Thanks to this thread I started my third rewatch of the series Seven Days, the last time I watched it was January 2023
The Nature of the Universe, Time Travel and More...
- Thread starter Will The Serious
- Start date
You are welcome.
I did not know what the series Seven Days is, but it sounds like Scifi at its best. I'll have to check it out. Thanks.
-Will
I did not know what the series Seven Days is, but it sounds like Scifi at its best. I'll have to check it out. Thanks.
-Will
A bit on time travel.
I came across this article, Is Time Trave Possible?
However, where the possibility of infinite parallel universes can exist, perhaps the act of traveling back in time and successfully killing your own grandfather would cause a split into two parallel universes where you, as the successful killer, would become trapped in a new branch universe as one with no grandfather because your origins were from a different place.
You killed the man who seemed destined to father your father or mother, but in this new universe, you were never born. You, on the other hand, still have your past, father, mother, grandfather, but they exist in another universe. No paradox, no disappearing from a loss of your past, just a separate timeline.
Now, how to get back from both the past and another universe?
Imagine the disappointment the time traveler might experience when returning to discover nothing has changed at all. Even any recorded data of the time traveler's presence in the past would cause a bifurcation of the time-line. The returned time traveler would not even be able to research an old newspaper clipping and find a reference to the event.
Unless!
This might be possible: What if that newspaper article did exist, but the time traveler didn't know it existed?
It might still be possible to affect the past as long as the information in the future, about the past, was a new discovery in the future's future. The time traveler's past always included the proof of time travel, it just hasn't been discovered.
Example: You travel into the past to invest in a stock you know has had a steep rise. You buy a bunch of certificates in your name, place them into a safety deposit box at a bank you use in your own time, then return to the original time.
You may be able to collect those stock certificates if you never knew they didn't exist. What if you never checked your safety deposit box before because, until you purchased the box in the past, you never realized you owned it. So there was no safety deposit box to know about, from your present day perspective. However, you return to your time with the key in your pocket and the new knowledge that you own the bank box, and the stocks. No paradox and you get rich.
Now, imagine time travel is possible, and that sometime in the future, someone will invent a time machine. As time travel advances, becomes cheaper, more commonly accessible, how likely is it you will be an ancestors of a future time traveler?
Let's hope you don't father the father of some psychopathic scientist hell bent on proving the Grandfather Paradox. However, if you prepared. You could tell your children to become scientist who study time travel. Tell them to raise younger scientists to discover time travel. Insist that their children, their children's children, and so on into the very distant future, as far as need be, all you future generations move towards the discovery of time travel and when they do...
Your future progeny should travel back in time to the date, Wednesday, the 8th of May, 2024, and teach you the secret of time travel.
There, time travel discovered in one day.
I'll let you know if I have any future generations that get into time travel. At this point, however, I doubt I will have any future generations after my own two kids, so maybe one of you should try.
-Will
I came across this article, Is Time Trave Possible?
This is my take on time travel, as well. The Grandfather Paradox is not a possible scenario because one's existence is proof that your past includes a surviving grandfather.
However, where the possibility of infinite parallel universes can exist, perhaps the act of traveling back in time and successfully killing your own grandfather would cause a split into two parallel universes where you, as the successful killer, would become trapped in a new branch universe as one with no grandfather because your origins were from a different place.
You killed the man who seemed destined to father your father or mother, but in this new universe, you were never born. You, on the other hand, still have your past, father, mother, grandfather, but they exist in another universe. No paradox, no disappearing from a loss of your past, just a separate timeline.
Now, how to get back from both the past and another universe?
Imagine the disappointment the time traveler might experience when returning to discover nothing has changed at all. Even any recorded data of the time traveler's presence in the past would cause a bifurcation of the time-line. The returned time traveler would not even be able to research an old newspaper clipping and find a reference to the event.
Unless!
This might be possible: What if that newspaper article did exist, but the time traveler didn't know it existed?
It might still be possible to affect the past as long as the information in the future, about the past, was a new discovery in the future's future. The time traveler's past always included the proof of time travel, it just hasn't been discovered.
Example: You travel into the past to invest in a stock you know has had a steep rise. You buy a bunch of certificates in your name, place them into a safety deposit box at a bank you use in your own time, then return to the original time.
You may be able to collect those stock certificates if you never knew they didn't exist. What if you never checked your safety deposit box before because, until you purchased the box in the past, you never realized you owned it. So there was no safety deposit box to know about, from your present day perspective. However, you return to your time with the key in your pocket and the new knowledge that you own the bank box, and the stocks. No paradox and you get rich.
Now, imagine time travel is possible, and that sometime in the future, someone will invent a time machine. As time travel advances, becomes cheaper, more commonly accessible, how likely is it you will be an ancestors of a future time traveler?
Let's hope you don't father the father of some psychopathic scientist hell bent on proving the Grandfather Paradox. However, if you prepared. You could tell your children to become scientist who study time travel. Tell them to raise younger scientists to discover time travel. Insist that their children, their children's children, and so on into the very distant future, as far as need be, all you future generations move towards the discovery of time travel and when they do...
Your future progeny should travel back in time to the date, Wednesday, the 8th of May, 2024, and teach you the secret of time travel.
There, time travel discovered in one day.
I'll let you know if I have any future generations that get into time travel. At this point, however, I doubt I will have any future generations after my own two kids, so maybe one of you should try.
-Will
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Update: Apparently not.
I Don't know if that means I don't grandfather future generations, or if it's just that none get to travel back in time. The good news is that no one has used me to prove the Grandfather Paradox possible.
-Will
Wall of text must be great drugs
My head can only really wrap around time travel being possible, but impossible to change anything because the entire thing would be a giant predestination paradox.
Considering time as a physical dimension one can move through, you can't really "change" it. I can just... move to it. If I travelled to the past, I... "always" travelled to the past, I always existed at that point. There was no "original timeline" or anything like that. If I was present at a point in time, I was present at that point in time. There's no possible way for me to not be present at that point.
The grandfather paradox then doesn't work because... my grandfather didn't die. No matter what I intend to do in the past, it doesn't change anything, because I already did it. "Before" I ever time travelled, I was already there in the past, because the past already happened, and if I was present in the past then I was always present in the past.
In that case, it's the same with the future... it already all exists. There's no changing the future. It's already there. Anything I do to try to change the future... I already did.
It has been postulated (by physicists such as David Deutsch) that all possible timelines exist, so if you go back in time, you're only affecting a timeline that is different from the one from which you came. In Einstein's Relativity theory, the past and future exist and are immutable, there are no such things as "now" and "universal time", and perception of timing depends on the frame of reference. The multiverse might be some multidimensional crystal through which our consciousnesses (or what we imagine as such) thread their ways.
"No man steps into the same river twice because the river is not the same and neither is the man."
"No man steps into the same river twice because the river is not the same and neither is the man."
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In one way, looking at time like that, there exists all past, all present, and all future at once. There is no flow, just changing one's position in time, exactly like 3 dimensional geography. All points exist at once, we just only see one point at a glance.
-Will
That just seems to "make sense" to me. The other three dimensions are just positions. They always exist. There's no "flow" to length, width, or height. They're just coordinates on a plane. Time just seems to also make sense as being another coordinate along another plane, so if you were able to navigate through the fourth dimension, you could simply move a coordinate along the plane. But that's also why you couldn't "change" anything... if I take a step back and then take a step forward, nothing about that axis changed. I can move all about in three dimensions and I won't change the dimension.
Now I suppose while I can't change the plane, I can change the properties of the location on that plane. I move to x position on the y axis, I can put an obstacle in the way or dig a hole or whatever. I suppose the same would be possible moving along the time axis... the coordinates would be the same, but the properties of the destination could prove different?
Time is relative. Past, Present, and Future are only really relevant to our perspective. "Time" is irrelevant, only the position on the plane is relevant. It's only relevant to us because we can't naturally manipulate that plane and are forced to travel along it continually in one direction at a fixed rate of speed... we DO know HOW to manipulate the plane to at least increase the speed at which we move along the plane in one direction.
Conversely, if time isn't just a fourth dimensional plane, and not really a dimension at all... it would be logical that time travel is just straight impossible because the ONLY thing that exists is "now". There is no past. There is no future. We perceive past and future, but they are nonexistent. "Time" is only now.
Relativity renders "now" impossible.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Finds Most Distant Known Galaxy
Apparently the picture of the Galaxy is 300 million years after the Big Bang & only ~1600 ly across.
And the small Galaxy is Super Bright/Massive for it's size / age.
Not bad given how little time it has formed, that brings into light ALOT of questions into existing Simulation Models.
Apparently the picture of the Galaxy is 300 million years after the Big Bang & only ~1600 ly across.
And the small Galaxy is Super Bright/Massive for it's size / age.
Not bad given how little time it has formed, that brings into light ALOT of questions into existing Simulation Models.
Article in New Scientist - paywalled unfortunately:
Here is the arXiv version of the paper on which the article is based:
A magnetic clock for a harmonic oscillator (arxiv.org)
with this abstract:
Here is another arXiv paper that posits that the initial universe was not entangled and was therefore timeless:
The Decoherent Arrow of Time and the Entanglement Past Hypothesis (arxiv.org)
Time may be an illusion created by quantum entanglement
Here is the arXiv version of the paper on which the article is based:
A magnetic clock for a harmonic oscillator (arxiv.org)
with this abstract:
The final paper was published as Phys. Rev. A 109, 052212 (2024) - Magnetic clock for a harmonic oscillator (aps.org) - again paywalled, I'm afraid.
Here is another arXiv paper that posits that the initial universe was not entangled and was therefore timeless:
The Decoherent Arrow of Time and the Entanglement Past Hypothesis (arxiv.org)
Quantum 'arrow of time' suggests early universe had no entanglement | New Scientist (paywalled)
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Time is different from the three physical dimensions in some significant ways.
Measuring the three coordinate dimensions, we typically use a physical measurement (i.e. we lay a rule across in two dimensions, then change axis to measure the other two directions. We also use time to measure distance. The speed of light, sound,... without time, we could not use those things to measure distance with.
With time, we must use the changes in physical distance against other changes in physical distance to measure time. We can not know time without a relative measure of a rate of change. Without the physical realm, there is no concept of time. However, I don't think I need a concept of time to know the physical world.
-Will
Right, but that is only because we don't have a natural ability to manipulate the time dimension. We can only observe it passively. A truly 4 dimensional being may not have such limitations and could measure time in the physical world...
Time being an emergent property is, of course, not a new idea. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation that attempts to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity is timeless with time arising from quantum entanglement and time evolution being interpreted as a gauge transformation. In a very loose sense, the equation describes all possible universal quantum wave functions that can arise as being fluctuations from nothingness. Even the ancient Greeks came up with a similar hypothesis. Zeno of Elea (ca. 490-430 BCE), a student of Parmenides, believed in monism, where reality is a single timeless entity and space, time, and motion are illusory.
To gainsay Leibnitz and Pangloss, this might not be the best of all possible worlds.
To gainsay Leibnitz and Pangloss, this might not be the best of all possible worlds.
