Physicists Are Looking At How We Might Take A Trip Through Time

Wall Street Journal ^ | 21 November 2003 | SHARON BEGLEY

[Hot Tabasco]

And there's the rub. Time travelers could never reach a time earlier than when a wormhole was engineered

Damn! I was hoping to pop back 35 years to my highschool girl's locker room for a quick peek. My 35 year reunion was not a pleasant sight........ :)

[PatrickHenry]

A friend of mine, John, is actually living that kind of thing. John's father married (of course) and had a son, John's brother. Then the wife died, and John's father married her sister, and their son is my friend, John. John's brother has a mother who is John's aunt, and vice versa. And strictly speaking, John's own mother could be describe as John's aunt (she being, at one time, the sister-in-law of his father). So as the son of his aunt, my friend John is his own cousin.

[Hot Tabasco]

If you could spin a light source, say a lazar light source, at the speed of light, what would happen to the beam of light?

Excellent question! I suggest you pose it to a democrap tho, they are the masters of spin.....

[general_re]

I don't know about travel into the future, but travel into the past must be logically impossible. The effect would precede the cause.

Or there is some higher-order logic to it all that we simply don't understand yet. That's usually the case when we're presented with actualities that, at first blush, appear to be logically impossible - it may turn out that causality is simply not the rigid principle we think it is, despite the apparent implications of such.

Or perhaps there is no underlying logic at all, and time travel simply does not comport with predicate logic in the first place. Like most people, I tend to dislike such explanations, but none of us are really in a position to conclusively rule it out, obviously - the fact that the universe appears to be a logical place insofar as the bits we've explored are concerned in no way creates a logical requirement that the rest of the universe be equally logical. It's not exactly like we're free of logical paradoxes at the moment, so what's one more? ;)

[myself6]

Time time time
an imagery line; mine not yours nor yours mine.
They lead the blind back to the mothers womb, tomb of the unborn child.
Coming events cast their shadows before,
wintery wind, the eye of the storm.
Witness the past, the future holds more prelude to ruin

[PatrickHenry]

It's not exactly like we're free of logical paradoxes at the moment ...

I am a paradox-free zone. Anchor your reality to me, and you might pull through.

[Quix]

If my memory of reading strange sites is accurate . . .

there are those running around loose with straight faces claiming that our government has had time travel machines for more than a decade or two or three.

[PatrickHenry]

there are those running around loose ...

Used to be. They've been undone. If there are still any loose ends, they'll unravel. Tempus fugit.

[yooper]

"On the other hand, name your favorite person you are sure is really from the future."

Nicola Tesla.

[doug from upland]

I would go back in time to the '40s in Arkansas. I'd find the guy in whose back seat Virginia Kelley was impregnated and make sure he had a condom.

[tiki]

I just talking about time travel yesterday. Peabody and Sherman were my favorite cartoon characters, LOL

[PJ-Comix]

I would love to travel about a million years into the future and then tell all those hot looking Eloi women that when they hear the whistle blow, they gotta....Well, you can figure out the rest.

[Sam Cree]

"I'd go look up the resolution, but I have a cat sleeping on my legs and I sorta hate to disturb him. He's been sleeping all day and he's kinda worn out from it."

Schrodinger's cat, I guess?

[Sam Cree]

I like "The Anubis Gates," by Tim Powers. Lots of fun, and well written. Also includes dancing apes.

[JoeSchem]

Well, I arrived safely and here I am! Pretty amazing, isn't it?

[general_re]

Suuure you are....

Zeno's paradox was resolved when some clever fellows invented calculus. The coastline paradox became somewhat more tractable with the discovery of fractals. And some we're stuck with, at least for the moment - Grelling's paradox, inter alia (my Latinate contribution for the evening), is a real bastard in first-order logic, and not much fun in higher-order logics either. Feel free to take a whack, if you like - if you're paradox-free, you must have something extremely clever up your sleeve. ;)

[JoeSchem]

Time travel is no big deal. Watch me travel back in time to Post #75 . . . .

[Quix]

Could you elaborate?

[RightWingAtheist]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Gregory Benford's Timescape yet. One of my favorite dramatizations of time travel and its paradoxes is the Outer Limits episode "The Man Who Was never Born," with Martin landau.

There's a science fiction story I read about years ago (In Arthur C. Clarke's Astounding Days) called "Ancestral Voices," written by one Nat Schachner. It's about someone who goes back in time to the Crusades (I think) and kills one of his ancestors, and as a result, thousands of people of different races and creeds-all with racist attitudes-vanish. Still relevant today, alas.

[RightWingAtheist]

I would love to travel about a million years into the future and then tell all those hot looking Eloi women that when they hear the whistle blow, they gotta....

Are you sure that they'll all look like Yvette Mimieux? :)