Time Travel Research....

Good day ATSers...

Came across this article today in my e-mail and thought it may well have a place on this forum.

www.spacedaily.com...

It is regarding a theoretical model for time travel or so they say, take a look and see what you think.

hmm, maybe John Titor was not a fake after all? Makes you wonder..

Originally posted by scarystuff
hmm, maybe John Titor was not a fake after all? Makes you wonder..

I'm not familiar with John Titor. Let me guess though, he was from the future ?

Kind of makes one think about the "time viewer" that they used in Dejavu. Hmmmm... OK so they could see into the past and eventually sent Denzel Washington into the past. But again, they sent a message to a desk in the past first BUT again, he shone one of those little lazer toy things on a pen into the past through the screen. So, regardless of the inconsistencies i guess they had the idea but, though nothing of the same existed in the past, used the "machine" to send him back. Was interesting none the less considering they used the "bending" process.

Hell if i was in the movie i would have just used a proxima to project the message onto the wall in the office considering light seemed to have passed through into that time - BUT then why did the light from the room they were in not pass though... again, inconsistency but ok, it was a good movie and i enjoyed it - i hate watching movies just to check continuity etc hehehe

Intresting stuff.

You might be intrested in this too, relating to a man who thinks he too can build a time machine.

Time travel man

Originally posted by Smugallo
It is regarding a theoretical model for time travel or so they say, take a look and see what you think.

Great find!

I've been studying the hell out of Time lately in trying to understand it for my upcoming podcast, and I have to say, this is a fascinating article. SpaceDaily's always got some of the best ones. However, I noticed a few problems in it that I'm not sure how Ori would respond to.

from Space Daily
That theory called for the time loop to form as a donut-shaped vacuum, inside which time would curve back on itself, so that a person traveling around the loop might be able to go further back in time with each lap. A sphere containing non-exotic, but unidentified matter, would in turn envelop the loop.

Later Ori says that dust would be the unidentified matter, and previous to this theory, they thought it'd have to be matter of a negative density. I'm not entirely sure why, though. It it's relativistic mass they're worried about, they've got bigger problems, because sending a person around what is effectively a giant centrigue, to the speed of light, would probably kill them.

I suppose what this works on, instead of speed, is gravity. But the gravitic forces required to create enough gravity to bend time in on itself would be so massive, I'd think those would crush the human as well as probably suck the entire planet up along with it.

This creates the practical problem of a gravity barrier that cannot be crossed, but supposedly Ori has found a way to nullify that problem with "a protected core". Shielding from the effects of gravity are beyond my comprehension, else I'd think it'd already have been utilized in an industrial capacity for creating rare earths.

Further, since all current evidence leads to the assumption that gravity is the 11th dimension, rather than a field, I don't even know that it can be shielded against. It'd be like trying to shield against height, or width, or length.

But, on the remote possibility that one could shield against gravity, wouldn't this then negate the very effect they were looking for? The core might loop time in on itself, but this effect would then be lost to the person moving about the interior of the donut.

from Space Daily
"If the proper initial conditions were achieved, the time machine would evolve on its own without any further intervention," says Ori, of the Technion Faculty of Physics. "It can be likened to shooting a ship with a cannon. Once the cannon is aimed properly and fired, the cannonball hits the ship on its own, driven solely by the laws of physics."

I don't know that this would necessarily be correct. Machines do not evolve without outside intervention, because they cannot breed selectively. I think what he's maybe assuming is that humans would continue work on the Time Loop in their present time, and that because of the closed-time loop properties, that this would give the effect of improving the donut throughout previous time and future time. Meaning, any changes made to the time loop throughout its entire existance would exist the instant after activation.

Two big problems with this that I can see.

1.) This also includes the eventual -destruction- of the time loop. Since everything eventually breaks down due to entropy, there will come an eventual point in time at which the physical donut is destroyed, either by man or nature's hand. This moment, too, will propagate along the entire timeline of the donut. what this unforutnately means is that as soon as the donut is activated, if it is truly successful, it would immediately be destroyed by it's own eventual end.

2.) This entire theory assumes that time is not only linear, but that it is also a constant. All present evidence points to the contrary. Time is relative to the observer depending on the speed travelled and distance travelled.

from Space Daily
"The machine is space time itself," he explains. "If we were to create an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves, it might enable future generations to return to visit our time. We, however, could not return to previous ages because our predecessors did not create this infrastructure for us."

While I do believe we'd need the infrastructure to exist as an "anchor point" for time travel before future generations can travel backwards as far as that anchor point, we might eventuall learn how to throw an anchor point further back, or operate without one. I don't see that happening without this first stepping stone, however.

By creating a closed loop, though, I think while it might be possible to create a closed loop of time, I think the prospect of entering it and leaving it more than once might prove impossible. Assuming it doesn't immediately destruct due to the "all points along the entire timeline of the donut time loop existing at once", problem, perhaps due to the tightening of the loop to the moments just after activation and just before destruction, which could, in fact be solved, this still leaves the problem of every moment in that loop of time existing forever (or until the donut is destroyed).

So the first test subject who walks in, leaves a trail of themselves, probably looking like a very strange play-doh snake with a cross-section shaped like himself, which would perpetually exist. The moment his foot touched down would exist forever, so would the next step, and all intermediate movements. Even after he exited the loop, were it possible, a nearly infinite number of himself would remain as a sort of smeared, overlapping trail, that would act as a physical barrier to the next test subject to walk through it, and so forth.

Further, this brings into existence the problem of two seperate masses occupying the same space at the same time, should the two come into contact. Would it create antimatter? Would it result in an explosion? If this destructive collision, or overlap was the eventual outcome of such an attempt at a time machine, it would happen almost instantly after creation of it, and it would create an explosion along the entire timeline of that donut's existance.

So if the "time donut" existed for 50 years before a matter/antimatter, or some similar type explosion occurred, it would, I would think, create an explosion that lasted for 50 years... that's a daunting thought.

I just don't know that closed time loops are the best approach to time travel. It seems way too risky, assuming it could even work in the first place.

I believe it is entirely impossible to back in time here on Earth. However, it is possible that we can go back in time if we went into space. Since many stars are so many light years away and if we had a vehicle that can travel faster than the speed of light, we would be able to go back in time to those far away stars.

Maybe teleportation would be used since it is impossible to travel at the speed of light. Teleportation can probably play a big part in time travel. We can already transport light into other areas through teleportation.

Great post thelibra, you have a much better grasp on this kind of thinking than i do, i must admit i find the idea of time travel truly astounding and mind boggling i am pretty positive that it probably may never be done even if the technology is developed. Lots and lots of paradoxical things could happen everything you change just open another can of worms if you get what i'm saying.

/EDIT
another article about Amos Ori

Time travel could be possible in the future...


IS there any correlation with the antigravity drive for space travel as mentioned here on ATS in another topic[couldnt find it], and what if that interstellar travelling also gets you back in time? like planet of the apes but then in reverse

Time travelling always reminds me of this quote[thought it was einstein]
" If time travel is possible how could it be, we never been visited by travellers from the future?"

[edit on 8-8-2007 by Foppezao]

[edit on 8-8-2007 by Foppezao]

Libra, my head hurts. I think I blew a gasket! Skipping all the quantum mechanics, theory, and science involved-what would be the purpose of traveling to the past? Observation? Doesn't simple observation of a thing change the outcome of what is being observed? Retroactive abortion? Go back and kill Stalin, Hitler, Nero, before they had/have a chance to become monsters?
Time travel would be a cool thing to do just to say humans are amazingly inventive but I can't imagine that any (ultimately) good thing could come from it. Of course, I may just have limited imagination.

Originally posted by Smugallo
i am pretty positive that it probably may never be done even if the technology is developed. Lots and lots of paradoxical things could happen everything you change just open another can of worms if you get what i'm saying.

Well, as best I can tell, "changing stuff in the past" would actually be a fairly minor event, because the physics of inertia is still very much a part of the world.

Most people view time as a line, perhaps even a branching line, and that each person's life occupies a certain segment of this line, segments overlap, but that ultimately each segment is like a link in the chain, and the breakage of one link snaps the whole chain and time must "re-create" itself into an entirely different existance.

However, from everything I'm reading about present theory, time is MUCH more like electrons circling an atom. Everyone has their own seperate bubble of time, moving at a different rate, and at varying distances from the observer. And when these individual time bubbles are in proximity to one another, they tend to bond and equalize to each other, to provide a common frame of reference.

An object might be made of countless trillions of atoms. The removal of any one atom is not likely to change anything that anyone would notice. The removal of hundreds of atoms might not even change it. In order to noticably change the object, one must first expend enough energy to unbond enough atoms.

In a similar fashion, human history is more of a collection of countless trillions of individual bubbles of time, bound together in a particular shape, each bubble taking an applicable amount of energy to shift, pop, or duplicate. You can't change the entire shape of human history by popping one bubble, two bubbles, or even a hundred bubbles. The countless other bubbles would simply rearrange themselves to fill in the gaps, and memory association (another fascinating subject) would create a new memory of the event based upon the available data.

For instance, World War II had the inertia of millions and millions of these bubbles behind it. The shape of it was predetermined by far more than just Hitler, but rather countless other factors, lives, economic, political, and social problems, and mounting tensions behind countries.

If you were to go back in time to attempt to shoot Hitler, one of two things would likely happen:

You would be unsuccessful, because the amount of energy require to "pop his bubble" would be far greater than the energy at your disposal. Your gun would misfire, you'd be killed by a passing soldier, you'd miss, your bomb would have been positioned on the opposite side of a support beam that shielded him from the majority of the blast, or something to that effect.

You would be succesful, but a new Hitler would rise up under a different name, within the same timeframe.

Because Hitler didn't start World War II, The WORLD started World War II. It was not the actions of a single man, but rather the culmination of actions, events, people, and situations, that needed nothing more than an inevitable catalyst.

So say you wanted to completely stop World War II to change history, and to do it, you took a neutron bomb back in time and blew it up in the middle of Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, the whole capital, leadership, and probably a good portion of Germany itself. The Neutron bomb would probably have sufficient energy to actually change the collective shape that all those bubbles formed... but most likely the change would involve the fall of Germany as a power, and then perhaps Soviet Russia occupying the role that Germany played instead... the end result still probably wouldn't be that vastly different. Most of the people whom are alive today would probably still be alive, but their family trees would be different, to account for whatever bubbles are left near enough for that time to bond to.

So instead of being John Smith from California, you are now John Tanaka from California. You still end up, through the subtle rearranging of bubbles to accomodate new bonds, going to the same school, having the same friends (who now have different parents) and have the same interests, and job and such, because all of these things happened within your own individual timeline. Technically, as far as your own time-bubble is concerned, who your parents are doesn't really matter.

However, with a large enough burst of energy to break apart that bubble, it would be likely that some bubbles would be thrown off, away from the time-shape of human history. I'm not sure what would happen to these bubbles, but my guess is that any bubbles that any bubbles dislodged from the "time shape" would either be drawn back in and readsorbed into the new shape, or if they were flung far enough outward that they would create pocket universes where the inhabitant(s) are unaware of their predicament. Time would effectively be "frozen" in that bubble until such time as another bubble were close enough for it to bond with and then form some common frame of reference.

For a final analogy of this scenario, I'd use music.

One bubble, alone, is like one note alone. It is nothing more than an otherwise meaningless tone, no matter how beautiful or off-key it is. Even it's timing has no relative value, because there's no other note for it to compare to. It is only when you add other notes before, after, or during the existing note, do they begin to take in a context. With each additional note, every note in the collection has more meaning, more definition as to its role in the overall musical piece.

Now if you could imagine, instead of reading the music as a sheet from star to finish, left to right, read it in a sphere, with all successive notes radiating outward from the center, in every direction, which is what gives us the "shape of time".

Originally posted by Foppezao
IS there any correlation with the antigravity drive for space travel as mentioned here on ATS in another topic[couldnt find it], and what if that interstellar travelling also gets you back in time? like planet of the apes but then in reverse

It's funny you mention that, but actually it would more than likely work the other way around. For instance, if we both wore matching watches set to 12:00, you stood still, and I put on a jet pack that could propel me at 669 million miles per hour, and at exactly one minute by my watch I hit a button that transported me back to your side, my watch would say 12:01, yours would say 12:08.

Now apply that to space travel. Spaceship travels out into the cosmos at just barely under light speed, for 10 years, to reach their destination. 80 years will have passed on Earth. If they turned right around and came back, at the same speed, the occupants of the space ship would only have aged a total of about 20 years. Everyone still on Earth would be long dead, and 160 years would have passed since their departure.

Now previously some people had thought that travelling Faster Than Light would enable one to reverse this trend (treating the speed of light as basically a 0 value axis). So that, if you could move at almost double the speed of light, 8 years for the traveller would be 1 year for the point they left at. This might even technically be the case, but the advantage of doing so would be questionable at best.

Since time is relative, and Earth and Planet X would be so far apart, they would each be experiencing their own seperate time shape. A year for Earth isn't going to be the same as a year for this other planet. So shipping something there faster might not even make a difference. However, let's pretend that it did.

What you would have is a method of travel that is so fast, it takes longer to experience the trip than the trip itself takes. The faster the trip at this point, the longer the trip. A year long trip at 2x light speed would feel like 8 years to a conscious observer. At 4x the speed of light, it'd be 16 years, 8x=32, 16x=64, 32x=128, and so on and so forth... until you have a situation where, quite literally, you would die of old age before you could complete a year-long trip across the cosmos, despite the fact that, relative to Earth, it was only a year.

And in writing this, I can't help but remember Steven King's The Jaunt". The essence of the story being that humans have developed a teleportation device that either kills humans or drives them insane if they try and pass through it consciously. They have to gas humans into unconsciousness for them to survive a near-instantaneous trip. But one family awakens to find their son, who had been curious about what "The Jaunt Effect" was, held his breath and stayed conscious through the transporter, and emerges as an ancient, insane, wizzend old man. He claws out his eyes and cries out "It's longer than you think, dad! Longer than you think!"

A transporter would basically be a FTL travel device, and if it were able to transport over long distances nearly instantaneously, it would have to be at many, many, many times the speed of light. The trip would take near eternity to the observer, though it would take almost no time to those outside of the travel itself.

Originally posted by Foppezao
Time travelling always reminds me of this quote[thought it was einstein]
" If time travel is possible how could it be, we never been visited by travellers from the future?"

Well, it's entirely possible we already have been.

Once I walked down a busy sidewalk in Seattle, in the middle of the day, and a man was running down the street shouting "Call the police, I've been robbed!" in a slightly British accent. He shouted it over and over, was clutching his chest, and might have even been bleeding. I don't actually know. What I do remember is that no one reacted. Not a single cell phone went up, almost no one even glanced in his direction, and no one walked or ran over to help him... I'm ashamed to say, I didn't either.

It was surreal. It was just too far outside of the normal routine of how life operates. People, especially crazy homeless people, are always shouting nonesense on the street in Seattle, and they're EVERYWHERE. You just get numb to their very presence, they become little more than furniture, because to pay attention to each and everyone one would take up your entire day, there's just so many of them. So the first few times the guy shouted it, I didn't even make them out as actual words. It was just some guy shouting about something. By the time he caught enough of my attention to wonder what he was saying, he was already running past me. By the time I had actually stopped to specifically listen to him, figure out what he was actually saying, ask my self if that's really what he was saying.

By the time my brain was able to assimilate what I'd just seen and heard, and confirmed it, the guy was already a block away from me, still running at full gait. I wasn't even sure what his face looked like by that point. My bus then pulled up. I shrugged, and got on, and went wherever it was I'd been going.

What I experienced was a mere sliver of a much greater story. Was the guy a tourist who got robbed and stabbed? Was he a disgruntled taxi passenger who didn't get his change from a taxi driver before they drove off? Had he just walked into his store to find it'd been ransacked, and was just running around in panic? Was he a guy just waiting for the bus at a corner when a kid skateboarded by and snatched his briefcase? I don't know. I'll never know. And from what I could see, probably no one else on that street knew or cared either... and just like that, he was out of my life.

Time travellers could be visiting us all the time, and who would notice? Even if a time traveller were seen by others, who is going to bother interacting with them unless they really have to? How many people that you've never met before do you ever interact with that aren't either customers of you, or of which you are a customer? Is that interaction anything more than a wave or a brief word?

And if the whole "energy required to pop a time bubble" rings true, the time travellers would have to actively exert enough for to change the past that they would do so on purpose. The act of stepping on a butterfly would not, therefore, cause humanity to end. It'd just mean a tiny set of otherwise unnoticed changes that get gradually even less definitive the further out from the point of origin they go.

Originally posted by whitewave
Libra, my head hurts. I think I blew a gasket!

Heheheheh, I KNOW the feeling. This has been the hardest concept to ever wrap my head around. What was initally going to be a silly little podcast done in a week's worth of time has required several weeks of effort just to get a layman's grasp on the situation. I couldn't even begin to work out the gausian equations, it's hard enough just to try and come to grips with a concept I've been raised since childhood to believe in is actually not only not true, but completely unrelated to the real thing.

It's like suddenly finding out that in point of fact, apples don't actually grow on trees, they are formed as the result of a blizzum travelling through a blazzum vector of flibbity, and exists only in jibbity. Just to understand the individual parts of the definition require a lot of work to understand what the definition means. And then you look up "blazzum", and it says something like "a state of groohah that warbles in 11 dimensions." It's just... Argh! It hurts after a while, but each and every part of the definition ends up being something fascinating and mind-blowing. My entire outlook on life has changed as a result of this.

Originally posted by whitewave
Skipping all the quantum mechanics, theory, and science involved-what would be the purpose of traveling to the past? Observation? Doesn't simple observation of a thing change the outcome of what is being observed? Retroactive abortion? Go back and kill Stalin, Hitler, Nero, before they had/have a chance to become monsters?

Errr... see the above replies in this same post, they pretty much answer this problem.

As for the observation though, that's actually more on a quantum scale. The idea is that, the smaller you go, the more improbable it becomes to accurately measure the position of an object.

This is because to figure out the coordinates of an object, you have to bounce something off of it, and gauge the reaction time. So while you could eyeball a wall, and simply use ambient light to figure it is about 5 feet tall, and 20 feet away. But say it was a photon you wanted to measure. The only thing we can currently use to measure the position of a photon with is another photon, except that the two are of equal size and mass. It'd be kind of like trying to determine the position of a car by throwing another car at it hard enough for it to bounce off and measure it's position by the reaction of the bounced car. Except in the process of doing this, you've now shifted the original car into a different position. Which in turn means that the measurement you just took is inaccurate, because it only reflects the previous position of the car, not the new one.

Originally posted by whitewave
Time travel would be a cool thing to do just to say humans are amazingly inventive but I can't imagine that any (ultimately) good thing could come from it.

I expect that it would have incredible uses in crime investigation, and research in nearly every field. Further, if you COULD conceivably travel backwards in time, you could get a near infinite loop of time in which to research stuff.

Say you can open up a portal to 20 years in the past, and you had a team of researchers willing to spend 20 years in the past, doing nothing but researching a particular subject. You can then take the results of their findings, 20 years worth of research, gained in mere seconds worth of "real time" and send it back 20 years again, with a fresh team, and they can work for 20 more years, etc... until you've managed to achieve hundreds of years of research in the space of minutes. THAT would set into effect such a rapid pace of technological acceleration that humankind would achieve godlike technology in mere minutes, bascially as long as it took to shift your teams through the doors.

That'd usher in a whole new Golden Age of research, the likes of which cannot even be properly comprehended at this stage.

Yeah I also found info on this..
see Back to Future(New Time Machine) thread which includes the actual published article by Ori..