Time Trip - questions and answers (How widely accepted is the theory that we can travel in time?)

BBC ^ | Friday, December 26, 2003 | BBC

[ffusco]

"Hawking proposed a Chronology Protection Conjecture which says that the laws of physics disallow time machines. Basically, such scientists argue that nature will conspire to prevent the building of a time machine - one possibility is that runaway surges in quantum energy would generate massive gravitational fields and turn any time machine into mush"

A sentient universse? Or G-d?

[PoorMuttly]

Just whatever you do....DON'T play it BACKWARDS !

[ffusco]

The limits of reductionism, the analytic scalpel endlessly naming smaller parts.

Everything is a manifestation of energy, so in a holistic way there is no objectivity or otherness.

[aruanan]

(How widely accepted is the theory that we can travel in time?)

I time travel all the time--but just one way, and I keep up with the flow of traffic.

[Orangedog]

I think a better question might be: if time travel is possible, then why haven't we been visited from the future yet?

How can you be sure we haven't been visited? It's not like a time traveller would walk up to you and say "Hi, I'm from the future!" Society has a habbit of either laughing at or locking up and medicating people who do things like that.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

The Squire of Gothos episode.

Great episode with General Trelane.

The one I'm thinking of is "The City On the Edge Of Forever" where Kirk falls in love with a pacifist.

[ffusco]

I love vintage Trek!

[aruanan]

The below is an example of that old high school saying, "The stars are matter. We are matter. It don't matter." Cute, but lame.

Everything is a manifestation of energy, so in a holistic way there is no objectivity or otherness.

Unless otherness doesn't depend on energy, in the same way that a scalpel and a retractor are both surgical steel but neither is the other and both are objectively different. A radio wave emitted by a star and a radio wave modulated by a radio station are both emitted radio waves but they are both objectively and subjectively different. It's their differences, not their similarities, that make the difference.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

I love vintage Trek!

Excellent show, never been anything like it before or since.

[razorback-bert]

I poste this reply yesterday.

[razorback-bert]

Oops, I left the d back in time.

[ffusco]

Re your list of 100 best albums:

Joy Division Unkown Pleasures

[hosepipe]

Yesterday is a figment of you're mind, tomorrow is too..
Carpe Diem..."Sieze the day"..

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Joy Division Unkown Pleasures

Don't have that one but I'll look into it. I'm always in the market for good music.

[ffusco]

Phililosophically speaking objectivity is a form of subjectivity.

[Imal]

This article was already posted 300 years from now.

[Orangedog]

With all the changes they'd inevitably make to the past, sooner or later someone is going to end up making a change that will alter January 1, 2004 enough that time travel *doesn't* get invented.

There are a lot of theories on time travel that gets around temporal paradox issues. None of them are complete, but they are based on our current understanding of quantum physics.

One theory is that traveling back in time would result in the traveler ending up in a parallel universe where everything appears to be the past, but is really the past in another universe that is very close to the one he left and when he returned, it would be back to his original universe. That way nothing he did in "the past" would effect his future.

Another theory is hard to get your mind around. That part of quantum theory is that cause and effect would get turned on it's head regarding time travel. According to some theorists, the laws of cause and effect would become reversed, so that your actions in the future would influence the your actions in the past. I've been trying to make sense of that one for a while. The problem is that we are corporial in nature. Our understanding of the universe is that there is a beginning, a middle and an end, in that order. For us to understand how space and time operate on a grand scale is like trying to explain three dimentional space to someone who only exists in a two dimensional world. All they can understand is right and left and would not be able to understand the concept of up and down.

[PoorMuttly]

O.K....Muttly have string and tomato.

Now what.

[calljack]

Edith Keeler played by Joan Collins.
You thought you were a nerd.
What was the name of Captian Pike's hores??
Now you are a NERD.

[Orangedog]

As long as you don't know the combination to the safe in Kirk's quarters, there is still hope for you. ;)