Originally posted by Wizzy
If you think about what you just said, no matter when(where?) you go into the future, it's still the past to a greater future. So in an essance, you're saying that you don't believe in time travel at the same time you are saying you do. Damnit, I just confused myself. >_<
You just confused me, too! :confused:
What I think is that you cannot travel against the flow of time. Sure the future is the past to another future but that's always the case.
OK here is an analogy:
I hope you know about equilibriums and stuff. So, let's say we have two balloons, one with a greater pressure than the other. 'Stuff' (i.e. matter) will flow from one to the other until equilibrium is reached. It would be very hard to go against that flow, perhaps impossible, but not impossible to go a bit faster in the same direction.
It's like a river, too.
There are experiments that demonstrate that certain particles can apparently go backwards in time - but only for a few seconds. Even then there is not 100% proof that that is where they have gone. But even if they did indeed go back, these are subatomic particles, we are humans built out of countless trillions of them. To take that number backwards against what I will call the 'flow' of time - and keep cohesion - would, I think, be impossible.
Whereas, there are a number of thought experiments based on real-world experiements, that show the possibility of travelling forwards in time, i.e. faster than our own normal flow.
For a start we have only got to remember that time is proportional to velocity. An astronaut travelling to Tau Ceti and back at a near-light speed would find that his clone who was left behind had aged more than he had. Experiments with electromagnetics and plasmas etc. have slowed the rate of decay in radioactive elements, plus affected quantum entanglement, in such a way that it appears the same thing is happening, yet somehow without the factors of velocity or distance.
The whole faster-than-light thing is kinda odd anyway, I think. I can walk faster than light. It all depends on what medium the light is in. Light travels slower in air than it does in a vacuum. This is all to do with light being both particle and wave based - i.e. it shares the properties of both in many ways. So, if light in a vacuum is the ultimate limit, can we imagine a situation where the vacuum is LESS of a vacuum? This points to wormhole theory, and there are many ways of approaching it. The thing is, we don't really know if, upon travelling through a wormhole, the time 'spent' (if we measure from the perspective of an outside observer) will be the same as that experienced inside the wormhole, or if it will be as if the traveller has actually travelling the distance at a sub-light speed, i.e. you could travel 110 light years in 2 hours and then come back - so the time you have spent is 4 hours - but the equivalent time that has passed outside may be the same as if you spent 200 years travelling at a near-light speed. Professor Steven Hawking has done some great work on this, as has David Taylor. They have both also done a lot of work on singularities such as black holes, which are real time-benders :p
So my point is that we know so little about time, yet everything we see tends to say "forwards only, backwards no". :)
...thoughts...?
::] krycek [::