Someone said over on the Beuller post that backwards time travel was impossible, when it is jsut as theoretically possible as forwards time travel.
Forward time travel as we imaging it, itn't really time travel. Actually no 'time travel' is time travel. WHen we think of it we commonly think of moving the speed of light and watchign everythign go by while we stay the same. Which is really just sitting around for X amount of time not realising its been so long.
However, there are other ways of travelling through time. A new theory called 'string theory' has been popping up over the past decade and it says that there are 10 dimensions. (among them time) and thats the smallest particles (electrons etc.) are made up of strings that are wound up in all 10 dimensions. They are a loop so the string exist everywhere in every dimension. Imagine winding a string in a ball. It would exist in the entire space of that ball in all 3 dimensions. But since this is a 10 dimensional string, it exists everywhere in all dimensions at the same time. This means that everythign exists in every point in time at any given point.
So since everythign exists at all times, everywhere time travel is theoretically possible. Although if an entity were to try to go through time the particles go to whereever they were at that point. So if a piece of an electron in you ear were part of a dinosaur leg 70,000,000 years ago and 'you' go back to that time, that part of your ear would be part of the leg.
Now... there is SO MUCH MORE. Read this book: Hyperspace by Michio Kaku if youre interested... its really easy to follow and he uses analogies that you can understand instead of throwing numbers at you.
08:08 pm, Monday, February 18, 2002 (10 years ago)
essentially what miriku said was that time branches and keeps gettign more confusing. but what string theory says is that all combinations conciavable of placing molecules (infinite jsut about) are in existence at all times. Thus time doesnt really exist as we understand it. We are just traveling along this 'line' in the dimension of time. Yep
This sort of discussion reminds me of how when scientists say they know what a comet is composed of, say it's a big methane slushball or whatnot. Absolute bullshit.Who knows? Who's stood on a comet and taken a sample? Probably contains stuff we've never seen. We are so naive to think we have anything as complex as time, let alone travelling through it, figured out. For all we really know there's a man playing an organ in his basement and out through the pipes flows time. C'mon, written language is less than 5000 years old, we basically became capable of abstract thought yesterday, relative to the age of the rest of the universe.
trivially, i'm not much for analogies. numbers either. there's nothing like a solid "for all x such that x is a subset of integers, there exists..." to start off an argument ;)
if time travel is impossible due to the 2nd law, does that mean we are defining time passing as the continued expansion (exertion) of the the universe? I'm sort of shaky on the subject, it's been a few years.......how do we know the universe is an isolated system? If it were not, then according to miriku, we could go back and forth in time? : / Maybe time is being "fed" therefore you could always have "new" time to use? or am I being a "dumbass"?
