The Theoretical Corner

[Harwood Butcher]

The Theoretical Corner

I've been into scientific theories for a while now, mainly ones I think up, whether they've already been thought of or if they're brand new, and I’ve decided to make this topic to share my theoretical thoughts and so you could share yours.

Let’s begin…

Time Traveling: Part 1

Description – “If someone travels into the past and kills you, you will not exist in the present. If you yourself travel into the past and kill yourself, do you disappear magically, fall down dieing (as is or decompose instantly), or would you stay alive?”

Now I’ve thought about this a good bit and I came to this conclusion, which is somewhat hard to explain and understand at first, but I think it’s plausible.

If I were to travel back in time to kill my past self, I would continue to live until I came back to the point at which I left the present. If I died instantly, which most believe would happen, my death would basically have to travel back to the present and then back to the past in basically no time in order for me to die. I don’t think that’s true. I think that the murder/suicide would have to be finalized after I returned to the present at the point that I would have traveled back in time. The reason I think this is because the event of time travel hasn’t happened yet so in actuality the murder/suicide didn’t take place in my present day lifetime. I would live in the past as a regular person, but would lack a sense of existence in some weird way. This all might seem odd, but to me it makes more sense than magically disappearing.

Time Traveling: Part 2

Description – “If you time travel to the past or future, where will physically end up?”

If you time travel to the past or future you would expect to land in the same place you left, but at a different place in time. Depending on the way you look at it, you would and wouldn’t. If you time travel 100 years in the past, you would most likely land some where else other than earth because everything in the universe is constantly moving and if you stay at the same coordinates during time travel, then the earth is one of the most unlikely places to end up.

I think this one is a lot more understanding than the other theory, so I hope you get it.

I have other theories, but these are the ones most fresh in my mind currently.

Please let me know your thoughts about this and post some of the theories you’ve heard of or ones you’ve thought up.

Edited November 30, 2007 by Original GTA Master

[Dark Lord]

OK.

I tried to read all that you worte until my mind went

Either way.I will put forward my theroy.

First:As you said.If i travel back in time and kill myself.

If i kill my self in past.I will not live to be in the future so as to travel back in time and kill myself.

That is.I am already dead in past.Then how come i will live and have an opportunity to go back and kill myself.

So,practically i am nothing. (<that last line made no sense)

Second:Until i believe.Traveling back in future is not possible.Traveling in future is possible.But not as we thing.

Something like what Einstein suggested.If i get into the space ship that were to circle around the black hole at the speed of light.

And in speed time slows.ie. Time Wraps. So, for me circling the hole took only 2 weeks(De to speed of light something) but by that time 20 years might have been passed on earth.So,when you return you are still young while your son is a grandpa

[Harwood Butcher]

OK.

I tried to read all that you worte until my mind went

Either way.I will put forward my theroy.

First:As you said.If i travel back in time and kill myself.

If i kill my self in past.I will not live to be in the future so as to travel back in time and kill myself.

That is.I am already dead in past.Then how come i will live and have an opportunity to go back and kill myself.

So,practically i am nothing. (<that last line made no sense)

That's what a lot of people say, but I think since you would be in the past and not the present, that you wouldn't die until you lived up to the exact moment you went back to the past. It's like you're on this very thin line of time where you're safe until you reach the point you were never going to get to.

Just now I thought of something else. If you went back in the past 5 years and placed a grenade next to your past self while you were sleeping and left before it blew up to go 6 years in the past, I don't think you would disappear.

Second:Until i believe.Traveling back in future is not possible.Traveling in future is possible.But not as we thing.

Something like what Einstein suggested.If i get into the space ship that were to circle around the black hole at the speed of light.

And in speed time slows.ie. Time Wraps. So, for me circling the hole took only 2 weeks(De to speed of light something) but by that time 20 years might have been passed on earth.So,when you return you are still young while your son is a grandpa

Yeah, I've heard a lot about that. Pretty cool. Although, I still have trouble understanding why speed has any effect on time.

[V]

I have one.

If we become capable of time travel one day, shouldn't there be evidence of this now and in the past? The first thing we'd do is go to the past, now, and reveal ourselves to the people that time travel was/is/will be possible.

And as of yet there hasn't been sightings like this.

[Connor]

Exactly what I was thinking, if they have figured it out in future, why haven't they sent someone to tell us?

[Harwood Butcher]

I have one.

If we become capable of time travel one day, shouldn't there be evidence of this now and in the past? The first thing we'd do is go to the past, now, and reveal ourselves to the people that time travel was/is/will be possible.

And as of yet there hasn't been sightings like this.

Exactly what I was thinking, if they have figured it out in future, why haven't they sent someone to tell us?

Actually they wouldn't tell us because that might have effects and change a lot of history. If we know that we could eventually time travel...then we might not come up with the idea because we know it'll eventually be possible.

[V]

Either way, time travel will wreak destruction.

[Harwood Butcher]

Either way, time travel will wreak destruction.

Depends on what people with the ability to time travel do. If they travel to the past to simply view something then they most likely won't screw anything up.

EDIT: I came up with a reason why you wouldn't disappear if you went to the past and killed your past self.

"You would not die instantly because at that time the existance of you at that current age was not possible to begin with, which means if time travel to the past is even possible then so is this."

Edited December 2, 2007 by Original GTA Master

[MrLlamaLlama]

In theory, the life we are living now could have been because someone travelled back in time and screwed w / it.

If someone travelled back in time and announced time travel, there would be no need for someone to invent it in the 'future' so no need for it to be announced, therefore, it wouldn't happen?

[Harwood Butcher]

In theory, the life we are living now could have been because someone travelled back in time and screwed w / it.

If someone travelled back in time and announced time travel, there would be no need for someone to invent it in the 'future' so no need for it to be announced, therefore, it wouldn't happen?

Exactly, that's why they wouldn't announce it.

[V]

I think we're gonna go in circles here.

Depends on what people with the ability to time travel do.

I am speaking as though it would eventually fall in the wrong hands, which I'm almost saying is inevitable.

[Sherman]

That's why theory is a theory... it's an explanation or idea without solid proof.

[Spaz The Great]

Even if you're currently situated in a time that you are not suppose to be in, I think you'd die from killing yourself. Either that or you'll just destroy the world/universe/galaxy/whatever. Y'know, effin' up the space time continuum and shit. But you shouldn't be able to kill yourself in the past, because to alter the past you'd alter the present. If you kill yourself, you won't then live to the present in which you decide to go back in time and kill yourself. Therefore, you won't go back and kill yourself. Thus making you still alive because you were dead and couldn't go back and kill yourself. Go ahead, try and make THAT make sense. Endless cycle. That is, of course, assuming that killing yourself in the past doesn't just cease your existence as killing yourself any other way would've.

[Gerard]

I could go on for hours about this stuff (and have done many times) but not tonight... maybe another time.

I think we need to look at this more at the physical level.

Take the scenario of travelling back in time to kill yourself. You step into the time machine, disappear and reappear in the past. When you travel, you actually "magically" disappear, and cease to exist - anybody watching you step into the machine would see you disappear. When reappearing in the past, anybody watching would see you "magically" appear out of nowhere.

That itself is impossible - there is a finite combined amount of matter and energy in the world, and so to appear somewhere you need to use up some matter/energy. We usually do that by leaving somewhere and moving somewhere else - when you walk you move your matter from position A to B. When you travel back in time, does the matter/energy go with you? If you did disappear into thin air, you would expel energy and probably leave behind all your matter (dust?). If you did appear from thin air, you would take in energy and matter from everything nearby (dust?). Last time I checked, it was pretty hard to make a human out of bits of soil and blu tac, so you would probably have to send all your matter with you, not just the information about how to rebuild you.

If you could scan a human being and replicate it out of any type of matter (dust, soil, gravy) that would be a much more significant advancement than time travel - recalibrating matter into any format you want. It's called alchemy. But giving that matter life? That's witchcraft. Either way, without physically transporting your matter to the past, you can't be recreated at the other end. That's why teleporters are... non existent. Sure you can scan something and "print" it out at the other end, but that won't be alive, and it's pretty hard to have every possible substance in a human on hand ready for the build.

So back to the theory...

Let's say you DO transport your physical matter back into the past (which would work). You would actually disappear out of the universe when you travel back. When you arrive in the past, you would be totally new to the universe - it's got a little bit bigger. You kill yourself, but you would continue to live, because that is where you exist now. You are not the manifestation of the matter that you just killed, you have been created in addition to it.

The time-travel conundrum I prefer is the "knowledge out of nowhere" one. Lets say we travelled back in time 60 years, and took with us a record of a Beatles' song, then gave it to the Beatles before they wrote it. They then copy the song you gave them, record it and release the record. Then you in the future take the record back to them in the past, and they copy it again. Who wrote the song in the first place? It wasn't the Beatles, because they copied it from you. It wasn't you, because you took it from the copy. If that analogy doesn't work for you, try a book or a story or anything created. You could even do it with a physical object - take an iPod from 2009 and bring it back to 2007 and give it to Apple. Who designed it in the first place? Nobody? Impossible.

These conundrums prove to me that time travel can't exist, because things can't come out of nowhere. I certainly believe that we will one day be able to view the past, but not to the point where we can alter it, because then by definition it is no longer the past. You may be able to alter an alternative past, in addition to the one that you came from, and you would alter the events in that past, but not yours.

I could go on for hours about this stuff (and have done many times) but not tonight... maybe another time.

Damn liar.

[MishoM]

Thats actually the first thing I'd do, Gerard. I'd travel back in time and give Phil Collins his own album and say, "Dude, just copy it, no ones heard it..." Then everything would blow up and all matter would just vanish because I gave Phil Collins his own CD from the future.

Sounds awesome.

Edit: While we're talking about time travel, I feel this needs to be said: "Where we're going, we don't need roads..." (Back 2 The Future FTW)

Edited December 3, 2007 by MishoM

[Harwood Butcher]

Even if you're currently situated in a time that you are not suppose to be in, I think you'd die from killing yourself. Either that or you'll just destroy the world/universe/galaxy/whatever. Y'know, effin' up the space time continuum and shit. But you shouldn't be able to kill yourself in the past, because to alter the past you'd alter the present. If you kill yourself, you won't then live to the present in which you decide to go back in time and kill yourself. Therefore, you won't go back and kill yourself. Thus making you still alive because you were dead and couldn't go back and kill yourself. Go ahead, try and make THAT make sense. Endless cycle. That is, of course, assuming that killing yourself in the past doesn't just cease your existence as killing yourself any other way would've.

Yes, you won't live in the present, but if you kill yourself in the past and stay in the past, I think you would live on until you reached the point you initially traveled to the past. The only difference would be that there wouldn't be another you since you killed your past self in the past. Thus, no cycle but an end.

I could go on for hours about this stuff (and have done many times) but not tonight... maybe another time.

Please do.

I think we need to look at this more at the physical level.

Take the scenario of travelling back in time to kill yourself. You step into the time machine, disappear and reappear in the past. When you travel, you actually "magically" disappear, and cease to exist - anybody watching you step into the machine would see you disappear. When reappearing in the past, anybody watching would see you "magically" appear out of nowhere.

That itself is impossible - there is a finite combined amount of matter and energy in the world, and so to appear somewhere you need to use up some matter/energy. We usually do that by leaving somewhere and moving somewhere else - when you walk you move your matter from position A to B. When you travel back in time, does the matter/energy go with you? If you did disappear into thin air, you would expel energy and probably leave behind all your matter (dust?). If you did appear from thin air, you would take in energy and matter from everything nearby (dust?). Last time I checked, it was pretty hard to make a human out of bits of soil and blu tac, so you would probably have to send all your matter with you, not just the information about how to rebuild you.

If you could scan a human being and replicate it out of any type of matter (dust, soil, gravy) that would be a much more significant advancement than time travel - recalibrating matter into any format you want. It's called alchemy. But giving that matter life? That's witchcraft. Either way, without physically transporting your matter to the past, you can't be recreated at the other end. That's why teleporters are... non existent. Sure you can scan something and "print" it out at the other end, but that won't be alive, and it's pretty hard to have every possible substance in a human on hand ready for the build.

Well that's thinking about time travel in the Hollywood sense, but I think traveling into the past would work around the same way traveling into the future would work (In a way).

So back to the theory...

Let's say you DO transport your physical matter back into the past (which would work). You would actually disappear out of the universe when you travel back. When you arrive in the past, you would be totally new to the universe - it's got a little bit bigger. You kill yourself, but you would continue to live, because that is where you exist now. You are not the manifestation of the matter that you just killed, you have been created in addition to it.

That's actually how I'm basically looking at it and believe that's what would happen.

The time-travel conundrum I prefer is the "knowledge out of nowhere" one. Lets say we travelled back in time 60 years, and took with us a record of a Beatles' song, then gave it to the Beatles before they wrote it. They then copy the song you gave them, record it and release the record. Then you in the future take the record back to them in the past, and they copy it again. Who wrote the song in the first place? It wasn't the Beatles, because they copied it from you. It wasn't you, because you took it from the copy. If that analogy doesn't work for you, try a book or a story or anything created. You could even do it with a physical object - take an iPod from 2009 and bring it back to 2007 and give it to Apple. Who designed it in the first place? Nobody? Impossible.

These conundrums prove to me that time travel can't exist, because things can't come out of nowhere. I certainly believe that we will one day be able to view the past, but not to the point where we can alter it, because then by definition it is no longer the past. You may be able to alter an alternative past, in addition to the one that you came from, and you would alter the events in that past, but not yours.

Personally, I don't see how that proves that time travel can't exist, but how it could mess everything up. We're already able to view the past, of far off objects in outer space, but have yet to be able to view our own past. I think once we're able to make something travel faster than the speed of light, which at this point is considered impossible, that we would be able to view the past and possible go into the past.

If they say the closer we travel to the speed of light the slower time goes for us, maybe traveling faster than the speed of light will actually cause us to back track into the past.(just a random ass theory)

EDIT: Along with that last little bit I mentioned, maybe the faster we go past the speed of light, the faster we'll travel into the past. So time traveling would actually be quite slow.

Edited December 3, 2007 by Original GTA Master

[Spaz The Great]

Well, if you believe in astral projections and out-of-body experiences, "viewing" anything, including the past, is possible. Not so much y'know, physically interacting, but viewing would be nothing.

[Dazza]

You know, talking about killing yourself in the past. (Got confused when Gerard started talking, so I'll start here)

Anyway, what I think is that if you kill yourself in the past, you de-materialise, nothing with you in it, you didn't exist, that would cause a downward slope in time to an alternative (lets say 2007). But if you are in the same place and time as yourself, that would cause a paradox, meaning you wouldn't be able to do anything and most likely again, de-materialise.

Going on about Time-Travel, their is no prove in the history books that it happened unless they disused themselves, if not, they'd most likely get burnt on a stake alive and people chanting, "WITCH, WITCH, WITCH!". But if it did happen, in the past there has been 'UFO' sightings, which could infact just be us from the future (I don't support this fact, just putting it out there).

[hunter88888]

1. I think, that the moment you killed yourself, both yous would die, and an alternate universe would exist, with you not interacting in it and the consequences of you dying affecting it. However, you, from that point on, would still live in the normal universe, just so you could come and kill yourself.

2. I'd like to think time travel has the "safety" on and would put you at that place on Earth even if it's 1000000km away in the future...

[Gerard]

When you say we can "view the past", you actually mean that light that was reflected off objects hasn't reached us yet, but that is just a record of the past. If you read a website, you're reading how the website was a second or so ago, because that's when it set off to reach you. It may have changed since then, but you'll have to wait to find out. You aren't mysteriously looking into the past, you're just viewing a record of it. This is the same as light taking a while to reach Earth. Nothing magical about it, just the data travelling slow.

The obvious way to disprove most methods of time travel is to ask why there are no proven visitors from the future. Okay maybe one or two people have come back and been burnt as witches, but if the future really holds a time machine, surely (over time) millions of people would use it.

Personally I don't believe in travel to the past, but I do believe that there are (or will be) ways to view what happened, because everything we do affects so much.

Parallel universes are an interesting concept I will expand on some other time. Some people say that every decision creates an alternate existence where the other option was chosen - and if you think how many different decisions YOU make every second (when to breathe, when to take a step, which letter to type), there are a lot of possibilities. To me, this is rubbish. Some decisions are obvious (whether or not to stop walking before you hit the wall), and there is no way you could justify making a different decision in the alternate universe. Is there some cut-off point for difficulty of decisions? Of course not.

Every choice we make is for a reason. I chose to listen to this song because I like it and I haven't heard it in a while. I chose to reply to this topic because it interests me. I chose to write in English because its my native language, tgtap's main language and the native language of most people reading this topic. Not a hard choice. Even more complicated decisions like when I leave the house for my meeting at 4:30 is based on loads of different factors that I am BOUND to make the decision to leave at the time I do, there is no other possibility because I didn't choose it. If I get distracted and stay for another 5 minutes, that is bound to happen at that time and distract me. That happened for a reason, not by chance.

moar l8r

[Harwood Butcher]

You know, talking about killing yourself in the past. (Got confused when Gerard started talking, so I'll start here)

Anyway, what I think is that if you kill yourself in the past, you de-materialise, nothing with you in it, you didn't exist, that would cause a downward slope in time to an alternative (lets say 2007). But if you are in the same place and time as yourself, that would cause a paradox, meaning you wouldn't be able to do anything and most likely again, de-materialise.

Going on about Time-Travel, their is no prove in the history books that it happened unless they disused themselves, if not, they'd most likely get burnt on a stake alive and people chanting, "WITCH, WITCH, WITCH!". But if it did happen, in the past there has been 'UFO' sightings, which could infact just be us from the future (I don't support this fact, just putting it out there).

You're not really explaining why you would de-materialise, although you could choose to believe that's what would happen. Just because there isn't any proof doesn't mean it won't happen. I think people view time travel wrong. Just because there hasn't been visitors from the future doesn't mean anything. There is a pretty big chance that people looked at that idea all wrong...maybe we're the farthest in time so far, which means it's impossible to have visitors from the future. Look at it simply as, the future isn't anywhere in existance yet.

1. I think, that the moment you killed yourself, both yous would die, and an alternate universe would exist, with you not interacting in it and the consequences of you dying affecting it. However, you, from that point on, would still live in the normal universe, just so you could come and kill yourself.

So you believe that if I traveled into the past and killed my past self that I would have no choice but to wait until the exact moment in time where I last traveled back in time to travel back again to kill my past self that went back in the first place....I don't understand your logic. I would assume that's the same as believing in karma.

The obvious way to disprove most methods of time travel is to ask why there are no proven visitors from the future. Okay maybe one or two people have come back and been burnt as witches, but if the future really holds a time machine, surely (over time) millions of people would use it.

There are actually people that have claimed they were from the future and came back to put their money in some stocks. Along with that, no one could find any records on him.

[Dazza]

De-materialising would be the reverse affect of materialising, where you pop in a place at random. But de-materialising would be the opposite, but you wouldn't exist, anywhere in that time frame and the future, be like someone going missing and never coming back.

Hunter can you explain a bit more? Like if you went and killed yourself, you'd live in the normal universe if you went back, but the universe you killed yourself in would go down a different path?

Is there any proof of this OGTAM?

[Slyde]

There are actually people that have claimed they were from the future and came back to put their money in some stocks. Along with that, no one could find any records on him.

Why would anyone from the future want to claim that they are from the future? It may effect the future so much, any idiot would know not to do that.

I'm pretty sure that it will be impossible to ever create some sort of time machine no matter how advance our technology is. Like i said before, unless somebody travels back in time to a place where there is no entities around can there be an identical future. Nobody would want to mess up the future. Thats unless a guy destroys earth and you have to take on the task with your time machine to make sure he was never born.

[Gerard]

You missed my point. A handful of people CLAIM to be from the future, okay fine that's fair. But what about everyone else? Surely billions of people would want to travel back in time, especially if you could buy stocks (or gamble) and become a billionaire. Where are they all then?

[Spaz The Great]

So you believe that if I traveled into the past and killed my past self that I would have no choice but to wait until the exact moment in time where I last traveled back in time to travel back again to kill my past self that went back in the first place....I don't understand your logic. I would assume that's the same as believing in karma.

How does that line that is messing with my half-tired brain have any relation or similarities to karma, at all?

You missed my point. A handful of people CLAIM to be from the future, okay fine that's fair. But what about everyone else? Surely billions of people would want to travel back in time, especially if you could buy stocks (or gamble) and become a billionaire. Where are they all then?

Maybe they aren't claiming to be from the future? We could be hanging around hundreds of people from the future. There are plenty of people you see on the streets only once in your life and then never come across again.