Web based Time Travel...

C

CircuitSurfer

Temporal Novice
The growing technology of fiberoptics and the idea that C platueas to allow time travel.
Why couldnt things like Instant messages "travel"?

....let the talks begin....
 
im not sure in what context you are refering to. but i do know there have been experiments with lasers where the time when the laser pulse was emited, and when it reached its destination were recorded. and the laser firing through, whatever it was ( i forget the details) ariaved at its destination a fraction of a second before it was fired. im sure you could find the research online through google
 
Fiberoptics uses light to send data. Since time travel is possible once the speed of light (C) reaches standstill, couldnt fiberoptics be manipulated to send data through time? With advanced technology that could attain such speeds it could be possible. If data is sent to a server existing at that time and now , couldnt data be transfered? Couldnt ppl even chat across time?
 
i am going to say no. lets say you can speed up light, regardless of how fast it goes, it can never get from point a to point b before it is sent, think of the half of a half of a half concept, it will always get closer to the time sent, but never quite to or before it. the experiment i was refering to, the laser didnt actually speed up, if i recall, but it exploited a state where certain particles can be two places at once for an instant. i can not express this clearly, but i have gone over it a number of times trying.

speaking to the future is easy... any delay will do it. if you stand beside your friend and speak to him with your voice, he is hearing you from the future of when you spoke it... but into the past this isnt as easy. maybe im just ignorant, but could you explain what you meen in more detail, maybe it would help me to understand.
 
Well in terms of speed, i am not talking of any speed what-so-ever. There is a theory of time travel that states that once you hit a certain speed of C it plateaus and literally stops, allowing for negative time. As far as your notion of the laser and how it only appeared for an instant,with a server all you need is a few seconds to copy binary code.
 
do you have any links to this theory/concept? I have a hard time grasping light photons as anything special, they should react in the same way as any other particle or smaller mass. People used to think that if you traveled faster than a horse can run, you would die. I see this in very much the same light... this is just one very very quick horse that we havent figured out yet.
 
One more thing: this is only true for things with mass. Photons, or particles of light, have no mass, and so they can go at c. As a matter of fact, it's thought that if you have no mass, you must travel at the speed of light. As someone once pointed out, the Universe is not only weirder than we imagine, it's weirder than we can imagine!

im sure you know this im just posting it.

yes, for an object 'with mass' it should take an infinite amount of energy to move at the speed of light, because thats what the math adds up to, einstein said so. Perhaps this is wrong though. I have a hard time believeing this formula to be exact. Science is constantly questioning, disproving and finding answers that better fit. If you accept this, then you can accept that the 'rules' are not rules at all. They are simply very very good guidlines. the number of PI is said to have no repeating sections to it, and is infinatly long, and random. Does this stop people from trying to prove it wrong?
 
yes, for an object 'with mass' it should take an infinite amount of energy to move at the speed of light, because thats what the math adds up to, einstein said so. Perhaps this is wrong though. I have a hard time believeing this formula to be exact.
Click to expand...

The unit of the metre is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second. The second is the time it takes for a beam of light to travel 299792458m. It's a circular arguement, but it provides us with a speed of light that must be constant.
Most of physics is derived from these assumptions and so therefore, energy can be related to light but as such cannot break this equation.

Is that what you meant when you said you had a hard time believing this formula?

James
 
no, i meen i have a hard time accepting it as a set in stone fact that can not be altered.
im willing to go along with it when i need answers, and while i trust it and the answers, i do so realizing that it all might not be true. in the sense that we do not know for certain and can not prove for certain. yet. its the equal to proving or disproving god. we cant. not yet. and i believe to do so would be foolish. my eyes are open. i guess its a fairly abstract way to think.
 
Interesting thought. Maybe people should focus more on ideas like these, instead of trying to find a way to allow a person to travel in time.

A little while ago I tried to figure out what it would take to have my future self send a message (email) back in time. In theory it's very simple... you just have to think about it now and try not to forget it in the future. The minute the technology will allow you to pull something like this off, your future self will send you an email. However, there are millions of reasons I can think of why this won't work (perhaps the technology will not be available to civilians for instance).

Roel
 
The speed of light is what SETS the "arrow of time" based on our human perceptions. We perceive things happening in a causal sequence (first A happens then B happens) simply because our primary sense (vision) is resonant with the speed of light.

Here is one way to think about it: There is a physical significance to the "c-squared" in Einstein's famous "E=mc^2" equation. In terms of geometry, any distance "squared" denotes area (length x length). In the case of light, "c-squared" is defining a dynamically growing light bubble that emanantes from any light source. The surface area of this spherical light bubble is what the "c-squared" is trying to describe. To borrow a term from black hole physics, the surface of this light bubble is the "event horizon" of our perceptions. We can only perceive what is on the surface of this light bubble (event horizon). Once the light bubble passes us by, the event has occurred and can no longer be perceived. This is how we set our local "arrow of time".

Another way to think about it is similar to Edwin Abbott's Flatland thought experiment: Imagine a species that has no eyes, and its most sophisticated (highest frequency) sense is hearing. Such a species would set their "arrow of time" based on the speed of sound, not the speed of light, because they have no means to perceive light. Rather than a light bubble, this species would have a sound bubble as their event horizon. Such a species would also (erroneously) arrive at the conclusion that the sound barrier could not be exceeded, because they cannot sense anything faster than sound. We know this conclusion is incorrect due to the limitations of that species' perceptions (but there was a time when humans thought the speed of sound was impenetrable as well). But now shift from the hearing-only species to our situation (similar to shifting from Abbott's 2-D Flatland to our 3-D universe). This would tell us that we are also "missing something" by setting reality based solely on what we, as humans, can perceive via light.

Mainstream science is even, in our current day, validating that we are "missing" a whole lot of stuff, ever since NASA WMAP probe set "visible matter" as being only 6% of the total amount of energy in the universe. Dark Matter (DM) and Dark Energy (DE) are very real topics now in mainstream physics, and the implication is understanding what DM and DE are will help us overcome our currently incorrect view of the speed of light as an impenetrable barrier.

Kind Regards,
RainmanTime
 
jayson wrote:
>>its hard for humans to think outside of their limits, maybe impossible for the most part.<<

Indeed. Einstein even dealt with this concept at length when he set down the fundamental basis for his theories. I don't recall the precise words he used, but to paraphrase: Our fundamental assumption must be that our senses tell us what is the truth. While Einstein even noted that this may be fundamentally flawed (think of what your senses tell you when you see the magician cut a person into pieces in a box), he pointed out that we must always start any new theory with a fundamental assumption of what is true.

I am not an Einstein basher, in fact I admire him for so clearly stating his fundamental assumption so no one would get confused (but still, people do). Perhaps it is reasonable to assume that our senses tell us "the truth", but the question becomes: do our senses tell us "the WHOLE truth"?

This fundamental assumption that our senses do not lie to us is the crux of the problem that our society is currently dealing with (and trying to transcend). As I pointed out, NASA WMAP data is telling us that we can ONLY SEE 6% of the total energy that is "out there" as visible mass. In other words, our senses really are NOT telling us the WHOLE truth. Linear time is an illusion based on an incorrection assumption about what our senses tell us. It reminds me of the old saying "if a tree falls in the woods and there is noone to hear it, did it really happen?" The answer appears to be that this event did NOT happen, at least not in the worldlines of those people who were not there to perceive the event.

Also reminds me of the Stephen King story Langoliers. But I don't want to bring scifi into the fray here! :D

Kind Regards,
RainmanTime
 
According to Einsteins theory of relativity you cannot travel at the speed of light as it requires an infinite amount of energy to do so. The interesting bit is this does not apply if you have zero mass, if you have zero mass you can travel at what ever speed you like and you do not need infinite power to do so. With zero mass you can if you wish even exceed the speed of light. The light speed limit is the biggest problem with interstellar travel as if effectively forbids us from getting anywhere in space in anything like a reasonable amount of time - over 4 years to get to the closest star at light speed and we can't even go that fast!

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The Complicated Paragraph

According to Special Relativity kinetic (movement) energy is related to your speed and your mass. The faster you go the higher your kinetic energy so it follows that this energy need to come from somewhere. As you approach the speed of light this kinetic energy level rises sharply giving you very high energy needs if you wish to reach such speeds. With two gravitational drives however it is possible to to cancel your mass out so it becomes zero and if you use a zero mass value in Einstein's formula your kinetic energy is zero irrespective of speed. If your kinetic energy remains at zero you can then travel at what ever speed you wish - even at speeds faster than light! It is the high values of kinetic energy that prevent you from travelling at light speed, remove your mass and the light speed barrier disappears.

Problems, Problems, Problems

Yup, Building an anti-gravity machine is not going to be easy at the best of times but building a light breaker is going to give a whole new set of problems. The biggest problem is how do you properly cancel out the mass? The problem is that it is only exactly between the two Gravitational Engines where you will get a zero mass produced. However objects and people in particular (excluding the odd super model) are not perfectly flat. A gravitational pull changes with distance so and this means that some parts of your craft will have positive mass and some will have negative mass. Any mass, negative or positive will prevent you from travelling at anywhere near light speed never mind exceeding it.

The answer to this problem is to use the negative and positive components of your craft to cancel each other out and to make sure that balance does not change when you are on your journey. You would not be able to walk from negative the to the positive section while traveling faster then light as that will up set the balance and could cause your ship to break the laws of physics and the cosequences of this could be very bad indeed. You could for instance turn into a black hole or alternatively nothing may happen. It is difficult to tell the exact consequences as traveling faster than light is an area in which physicsits are not exactly experienced! Your kenitic energy will be a complex number and this may not be entirely healthy.

Will it take very powerful engines to exceed light speed?

Oddly no. Once you have zero mass the engines just give an acceleration which only stops whan the craft either runs out of fuel or you switch the engines off. While the engines are on and accellerating they will just keep accellerating and accellerating and accellerating... It may take you a long time to reach light speed but you will evntually get there and then exceed it.

Normal earth (or even space) bound propulsion systems provide you with speed, but a zero mass engine acts by different rules giving you an acceleration only. The power of your engines will only determine how fast you get to light speed not if you will, there is no maximum speed and the accelleration limit will be decided by the power of your engines. Since your mass has been canceled out there is no longer any limitation on how fast you can accellerate so you can use much higer acceleration rates than are possible in existing transport systems.

So there you have it, how to travel faster than light without breaking the rules of physics and Einstein doesn't have any complaints about it!


source:http://www.blachford.info/quantum/fastlight.html
 
This is some interesting and innovative thinking. And as the author points out on his web page, this closely resembles the "solution" that has been come to be called the Alcubierre Warp Drive, in honor of Miguel Alcubierre who first floated the concept in a refereed physics paper. However, Dr. Alcubierre speaks of "singularities" rather than anti-gravity. Indeed, when I first read of the John Titor story, I realized how close Titor's schematics of the "time travel" field created by his device resembled the concepts of Alcubierre. If Titor is a hoax, Dr. Alcubierre's paper could have certainly given the person posing as Titor a lot of "believeable" information to weave into his story.

Now, I am not a person who bashes anyone who applies his/her brain to "solve" the problems of the ages. I encourage it. But without acceptance of such theories by people with the physics and mathematical background, the theories remain stories until a higher level of verification (up to and including a working model) is presented. If Mr. Blachford is serious, I would encourage him to develop his mathematical skills, write a formal paper, and submit to such refereed publications as _Physics Today_.

Let me also point out that the theory proposed above is also based on what we believe to be true about gravity from what our senses tell us. To be more specific, this theory assumes that gravity is truly a property of mass, in other words a "cause" rather than simply an "effect". There are alternate theories (some slowly gaining the eyes of physicists) that the CAUSE of what we see as the EFFECT that we call gravity is really a property of all space around us, and is not merely concentrated within mass. One observation (or lack of observation to be accurate) that supports this view is nowhere in nature do we observe any sort of effect that we would call "anti-gravity", or rather an effect where a body is pushed away from another body, rather than drawn to it.

I find it is always best to use a lower-dimensional analogy to be more specific in what I am talking about. In this example, we will look at aerodynamic properties and the effect we call DRAG and compare it to the effect we call gravity. When a body moves thru a fluid (like air) at some velocity, it creates a force effect we call DRAG. This force we call drag is not an inherent property of the body, because it "goes away" once the body is brought to rest with respect to the fluid's mass. Furthermore (and here is the comparision point with anti-gravity) we do not observe any effects in nature that we would call "anti-drag". Drag is positive (resistive) or zero, but not negative. This is the FIRST CLUE to understanding a FIELD EFFECT from a property of a body.

The force of drag is not a property of an airplane, nor is it a property of the airmass the airplane moves through. Rather, drag is an EFFECT caused by the interaction of the solid field of the airplane with the malleable field of the fluid. If one takes this as a clue, we could come to the same conclusion about gravity. Perhaps gravity is NOT a property of mass, but rather the effect that we observe (attraction of bodies) that we call gravity is actually a result of the interaction of the bodies with their surrounding field (space). This is, essentially, the basis for theories of space as a "superfluid" or sometimes called the "exotic vacuum".

I do not make claims that such superfluid theories are "true" or "correct". However, I do find it interesting how such a theory aligns with what we see in aerodynamics with respect to drag/lift, and the fact that this theory ignores the "proven fact" (which it is not) that gravity is an inherent property of mass.

Most of the great discoveries through the ages have resulted from someone taking a different view from what "everyone else" thought was true. I am certain this is how we will come to understand time, and I would bet this is also how we will understand (and manipulate) gravity.

Kind Regards,
RainmanTime
 
Maybe if you were to encode a text message onto a photon before sending it off into the channel. There are lasers precise enough to write messages onto a particle, if you want to be so crude, or you could sit down and actually write lines of encrypted code and piggyback it onto the energy signature. Just a thought, but it's probably been done before.
 
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