Time Travelling Is Useless

[Anthony Yau]

The 'Yauman Theory of Time Travel' states that "time travel is a fruitless exercise". Very often I hear my friends say that if they had a time machine they would go back and buy shares in Microsoft and Intel and thus make millions. I simply say to them if they had a time machine, they would be none-the-wiser and certainly none-the-richer! Their best option would be make a fortune from selling the device.

The common understanding is that if you went back in time, you would see your younger self a la "Back to the Future" style. That is wrong because it requires matter to materialise in the past that did not originally exist. A different understanding is that you could travel back in time and replace your "former" self...but still retain the knowledge from the "future". That is of course impossible because if you travel back to a time when the enviroment and everything in it is in the past...you and your memories will also revert back to a time in the past. That will just develop a time loop where you would go back in time and be unaware you had come from the future and do everything you would have done originally...then go back again...do everything the same again....etc.

So in this context, time travelling is pointless because nothing will change. That could explain why we have not seen any time travellers so far because even they are none the wiser. This would also restrict a time traveller to not being able to travel to a time before they were born otherwise they would no longer exist.

Therefore we shouldn't think how we can send a person or an object through time but rather something less tangible. So what is the solution? Well, the movie 'Frequency' got the concept right, just the execution needs developing (Boy, I wish it was as simple as combining the Northern Lights with an antique CB radio!) I'm currently researching how to send messages to the past...either to be seen or heard. Currently we know that the only thing that can travel at the speed of light is...light, so to find something that can travel even faster, our best bet is to start with light itself. Development of light accelerators can facilitate the projection of an image that can be seen in the past. Whether or not, the person in the past will act upon that message is another thing.

To transmit an audio signal to the past is far more tricky but still not impossible. The sound we hear is simply vibrations in the air. So naturally we need to develop a method of time displacing vibrations in the air, which students of quantum harmonics can appreciate is no mean feat. My research in these fields is of course still ongoing and far from completion but hopefully people of this board can discuss this further among yourselves.

So is time travel really useless? Well, only time can tell.

Anthony

 

[Guest]

A bright idea of yours! I was thinking in intensify light by "lens", then it could be more effective, to graduate magnitude, so material could go with it! That material should have some kind of receiver for this lights. Any ideas?

 

[Guest]

Correction: "these lights".

 

[daGnutt]

Okey... the first thing you wrote... that a older me, and the younger me would exist of the same matter, yeah sure... really man... for example, the human skeleton never gets older than 10 years, the only thing that stays the same during your entire life (except in the beginning) is the brain, this is the only human organ that does not "reproduce" itself... the rest of the body does never get as old as you are...

Think about this... you know that for example about a million red blood cells die every second, and a million new is produced... so think... and remeber a cell may change matter....

 

[Anthony Yau]

daGnutt,

That is exactly what I was getting at. We know memories are simply chemical connections in our brains that result from experiences we encounter. So if we travel back to the past, those connections that existed between the two time points would not have been produced. This begs the question why bother with travelling back to the past since you would do nothing different to what you did the first time round. Your correct statement that the human brain is incapable of self-reproduction reinforces this fact and suggests that ways around this phenomenon is improbable.