Want to be a time traveller? Now you can be!

[kiwi1960]

This is for all those that want to time travel...

Stand up, walk to any wall.... turn around and face the opposite wall, now, walk to it...

Bravo, you are now a traveller...and as it takes time to walk from wall to wall, you are, really.... a time traveller.

This is still only able to transport you into the future, but they are working on the solution.

[HoloYolo]

Is this a joke? If it is it's not funny.

[kiwi1960]

No, its a fact. We are all time travellers. Even in the KSP world, where we go from one planet to another, it takes time.

People forget this when talking about how much fun it would be to be a time traveller... they are one now.

But till REAL time travel is invented, if ever, then we have to settle for reality.

I reckon the name of it should be changed, to avoid confusion...

My son said time travel was impossible... I told him its already here... I won!

[HoloYolo]

No, its a fact. We are all time travellers. Even in the KSP world, where we go from one planet to another, it takes time.

People forget this when talking about how much fun it would be to be a time traveller... they are one now.

But till REAL time travel is invented, if ever, then we have to settle for reality.

I reckon the name of it should be changed, to avoid confusion...

My son said time travel was impossible... I told him its already here... I won!

Sorry about that, I read it wrong. You're right. Here's another fact. We are always in the past! By the the time light of a current event hits our eyes, it already happened, so we're always in the past!

[hugix]

I travel through time a lot. But I only manage to go about 60 seconds per minute.

[benjee10]

I'm not actually sure if this counts as time travel. Since everything around us is also traveling forwards in time at the exact same rate, can we not be seen to be in fact stationary? It's the same as two objects rendezvousing with each other in KSP; though they may be traveling at thousands of metres per second, if they have zero relative velocity then they can be seen to not be moving at all, right? Especially when there is no frame of reference. I'd only count it as time travel if we were moving through time faster or slower than the things around us, but we're not.

[Camacha]

I travel through time a lot. But I only manage to go about 60 seconds per minute.

Your minutes or my minutes? OP seems to be true, but in a different way. If you walk around, time passes slightly slower for you than for the environment. You age slower than the room around you, so you are not only travelling through space, but also through time in the actual sense thanks to relative velocity time dilation.

[K^2]

Stand up, walk to any wall.... turn around and face the opposite wall, now, walk to it...

Bravo, you are now a traveller...and as it takes time to walk from wall to wall, you are, really.... a time traveller.

Surely, you're a traveler of both time and space, to be where you have been.

[vger]

I like the time machine I've been using since I was little. I can look into the past whenever I want. The only drawback is I can only look into periods of the past that I had bothered to videotape.

[NFUN]

Surely, you're a traveler of both time and space, to be where you have been.

We should be careful not to travel too far in time, lest all we see turn to brown as the sun burns the ground.

[LordFerret]

Truth is, we all live in the past as everything you see has happened already ... it takes time for the light bounced off what we're looking at to reach our eyes, so in that sense we're seeing what has happened and not what is happening.

[Xannari Ferrows]

The time on my watch: NOW

As funny as it may be, it's not accurate. It's not now, but rather anywhere from .4 to .7 seconds on average in the past when accounting for perceptive limitations, and varying timescales for distant objects.

[YNM]

I'd go with cosmological standards of "now" : a period that extends +- 10000 yrs. If time travel is a reality I expect to jump farther than that...

[Motokid600]

Way I like to think of it is... Ignoring time zones If you were to strap an atomic clock to yourself and walk east the clock would run faster. If you walk west the clock would run slower. Time travel.

[-Velocity-]

I don't think that time works like a time line... there is just change, and thermodynamics makes it so that certain kinds of changes are vastly more likely than others.

Have you ever seen a broken dinner plate fly back together and fall back up to where it fell from? It sounds ludicrous, but it is not technically impossible- only statistically impossible. First, the molecules vibrating with heat energy in the shattered plate have to mostly vibrate at the same time in the exact same direction to additively combine all their thermal kinetic energy into macroscopic kinetic energy (converting heat directly into motion), which sends the plate shards flying back together, while slightly cooling the shards. (The plate could also extract heat energy from the air molecules bombarding its surface.) Next, as the plate shards all recombine at the exact same time and place to reconstruct the plate, additional heat vibrations have to line up perfectly to reconnect all the molecular bonds that broke when the plate shattered. Finally, the remainder of the heat energy is converted into upward motion, which brings the plate back into your hand. Of course, if you wanted to exactly reverse it, you'd also have to have heat in the air reconstruct the sound of the plate breaking and have that sound all converge down to the plate.

Anyway, it sounds ridiculous, but all it is is a breaking plate played "backwards" in time. What tells us it is possible is that the laws of physics are actually fully reversible- every interaction can happen in either direction without any violation. A broken dinner plate spontaneously reassembling itself is technically possible, but so exceedingly unlikely that no one will ever observe such a thing in a billion, billion, billion, etc. lives of the universe. Statistics- thermodynamics, effectively- makes it appear that certain things like to happen in certain directions only. Iron rusts; rust does not un-rust and become iron. Dinner plates do not un-break.

/Opinion:

To me, that the laws of physics are fully reversible suggests that there is no past or future, there is only rate of change, which is time. We can not travel backward in time because there is nowhere to travel back to, and no way to violate causality. Even when you play the dinner plate breaking in reverse, causality is preserved- but you couldn't reverse the expansion of the universe, for example, without breaking causality. And we also don't travel "forward" in time- we just travel in time. Thermodynamics doesn't really set the "direction" in time, it just sets what kind of things are statistically (but not completely) impossible when we travel in time.

Edited July 5, 2015 by |Velocity|

[PakledHostage]

I travel through time a lot. But I only manage to go about 60 seconds per minute.

Then what good is your avatar? I thought you said you were a time lord?

[kiwi1960]

The problem that none of you have grasped yet is "time"... its only a concept, a way to explain things.

If you were on Pluto, "time" would still run the same as on Earth, but one "year" takes hundreds of our years to complete, or rather, the orbit of Pluto around the sun is longer than here.

So, if I were on Pluto, and 55 years old here, I wouldn't even have had a first birthday yet, on Pluto.

So really, "time" travel is a very bad word to use. Maybe two words would be better, to differentiate between backwards and forwards through "time"...

Back travel and forward travel?

But, getting back to the OLD standard time travel debate...

If you could build a machine takes you BACK in time, or FORWARD in time, then couldn't you just as easily go SIDEWAYS through time? Inter dimensional travel...

I just thought that, BUT, seeing it written, Doctor Who has gone to other dimensions in his TARDIS... so its not really my idea.

Even if you could invent a standard time machine, there would be problems.

Lets say you could go back in time 1 minute. Your would actually be sitting beside yourself as the Earth has moved slightly AND rotated.

If you went back 100 years, your machine would have to take that into account.

[RainDreamer]

As a frequent flyer, I do time travel a lot going between time zones. Heck, my SO is 12 hours in the past comparing to my current time. The time travel jokes get boring after a while.

[StrandedonEarth]

I like the time machine I've been using since I was little. I can look into the past whenever I want. The only drawback is I can only look into periods of the past that I had bothered to videotape.

Yes, this is the part of time travel we mortal humans have mastered: The ability to capture moments in time, from instants to hours, and replay them at will.

[hugix]

Truth is, we all live in the past as everything you see has happened already ... it takes time for the light bounced off what we're looking at to reach our eyes, so in that sense we're seeing what has happened and not what is happening.

Well actually, we live in the future. It is true light takes some time to reach our eyes, but our brains process these signals differently. It trries not to understand what is happening 'now' (now being this moment minus the time light took to travel). Our brain actually tries to figure out what is going to happen. This makes it easier for us to anticipate certain situations.

[YNM]

Well actually, we live in the future. It is true light takes some time to reach our eyes, but our brains process these signals differently. It trries not to understand what is happening 'now' (now being this moment minus the time light took to travel). Our brain actually tries to figure out what is going to happen. This makes it easier for us to anticipate certain situations.

That's why you can still fool living things. I often wonder, while light is fast (yet space is horribly huge) isn't all neurons are sending electrochemical signal ? Doesn't that mean even more delays ? How can we know that what happens at our feet is the same as what out eye see ? Or are there delays ? If not, is there any lag felt ? I never felt it - maybe there's a limit in the smallest instance we can feel, and that's what keep us being able to function ?

@kiwi1960 : I'd say time is the distace between two event at the same space coordinate. True that martian year is longer than our year, but a single caesium atom is going to oscilate the same way, the same distance (spatial and causal) between two maximum. There'd only be some very small difference due to relativity (mars being farther from sun and going slower)...

[kiwi1960]

I admit, I got it wrong, dammit... Time is a concept to MEASURE our day and years.

Maybe... as i have been thinking again.... "time" travel in the Doctor Who sense cannot ever be possible, for one very simple reason.

We are thinking of time that can be traversed... maybe it cannot be. There is no "past" except in our memories (etc) and no future as it hasn't happened yet.

"time" therefore is a constant... they only REAL time is now. its not really "moving" forward... it just IS, the past doesn't exist and it never did, not for us, even 1 minute ago doesn't exist any more.

Time cannot be traversed if it does not exist... if it could be... and lets get this right... time, even with all its little local quirks like in a black hole, is the same. If you could go back in time, or forward, then you risk destabilizing a Universal constant, possibly, the universe (for you at least) would cease to exist and so would you... dare I say it, there might even be a chance that time itself is disrupted Universally...

Hmmm... that scares me for some reason... my brain isn't big enough to figure it out to its conclusion....

[benjee10]

I admit, I got it wrong, dammit... Time is a concept to MEASURE our day and years.

Maybe... as i have been thinking again.... "time" travel in the Doctor Who sense cannot ever be possible, for one very simple reason.

We are thinking of time that can be traversed... maybe it cannot be. There is no "past" except in our memories (etc) and no future as it hasn't happened yet.

"time" therefore is a constant... they only REAL time is now. its not really "moving" forward... it just IS, the past doesn't exist and it never did, not for us, even 1 minute ago doesn't exist any more.

Time cannot be traversed if it does not exist... if it could be... and lets get this right... time, even with all its little local quirks like in a black hole, is the same. If you could go back in time, or forward, then you risk destabilizing a Universal constant, possibly, the universe (for you at least) would cease to exist and so would you... dare I say it, there might even be a chance that time itself is disrupted Universally...

Hmmm... that scares me for some reason... my brain isn't big enough to figure it out to its conclusion....

We don't know that and can't ever know that for sure. Maybe time exists as a 'physical' dimension, maybe it doesn't, there's no way of knowing without being able to view it from a higher perspective.

[YNM]

One promising thing is if (mind, I really mean if) multi-timeline-verse is true - you can literally think that anything else is happening on other timelines, maybe some movies were real and such... Even so, we can't tell is that true or not scientifically, forever. For that the other timelines don't interact with ours (hence no physical effect, nothing to be measured).

I often view the reality as a single unique version among all other timelines, and sudden "time travel" (where you go between two instance that's not supposed to be in your timeline) might makes you move between timelines (as for sure you cannot break causality - unless we already see a creature from the far future, think of the film terminator that whatever the characters do it won't stop the nuclear doom, hence causality is preserved).

Being able to time travel would be a really bad wanted limbo...

[Camacha]

Why is relativity kept out of this discussion? Time dilation means we travel time in a real sense on a daily basis. Even my feet are slighty younger than my brain is due to the gravity gradient of Earth and velocity has a say in the matter too.