Desktop Big Bang Shows Time Travel May Be Possible After All | Hacker News Reader

Desktop Big Bang Shows Time Travel May Be Possible After All

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22 pointsforgotmyuser7 comments

FTA - “That doesn’t mean that real time travel is possible,” he said. “But for this analog model, it is so.”

Way to get my hopes up with the headline crappy science journalism...

Misleading headline. Misleading article.

It's like saying: Hey! Time Travel is possible. All you really need is a capsule that travels at the speed of light going around an infinitely long cylinder. See? Possible.

I've always looked at it like this: Time travel is possible and we're doing it all the time, just at the standard rate. Mathematic models show that if you travel close to the speed of light that time slows down, effectively making you travel faster into the future. Once you hit light speed (which is theoretically impossible), time essentially stops. Past that (also theoretically impossible), I would imagine time reverses, though I haven't studied this stuff in years. Granted we'll probably never be able to travel that fast or backwards in time, but we're all traveling through time, just at 1second/second.

Time travel becomes a much greater possibility in the event of multiverse being true, because then causality doesn't matter.

If every decision 'creates' a new universe, then your birth doesn't depend on the duplicate grandfather in the time travelled universe. Sure time-duplicate you won't live, but that won't cause you to cease to exist.

In a linear universe time travel is paradoxical because you're literally creating a loop in time and any action you take is likely to cause a knot. In a multiverse you're simply rearranging matter to a prior state with the exception of you, it's still a continuous line of time. Time hasn't changed, the matter in the universe has.

I personally believe I'm travelling through time at 1.1second/second and I'm impatiently waiting for everyone to catch up.

Would you go to the past or to the future?

As you accelerate, time moves more slowly for you relative to a stationary (or slower moving) observer. Time speeds up for everything relative to you.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

There's also various experiments with atomic clocks proving this on an extremely small scale. Basically, as you move through space, you also distort time.

Aren't we traveling in time with each moment anyway?

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