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Time Travel: Scientific Plausibility / Theories / Research

Is physical time travel possible?

  • Yes

    Votes: 15 53.6%
  • No

    Votes: 7 25.0%
  • "Dude! Where's my DeLorean?"

    Votes: 6 21.4%

  • Total voters
    28
...So it is quite possible that the Earth could have been moving away from the rocket at high speed and so we would all be younger than the Astronauts..

Ah, but the earth is comparitvely stationary in space, but a rocket is moving through space at high velocity and that's why the fabric of space is having a "time-effect" on the rocket, just as an aeroplane gets drag acting on it as it passes through the air.
 
..I assume the clever Bods at NASA have tried out space travel with an atomic clock on board ship and one in the Lab ?

It's certainly been done as an experiment with airliners, and the clocks on board have been found to run slower (by milliseconds) than stationary clocks in the lab, so presumably NASA assumes the same thing would happen with clocks on rockets and is therefore not worth trying.
PS- I'd thoroughly recommend the film 'Interstellar' which deals with time-stretching effects in an intelligent manner.

SPOILER ALERT- In the screenshot below some of the crew have shuttled down to this planet and wonder why the sea is so shallow, but then they realise the water has been sucked out by the massive gravitational pull of a nearby wormhole (or something) and that it'll soon rush back in..
They get back to the orbiting ship a few hours later and are shocked to find that the crew member who they left up there has now aged 23 years because of the wormholes effects..


interstellar_movie_poster_3.jpg
 
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I did post a link to a scientific explanation about the relationship between Faster-Than Light travel and time travel, earlier in this thread
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...scientific-theories.4756/page-15#post-1277716
here's the link again
http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_part4.html#chap

In short, for any signal sent FTL in one frame of reference, another frame of reference can be found in which that signal actually traveled backwards in time, thus violating causality in that frame.
 
Ah, but the earth is comparitvely stationary in space, but a rocket is moving through space at high velocity and that's why the fabric of space is having a "time-effect" on the rocket, just as an aeroplane gets drag acting on it as it passes through the air.

I admit I don't get Physics, it's seems to be all comparative and relative. The Earth is moving at 67,000 mph around the Sun, the Solar System is moving at ~514,000 mph around the Galactic Hub - how fast is the rocket moving if it isn't following the Earth's orbit ?
 
Yes, in fact I've often wondered whether it's an ability that some aliens have mastered.
If they can't penetrate the light-speed barrier to visit us in person, maybe they're doing it telepathically (assuming that thought travels instantaneously).

Ah now this I measured in 1st Year Experimental Psychology (but can't remember how) - a thought in your head takes an average 10 millisecs to form.
 
Astrophysicist Says He Knows How to Build a Time Machine

Astrophysicist Ron Mallett believes he’s found a way to travel back in time — theoretically.

Source: Futurism online
Date: 1 January, 2020

The tenured University of Connecticut physics professor recently told CNN that he’s written a scientific equation that could serve as the foundation for an actual time machine. He’s even built a prototype device to illustrate a key component of his theory — though Mallett’s peers remain unconvinced that his time machine will ever come to fruition.

To understand Mallett’s machine, you need to know the basics of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which states that time accelerates or decelerates depending on the speed at which an object is moving.

https://futurism-com.cdn.ampproject...sm.com/astrophysicist-build-time-machine-past
 
I had a dream last night where the secrets of time travel were revealed to me. In my dream, I was talking to someone I couldn't see about how time travel would work. They explained the mechanics to me (and here's the let down - I can't remember what that bit was) but as a result, I said, "That means we can only travel forwards in time?" And they replied, "That's correct. We can send explorers forwards in time as time is moving in that direction anyway. We in essence create the future as we we time hop towards it. We can send them back but no further than when they left."

Now in the cold light of day, I am wondering what I meant. I think my brain meant that we can only time travel backwards after first having travelled forwards. You can't go any further back then your starting point.

So if we today (2020) sent a person 5 years in to the future, they would arrive instantaneously in 2025 to find us waiting for them only we would be 5 years older. We would still be alive and would have lived the past 5 years without them but they would have skipped it. We could then tell them what had happened in the past 5 years, send them back to 2020 and when they arrived back, it would be as if they hadn't left at all yet now they would have knowledge of the future 5 years.
 
So if we today (2020) sent a person 5 years in to the future, they would arrive instantaneously in 2025 to find us waiting for them only we would be 5 years older. We would still be alive and would have lived the past 5 years without them but they would have skipped it. We could then tell them what had happened in the past 5 years, send them back to 2020 and when they arrived back, it would be as if they hadn't left at all yet now they would have knowledge of the future 5 years.

And that person would be 'out of the loop' in that there is no chance they could meet themselves or kill Hitler.
 
And that person would be 'out of the loop' in that there is no chance they could meet themselves or kill Hitler.
I suppose so. Any forward travel wouldn't create the Grandad paradox and as long as they could only return to their starting point then nothing is amiss there either.
 
suppose so. Any forward travel wouldn't create the Grandad paradox and as long as they could only return to their starting point then nothing is amiss there either.

But...
What if they travelled forwards, spoke to someone in the future and then came back only to kill them in the present?
 
They wouldn't be in the future!!

True. Arriving back at the starting point means that the future hasn't happened yet but the traveller has glimpsed it. The traveller has seen one possible future and by killing that person in the present time, they would alter the future timeline.

Imagine Professor A oversees the experiment and sends Traveller X fives years into the future. X instantly arrives 5 years in the future and is greeted by A+5. A+5 then sends X backwards 5 years to the exact same point and time of departure. X arrives back and sees A again. As far as A is concerned, X never left and as far as time is concerned, he never left either.

So if X stood up and killed A, then A+5 couldn't exist in the future to send him back. However, A+5 doesn't need to exist in the future as X never left the present time.
 
I'm not sure how relevant this is to time travel for us macro-scale material beings, but this new research indicates the "butterfly effect"[*} doesn't seem to apply at the quantum level.

[*] This refers to the "butterfly effect" a la Bradbury - i.e., damaging the state of the past automatically changes the progression of subsequent events and hence the state of the "present". This isn't exactly the same thing as the "butterfly effect" a la Lorenz / chaos theory.

Time Travel Simulation Shows Quantum 'Butterfly Effect' Doesn't Exist

Here's the story – our protagonist rewinds history, locates baby Hitler, and averts global war by putting him on a path to peace … but, oh noes! This sets off a domino chain of events that stops our hero from being born, or worse, kicks off the apocalypse.

Unintended 'butterfly effect'-style consequences of time travel might be a juicy problem in science fiction, but physicists now have reason to believe in a quantum landscape, tweaking history in this way shouldn't be a major problem.

Since going back to a previous moment in time is still in the 'too hard' basket, a pair of physicists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US went with the next best thing and created a simulation using an IBM-Q quantum computer.

"On a quantum computer, there is no problem simulating opposite-in-time evolution, or simulating running a process backwards into the past," says theoretical physicist Nikolai Sinitsyn.

It's hardly as complex as a Universe of human actors and historical events, but a small stage made up of correlated quantum states is plenty for researchers to replay events with tiny changes to see how things play out.

"So we can actually see what happens with a complex quantum world if we travel back in time, add small damage, and return. We found that our world survives, which means there's no butterfly effect in quantum mechanics," says Sinitsyn. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/time-t...has-nothing-to-fear-from-the-butterfly-effect
 
This newly published research in the mathematics of dynamics suggests paradox-free time travel is possible ... If time travel were to be possible ... If you believe the math ...
A Physicist Has Come Up With Math That Makes 'Paradox-Free' Time Travel Plausible

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It's a monumental head-scratcher known as the 'grandfather paradox', but now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, says he has worked out how to "square the numbers" to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

"Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system," says Tobar.

"However, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel – where an event can be both in the past and future of itself – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head."

What the calculations show is that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid paradoxes. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-physicist-has-come-up-with-the-maths-to-make-time-travel-plausible


Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice
Germain Tobar and Fabio Costa
Published 21 September 2020 • © 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd
Classical and Quantum Gravity, Volume 37, Number 20

Abstract
The theory of general relativity predicts the existence of closed time-like curves (CTCs), which theoretically would allow an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self. This raises the question of whether this could create a grandfather paradox, in which the observer interacts in such a way to prevent their own time travel. Previous research has proposed a framework for deterministic, reversible, dynamics compatible with non-trivial time travel, where observers in distinct regions of spacetime can perform arbitrary local operations with no contradiction arising. However, only scenarios with up to three regions have been fully characterised, revealing only one type of process where the observers can verify to both be in the past and future of each other. Here we extend this characterisation to an arbitrary number of regions and find that there exist several inequivalent processes that can only arise due to non-trivial time travel. This supports the view that complex dynamics is possible in the presence of CTCs, compatible with free choice of local operations and free of inconsistencies.

FULL ARTICLE:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/aba4bc
 
Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere in thread or forum, but one thing I dont quite "get" about time travel leaving aside paradoxes and the like.

The earth is moving rather quickly through space, as is the solar system, and so on up the scales. So if I decided to travel back 57 years to see myself being born, the earth I am on NOW is many many many miles away from the earth that I would like to travel too. How can I get "there" from "here", meaning the physical location of the soon to be sprogged young Twigs?
 
Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere in thread or forum, but one thing I dont quite "get" about time travel leaving aside paradoxes and the like.
The earth is moving rather quickly through space, as is the solar system, and so on up the scales. So if I decided to travel back 57 years to see myself being born, the earth I am on NOW is many many many miles away from the earth that I would like to travel too. How can I get "there" from "here", meaning the physical location of the soon to be sprogged young Twigs?

Yes, this subject has been mentioned multiple times in multiple places. Within this thread the first mention dates back to 2001:

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...plausibility-theories-research.4756/post-7957
 
I have just launched a book, ' Threads of Time' A compilation of accounts collated from individuals who may have experienced a brief excursion into another time zone or have slipped into an alternative dimensions. Examples include
Close to the village of Rougham, Suffolk, UK, a Georgian mansion house unexpectedly appears and disappears. This case of sightings has been ongoing for 150 years.
In 1984, Ken Webster received dozens of messages that appeared on his BBC Microcomputer monitor, written in ‘Middle English’. A person named Lukas Wainman believed to be from the 1500’s sent these strange messages.
A Russian scientist, who constructed a time travel ‘pod’, in which one of the experiments resulted in tragic circumstances. In a terraced house in Bath, Somerset, UK, a retired watchmaker created a healing device that also had the additional capability of being used as a time machine. https://rb.gy/ui7jve
 

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HEY,
IS ANYONE INTERESTED IN TIME TRAVEL? DO ANY OF YOU GUYS HAVE ANY THEORIES? I WOULD LIKE TO CHIT CHAT WITH ANYONE THAT HAS ANYTHING INTERESTING THEY HAVE TO SAY ABOUT TIME TRAVEL. REPLY OR E-MAIL ME. ZERO
Yeah...I have just launched a book on this topic...Threads of Time..
 
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