every time you get in a car and drive, every time you walk to the fridge, you're time traveling to the future. The time difference is just too small to notice.

If, however, you got into a very fast spaceship, something nearing the speed of light, then you would easily notice the time difference. Time traveling to the future is part and parcel with Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Time traveling to the past is when things get kooky.

[KillerGremlin]

Anyone see the video on the 10th dimension?

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I'm sure it's flawed, inaccurate, and simplified to a flaw....but for people like me who suck at physics it's like a drug trip without the euphoric awesomeness :p

Anyway, time travel is awesome. Back to the Future, Terminator, 12 Monkeys...

There is always that paradox, "if time travel was possible wouldn't someone from the future have come back by now." But, how can they come back if time travel hasn't been invented yet?

I dunno, in my basic physics 101 class my prof said time behaves like a vector that moves in one direction. Wouldn't surprise me if theories of time travel can somehow be supported using complex math.

[Typhoid]

Time travel is easily possible, just not in the reasonable concepts TV and movies put it into.

As someone stated below, every time you basically move anywhere - you're traveling forward in time.

If you go into space, and remain there for long periods of time, and then come back to Earth, you will have aged at a less rapid rate than people on the planet.


To travel in time is to travel faster than the speed of light, and since everything has a mass, minus light - and in order to go faster you need to produce more energy in relation to how much mass you have, you will need an infinite amount of energy even if you have relatively no mass.

Now, there is a theory that states something like :

Picture a piece of paper, put a dot at one end, and a dot at the other. It would take a long time to draw a line between those two dots as is - but if you fold the paper up, and line the dots up and poke a hole through the paper - you're instantly at the other dot, and didn't have to go through the middle of the paper.

Demetri Martin said it best: "I have a time machine at home. But it only travels forward in time, at normal speed. It's more just like a cardboard box with 'Time Machine' written on it."

[Angrist]

I think it's bullocks. Time is not a dimension, it's a name. Stuff doesn't stay the same because it changes, so we say time passes. It's not like you can move back in a dimension.

The past is gone. The future doesn't exist yet. There is no paper with a line on it. There's just 1 point, the present. Does it move? In comparison to what? There is nothing else to move in, so you might as well say it doesn't move.


But I absolutely love time travel in entertainment media. :D I love finding the silly paradoxes.

[BreakABone]

I don't like Angrist's definition.
Makes time seem so dull.
I mean the only point that ever exists is the present?
Bleh!

[GameMaster]

People from the future who travel back to our time abide by a code that insists that they keep their travel a secret from us. Everyday, we walk among beings from the future. They dress themselves to look like us because if we knew when they were from, it would cause pandemonium.

[Typhoid]

I think it's bullocks. Time is not a dimension, it's a name.


Actually, time isn't a name, it is a dimension. Clock time is made up, we created that - however we did not make up the progression of time.

Remember, just because we can't do something yet, doesn't mean it isn't possible.

[Fox 6]

Time is a dimension.

A brief history of time by Stephen Hawking, you should look into it.


Black holes have so much gravity that they are theorized to even suck in time.

[KillerGremlin]

If you guys watch the video I posted, it sort of touches on time as a "dimension."

In Mechanics we treated time as a vector quantity. I'm not sure how you would treat time as a spatial dimension? My math sucks, I took Calc 3 and peaced out of engineering. Calc 3 is where you start to learn about the fun stuff, like the 4th dimension.

Anyway, in most senses time is a unit of measurement between two points. Humans like to have a START----------END.

I always am inclined to wonder, is time infinite?

[Typhoid]

Time is not a spatial dimension, however spacetime is.

[Angrist]

That 10th dimention video was interesting, but I still don't see time as a dimension.

I can believe in a 4th dimension, but it has to be something we don't know. Not something we already know, but always moves at the same pace in the same direction.

Let's say we lived in the 2nd dimension. Would we be able to see the 3rd dimension, while we couldn't change it or move through it? No, we wouldn't be aware of the 3rd dimension.
Which reminds me, time would also exist in a 2D or 1D world. They'd think that time was the 3rd or 2nd dimension. We'd laugh at them.

I've read about the theories. About the time-space continuum. It's why you can't throw a ball fast and in an arch. Or through it slow and in a straight line. Fun theory, but there are much more plausible alternatives.

I've been wanting to read Einstein's relativity theory. Haven't gotten around to it. Sure sounds interesting, but it still wouldn't prove that you can go back in time.

[Szymon]

My understanding of time is a straight line on a large open field. I move along this straight line, not being able to stray from it, slow down or speed up. If I were walking down a line on a field, I could move faster or slow down and stop, or I could break off from the line and move any direction I want to.

What does this mean? It means that time isn't really tangible, like an open field. We don't move through time like we walk on a plane, otherwise we would be able to stray from the line, speed up or slow down. We theorize that we can move from on physical point to another using worm holes, but if time isn't physical, is it possible to use a worm hole to do the same?

No fucking clue.

[Typhoid]

A wormhole isn't exactly transporting you instantly to a location far away - it's more like a hypothosized shortcut.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Worm3.jpg