Traveling back in time impossible?

[Roel van Houten]

Hi,

As we all know timetravel is a very complex and difficult matter, so as long as nobody discovers the truth behind it, people will always keep on thinking about it.

The same goes with me. I think a lot about the concept of time and timetravel. I've posted quite a few messages about how I see time. However, I was having this discussion about timetravel and it somehow occured to me that traveling back in time is virtually impossible. I know it will take just one reply to make me believe the opposite, but I'll try explaining what I suddenly realized:

Visualize you being a timetraveler sitting in a glass box (the time machine) in which you want to go back in time. Imagine going back in time step by step, so you can see the process of you going back in time. Going back in time means that your "time" has to pass much slower than the time outside the box. If that's the case, in fact you would be traveling in the future. People outside the box would become older and older, but time will never surpass you, because that would mean time has to pass in a negative order. At the moment of the discussion that seemed impossible to me. However, I'm having my doubts already.

Greetings from cold, but not rainy Amsterdam

 

[Guest]

Dear "cold and rainy"

You assume too much. Either one controls their progression through time or they do not. Reality does not get confused, people do. Since reality is the *absolute measure* of "the way it is and should be" truth becomes what ever it is observed be, wether it makes sense to the human mind or not. It would be as if one stepped into a house of mirrors and began to formulate a theory about which immages were real and which were illusions. Time does this, time goes there, time speeds up, slows down, time goes in, the time goes out, it does the hokey pokey and shakes you all abou..............oh sorry got carried away. How about time does absolutely nothing except reflect our own immaginings back at us. In which case we can shadow-box ourselves stupid.

Why be scared of the dark, when one is stone cold blind??????

 

[Roel van Houten]

One can never assume too much.

If people had stopped spreading their thoughts, we'd still be walking around naked with a spear, hunting animals for food...

I realize that I contradict my own assumptions in some posts, but I feel I have to keep reconsidering my own ideas. After all, no one on this board can proof any timetravel theory yet, so why stop thinking about it?

Greetings from Amsterdam

Roel

 

[Trott]

Actually, in order to travel back in time you must surpass the speed of light, thereby flipping the light cone over so that what lies ahead is actually the past. If you merely want your dilated time to move slower than the proper time around you, you would approach the speed of light, but to go back in time you would need to go faster than light or find a geodesic which allowed you to take a path faster than light i.e. a wormhole.
Here is a way you can remember:
There once was a lady named Ms.Bright, who travelled much faster than light, she left one day in a relative way and returned the previous night.

 

[Guest]

There was once a sailor from Murmask
Whos balls were made of brass
Come stormy weather they'd
Clang together and lightning
Shot out his ass.