Thanks Kittamaru....
It was too late to edit myself, and I also reported it.
Quick action...nice.
Time Travel is Science Fiction
- Thread starter Farsight
- Start date
It was too late to edit myself, and I also reported it.
Quick action...nice.
Thanks LaurieAG, noted.
On September 11 of 2001, The hijackers flew the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 175: Left Logan Airport at 8:14 a.m. en route to Los Angeles with a crew of nine and 51 passengers, not including five hijackers.
The hijackers flew the plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m.
Thus at 8AM on 9/11/01 most would have expected that the twin towers would be standing with more than 3000 people working in them to be in the professor's now already existing future, scheduled to arrive four hours later at 12:00 on 9/11 but when that future did arrive at noon it was something quite different. I. e. Few would have expected that site to be rubble with parts of two airplanes mixed into the rubble. They would have expected the twin towers to be standing . They were wrong in their expectations, but the point is :
That any SINGLE now pre-existing future must have evolved from the series of past events either deterministically (in violation of both free will ideas and QM's probabilistic nature.) and/or be controlled by some clairvoyant agent, many would call a God. Even if free will does not exist, QM makes more than a trillion, trillion "possible futures" which are only one second from becoming the present's now during the next second. Where were all these trillion trillion plus "future complete universes" stored? What happened to all but one of them? Also note each of them had more than a trillion, trillion different futures stored some where that were to arrive as the present "now" in 2 seconds. Etc.
SUMMARY: The professor's view that all possible futures DO now exist is the most improbably fantasy I can imagine. Thus I conclude there is no now existing future one can "time travel" to, where "time travel" has any meaning other than use some procedure to live longer than if that procedure were not used, so you will still be alive in a present more remote from your birth date. There are several "procedures" that do achieve this slower aging rate (at least on average.) Mine is working well. It is to exercise and eat a healthy diet, use vitamin D3 so I can avoid the sun's aging effects and take a "baby aspirin"* daily as I am more than a decade past my expected death date.** Of course I never smoked and got a lot of "safe sex" in my younger days. Amazingly my weight has not changed by more than 5 Lbs since I was 25 and I remain tall and thin with very desirable body mass index but I am about a cm less tall now and my hair is white. Yet I am still both mentally and physically active and with a memory for facts of physics so good that I rarely need to google for any physical fact.
* Actually less (only 81mg) is effective and now in US cheaply sold with 365 tiny coated pills in a small bottle.
** At least two decades beyond what my US average life expectance at birth was. When I retired early to live in Brazil I put 350,000 dollars into an annuity that was paying much higher rate of returns than they do now ~6.5% annually. I did that even thought I and most expected serious inflation at the time to protect myself from foolishness that I might do as I aged. I have recovered my $350,000 more than three times over and am not yet thru making them sorry they sold that policy to me.
United Airlines Flight 175: Left Logan Airport at 8:14 a.m. en route to Los Angeles with a crew of nine and 51 passengers, not including five hijackers.
The hijackers flew the plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m.
Thus at 8AM on 9/11/01 most would have expected that the twin towers would be standing with more than 3000 people working in them to be in the professor's now already existing future, scheduled to arrive four hours later at 12:00 on 9/11 but when that future did arrive at noon it was something quite different. I. e. Few would have expected that site to be rubble with parts of two airplanes mixed into the rubble. They would have expected the twin towers to be standing . They were wrong in their expectations, but the point is :
That any SINGLE now pre-existing future must have evolved from the series of past events either deterministically (in violation of both free will ideas and QM's probabilistic nature.) and/or be controlled by some clairvoyant agent, many would call a God. Even if free will does not exist, QM makes more than a trillion, trillion "possible futures" which are only one second from becoming the present's now during the next second. Where were all these trillion trillion plus "future complete universes" stored? What happened to all but one of them? Also note each of them had more than a trillion, trillion different futures stored some where that were to arrive as the present "now" in 2 seconds. Etc.
SUMMARY: The professor's view that all possible futures DO now exist is the most improbably fantasy I can imagine. Thus I conclude there is no now existing future one can "time travel" to, where "time travel" has any meaning other than use some procedure to live longer than if that procedure were not used, so you will still be alive in a present more remote from your birth date. There are several "procedures" that do achieve this slower aging rate (at least on average.) Mine is working well. It is to exercise and eat a healthy diet, use vitamin D3 so I can avoid the sun's aging effects and take a "baby aspirin"* daily as I am more than a decade past my expected death date.** Of course I never smoked and got a lot of "safe sex" in my younger days. Amazingly my weight has not changed by more than 5 Lbs since I was 25 and I remain tall and thin with very desirable body mass index but I am about a cm less tall now and my hair is white. Yet I am still both mentally and physically active and with a memory for facts of physics so good that I rarely need to google for any physical fact.
* Actually less (only 81mg) is effective and now in US cheaply sold with 365 tiny coated pills in a small bottle.
** At least two decades beyond what my US average life expectance at birth was. When I retired early to live in Brazil I put 350,000 dollars into an annuity that was paying much higher rate of returns than they do now ~6.5% annually. I did that even thought I and most expected serious inflation at the time to protect myself from foolishness that I might do as I aged. I have recovered my $350,000 more than three times over and am not yet thru making them sorry they sold that policy to me.
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Billy, I don't believe that the professor intended his comments in the way you or even I have characterized them. I was responding by putting his comments into the context of the thread, which I am pretty sure he did not fully understand.
In his second email response his comments began with an introduction of simutaneity of relativity, the present defined as a single point and, that asking what is happening in Andromeda right now does not even make sense. Based on that, I don't believe the following comment that past and future coexist, can be understood as a statement of any physical reality.
His last paragraph does say directly that time travel to the future is possible but through limitations based essentially on the grandfather paradox, time travel to the past is not! In the context of his comments only, I have to read this as defining time travel to the future as what I referred to earlier as waking up in the morning or the case of the twin paradox. Neither of which do I consider time-travel and neither of which suggests that the future exists now.
More important to your comment is a single sentence in that last paragraph,
"Since this sounds difficult to accept because it would clearly limit free will, then the obvious solution is that you can't travel to the past."
When taken out of the context of the discussion as a whole, it sounds very much like he is attempting to present a reasoned explanation about the concept of time-travel, as he understands GR, relying on the implied definitions of time-travel associated with his comments. I don't see a single fixed definition presented... But he very clearly excludes any condition that limits free will and doesn't make any statement that extends a physical reality to the past or future, right now.
Though I am sure this particular professor, does have some fringe or cutting edge ideas about the potential practical applications of physics, I don't believe he understood the full context of the discussion before his comments were posted.
While it is very ineresting to read email responses by professors and practicing physicists, I don't think it is always fair to them to ask them to respond to a few quoted posts, whose full implications cannot be understood out of context of the larger discussion. Participants in the thread obviously have trouble at times pinning down the opposing position. It would be far better to ask a specific question.
I concur. Tashja, please can you show Prof Alcubierre the OP? And tell him we live in a world of space and motion, and that the map is not the territory.
List one. Finally after four request you did give an example you claimed showed me putting words in your mouth. I. e. my saying "not prohibit" is not equal to "Is possible" is not putting words in any ones mouth - just stating a fact, and sometimes further illustrating why that is a fact by noting the laws of physics don't say anything about many things I generically called X and that X = Time travel, meaning more than just using one of several processes to slow your rate of aging is one such X than physics is silent about. I agree that accelerating up to near the speed of light does make aging proceed more slowly in terms of Earth based clocks, as does suspended animation or just exercise and good diet does.
I belived that "free will" is a very common illusion until about 1992 as the discharge of every nerve in the body, especially the brain, does follow the laws of chemistry and physics. Then quite by accident, in my year of studies (with full APL/JHU salary) in the cognitive Science Department of JHU when investigating how perception is actually achieved I discover how it was at least possible for genuine free will to co-exist with these physical laws - not a proof that free will does.
In fact I am still of the opinion that "free will" probably is just an illusion. (That opinion is based on "in brain" micro electrode studies that in some cases indicate a decision has been made even 30 seconds before the person is conscious of doing so, and the many dichotic listening experiments that show three or four sentences other than the one you are consciously attending are as fully processed as the one you are consciously following. I.e. the brain is a "parallel processor" except only one "stream of consciousness" at a time is possible so that is a serial process.
I. e. during that year, I developed what I call the Real Time Simulation mode for perception, which is in conflict with the accepted POV that perceptions follow many stages (each with neural process delays) of "computational transforms" of the input sensory data. Many fact support my POV and are in conflict with the accepted POV. To just name two: visual experiences in dreams with eyes closed & Playing a fast game of Ping-Pong or avoiding a collision in an F-1 race car in less than 0.02 seconds. For more on the Real Time Simulation taking place in parietal cortex when awake or dreaming with special emphasis on the possibility that humans can have genuine free will, See: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=905778&postcount=66 where I explain and justify my RTS view of perception. Then see:
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/wh...e-will-an-illusion.104623/page-5#post-2644660 and posts 84,86 & 94 where I clarify my POV more in response to some questions.
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Completely, wholely, utterly, and in all ways irrelevant.
This is just wrong.
First off, nothing you have presented contradicts the concept of free will, there are a number of ways that free-will and pre-determinism can both be shown to be compatable, not the least of which is the fact that humans don't exert 'true' free will - if you think otherwise, go mmarry a gay jewish black dude, and no, that's not a slur, I actually mean it literaly.
On the other hand, there's different ways of treating the co-existence of the past present and future that render what you have to say irrelevant.
Finally pre-determinism does not, in fact, contradict the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.
I've alluded to this several times now, and so far all you've done is ignore me, much like a troll would.
Now you're just being absurd...
Things exist. Things like stars and planets and light and electrons and hearts and clocks. These things move, and they move through space. The past is merely a label for where all these things used to be. But in itself it doesn't exist. Things exist, space exists, motion exists. But the past is not a thing, and it is not a place that you can go, and nor is the future. See [URL='http://www.sciforums.com/threads/time-travel-is-science-fiction.140847/']the OP[/url], where I refer to the stasis box, which is a glorified freezer. You "travel to the future" by not moving at all whilst everything else does. You aren't travelling at all. And there is no way you can travel such that all the things that exist are back where they were without ever having moved at all.
Do ideas and dreams exist?
There is a specific question, and I believe all the good professors have answered that question....
Do the laws of physics and GR and associated equations give solutions that allow for time travel. And the answer has been a resounding yes.
As a pusher of fantasies such as claiming to have a ToE, your concurrence can be taken with a grain of salt.
Let me continue your rather limited description of what does and does not exist.....
Space exists, time exists, spacetime exists, gravity exists, motion exists, matter/energy exists, and all exist and are emergent from spacetime.
Hope that helps.
Thanks, and it helps, but the benefit is limited for me. What does spacetime emerge from? ... That is a rhoterical question, Paddoboy, but the point is that being a cheerleader for the standard cosmology is fine, but not necessary in every breath. And to repeatedly disparage any member, over and over, is unseemly, IMHO. Give us all a break and make your bullets count.
I don't believe you could get a consensus that would agree those solutions represent reality, which seems to be your position. It is rather like the Godel solutions issue PhysBang raised earlier. They are valid GR solutions, that do not represent reality.
Which gets back again to this rather emotive issue of what is reality. You agree that the solutions are valid. But our limited technological know how at this stage of our development, limits us into turning these solutions into reality, on human scale reasonable timelines.
My personal opinion on all this, and I'm sure I have made that perfectly obvious, is that
I reason that anything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics and GR, and are valid solutions of GR, could by any sufficiently advanced civilisation, be possible.
None of us can really give a 100% certainty of what can eventuate and what we may be able to achieve in the future...there are too many variables, not the least being that Earth/Sun do have a "use by date"
That though gives us around 3 billion years to be able to achieve [if possible] all those GR solutions which are not forbidden.
I don't see my stance as arrogant or stubborn...I'm not giving any 100% faitre complei certainty that time travel, spacetime manipulation, matter transportation etc etc are certain.
I'm saying they are possible by an advanced civilisation.
And in all reality, if we don't achieve all those possibilities, along with inter-stellar travel, then we are doomed as a species.
In summing, we were not born to stagnate on this fart arse little blue orb.
Not particularly referring to you, but I do wish people would address that, and not confuse the issue with irrelevant red herrings, invalid analogies, and other rather contrived situations.
Apologies for taking this beyond the specific subject, but I do think it is relevant.
tashja
Registered Senior Member
Billy T, isn't that what the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM says?
1. Appeal to Emotion.
"September 11th was bad. I'm bringing up September 11th. You are bad for disagreeing with me."
Well, it might be a little better than that.
"September 11th was bad. If you don't believe in free will, then you can't say that the terrorists are bad. Therefore you're a bad person."
2. Equivocation
"Thus at 8AM on 9/11/01 most would have expected that the twin towers would be standing"
This mistakes the use of the word "expect". What people might predict given the knowledge that they have is far different from what is in principle determined, or expected to happen, by the state of the universe at any given space-like hypersurface and the laws of physics.
3. Category mistake between an interpretation of QM and QM itself.
"Even if free will does not exist, QM makes more than a trillion, trillion "possible futures" which are only one second from becoming the present's now during the next second."
QM lays out certain probabilities, but it is possible to interpret these as merely subjective probabilities, i.e., they are probabilities that exist because of limited knowledge, not because of physical states of affairs. Only specific interpretations of QM commit to objective probabilities, not all interpretations.
4. Straw man/Misrepresenting the position of another interlocutor
"The professor's view that all possible futures DO now exist is the most improbably fantasy I can imagine."
The person in question did not commit to the existence of multiple possible futures; given the comments presented, the person need only commit to a single course of events existing in a 4D geometry.
I have no idea what you mean by that run-on sentence.
Well, that is simply incorrect. You have some kind of weird idea of what time dilation is, but it is not how you imagine it to be. Good diet may change the rate of certain biological processes, but it does not slow down every possible physical process. If you do not understand the difference, I will not be surprised, but it is worth pointing out that you will not really be capable of understanding the relevant science.
RiiiIIIIIiight.
So your bullshit appeal to emotion based on the appeal of free will is something that you don't even believe.
This level of argumentation is all too common from you.
Feynman's "Sum Over Histories" theory.....I have mentioned it, but it seems to have been lost in all the noise.
