Matter cannot exist in two places at once
- Thread starter kimberlyd
- Start date
RainmanTime
Super Moderator
OR...the more likely conclusion is that the conservation law makes it highly unlikely that one can travel back in time to begin with. Said another way, there is a VERY LARGE scientific barrier you would have to overcome to show that your belief in your "IF" condition is even possible.
RMT
For me, time travel is not impossible... just improbable... but only because of mans own limited thinking not because of the inability to. There are too many documentations of time slips for me to believe other wise. As for the other self ceasing to exist, once something exist.... only by removing what made that something exist in the first place can the something cease to exist, ie a persons parents both die before they are created. If say, one parent dies but the other still lives... the probability of the person still being born is still there, they would be just different then they were if both parents were to have lived.
RainmanTime
Super Moderator
I truly understand what you are saying, but I am here to point out to you that what you are saying is based in either an emotional or pure philosophical argument, not science. The physics that govern our universe has nothing whatsoever to do with "mans own limited thinking." And because some people misinterpret my musings as somehow demeaning or denigrating people and their ideas, let me assure you that this is nothing personal. I am strictly trying to tell you the scientific side of the story that counters the emotional and/or philosophical beliefs you have shared.
Since science is based upon measurements of physical states and processes, allow me to use another example to help you shift your thinking more towards a scientific orientation. I am hopeful that laying out the details of this example will help you think in a different manner....a manner more conducive to scientific quantification of what it would mean to "time travel."
This example focuses on the simple question: "How would you measure something in the world around you in order to know, to a high degree of certainty, that you had traveled back in time?" Said another way the question might be "how does an individual measure something to know they have shifted in time?" Now, I want to caution you that providing an answer like "reading the newspaper date or asking someone what the date is" does NOT represent a scientific measurement. Rather, it amounts to nothing more than a collection of information, and information, in its most raw sense, can be either true or false...Raw information needs some form of validation to know that the information represents reality.
What I am getting at could be more simply expressed as the FACT that our method of tracking the passage of time is completely arbitrary and based upon certain human agreements. The fact that this is the year 2015, and the year 1963 was the year when JFK was assassinated is mere convention....an agreement by humans to peg the calendar to a specific point in the past (i.e. the birth of Christ). The definition of the months and the days is, similarly, by local agreements among human beings based on relative measures of MATTER in MOTION in our area of the universe. In fact, every single device that mankind has ever devised to measure the passage of time is based upon MATTER in MOTION. A sundial tracks the local time of day due to the motion of the earth about its axis relative to Sol. Our calendar is based upon the motion of the earth around Sol and how the apparent elevation of Sol in our sky changes over the four seasons. A grandfather clock tracks time by the swinging of a large mass at the end of its pendulum. A Swiss watch is an intricate motion of many, highly accurately styled elements of matter (springs and cogs).
So now how does this fact relate to our simple question stated above? Well, consequentially, the things that you would end up measuring to know you were displaced in time are MATTER (primarily) and MOTION (secondarily). For example, if you were a person of today, 2015, and you were to travel to sometime in the past where you saw NO airplanes flying through the air at all, this would give you an indication that you are no longer in your "home time" (whatever that is). You might look around at other forms of MATTER that are around you and how they MOVE to get some other clues. While you may not see any airplanes, you may see some very "old fashioned" automobiles that might give away what time you were in. But now stop and think deeply about how you are INFERRING a time. The only reason you might be able to infer a time if you recognized, say, a Ford Model T automobile is because IN YOUR MEMORY you hold information that you learned about that period of time, right? So even though that Model T gives your mind an "anchor" in time that you could use to determine that it appears you moved backwards in time, you still could not be absolutely sure.
To prove you could not be absolutely sure, one only needs to posit that you end up in an environment that looks COMPLETELY alien to you (in all senses of the word). You may see things that, from all outward appearances, look like they would pass as an automobile, but they are like NO automobile that you ever saw, or read about, or studied in history....at all. In other words, you have NO information references coded into your memory buy which you can make an alignment between time and that form of matter you are looking at. For all you know, you could have just been displaced in SPACE BUT NOT TIME. In other words, it could still be 2015 here on earth, but instantaneously your body was moved to some other galaxy, with another world of civilized beings, who just happened to develop similar artificial implements such as cars, and clothes, and shoes, and kitchenware, and all those other things.....but they look like NOTHING you have ever seen before. In such a case as this, you are UNABLE to directly measure MATTER or MOTION and have a high degree of certainty that you moved through time, rather than space.
Does the above start to give you the gist of what I am getting at? Our romantic notion of TIME is a construct of our minds that results from possessing a MEMORY of how MATTER has been in MOTION for our lifetimes and the past lifetimes that we have documented in our histories. But what we have been learning about TIME ever since Einstein showed up is that the scientific nature of TIME is nothing like that romantic notion we think about when we wax philosophically about "what would it be like if I could travel back in time to 1963 before Kennedy was shot?" No. In fact, science has told us in no uncertain terms that TIME and SPACE are two "dimensions" of the exact same thing. Space-Time is a fabric, and it interacts with Mass through the four known forces of science (Strong, Weak, Electromagnetism, and the weakest of them all, Gravity).
Can you understand how I am trying to get you to think differently? To think scientifically? And when you start to think differently....scientifically....you will come to understand that the romantic notion of "time travel" as described in all the stories we love to watch and re-tell is a VERY low probability of what time travel would really "look like" and how it would really manifest.
RMT
Darby
Epochal Historian
Likewise, I don't see any particular problem. In fact, if we accept the idea that time travel to the past is possible then the possibility of meeting oneself becomes a major component of the definition of the term "time travel". The possibility is explicitly assumed to be true.
People make philosophical objections to the situation because there is some apparent paradox involved. But take away the fact that its a human being meeting his/her younger self and substitute a water molecule. What's the problem with two water molecules coming into contact? There's no way - none whatsoever - for us to tell one H20 molecule form any other H20 molecule and they all get along together just fine, even if a couple happen to be time traveling rain drops. No problem.
If we accept time travel to the past then John What's His Name traveling from 2036 to 2000 and "changing the timeline" might annoy some folks but the real question is did his interaction with 2000 violate any physical law? Physical laws don't care one whit about people's feelings, desires, philosophical objections, paranoia about paradoxes, how well they formulate an argument and or their familial relationships. All they care about are things like conservation of energy, charge, momentum, etc. If it all becomes a particle soup because Johnny visited 2000 that's just fine for the particles - so long as no physical laws were violated.
It's a big "what if" because the current state of the science strongly favors time travel to the past as not being possible. But if it is possible then we have to accept that meeting oneself is a fact unless and until we discover an actual physical law that says it is not possible.
If you were to travel in your same time line, and met yourself, you would still be two separate entities. Otherwise, one could not time travel at all, ever. Because if you as you are now, changed with time travel in your own time line, you would in any time line. You would time travel and when you hit the designated year, you would just disappear. So you kind of HAVE to be a on either a separate time line, or be a separate entity.
I know that if you travel into the future more than tens years time, your atomic and molecular resonance changes., so technically your not really the same person any longer.The other person that your'e going to visit is within another time resonance, or harmonic vibration.So you in that new environment would be accounted for as another, but not the same person.
Your inner identity core frequency however in some cases is very similar.So you probably would not want to put your fingers in each other's mouth, or dream together. But just standing apart for a visit, would be it seems in some cases, okay.
Your self identity inner core matrix, acts much the same as a computer program.So what you have to look at is one program is x distance in length and the other one may go past that point.But please note in both cases, say if the time traveler learned how to time travel at age 14, both of those recorded self identity core matrixes would be pretty near the same.So you might not desire to place a body part, such as a transferred organ into the older version of the 14 year old original.
I don't think that an individual would be able to travel within their own time-line. As mentioned before, I truly believe that the universe has a finite amount of matter, and there is now way to introduce or remove pre-existing matter. So by going back in time and meeting yourself, you are doubling the amount of matter you take up in your own time-line, which I don't think is possible. Where would that new matter come from? Unless you were able to "swap" with someone or something else and balance out the amount of matter on either end, I don't think it would work.
Pinoy Jade
Temporal Novice
There would be a disruption for sure, traveling on the past of to the future can lead to a serious break down on time continuum. A single mistake or a single thing that should not be done yet you have change it can lead to a worse situation for the future. That is why dont mess up with the time continumm 
Carl Grove1
Chrono Cadet
I am not qualified to comment on the theoretical aspects raised in this thread, but as I am currently building up a catalogue of alleged time slip cases, I can say that there are a number of cases on record in which children have experienced seeing an adult under somewhat odd circumstances, and then years later, in the same location, saw a child appear whom they recognised as themselves. While most of them found this psychologically disturbing, there were no indications that anything serious happened in the space-time continuum as a result.
Darby
Epochal Historian
I think this is better phrased as, "There are a number of unverifiable cases on record in which adults claim that as a child they experienced..."
Absent verifiable fact this sort of information is background noise. It isn't evidence of anything in particular. That there are an unspecified number of such claims doesn't fortify the claims. It's still GIGO no matter how many such cases are reported - garbage as your input means you will have garbage as your output. Yes, people can arbitrarily choose to be Believers based on weak evidence. But that's not going to convince those who have a bit more of an open mind and look at these things from all sides.
Ask yourself why you choose to believe such stories. Is it because you like to hear them and find therm interesting? Or were you presented with clear, concise, complete and unambiguous evidence that eliminated the mundane explanations (not the least of which is hoax) and left you with the only explanation as its time travel and no other answer is possible?
Last edited by a moderator:
Carl Grove1
Chrono Cadet
I don't recall saying or even implying that I "believed" such stories. I certainly find time slip experiences extremely interesting and do not apologise for doing so. I am not really a "believer" in anything, but like everyone else I have my own prejudices and assumptions and I make an effort to suspend disbelief when faced with data that seem to contradict our common assumptions about such phenomena. If even a small percentage of these are "true" then such cases may be highly significant. All I am doing is collecting evidence and looking for clues and patterns about what is going on. If it looked as if people were making up stories (I have come across a few that may fall into this category) then I would obviously view that as the favoured explanation. But that isn't what I'm finding.
If you are looking for "clear, concise, complete and unambiguous evidence" about anything, let alone a phenomenon as elusive as this, then you can't be living on the same planet as I am. It just doesn't work that way. Eye witness testimony is always inherently uncertain, and that goes with the territory, I'm afraid. The accounts I have read and the contacts I have had with witnesses are mostly indicative of patently sincere people trying to come to terms with what for many is a disturbing and sometimes frightening event. Explicitly describing the accounts they have given as "garbage" is hardly the attitude of open-mindedness that you claim to promote.
If you are looking for "clear, concise, complete and unambiguous evidence" about anything, let alone a phenomenon as elusive as this, then you can't be living on the same planet as I am. It just doesn't work that way. Eye witness testimony is always inherently uncertain, and that goes with the territory, I'm afraid. The accounts I have read and the contacts I have had with witnesses are mostly indicative of patently sincere people trying to come to terms with what for many is a disturbing and sometimes frightening event. Explicitly describing the accounts they have given as "garbage" is hardly the attitude of open-mindedness that you claim to promote.
Darby
Epochal Historian
Being sincere doesn't equate to being correct nor does it of necessity equate to clear, concise, complete and unambiguous evidence. And there's nothing particularly difficult about that criteria. A well stated case (clear), that isn't a rambling bat shit crazy diatribe (concise), stated in complete and intelligent sentences (complete) using well defined terminology (unambiguous) does not require travel to another planet to achieve. If nothing else its a general requirement of the scientific method.
Now, see what I mean about an open minds or the lack thereof? Yours slammed shut tight as a tick simply because I required more than, "Well, they sounded sincere to me" as the basis to judge a claim. Hell, paranoid schizophrenics sound sincere in their ramblings. They generally are sincere. But that alone doesn't make their claims of persecution by MIBs real.
Love Rooster
Temporal Novice
Love Rooster
Temporal Novice
Maybe a younger you could sit on an older yous lap in front of a camp fire talking with your future daughter who hasn't even been born yet. trip to remember
Carl Grove1
Chrono Cadet
I'm sure that both of us are quite capable of distinguishing the kind of rambling, inarticulate nonsense that you refer to from a sensible, coherent narrative, and it is the latter that interests me. All I am saying is that people deserve a fair hearing, and you don't seem to approve of that. I think we had better just agree to differ.
