If it were possible... nobody would know....

F

Fusion85

Temporal Novice
I haven't read into time travel much so maybe someone can shed light on this. I was just thinking about time travel and came to this conclusion. If it were possible to travel through time only the person doing it would know. If I were sitting beside you and said I'm going back to say, "JFK's assassination" and stop it. As soon as I went back in time and told him about what I did, he wouldn't know what I was talking about. Because if JFK lived it would be common knowledge to him. Would be to him as if he never died. He would be confused.

I don't know, just wanted to discuss this while its on my mind. Someone shed some light on this for me. As I am confused about it myself. Lots of things I'm thinking about time travel right now.
 
People tend to speak of 'the past' as though it was some thing that existed 'out there'.

But the trouble is.....there is really no such thing as 'the past'. Not least because there is ( as Relativity shows ) no single universal 'now' for which to guage time.

Where exactly is this 'past' ? The atoms of the world move on in time, into a new state. Where is any evidence that they collectively remember a past state in such a sense that a past even exists ?

My answer to all the time travel paradoxes is quite simply...there is no such thing as 'the past'. There is no former state of existence waiting patiently out there for you to travel to it. Past events are dead and gone......by definition they no longer exist.

How do you propose to travel to something that doesn't exist ?
 
How do you propose to travel to something that doesn't exist ?
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It seems to me you can make the same argument about the future.

Much of the problem,conceptually, was a mathematician, Minkowski, deciding to slap an x,y,z,t coordinate system on existence. So you can find your location, and the location of a presumed event in the future, and calculate the distance between them. But this requires what is often referred to as a "god's-eye" viewpoint.Note that Einstein was a little too clever to fall into this trap: He always referred to a clock and a meter stick which are concrete.

Question: What justification is there for such a viewpoint? Alfred North Whitehead spoke of the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness,": confusing the map with the territory. There is a necessary distinction to be made between math and physics.Anything we may think imagine doesn't necessarily exist.

When we talk about "the future" we're talking about imagination, aren't we? Haven't we seen page after page of descriptions about the future by HDRkid and all of the presumed time travelers? Is there any of that which isn't simply B.S.?

End of rant.

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It seems to me you can make the same argument about the future.
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Indeed...and probably even more so. But one should qualify. It is not so much that there is 'no such thing' as the future......of course there is. But it does not 'exist'...and by existence i mean nuts and bolts something you can get your hands on.

'The future' is an abstract concept. The future of what ? Even that precious moment we call 'now' is an illusion...there is no such moment, as all events are seperated by time ( no matter how small the distance). 'Now' at the end of my garden is actually about one thirteen millionth of a second different to 'now' in my house. Time travellers speak of travelling to a particular time......as if there was some universal 'moment' that covers the Earth. But there isn't.

Even within the world itself.....Australia is actually about 1/23 of a second distant timewise to the UK. So much for 'now'.

As for 'the future'....the fact that it WILL one day exist should not be confused with it already somehow existing in some concrete sense that one can travel to.

I agree that Minowski's spacetime maps give a sense of past, present, and future somehow all 'existing' from a bird's eye perspective. But the perspective is a human one, and I suspect that time itself ( as with all our other senses ) is a creation of the human brain.
 
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