Can Tomorrow Be Yesterday?

I am traveling forward through time right now, so are you. To insist that time travel is impossible is just stupid.

The papers I've read suggest a theoretical possibility of traveling back in time, but only to the time the machine was turned on.

I haven't seen any serious discussions of paradoxes.

I'd do some re-research.. and figure out how it all worked.

Actually, time itself is an illusion we have developed to help us assign some sort of order to a totally random universe...

Time is just God's way of making sure that not everything happens at once.

[Not original, but I don't remember where I encountered this "explanation."]

Indeed we are traveling on the arrow of entropy at the speed of light minus our velocity through space. Pretty amazing. Would I go back in time? Are you kidding me? Give me a stack of stock market data and $10000 and I'm leaving right now.

Once I've raided wall street (hey, why not, Goldman Sachs does it and gets away with it) then I would consider traveling ahead just to see some of the cool iPhones we will have in the future. Maybe they'll have one that can track me through time by then.

In fact, what I would do is go back in time with data that would allow me to rob the "financial wizards" of Wall Street before they had an opportunity to rob the American public with their succession of "free market" "too big to fail" welfare handouts. Yep, that's exactly what I would do.

Even better, I would go back and find the parents of key architects of the bogus "laissez faire" market ripoff scheme like Milton Freedman and Ronald Reagan and I would interfere with their meeting so that these guys would never be born.

If an event occurs, a record of that event also travels through space at the speed of light. If we observe a supernova 10 million light years away, well that event occurred at that star 10 million years ago. So we do peek into the past by observation. If it were possible to find a warp in the space-time fabric, whereby we could see the light at a shortened time than normal paths would allow, then maybe we could see the past and maybe we could see our own birth....ugh no lets not go there.

If worm holes are out there and observable, what I suspect is that any event will be projected into the past traveling the same path presented by the warp in the time-space fabric and thus would advance at the same speed as our observation. Our observation would never be able to pass the event. So no, it is most unlikely we could observe the past based on events occurring in the same vicinity. Unless a warp developed after the event (your birth) and made your observation follow a path that allowed shortened distance for light to travel to the event. It will still be impossible to interact with the event other than as an observer (even the observation may create a paradox).

So if I am to believe what I am writing (or understand it), my answer is still no way. Now if someone were located elsewhere in far space (say 66 light years away) and looked at the earth, they too would see the earth as it existed a million years ago relative to their position. Heck they may even see my birth 66 years ago. That is how long it would take the light reflected on Earth at that time to reach that alien observer.

Yes, but not until three days from yesterday.

Free beer tomorrow!

There was free beer yesterday, too, but you missed it.

Actual time travel would break the second law of thermodynamics. Any contribution of time travel is to the development of theory.

I think I have a firm grasp of thermo, but I don't follow your logic. Could you elaborate?

I'm no physicist myself, but. Entropy always increases. Traveling back in time would add the increased entropy of our time to the past. So which state of entropy holds in the you or me from now, back then?

I guess we're not violating the spirit of the second law, by increasing the entropy of the past with our presence. But haven't we decreased the entropy of our present by leaving?

(I knew I shouldn't have waded into this discussion.)

I'm no physicist either, but enjoy hearing all the thoughts out there. I'm not saying the man was correct and hopefully I'm not taking his thoughts out of context, but Einstein said something to the effect that we should be able to move through time as easily as we move through space.

There was a paper released last year that was able to derive Newton's Laws, Relativity and more starting with the laws of thermo... with the catch that gravity doesn't actually exist, it is derived from thermodynamic properties (also another catch has something to do with us living in a 7 dimensional universe). Hence my interest in your statement.

If the paper is correct and gravity, a "fundamental force, is just an illusion, then, as someone already stated, perhaps time is as well.

in my humble understanding of things...

Like everything else, Entropy is subject to Relativity, and therefore can decrease locally, while obeying your overall apparent universal law of 'always increasing'. If this were not true, we wouldn't exist and work wouldn't get done. An act of creativity is a localized decrease in entropy.

I agree Chris. And to do so, we accelerate entropy locally. In other words, we must consume a larger portion of entropy in order to reverse an amount of the arrow equivalent to our life work. It is consequently a net zero game outside that bubble and so entropy is not violated.

We are able to do this for only one reason and that is that plants have the unique ability to splice into the arrow of entropy and extract an amount of energy in excess to what they require to survive. We are hence parasites on the plant kingdom. In fact, currently, we are sucking (literally) off the accumulation of stored energy of plants over eons and in doing so tremendously accelerating our entropy locally and thereby gaining a tremendous advantage in terms of our rate of progress in developing (=building a store of "reverse entropy" = accumulated knowledge & organization).

If one draws two lines it becomes apparent that there is a point of intersection in time where, if our consumption is not enabled to continue based on a solar or fusion technology, we will have effectively accelerated our arrival at the end game of civilization, as we know it.

Faith or the lack therein in global warming and such only move the slider around slightly, in the larger scheme of things. The end game is certain. We may have some control over how long it plays out, barring meteors or global political insanity.

ya... now thats what I meant to say... ga

I don't know enough about the science behind the topic to have an opinion one way or the other. However I would like to share one of my favorite conversation starters. Ask a group of people if they would rather go 100, (200, 500) years backwards or forwards to live the rest of their lives, and then ask why they chose what they did.

The reasons usually start a lively discussion and tell me a lot about a person. I especially love the romatics who yearn for the "good old days". They usually stick with their choice even after being reminded of that oh so romatic flu epidemic, the "war to end all wars" and other such fun events they are heading back to.

For me the only choice is to move forward and never look back.

I would like to go back to a time just before humans, but only if I could bring a fishing pole and plenty of extra line and hooks. I bet the fishing would be incredible!!!!

That deserves a good answer AND an off-topic vote. :) I'm going to use it to assess future friends and acquaintances.

Traveling back in time is just as possible as taking the square root of -1.

Sorry for the title - wanted something catchy.

I've looked at time both as a science student and as a student of the paranormal.

Time is not an easy subject because it is closely linked to our ideas about reality.

It seems clear that time is basically just a concept, an idea, that has to do with motion, or change. If you could not perceive motion, then you would have no need for a concept of time. We call things that seem to stay the same forever "timeless." And things that move or change too fast are "instantaneous." We use time as a way to reconcile the difference between perceiving a fleeting event and a solid object.

So while you can perceive objects moving fast or slow, or getting old, time is just a concept we use to describe our perception of change. Time itself is, apparently, not perceivable as an object or as something with physical dimension.

You could only "travel" (which means to change your position) in a space that actually has other positions in it that you could occupy. We perceive space as something we can move around in, but we do not perceive time in that same way.

However, to believe that time is not "real" like space is, we have to assume an interesting thing about reality: That it is essentially instantaneous. Though this is conceptually difficult in some ways, it seems to be the most obvious conclusion, in terms of perception.

In such a reality, "the past" only exists as records of what actually happened. We could call those records "memories" even though non-mental "records" of past events also exist. In this sense, not only could we have memories of past events in our minds, but our environment could be seen as having a recording ability as well. Thus, a rock that has existed for 5 million years would have bits of its own "past" recorded in it. And so would everything else.

This last point is only speculation, but what it gives us is a very broad and general way to "travel" into the "past." When one does this as an individual one calls it "remembering."

Our mental records of past events can be so accurate and vivid, that one can "get in" to a memory and swear he was once more in that past event, experiencing it. And so we get a kind of "time travel."

This might be all that "time travel" could ever amount to.

So let me re-state the "grandfather paradox": If you could find and erase every single record in the entire universe of your grandfather, would that be enough to erase your own existence? I would think it would not be. The perception of "travel" in this case would be just a trick of the mind. And the "changes" made were only made to recordings. So reality would be altered, but not enough to erase something that existed as a record-maker instead of simply a record.

Research does in fact exist demonstrating that a person is capable of "erasing" his own memories, and that this action had no harmful effect on his current existence.

To sum up, if time does not really exist as a kind of space, with its own dimensions, then it can not be traveled through. However, that requires that everything we perceive as persisting is actually being continuously re-created in present time. I believe that this latter model corresponds better to what we actually perceive.

This is pretty much how time travel is possible. In Eastern terminology it would be explained as "accessing" the "Akashic records." There are many links for the term Akashic and Akasha. Most are of the "New Age" type. But the source is much older as the concept exists in several older Eastern religions, like Hinduism. It was popularized in the Theosophy movement in the West. I know a lot of people get upset at the mere mention that there may be similarities in Eastern understanding of the Universe and modern scientific understanding; i.e., Quantum Physics.

I'm not saying these observations are equatable, but I do see similarities in Dark Matter and Dark Energy and the concept of "Ether" in Eastern religion. Both are saying there is "something" in what we think of as "nothing" or "space," which is not perceivable by our physical senses. In Quantum Physics this "space" is filled with "virtual" particles. Even though the Michelson-Morley experiment "disproved" the existence of the Aether as it was termed. It is interesting that that term was used to describe the medium through which light "traveled" by scientists at the time, as it does have it's origin in Eastern thought.

The theory of karma implies that the future can also be predicted by this same method.

It is maybe not so well known that some of the key "founders" of Quantum Mechanics were comfortable with thinking that science and mysticism were, each, valid ways of gaining knowledge about Reality. One of the best books of their (Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Plank, de Broglie, and Pauli) writings about the subject is "Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of The World's Great Physicists", edited by Ken Wilbur. Probably the best expressed review at the Amazon link is by Allen B. Hundley. Although his attribution of the quote, "those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it," to Plank, should have been to Bohr. Another interesting link is the Wikiquotes link for Quantum Mechanics. More than a few of these great scientists admitted to the reintroduction of "ignorance" in understanding Reality in light of Quantum Mechanics. Too often, we "moderns" have come to think that we somehow understand Quantum Mechanics better than the founders and later visionaries did and dismiss that there might be other valid ways of experiencing Reality besides mathematical equations. For those who really love Physics, I think no matter what you personally believe about Reality, reading some of the founder's ideas about it captures the reason they were looking for answers in the first place. And that inspiration of "wonder" has no religious affiliation. It just is.