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Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen the past or future. Only physical things still or moving, combining with other things or not ...

What we call 'the past' is a mental picture of where physical things used to be positioned and their condition. But everything in 'that now' has changed. Just as when we 'travel' in physical space, when we get 'back home' it has changed.

If I were to 'time travel' I'd be gone from now. But everyone else would go on living in now. So where was the 'instant of time' I travelled to stored so I could go there? And the infinite number of instants between it and now?

Fanciful idea, but no evidence ... none zero zip nada

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> So where was the 'instant of time' I travelled to stored so I could go there?

Not where, when. [1] The block universe ontology is pretty commonly offered as an interpretation of general relativity. People consider GR as pretty strong evidence for such an ontology. Personally I don't but I'm just saying your criticism isn't very good.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time...

That article doesn't mention general theory or relativity, quoted discussions indicate that eternalism mostly relies on geometric expression of (plain) Minkowsky spacetime, which is interpreted literally as indication of existence of global time dimension. General theory or relativity is bad news for eternalism, because curved space is more obviously local and thus less compatible with eternalism which favors globality.

How do you reconcile this idea with special relativity?

By the speed of how these things move, interact or change state relative to each other.

Every single oscillating particle needs to travel more absolute distance when speed increases, so it will oscillate with lower frequency for the external observer, thus causing time dilation.

In special theory of relativity time is local, so objects interact only with immediate moment - present, and not with past and future. You need to first somehow overcome locality to postulate global time, which you would be hard pressed to do.

The Earth is not the center of the universe. Similarly, time-travel seems to be an idea still stuck in the Newtonian idea of absolute time. As SR demonstrated: There is no such thing.

“Einstein said, ‘Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it,’”

https://phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimension...

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