[Stealth]

yeah well i never said we could travel faster!

i didn't say we could travel the speed of light, i said it would probably be POSSIBLE...

[Megadude]

even energyhas mass right?

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Megadude
well well, isn't something strange happening:D
i post but someone always beats me to it :looks at stealth:

lol, what's even funnier is what you say i already said in my previous posts almost exactly  we must think alike

great minds think alike




EDIT:  Forgot to close the 'color' tag

[demon442]

Originally posted by Megadude
even energyhas mass right?

I'm no physics expert, but i'd say no.  Try to get the mass of a flame and let me know how you make out...

[Megadude]

Clicky, sil vous plait

It is massless, yet, it isn't.  What a paradox.  If anyone care enough to read an understand the article, perhaps u can tell us lay men what it's all about.

[CP5670]

The only way the speed of light can be reached is through pure energy (E). To do this, you would have to take mass (M) out of the equation. And since we have to be composed of mass to exist, you would be taking us out of the 'speed of light' equation. Therefor, only pure energy can travel at the speed of light (photons). - E = C^2 (energy equals the speed of light squared)

uh...the c speed limit is not related to e=mc²; it can be derived from the lorentz speed equation, v_T = (v₁ + v₂)/Ö(1 + v₁v₂/c²). (this holds for all 0 < v₁ < c and 0 < v₂ < c)

eh...pure mathematics is better than this...

If anyone care enough to read an understand the article, perhaps u can tell us lay men what it's all about.

Makes sense to me, but it basically says that the question has not been answered yet and probably cannot easily be by experimentation alone.

i didn't say we could travel the speed of light, i said it would probably be POSSIBLE...

It is actually quite possible to travel very close to the speed of light, just not at that speed.

[demon442]

I read the article...didn't cesinarily undertand it...but hey im only 16...

[CP5670]

well I'm 15 and it seemed fine to me...

[demon442]

Im also not a genious and I barely passed algebra II in school...of course i hate math but dag yo...

[Kazashi]

Originally posted by CP5670


uh...the c speed limit is not related to e=mc²; it can be derived from the lorentz speed equation, v_T = (v₁ + v₂)/Ö(1 + v₁v₂/c²). (this holds for all 0 < v₁ < c and 0 < v₂ < c)

My hero! Now I'm no longer left alone with having to explain this

The idea of outpacing light to see our past derives from a common astronomical concept. Light from the edge of the universe takes its time to reach us, on the order of billions of years i.e. we are currently seeing those objects as they were billions of years ago. I'm sure most people know that deal. In the same respect, light emitted from ourselves is also racing away to some (all) corners of the universe  - if we were to get there first by whatever means someone wants to dream up, then we'd see that light and our former selves.

Another form of time travel would be to travel at high relatavistic speeds for a while and let the rest of the universe pass by a few million years.  However both these forms don't fit into the classical interpretation of time travel, which more or less implies jumping to any point in time on little more than a whim, and possibly some petrol fumes. That, for the most part, still lies in the realm of hypothesis, and can't really be proven or disproven with current knowledge. There are bound to be many more paradigm-shattering discoveries remaining that will change current understanding.

*Mr Obvious takes off his thinking cap...*

[Nico]

let's take a bet:
in 20 years, scientists will have rendered all your theories and all your pretty equations false, and will have replaced them with new ones that will be proven false in 40 years, and will widen the range of possibilities, and in 60 years...

[elorran]

Or alternative, we can just tell more jokes instead of debating creation and it's working....

= = = = = =

During his wedding rehearsal, the groom approached his pastor with an unusual offer. "I'll give you $100 if you'll change the wedding vows, and leave out the 'love, honor, obey, and forsake all others' part." He pressed a $100 bill in the pastor's hand and walked away with a satisfied smile.

On the day of the wedding, the groom was feeling pretty pleased when the pastor got to the part where the vows are exchanged. The pastor looked him in the eye and asked, "Will you promise to bow before her, obey whatever command she gives, fulfill her every wish, serve her breakfast each morning, and swear before God that you'll not look at another woman as long as you both shall life?"

The groom gulped and looked astonished, but he finally said "Yes" in a tiny voice. He then leaned in toward the pastor and whispered, "I thought we had a deal!"

The pastor pressed the $100 bill back into his hand and whispered in return, "She made me a much better offer."

[Megadude]

I'm not exactly stupid in areas of math and physics (I'm taking advanced precal this year); i was just being sarcastic.  I got to as far as photon is massless yet it has mass.  Then I lost interest.

[Kellan]

Ah, Time Travel. I remember it well.

Why, it was only last yea...no wait, maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was next Tuesday - no, Thursday week. Or the year 2042. May 11th. Yesterday! Tomorrow! Today! AIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Anyhoo, yeah, I thought it was always that you couldn't enact the grandfather paradox or anything like that because you just create a new parallel universe in doing so, therefore you can't change your reality but only create others.

I was also under the impression that travel into the future was easier because there were a potentially infinite number of universes to travel into. Which, of course would make travel into the future completely pointless except as a curio. It couldn't actually 'predict' anything meaningful.

[Mr. Vega]

Actually it is plausible to go faster than time using the ST warp idea (aka curve spacetime around you to push you foreward. It's like when your in a big airport, and there's one of those moving walkways. There's a limit to how fast you can walk normally, but if your on the walkway you can move faster than you can normally.

[YodaSean]

You will not be retrieved if you die by suicide. Sorry, but we don't want your family blaming us for you killing yourself because you think you will get to the future sooner

[Sesquipedalian]

If time travel in the "jumping to any point in time on little more than a whim, and possibly some petrol fumes" sense were ever to become a possibility, we still could never do anything that would change the course of history, past or future.

Travelling to the past would not introduce anything new into the course of history.  It is the past; you were already there, and the actions you performed then are part of the events leading up to your going back.

A traveller to the future is faced with the same situation.  There are, as Kellan said, an infinite number of possibilites (in fact, an infinitely infinite number), but only one of those possibilites is ever actualised in the past, present, or future.  So the traveller to the future could certainly go and get reliable stock market information if he wanted, and he could bring it back and use it to get rich.  If he does this successfully, he will also have found himself to be a rich man when he arrives in the future in the first place.  Moreover, if upon his arrival in the future he finds his future self not to have gotten rich from the stock trade, he may as well give up his plan, since the evidence is standing right there in front of him that it will not work.

[Kazashi]

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian
If time travel in the "jumping to any point in time on little more than a whim, and possibly some petrol fumes" sense were ever to become a possibility, we still could never do anything that would change the course of history, past or future.

Travelling to the past would not introduce anything new into the course of history.  It is the past; you were already there, and the actions you performed then are part of the events leading up to your going back.

A traveller to the future is faced with the same situation.  There are, as Kellan said, an infinite number of possibilites (in fact, an infinitely infinite number), but only one of those possibilites is ever actualised in the past, present, or future.  So the traveller to the future could certainly go and get reliable stock market information if he wanted, and he could bring it back and use it to get rich.  If he does this successfully, he will also have found himself to be a rich man when he arrives in the future in the first place.  Moreover, if upon his arrival in the future he finds his future self not to have gotten rich from the stock trade, he may as well give up his plan, since the evidence is standing right there in front of him that it will not work.

One thing that gets me about this line of reasoning is that it accepts time as being forever linear. Wouldn't time travel in the sense mentioned require the interpretation of time as just another dimension as manipulable as the physical 3 dimensions we hold to? By adding the dimension of time to that which can be controlled, it loses its sense of linearity which is so firmly entrenched in our life because we can know no other way in our current way.

[Dark_4ce]

I read somewhere of a crackpot theory in which time travel could be possible into to the past. Basically, the theory hypothesises that space and time is circular. That the big bang and the big crunch are one in the same. So if you would go futher enough into the future to the end of the universe. It would end and start all over again. Hence you'd be back in time. So you just keep going forward until you reached you're favored time. Now I don't remember how the theory stated that it could do this in a reasonable time span, but it had something to do with reaching almost the the speed of light then doing a quantum leap into tachyon speed. Something like that. Like I said, it's a crackpot theory.

[CP5670]

One thing that gets me about this line of reasoning is that it accepts time as being forever linear. Wouldn't time travel in the sense mentioned require the interpretation of time as just another dimension as manipulable as the physical 3 dimensions we hold to? By adding the dimension of time to that which can be controlled, it loses its sense of linearity which is so firmly entrenched in our life because we can know no other way in our current way.

Exactly. In fact, if the looped-time theory is to hold, a second time dimension would actually be required, and it wouldn't really be a curve at all but would be sort of like a point moving on a surface with an infinite number of directions to move to at every position.

If time travel in the "jumping to any point in time on little more than a whim, and possibly some petrol fumes" sense were ever to become a possibility, we still could never do anything that would change the course of history, past or future.

Travelling to the past would not introduce anything new into the course of history. It is the past; you were already there, and the actions you performed then are part of the events leading up to your going back.

That is partially correct, but the current hypothesis is that all of these realities are "actualized" into the same reality and that no one reality is any more "real" than another. Therefore, going back in time will just put you into a different form of the reality that already exists within the one we know. So in other words, a probabilistic set of particle movements exists wherein this guy got rich simultaneously along with a set of particle interactions that caused the guy not to get rich, and these probabilities are both part a larger reality.

I read somewhere of a crackpot theory in which time travel could be possible into to the past. Basically, the theory hypothesises that space and time is circular. That the big bang and the big crunch are one in the same. So if you would go futher enough into the future to the end of the universe. It would end and start all over again. Hence you'd be back in time.

Actually, that is one of the two dominant science theories out there today. It makes sense to me, but the alternative of an infinite open curve (instead of a closed curve) is equally plausible judging from what we know so far.

My hero! Now I'm no longer left alone with having to explain this

lol actually I might just be talking nonsense since I am a math guy and don't know much physics.