h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yahoo, finally someone else who shares my theories! Well, with a single descrepancy (sp?)... the thing about being able to live in only our four dimensions... that's not entirely true. Just like a point on a plane doesn't realize that there is another dimension (if points were sentient, that is) to his/her/its existance because he/she/it only resides in it without moving around in it. (for no better explaination, the point is, well, a point within the plane, and they inhabit higher dimensions (heighth/width/depth/time) whether they're aware of it or not). Now that I've talked myself in a circle, onward!!

To best sum up, from "Mostly Harmless"...
"... I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there's all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions thirteen to twenty-two that you really wouldn't want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place."

What if you start out going faster than light?

I beleive tachions fall into this catagory.

I don't believe (but I could be wrong) that anything starts life travelling at, or faster, than the speed of light in a vacuum. Thus it has to accelerate to this speed, suffering all the problems of time dilation and mass increase. Certainly, a person wishing to time travel would suffer these problems.

Yeah you're right they do.
Just as us mortals can't reach the speed of light, these little buggers can't go slower that the speed of light.

There's this nifty thing called quantum physiscs that actually works out better if tachions exist.

In quantum physics, particles come into existance with initial velocities that partially account for a loss in mass.

OK - here's another perspective on it. Time is purely a personal, subjective, relative measure.

How old are you now? Then that's how old everybody who ever lived or will ever live in this world is at this moment in time (relative to you).

Relative to you, You, your boyfriend/girlfriend, mother, father, children and everybody else on the planet are the same age. When they were born (or conceived, depending on your point of view) the clock was set to zero. So everybody is on a voyage through life that has reached a certain stage, i.e. your current age.

So, when looking at someone older, you are seeing them in their future (they have not themselves yet reached the age you perceive them to be), and when looking at someone younger, you are seeing them as they were in their past. A new-born in your eyes is currently living sometime in the future.

Also, if we grant that someone in the sixteenth century was born, lived a nice long life and died sometime in the sixteenth century, then he had to go through a whole set of experiences in life, and that he too is currently the same age relative to you. The same applies to people who have not yet been born.

It's time travel of a sort, albeit it doesn't get you any nearer to meeting a live Tyrannosaurus Rex.

CR

I will acknowledge that this last post is a bit tongue-in-cheek. it is an extremely anthropocentric (human centred) view of the world, and probably raises more questions than it solves. However, when thinking about it further I think it is good to look at time from a number of different perspectives.

Time, for all we know, is just a human way of measuring a very basic law of the universe - that once something is done it cannot be undone. The earth revolves around the sun, living things beget other living things and die, hurricanes roar, and that is just the way it is. Maybe time is just a measure, constructed by us humans, to make sense of it all.

In 500 years time people may look back at our period and laugh about the great 20th / 21st century love-affair with time travel - similar to the way we look with disbelief on the medieval preoccupation with angels and devils. Lots of thinking and debate, but ultimately a futile quest.

CR

General note to everyone:

I've written a time travel page with some of these ideas expressed in it. It is at http://www.h2g2.com/A274105. If you wand to start a new time travel forum there, I'd be much obliged. Also, are there any time travel pages in the Approved Guide?

I'd suggest using the 'search the guide' feature located just under the ad on this very page for inquiries such as this in the future.

A simple search resulted in nothing, so feel free to write your own article, and submit it.

The Klinkenberg theory:
Everytime a desition is made, another parallell univers appears, the same way as cells devide themselves. After some time the univers and parallell worlds will look like a three, with many branches spreading into time and space. But there´ll be a saturation point, when there are so many different universes that everything explode, into a new Big Bang, man! All new creates something new!

I've heard this kind of general idea expressed before as " The Many Worlds hypothesis" . First though, I just want to say that I am not well versed in this subject so I'm just going to paraphrase it out of a book: "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" by John Gribbin Chptr 11 Parts 2+3.

' The Copenhagen interpretation involves thinking about the the quantum uncertainty generated on a quantum level (Heisenberg) that is resolved by a conscious observation made on the quantum level collapses the wave function the two possible outcomes in to just one concrete reality. This situation was best summed up by Erwin Schrodinger with his famous Cat-in-the-Box experiment.'

" The many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics originated in the works of Hugh Everett, a graduate student at the University of Princeton in the 1950's.....The equations of quantum mechanics tell us that inside the the box of Schrodinger's though experiment there are versions of a "Live Cat" and a "Dead Cat" wave function that are equally real. The conventional copenhagen interpretation looks at these possibilities from a different perspective and says, in effect, that both possibilities are equally unreal and that only one of them crystalises into reality when we look into the box. Everett's interpretation takes the the equations entirely at face value and says that both cats are real. There is a live cat and there is a dead cat; and they are both located in different worlds. It is not that the radioactive atom in the box did or did not decay ( and thus caused the cat to be both alive and dead ) but that it did both. Faced with a descision, the whole world - the entire universe - split into two versions of itself, identical in all respects except that in one version the radioactive atom decayed and the cat died and in the other it didn't and the cat remains alive. It sounds like science fiction, but it is based on impeccable mathematical equations, following from a consistant and logical interpretation of taking quantum Mechanics literally." ( Gribbin, Blackswan, 1998 ).

I have never heard of this saturation point before though. If these different Universes all exists entirely separate from each other how do you propse that they interact to cause the explosion. It sounds like all of these new quantum descion Universes are taking place in a box. Evetually there is no more room for these additional realities and the sides cave in and the universe leaks out. But surely it isn't like this. There is no box in which all these Universes start to occupy and so no saturation. feel free to tell me toherwise. I'd love to learn more about this.

Clive

All of this forum is devoted to traveling backwards in time. There has not been one "traveling forward in time" article. Why? Traveling forward in time is borring. And more importantly, doable. Actually, it's been done. The way to travel forward in time is to travel close to the speed of light. Traveling at the speed of light is, in my opinion, impossible, as is escaping a wormhole and reaching absolute zero. But to travel forward in time, traveling at 9/10 of the speed of light is OK.

Side note: Traveling forward has not only been done, but YOU, personally, have done it. Right now. Think about it.

I don't mean to toot my own horn (actually, I do -- but that's beside the point), but I've added some more info to my time travel entry, http://www.h2g2.com/A274105. I have finally included data on this forum's most popular theory, that when you go into the past you actually enter an alternative universe. I'd explain more, but that would defeat the purpose of my having added this information to my entry. So, to read more, click the link (or, if you have an old browser, copy & paste in into the location bar).

I was gonna say.... you almost missed the obvious fact that we all are already traveling forward in time. It's just the rate at which we do it. I guess that's why no one discusses it much.

~Amy †

CHER said it all in her song "if i could turn back time"
if you play it slowly in reverse you can hear the answer to time travel,the meaning of life and why fat women wear skin tite legings.

To me, the problem isn't whetever time-travel is actually possible, it occurs whenever we have time-travel in a sci-fi story. This will never work out good no matter how good a writer is...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Enough already.

My mind was totally twisted in time about half way through the discussion on time travel so I don't know if anyone brought up the notions introduced by R. A. Heinlein in his novel 'The Number of the Beast'.

It is a variation on the multiple universe theory that I kind of like.

Did I say 'Enough Already' on this time line already or was that on/in the other one(s?).

See now I am driving myself time crazy........


AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

May I suggest the ultimate source for the final word on Time Travel?

I recommend the true biographical recounting of the adventures of a gentleman by the name of Arthur Dent, told in a trilogy in five parts, known collectively as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".