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FullCircle -> RE: What If? (9/19/2007 1:24:08 PM)
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They say that you can only go back to the date the time machine was built and not prior to this date. I’m not sure why they say that but I think it has something to do with the fact no one has come back to us from the future in a time machine yet. If you invented a time machine you’d expect yourself to travel back and give yourself the blueprints at an earlier age but no one has yet.
If you are to take the theory of relativity literally then time travel is indirectly possible. The faster you travel the slower time becomes and this has been proven with atomic clocks; one on a plane one on the ground. So you travel at a high speed and you therefore slow down the world around you to the point where you can arrive at your destination before you leave. So if you see a pile of blood and guts appear out of no where, one possible explanation is that you are about to step into an experimental time machine and the forces due to travelling beyond the speed of light took its toll on your body somewhat. If you see the pile of blood and guts beside you appear and so change your mind about the journey before you, does the pile of blood and guts ever appear?
Personally I love the ideas of paradoxes that time machines bring up. There is the famous one about going back in time and killing yourself therefore how do you go back in time and kill yourself? They say this is what parallel universes were created for; to deal with such paradoxes. How nice, I'm not killing myself but another me...
I’m no expert on the mathematical equations involved but it always seemed odd to me that just because people witnessed time slow down that the natural progression for this was for time to start going backwards. I see the relationship between the rate that time slows down for an object and the speed at which the object is travelling as being more like a exponential decay curve with the rate of passage of time getting close to zero but never quite reaching it.
Not that I want to spoil peoples dreams but there seems too much that depends on time moving progressively forward for it to ever realistically stop. The atomic clock on the plane slowed down but the interesting question for me is what the extent of that effect was? Did time slow down in the plane, one mile around the plane, two miles around the plane? It might just be me being thick but I can’t understand how various time differences can all exist at once, there must be some kind of rebalance and that didn’t occur when the clocks were brought back together. Is some of the air I’m breathing slightly out of time from the rest because it went through a jet engine? I don’t even want to start thinking about what time zone photons are in.
bla bla etc.[:D]
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