Having found the main web page a bit sparse, I would like to suggest a bit of modification to the "theories" section:
Theories of Time Travel
(For each example, we will assume that a person has gone back in time to prevent some event. The methods will be discussed later; for now, let us simply assume that time travel is possible.)
Theory 1- success
This theory assumes that everything you do will have a hand in the new future you create. If you travel back to your time, you will find that it has been changed, but that you have been unaffected by such changes. The most probable cause of such a result is that you are still from the future that you came from, but you have created and travelled to an alternative future. You could even meet your alternative self from such a future. In fact, your alternative self could actually still have travelled back, making a third alternative reality (which you will never see).
The assumption here is that realities can ‘split off’ of eachother. When does this happen? Many scientists believe that it happens constantly. According to quantum mechanics, the future cannot be determined exactly; each event has a probability of happening. Some believe that, actually, every event DOES happen; every instant, the universe splits into many possible universes, and we with it. An additional claim is thus: since the future is fuzzy, so is the past. Just as we can only determine the most probable future, we can only determine the most probable past. Someone travelling back (or forward) would land in a randomly generated reality, practically picked from a hat out of all possible pasts/futures. Changing this past, therefore, would have no effect on the future they came from; it would only change the probabilities for the future that they were headed towards.
Theory 2- infinite regress
This theory assumes that you do effect yourself by changing the past. In this model, a person coming back to fix something would probably prevent themselves from coming back, by eliminating any reason for coming back. Say for instance, that you come back to kill someone who made your life miserable. You are successful, and your new self is happy; therefore, your future self has no reason to go back in time. Because of this, the new you does not go back in time, and the person is never killed; the timeline is then restored to the original scenario, in which you are miserable. However, the series of events still repeats itself; you go back, kill, are happy, don’t go back, are unhappy, do go back, are happy, don’t, happy, do, unhappy… the loop repeats forever.
There is one way out of the loop, however: probability. The chances that the loop would run exactly the same, every time, ad infinitum, are practically zero. At some point, some random thing is likely to cut the loop short of infinity.
This has an actual practical application, believe it or not. If one were to build a small time machine whose sole purpose is to prevent itself from activating (for instance, it sends an electric shock back in time which is sufficient to fry it’s electronics, preventing it from sending an electric shock back in time), then the machine would never be activated. Every time the machine neared activation, lady luck would act to prevent it. If a person were to activate the machine every time something in there life went wrong, nothing in there life would ever go wrong! The trouble is in making sure that you DO activate it EVERY TIME something goes wrong. Luck can work against you, too, causing you to misplace the device, or otherwise preventing you from activating it without preventing you from wanting to. Such a device could be acting right now, preventing you from understanding this text, in an attempt to avoid it’s own creation; by avoiding creation, it could avoid activation. So, by this theory, luck would go against both the creation and use of any time machine, since any trip to the past has some probability of falsifying it’s own existence.
This theory implies a sort of ‘metatime’ in which time itself changes; a timeline can first be one thing, than another, then another. So, what if we travel backwards in metatime? Obviously, weird things… but travelling in metatime happens to imply metametatime, denoted meta2time, in which a metatimeline changes. Is there a meta3time, a meta4time, or even a meta5time? How about an infinite regression of such meta#times? Why not? Sounds good to me. It means I can not only be a time traveller, but a metatime traveller…
The existence of metatime offers another interesting possibility: that we are actually travelling through time. What this means is that, if a time traveller went back in time, there would be nothing there; the particles have moved on, leaving a vacuum in the past. Another version could explain the fuzziness of the future and the past by saying that if a time traveller went forwards or backwards, they would not encounter solid particles, but fuzzy probability wave-fronts. Wave-fronts tend to solidify, acting as particles, when observed; the present is the most solid region. If a time traveller escaped the present, they would start competing with the present for solidity… and probably lose. Their fuzzy form might eventually be encountered by the present-wavefront, if it had a slower time-momentum; however, it might not pick up enough speed to stay there. The results? Hard to say, without inventing and then solving some very complicated math. If one of these possibilities were true, time-travel might be impossible (unless metatime travel were possible&#8230
. So, for further purposes, we will assume that particles exist fully at all temporal locations.
Theory 3- failure
This theory predicts that, after travelling to the past, everything you will do will cause the future you came from, rather than preventing it. In other words, you aren’t changing anything; you were meant to do everything that you did.
One possible reason why this would happen would be because the ‘infinite regression’ theory holds true: lady luck searches for a self-consistent timeline, any eventually finds one in which the time-travel happens not to change anything. In such a case, we are assumed to be at the end of ‘metatime’; time has reached a stable state, and no additional change is to take place. Weather or not this is possible is up to personal opinion.
If this were true, time travel would be difficult and pointless for all but observational purposes. Not only would luck try to prevent you from going back in time, it would also keep its all-seeing eyes on you if you managed to get back there.
Methods of Time Travel
(For this discussion, only methods of going backwards will be included, due to the obvious fact that we are normally going forwards at all times, and building a machine to go forwards would be like building a cryogenic stasis chamber; the real achievement would be coming back again.)
Method 1: negative distance
Assuming you are travelling positive speeds, then, if there is a positive distance between you and a place, it takes positive time to get there. If there is no distance, it takes no time. So, if there is a negative distance between you and an object, it shall take negative time to get there going positive speeds.
That’s nuts!
True, very true. Normally, you would be moving away from something if you are going at speeds greater than zero while it is a negative distance from you; this is because, according to physics, anything that is behind you is a negative distance away, and anything in front of you is a positive distance. To move forward is to move a positive distance. However, that assumes a positive amount of space.
Of course it does! Anything else would be crazy!
Yea, yea… anyway, so, how can we get a negative amount of space? Both the space in front of you and the space behind you is positive; it’s only the distance that’s considered negative. How can we control the amount of space? One method is speed; the faster something goes, the less space it has. Once it crosses light-speed (a feat considered impossible), it has a negative distance. Another method, though, would be antigravity… The more gravity, the more space. A black hole, for instance, has an infinite amount of space within it; you can fall forever without actually reaching the so-called singularity. So a similar patch of antigravity would have either no space, or a negative-infinite amount (I’m not clear on the details&#8230. The next question, of course, is how to get an anti-gravity area. The answer? Negative mass! Antimatter actually has a positive mass, so that’s a no-go. So the ultimate answer is, I don’t know; if I did know, I’d be rich.
Method 2: c+ speeds
According to relativity, the faster a thing goes, the slower time runs for it. You can think of this as a type of compensation; the more speed in space, the less speed in time. If something has light-speed in space, it has no speed in time. (This assumes a positive mass. Light has no mass, making it constantly light-speed, but still normal in time-speed, and ‘tachions’ have a mass equal to the square root of a negative number.) So if something exceeds light-speed, it has a negative time-speed, which makes it go backwards.
How is light speed exceeded? Well, it takes an infinite speed to go light-speed with a positive mass; therefore, it should take a slightly higher number to go past that… once again, we run into a bit of trouble.
Method 3: Quantum Tunnelling
A safe and easy way to exceed light-speed actually happens all the time, if we check quantum physics. The truth is, relativity and quantum physics are unmeshable; however, if we ignore the angry screaming mob of scientists, I can continue with my explanation. One controversial scientist has actually harnessed quantum physics to send a microwave transmission across the light speed barrier. Actually, all he really had to do was to filter the message for that part of it which had travelled back in time; you see, according to his odd marriage of quantum and relative ideas, all particles randomly jump back in time. You see, quantum mechanics claims that, for no reason, a particle may jump to a new location; furthermore, particles do this all the time. As relativity would have it, this random jumping violates the speed of light, sending the particle back in time. So: part of any group of particles can be found slightly backwards in time. The further back you go, the weaker the signal; also, the further back, the more displaced in space. What Nimtz (the scientist) did was to filter the normal particles out by putting a barrier between the transmitter and the receiver. The more distance between, the weaker the signal; but also, more space-displacement means more time-displacement, as well. This method has great difficulties transmitting solid objects, for obvious reasons; however, energy signals can be sent.
Method 4: holes in space-time
This includes methods such as wormholes. In such methods, space is bent to replace time, so that by traversing a particular space (such as the inside of a wormhole), one may travel in time. Another way to describe a wormhole might be as a negative space. The existence of a wormhole does not imply a time machine; however, the ends of a wormhole can drift apart in time as they drift apart in space.
To sustain a wormhole, you must use negative energy. Theoretically, tiny wormholes abound; however, to get one big enough to use, you must feed it an amount of negative energy equivalent to or greater than the mass of Jupiter. To get such a large amount of energy, one would probably need to split ‘vacuum energy’ (the large amount of completely neutral energy that resides everywhere) in two, generating both positive and negative energy.
The main disadvantage of such a time machine, otherwise viable, is the fact that such a machine cannot send a person farther back than the time of the machine’s creation; in fact, each machine would have a set time-displacement, relatively difficult to change.
Theories of Time Travel
(For each example, we will assume that a person has gone back in time to prevent some event. The methods will be discussed later; for now, let us simply assume that time travel is possible.)
Theory 1- success
This theory assumes that everything you do will have a hand in the new future you create. If you travel back to your time, you will find that it has been changed, but that you have been unaffected by such changes. The most probable cause of such a result is that you are still from the future that you came from, but you have created and travelled to an alternative future. You could even meet your alternative self from such a future. In fact, your alternative self could actually still have travelled back, making a third alternative reality (which you will never see).
The assumption here is that realities can ‘split off’ of eachother. When does this happen? Many scientists believe that it happens constantly. According to quantum mechanics, the future cannot be determined exactly; each event has a probability of happening. Some believe that, actually, every event DOES happen; every instant, the universe splits into many possible universes, and we with it. An additional claim is thus: since the future is fuzzy, so is the past. Just as we can only determine the most probable future, we can only determine the most probable past. Someone travelling back (or forward) would land in a randomly generated reality, practically picked from a hat out of all possible pasts/futures. Changing this past, therefore, would have no effect on the future they came from; it would only change the probabilities for the future that they were headed towards.
Theory 2- infinite regress
This theory assumes that you do effect yourself by changing the past. In this model, a person coming back to fix something would probably prevent themselves from coming back, by eliminating any reason for coming back. Say for instance, that you come back to kill someone who made your life miserable. You are successful, and your new self is happy; therefore, your future self has no reason to go back in time. Because of this, the new you does not go back in time, and the person is never killed; the timeline is then restored to the original scenario, in which you are miserable. However, the series of events still repeats itself; you go back, kill, are happy, don’t go back, are unhappy, do go back, are happy, don’t, happy, do, unhappy… the loop repeats forever.
There is one way out of the loop, however: probability. The chances that the loop would run exactly the same, every time, ad infinitum, are practically zero. At some point, some random thing is likely to cut the loop short of infinity.
This has an actual practical application, believe it or not. If one were to build a small time machine whose sole purpose is to prevent itself from activating (for instance, it sends an electric shock back in time which is sufficient to fry it’s electronics, preventing it from sending an electric shock back in time), then the machine would never be activated. Every time the machine neared activation, lady luck would act to prevent it. If a person were to activate the machine every time something in there life went wrong, nothing in there life would ever go wrong! The trouble is in making sure that you DO activate it EVERY TIME something goes wrong. Luck can work against you, too, causing you to misplace the device, or otherwise preventing you from activating it without preventing you from wanting to. Such a device could be acting right now, preventing you from understanding this text, in an attempt to avoid it’s own creation; by avoiding creation, it could avoid activation. So, by this theory, luck would go against both the creation and use of any time machine, since any trip to the past has some probability of falsifying it’s own existence.
This theory implies a sort of ‘metatime’ in which time itself changes; a timeline can first be one thing, than another, then another. So, what if we travel backwards in metatime? Obviously, weird things… but travelling in metatime happens to imply metametatime, denoted meta2time, in which a metatimeline changes. Is there a meta3time, a meta4time, or even a meta5time? How about an infinite regression of such meta#times? Why not? Sounds good to me. It means I can not only be a time traveller, but a metatime traveller…
The existence of metatime offers another interesting possibility: that we are actually travelling through time. What this means is that, if a time traveller went back in time, there would be nothing there; the particles have moved on, leaving a vacuum in the past. Another version could explain the fuzziness of the future and the past by saying that if a time traveller went forwards or backwards, they would not encounter solid particles, but fuzzy probability wave-fronts. Wave-fronts tend to solidify, acting as particles, when observed; the present is the most solid region. If a time traveller escaped the present, they would start competing with the present for solidity… and probably lose. Their fuzzy form might eventually be encountered by the present-wavefront, if it had a slower time-momentum; however, it might not pick up enough speed to stay there. The results? Hard to say, without inventing and then solving some very complicated math. If one of these possibilities were true, time-travel might be impossible (unless metatime travel were possible&#8230
. So, for further purposes, we will assume that particles exist fully at all temporal locations.Theory 3- failure
This theory predicts that, after travelling to the past, everything you will do will cause the future you came from, rather than preventing it. In other words, you aren’t changing anything; you were meant to do everything that you did.
One possible reason why this would happen would be because the ‘infinite regression’ theory holds true: lady luck searches for a self-consistent timeline, any eventually finds one in which the time-travel happens not to change anything. In such a case, we are assumed to be at the end of ‘metatime’; time has reached a stable state, and no additional change is to take place. Weather or not this is possible is up to personal opinion.
If this were true, time travel would be difficult and pointless for all but observational purposes. Not only would luck try to prevent you from going back in time, it would also keep its all-seeing eyes on you if you managed to get back there.
Methods of Time Travel
(For this discussion, only methods of going backwards will be included, due to the obvious fact that we are normally going forwards at all times, and building a machine to go forwards would be like building a cryogenic stasis chamber; the real achievement would be coming back again.)
Method 1: negative distance
Assuming you are travelling positive speeds, then, if there is a positive distance between you and a place, it takes positive time to get there. If there is no distance, it takes no time. So, if there is a negative distance between you and an object, it shall take negative time to get there going positive speeds.
That’s nuts!
True, very true. Normally, you would be moving away from something if you are going at speeds greater than zero while it is a negative distance from you; this is because, according to physics, anything that is behind you is a negative distance away, and anything in front of you is a positive distance. To move forward is to move a positive distance. However, that assumes a positive amount of space.
Of course it does! Anything else would be crazy!
Yea, yea… anyway, so, how can we get a negative amount of space? Both the space in front of you and the space behind you is positive; it’s only the distance that’s considered negative. How can we control the amount of space? One method is speed; the faster something goes, the less space it has. Once it crosses light-speed (a feat considered impossible), it has a negative distance. Another method, though, would be antigravity… The more gravity, the more space. A black hole, for instance, has an infinite amount of space within it; you can fall forever without actually reaching the so-called singularity. So a similar patch of antigravity would have either no space, or a negative-infinite amount (I’m not clear on the details&#8230
. The next question, of course, is how to get an anti-gravity area. The answer? Negative mass! Antimatter actually has a positive mass, so that’s a no-go. So the ultimate answer is, I don’t know; if I did know, I’d be rich.Method 2: c+ speeds
According to relativity, the faster a thing goes, the slower time runs for it. You can think of this as a type of compensation; the more speed in space, the less speed in time. If something has light-speed in space, it has no speed in time. (This assumes a positive mass. Light has no mass, making it constantly light-speed, but still normal in time-speed, and ‘tachions’ have a mass equal to the square root of a negative number.) So if something exceeds light-speed, it has a negative time-speed, which makes it go backwards.
How is light speed exceeded? Well, it takes an infinite speed to go light-speed with a positive mass; therefore, it should take a slightly higher number to go past that… once again, we run into a bit of trouble.
Method 3: Quantum Tunnelling
A safe and easy way to exceed light-speed actually happens all the time, if we check quantum physics. The truth is, relativity and quantum physics are unmeshable; however, if we ignore the angry screaming mob of scientists, I can continue with my explanation. One controversial scientist has actually harnessed quantum physics to send a microwave transmission across the light speed barrier. Actually, all he really had to do was to filter the message for that part of it which had travelled back in time; you see, according to his odd marriage of quantum and relative ideas, all particles randomly jump back in time. You see, quantum mechanics claims that, for no reason, a particle may jump to a new location; furthermore, particles do this all the time. As relativity would have it, this random jumping violates the speed of light, sending the particle back in time. So: part of any group of particles can be found slightly backwards in time. The further back you go, the weaker the signal; also, the further back, the more displaced in space. What Nimtz (the scientist) did was to filter the normal particles out by putting a barrier between the transmitter and the receiver. The more distance between, the weaker the signal; but also, more space-displacement means more time-displacement, as well. This method has great difficulties transmitting solid objects, for obvious reasons; however, energy signals can be sent.
Method 4: holes in space-time
This includes methods such as wormholes. In such methods, space is bent to replace time, so that by traversing a particular space (such as the inside of a wormhole), one may travel in time. Another way to describe a wormhole might be as a negative space. The existence of a wormhole does not imply a time machine; however, the ends of a wormhole can drift apart in time as they drift apart in space.
To sustain a wormhole, you must use negative energy. Theoretically, tiny wormholes abound; however, to get one big enough to use, you must feed it an amount of negative energy equivalent to or greater than the mass of Jupiter. To get such a large amount of energy, one would probably need to split ‘vacuum energy’ (the large amount of completely neutral energy that resides everywhere) in two, generating both positive and negative energy.
The main disadvantage of such a time machine, otherwise viable, is the fact that such a machine cannot send a person farther back than the time of the machine’s creation; in fact, each machine would have a set time-displacement, relatively difficult to change.
