Future Hi: Time Travel

July 14, 2005

Time Travel

Article recently: New model 'permits time travel'. Researchers are trying to find models for time travel that avoid the good old paradox, of what would happen if you went back in time and stopped your grandfather from meeting your grandmother, or you killed your dad before you were conceived. Which would make it sort of impossible that you're still there, then. So, it has been used to sort of prove that time travel is impossible. Now, these new thoughts don't sound terribly much better. Even scientists have a hard time wrapping their mind around time. So, let me help them out a little bit. Here's how I think it works.

Time is a dimension, just like the 3 dimensions of space. There probably are more dimensions. String theory seems to predict something like 12 dimensions. So there's most likely more directions to move in than the 4 of spacetime. But there certainly are those.

Despite time being just another dimension, we seem to be wired to perceive it as a one-directional stream. Something happens, and then it gets frozen in the past, as the history that leads to this point. And the future hasn't happened yet. So, both the past and the future seem equally inaccessible to us. But that's really just the fault of our perceptual wiring. Doesn't actually have much to do with Reality with a big R, the stuff that's really there. It is just the reality that we construct from our perceptions, and our abstract conclusions about those perceptions, which keeps time in that format.

However, we can learn something about time as a dimension by studying the dimensions of space, which we perceive ourselves moving more freely in.

Let's say I'm standing on the town hall square, and then I walk down to the train station. I can remember that I was at the town hall square. Now, if I walk back to the town hall square, will I catch myself standing there? No, of course not. Not even if I do it really quickly. That's logical for us in space. But really it isn't all that different with time.

Our lives are objects in 4 dimensions, at least. Even if you take just your body. It has length, width, breath, and it has an extension in time. It extends backwards in time from where you are now, and forward in time to its death. All of that sort of sticks together. It might change in various ways, but it does have a certain coherence.

Let's take a mobile item with some spatial size, like a bus. It might be 15 meters long, but it sticks together. If the front end moves, the back end moves with it. Whatever influences the front has an influence on the back, and vice versa. It won't be entirely the same, but it will be connected. If the front end stands in the sun, the back end will get warmer too, even if it doesn't. If somebody puts a sign on the front, saying that now this is a school bus, then the meaning of the back will suddenly change too, even if nothing else changed about it. Your life is kind of like that too.

Good actors will prepare for much more than the role they're asked to play. They will sit and write down what they think the past history is of this character. They will construct events in his or her life that might have made him what he is. They will construct emotions from past experiences. They will decide where he's going, what he wants to do, and why. And that creates a much more full character in the present.

The past is where you're coming from - the path and experiences that add up to who you are now. The future is where you're headed - the path and the experiences you'll go through if you continue as you are now, and with the history you've had. In principle both that past and that future are changeable. If you suddenly change, you'll need a different past history to explain it, and you'll suddenly be pointing towards a different future.

But it is difficult to suddenly change, because there's a lot of inertia in all this stuff. There's a considerable weight in your past history. It adds up quite convincingly to explain who you are now. The most likely way of changing it is to re-interpret it, and get a different meaning out of it. But it would also just have to change, if you really change.

All of it is quantum probabilities, so it is really a lot more moldable than what a 10ton bus seems like to us. It seems so solid. But really it is all the holodeck. It can be whatever you want it to be. We just have so much invested in all the stuff we've observed and what we've concluded it is, so it is very hard to just change it arbitrarily, and observe something else. But there's nothing that makes it impossible.

Anyway, back to time travel. My life is like this bus that is moving. It sticks together, but it sometimes changes. The lives of everybody connected to me are also all intertwined.

So, let's say I go back in time with the intention to meet my dad, and stop him from meeting my mom. But the problem is that they're part of the back end of my bus. If I move, they move with me. They're not standing back at the bus depot any more, because the bus moved on. Just like I'm not standing back at the town hall square when I go and check. Because I moved. Duh.

In part because of our language, we often make the mistake of assuming that a place is the same, even as time changes, or other things change. You know, this is my office, and I can talk about my office yesterday, or last year, and in my mind I tend to think it is the same office. I believe it is the Hopi that have a language that doesn't do that. My office yesterday is not "here", it is "over there". Over there in yesterday. And they probably have a point. It isn't the same office. It looks a good deal like it, but it is different, the time is different, and a lot of the sub-atomic particles are probably different. We short-circuit our logic when we fall for the misconception that places and times are "the same" when they really aren't.

So, if I go back to where my father met my mother. Well, we could say that they no longer are there, because they moved on, got married, got me, etc. So, if there's only one of each of them, they're no longer there. The bus left. If you wanted to change things, you've have to catch up with the bus where it is.

Or, are they still there? See, that gets us into the more fantastic subject of parallel realities and multiple versions of ourselves. The funny thing is that most people intuitively would expect that if time travel were possible, they would go back and find exactly what "was there". I.e. your dad and mum exactly as they were, ready to have their first kiss at the drive-in, playing "Rebel without a Cause". But that requires that we keep existing at all times and places we've been. That there are a zillion you's stretching far back, and probably forward.

That's entirely possible, that it works like that. That the past isn't just a memory in your brain, but it is real, it is there, it is alive.

So, let's say they still are there. They're, however, also still connected with you, as part of a probable past that let to you being born. And, incidentally, to you getting around to go back in time at some stage in your life. It is all connected. Not two separate events, you and them. Rather, part of one bigger spacetime event.

One possibility is that you might find that the past event has already changed from what you thought it was. The later events in their and your lives might have redefined what really happened. Maybe the original event was a happy kiss in the drive-in. But later on they got divorced and got therapy and decided it all was different. Like, he was really a brute who raped her. So maybe that's what you'd see if you went back. Because the whole gestalt is connected backwards and forwards.

But then we have to touch on the possibility of what happens if the past changes.

We're talking about objects in 4 or more dimensions. A bit like the screenplay of a movie. It is all connected, the characters, the timeline, the events, the climax. If we change one part, we'd have to change others. If we rewrite the script a little bit, and make the main characters meet in Paris rather than in Rome, then a bunch of things will change. Their kids will speak French rather than Italian, etc. If you had already shot the movie in the first version, then the next version will be a different movie, even if the story is similar on many points, and some of the characters are roughly the same, and even if it has the same name.

Quantum physics seem to say that things exist if somebody has perceived them in a particular way. If they haven't been perceived, it is uncertain what is there. Could me many things, but the reality hasn't been frozen. So, if nobody was there to hear it, we don't know if the tree fell in the forest and made a sound. We don't know if Schroedinger's cat is alive or dead, unless we look.

So, my past is a certain way because I perceive it to be so. Not really that I *have* perceived it that way. More that I'm doing it now. If I stop perceiving it, it might go back to uncertainty. Or if I succeed in perceiving it differently, it becomes something different.

You'll notice that science skips rather quickly over the mystery of who it is who perceives things, as consciousness isn't a popular subject for people in the material sciences. So they usually just talk about "measuring", rather than awareness or consciousness. But it is unavoidable. Things are real when there's somebody there who perceives them. It would all become a little more logical if we accepted that there were such a thing as consciousness, and that it probably is extremely basic to how the universe works.

Now, what if you get to a fork in the road in your life? You might go left, you might go right. Your life develops differently, depending on which one you pick. Before you make the choice, the two possible futures are maybe equally probable. Once you make the choice, your future falls into a certain groove, and that choice becomes part of your past that explains how you got to where you are.

But how about if you also took the other road from the fork? No, not the you who's here today, who went left. But there's maybe a parallel aspect of you who took the path on the right, and went on from there. There might or might not be. Depends on whether anybody's there to experience it. If there were a consciousness which found the right side path interesting, it might have turned from the realm of uncertainty into a reality.

In your life there has been many forks in many roads. Possibly many or all of those turned into realities. One of which is the one you're sitting in now. They're related, at least by their common branching points, but they're otherwise different. The Flemming who decided to move to Rio and be a street performer would clearly be a different character than me, even though we might have a lot in common, and part of our history would be exactly the same.

So, back to those time paradoxes. If you try to go back and meet your mom and dad, before they conceived of you, then several things might happen. If you focus on the path that is part of your past, you'll probably find difficulty in trying to interfere. That's not as mysterious as it might sound. It is a bit like trying to spin around to see oneself from the back. No matter how fast I do it, I'll miss, because my back moves at the same time as the front. So, the same with the characters in your past. You might be surprised to find that they just walked out before you walked in. Because they're connected with you.

The difficulty of doing so depends a bit on how long the tail is. You can't see yourself from the back by spinning around. But if you were a snake, you could grab your own tail, because there's enough dimension there. The front of the bus can't see the back, but a litte train with many wagons maybe could. So, in time travel, you might have trouble getting to meet a recent version of yourself. But if you go far enough back, it isn't so hard. So, maybe it is not any great problem to go back and meet your parents.

But remember that there's a considerable inertia towards them doing roughly what they did, because there's already a well-perceived future reality in front of them, which they're connected with. There's a certain pull in that.

But maybe if you exert enough energy, you might make something else happen. You manage to throw a Molotov cocktail into their car, and they burn to death. Then what happens? Really just that you created a fork. Your parents would still have met in that drive-in, and you don't suddenly disappear. But there's now another timestream which develops differently. It will include a few hundred people for whom the mysterious tragedy in the drive-in in '62 happened, with the stranger who blew up a young couple, who claimed he was from the future, and was carrying strange electronic devices in his pocket. And that reality develops differently from the one you knew, in small or big ways. Might be huge, with time travel technology being then discovered in 1962, from somebody studying what you had in your pockets, or it might just be a minor ripple, and it becomes a world very similar to ours, just without your parents, but with you as an older criminal. And back here in our reality, we'll wonder why you never came back, but everything will otherwise continue as normal.

So, there is no paradox. There are just potential paths, and actual paths taken. Sometimes multiple parallel paths might be taken. Sometimes you might go back and take a different path. None of which changes that all of the paths, that somebody perceived themselves taking, were real.

Back to one little detail. That article mentioned that of course we aren't seeing any people who suddenly disappear because their past changed, so obviously that isn't happening. I wouldn't be so fast on that. OK, forks might happen in the past that lead to different realities. But this reality might also change. It is just that everything in it is connected and relatively consistent with each other. Remember, it is a 4 or more dimensional "object". So, if somebody succeeds in changing something about it, everything connected to it changes. Like, the whole history of why things are the way they are, and everybody's memories of what happened, which explains things. And that is probably hard, because there's a lot of inertia, and a whole lot of things to change. But probably possible, if enough energy is exerted. So if your neighbor across the street got written out of the story, it wouldn't be that his house suddenly, poof, evaporates, and everybody stands there wondering what happened to him. No, you'd be quite sure that there had never been a house on that lot, and you'd have no recollection of anybody with that name, and it would all be very logical, and everybody could confirm each other's stories. I'd say that stuff like that probably happens once in a while, but you most likely wouldn't have noticed, except for maybe an odd feeling that something was off, which you couldn't put your finger on. If you rely only on your perceptions and your memories, nothing would reveal that anything changed, because they would have changed at the same time.

I have little doubt that we'll figure it all out eventually, and that there's somebody somewhere who already can travel freely in time and space. See, it doesn't matter if it takes a million years to develop the technology, because that's just "right over there" in spacetime. And it is probably unavoidable that the spacetime multiverse becomes one big subway system, if it isn't already.

Posted by Flemming at July 14, 2005 05:42 PM

Comments

Nice explanation - lots of new stuff (for me, at least) to think about there. Over the years I've tried to think about this topic, only to shake my head in frustation after getting tangled in the web of it all. Thanks for giving me new ideas to ponder!

Posted by: Douglas at July 14, 2005 03:36 PM

Wow.

Posted by: Karlo at July 14, 2005 04:26 PM

Here's my problem (apart from the foggy reality of time) with the whole idea of time-travel.

All matter in the universe is constantly moving and evolving. You are proposing to "travel" back to an earlier state of the universe. In doing so, you're supposing that somewhere a copy of that earlier state exists. (The mountain is still standing, Mars hasn't lost all its water yet, etc.)

But then a copy of every moment of the universe must exist. An infinite number of copies of the universe are being maintained somewhere? What has the infinite capacity to store all these copies?

But only understand that *time is a fiction* and all the paradoxi (?) disappear. Along with "travelling". Here we are, now we are. Make of it what you want.

Posted by: TJ at July 14, 2005 04:38 PM

See, I agree with that, actually. This whole traveling in time and space idea is mostly an artifact of our limited range of perceptions. Particularly the time dimension, as we expect it to flow in only one direction. So we've gotten stuck in believing we're traveling at a set speed in one direction and that we can't ever turn around.

But if there's really just a huge Now, with a lot of places one can go to, yes, then the paradoxes mostly fall away. You can move from place to place, and maybe some of the places look like each other, but they're different places. Even if there are various webs of connection between them.

Posted by: Flemming at July 14, 2005 04:54 PM

Perhaps copies are not being kept on a gargantuan back-up drive elsewhere in the cosmos -- but time past has rather enfolded itself back into the holomovement.
In that case, it seems to me only a 'bodiless' mind could possibly enter the quintessential flux and retreive moments of time past (or time future) from the implicate order. (Do I dare call it the 'akhasic record?')
-- Sounds like a job for an AI to me. (O Wintermute, where art thou?!)

Posted by: Upwinger at July 14, 2005 05:05 PM

we already can and are time traveling as much as we need

Posted by: Love your Neighbor at July 14, 2005 07:19 PM

What has the capacity to store all those copies? Hmmm... "When the many are reduced to the one, to what is the one reduced?"

Posted by: Wild Gnu at July 15, 2005 01:54 AM

A meaningless rationalization of the above meaningless irrational statement: the universe *is* information. There is no harddrive. You are the hardrive, and it contains every possible conceivable permutation of 1's and 0's. So get over it and have sex. Bye.

Posted by: Wild Gnu at July 15, 2005 02:01 AM

Terrence Mckenna lives. Peace.

Posted by: Wild Gnu at July 15, 2005 02:09 AM

I do keep open the possibility that some kind of "travel experience" other than physical might be real.

Our whole idea of dimensionality might be wrong. David Bohm came to that conclusion about Descartes, whose X-Y-Z space became the basis of physics. Bohm started working on a physics of relationships rather than XYZ.

Just because travel by the physical body in the physical universe isn't involved doesn't mean there can't be other forms of experience. For example, consider "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick." Poor Phil actually lived through this (comix by Robert Crumb).

--http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo/weirdo1.htm--

Ouspensky also talked about multi-dimensionality at some length in Tertium Organum. Review/condensation here:

--http://linuxmafia.com/pub/skeptic/files-to-classify/tertium-organum.txt--

Discussed there, for example, is an idea called the "Linga Sharira". As we age our bodies change materially, grew bigger, older, etc. But our experience is that it's still all one body ... the LS is the body that exists in 4 dimensions. As Ouspensky goes on, he discusses the idea that our lives are like audio loops, repeating over and over. & They're connected to a lot of other loops.

Maybe if consciousness could move through these connections, you might experience earlier times like Dick did.

Waves in water don't travel across the surface, they're the result of water particles moving in loops. "Waves" are the "wrong" way of seeing what's going on, when you actually study the motion of water. Maybe when we think of time travel we're yearning to see the world in a more accurate way.

Ouspensky says (in this condensation),
"What is 'man' outside time and space? It would be the whole of mankind,
man as a 'species,' but at the same time possessing the characteristics,
attributes and peculiarities of =all= individual men; all fused into one
indivisible being of man. The idea of such a 'great being' inspired the
artist or artists who created the =Sphinx=."

That idea is represented in some pictures of Shiva in India, you see a whole bunch of heads reaching back to the left and to the right of a head in the middle of the picture. All of these bodies are the forms of the same being. That's different from how we see the world, but then we have to learn to see the reality of how "waves" work too.

So if time's a fiction, but if all of matter is the birthplace of consciousness, and if all of matter is loops connected together (births, sex, etc) then consciousness of some sort *might* be able to "travel" through matter loops to some earlier "time".

Finally, why do we want to travel? What is it we're hoping to find? Maybe if we could see what IS, as it IS, we'd have no desire to be anywhere else or anytime else. So maybe that desire is the recognition or remembering that we are "lost" and want to "go home".

It'd be great to hear your reactions to these ideas, and hear about any connected ideas you might know about. You over there ... head #42!

Posted by: TJ at July 15, 2005 03:15 AM

acctually there is no time at all. if you know what does it mean the present, you have to know that it is constant. look at the universe from the side, it is incomprehensible space, where are incomprehensible processes and if we would look it like to a small comparing to what we are, there are only movements of energy, matter if you want and others, and all of these movements are now. if there was the big bang, which is not possible whitout anything before that accident, then what we call present was not only from the first moment of the universe, but the present was allways, it has no begining and there is no end of that. time is not existed, just in our physical reality, which is only a liitle peace of what's going on... I think all theories about traveling through time is nonsense. if we could travel, we could travel past future now, becuase evryhting was now and the future is now, just there is need of move of elements, energy and so on. for example when human woman's and man's create another DNA code, it is the same what they are, we just call another person, but it is one body as a hole universe. there development, then birth and perception of reality is allways now, and everything goes through DNA, and if there will be possibility to travel into past or future it will be possible throu this code. however it's just only my opinion and sory for my not so bad english :)

Posted by: atinama at July 15, 2005 06:35 AM

As to whether we need multiple copies of the universe to accommodate multiple possible paths... Well, I wouldn't think it would work like that. I think we might get the idea better by examining space, which we tend to understand a bit more intuitively than time.

Like, again, if there's a road with a fork. One might go left, or one might go right. But there's no need to maintain two copies of the whole universe to make that possible. The existing dimensions of space has no problem accommodating a road with a fork, and some people who walk left, as well as others who walk right.

All you need is one more dimension. If, say, at a given point in time, I had multiple possible courses of action available. One more dimension allows all of those to be represented. Not by copying everything in the universe several times, but merely by having another direction to move in.

If I can buy a washing machine in white, yellow or orange, the extra information is not very much. It compresses very well. No reason to store several copies of the atmospheric conditions on Jupiter, because they probably won't be affected by those choices. So it is a bit like the compression of a file in a file system. One only needs to remember the stuff that changed.

The universe has room for several version of a movie. The actors and most of the props and most of the scenes can be reused. We only need to provide extra space for the stuff that's different. And I'd claim that the universe has spacetime dimensions enough for that kind of thing.

And, yes, it probably is just one big space, in simultaneous existence, with a sufficient number of dimensions to represent everything that might happen. One big Now, with many "places" to go.

Posted by: Flemming at July 15, 2005 08:26 AM

Flemming's last post, if I properly construe/understand it, is pretty-much spot-on. See David Deutsch's *Fabric of Reality*. There are several other cutting-edge physicists (and I'm not even counting, here, the guys of the Physics/Consciousness Group [I presume most folks who a "regulars" at this site will know the names of these guys...]): Max Tegmark comes to mind. The idea (and it can be modeled--one of the many uses of Hilbert Space theory, along with higher-order algebras) is that which had its inception with Everett and his "relative-state" theory of the quantum wave function, along with the work of Klein (and also Kaluza) on higher (or "other") physical dimensions. Modifications based on Everett's stuff (aka, of course, the "many-worlds" theory of quantum cosmology [the theory of the quantum-wave function for **all of Reality**) is what is powering Deutsch's work, Tegmark's work, Smollin's work, even Tipler's work, for that matter. The idea is that of more-or-less as many physical spacetime continua as there are logically-possible worlds (and possible-world semantics, of course, has been around since at least *Leibniz*, but was formalized as part of modal-logic by, e.g. Hughes & Creswell [see their classic *Intro. to Modal Logic*], and, most, importantly, the ***ontological implications of which*** have been explored and extended by the late David Lewis (see his *The Plurality of Worlds*), Bob Stalnaker, Rick Plantinga, and many others... But what has now finally began to evolve, conceptually, and this, too, has its roots in Leibniz (who bounced-off Aristotle in this regard...) that there may indeed be what one could call "ontological overlaps" between and among possible-worlds (i.e., alternate spacetimes), and that an atom, or a lap-top, or whatever, may overlap into a near-infinity of alternate realities, BUT that there is--somewhat ironically/paradoxically, a kind of ontological ***parsimony*** that is nonetheless preserved because any particular element is actually the same element across possible-worlds. Which is to say, and here's where Flemming is spot-on, it's only the **differences**---the **distinctions**---that have any ontological importance---everthing(s) else is actually exactly the **same** **across** all the (more-or-less infinite) possible-worlds. So there is a kind a economy, or conservation, or parsimony aspect to all this. But Reality (with a capital "R") nonetheless allows for the instantiation of any and all logically-possible states-of-affairs (or "worlds"). Moravec, in *Robot*, touches on this as well, but "comes at it" in a slightly different way, btw.

Gotta run...We'll all be masters of the Multiverse and Hyperspacetime soon enough (see also, btw, David Darling's new book on *Teleportation*...)

I'm outta here for now; warm regards, y'all!

Posted by: MCP2012 at July 15, 2005 10:11 AM

Thanks so much for posting this insightful piece Flemming. You have articulated very clearly what I have *tried* to a bit more cumbersomely over the course of this blog to do. I agree with *everything* you have said thus far. :)

Posted by: Paul at July 15, 2005 10:21 PM

Flemming,

Certainly you can add hypothetical dimensions to the universe to accomodate anything you *wish* you could do. But first you need some evidence that those dimensions exist. In science, you create a theory to accomodate the known facts, not the other way around.

Unless you intend to do time travel without doing any science.

Based on the evidence, I don't see any way around my argument that if you want to travel to another time/place, *that* universe *must* physically and separately exist. If you're going to go "there", and come back "here", it must physically and separately exist. Therefore, an infinite number of "theres" must physically and separately exist.

Possible? Certainly people have *speculated* about an infinity of universes. It's like going to Vegas. Maybe a few winners, mostly a lot of losers. If we want to "travel" in "time", we're going to have to be very smart about it.

Time is an invention of the human mind. Like a ruler. It's a way of describing the changes we see in the physical world (motion, energy). But it may be a *wrong* way of seeing things.

For an example of VERY recent thinking about time that shook the physics community, see the June Wired article about Peter Lynds. I'm glad somebody found the time to rock the boat.

Wired article: --http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/physics.html --
Peter's home site: --http://www.peterlynds.net.nz--
Wikipedia article: --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lynds--

Posted by: TJ at July 16, 2005 04:52 PM

One more thought, by way of example.

Consider your experience of a "motion" picture. Say, Spiderman. When you watch the film, it appears that the characters are in "motion". We happily submit to this illusion of "motion" in order to enjoy the picture.

For example, Spiderman appears to fly down a 3-dimensional street. That takes "time" in the movie-world.

But the "motion" is a trick. It takes advantage of the nature of human vision: images are "retained" by the eye-brain system. The illusion is created by the projector running at 24 frames per second. The film is shown on a 2-D screen; tricks are used by the photographer to help us with the illusion that we are watching 3-D scenes.

What if time is an illusion created by a trick of perception? Then all the "time" we spend thinking about how to "travel" in time is wasted life. We'd better be sure we're right about the nature of time before we start working on the "problem" of travelling in it.

Perhaps there is no time. Perhaps there is no motion. Perhaps what we call the 3-D universe is a projection. We don't seem to be able to stop or slow "the film". I guess "I" am not the projectionist. Who or what IS the projectionist?

Peter Lynds, if he's right, is telling us that there are no frames on the 3-D movie we call the world. If he's right about that, then all of physics has to be rewritten. From scratch. Even the simple stuff like F=ma and E=mc2 are all dependent on the idea of time as a series of frames.

That's why I mentioned Bohm, who started working on the *topology* of space rather than working with the illusions created by a Cartesian coordinate system.

Quantum mechanics "works" but seems so hard to understand. It tells us that the ways we see the world *don't work* on the sub-microscopic level. Things aren't as they seem.

Our "intuitions" about space, then, don't work on some levels. Possibly they're more reliable than our sense of time. *Possibly not*.

We need to understand the nature of the world, or "be smart", if we want to realize ambitions like time-travel. Einstein changed how we see reality: first he sat around and envisioned space *differently* than ALL the people that came before him.

We might have fun playing with 47-dimensional constructs. It's a great way to make a living in the "real world," if we can get someone to pay for it. But if we're interested in the Real world, our bodies aren't getting any younger. That part of "time" is pretty hard to argue with. Who wants to throw their "time" down some rathole?

Part and parcel of "psychedelic" experience -- or mystical experience -- is the experience of eternity. Eternity isn't an infinite stretch of time. Eternity isn't time at all.

Posted by: TJ at July 16, 2005 05:44 PM

Hopefully science can also help us understand some new things, rather than merely have good explanations for the things we think we already know. Making a jump, reaching a bigger picture, might help us realize that what we thought we knew merely was a limited special case, an illusion created by the mental filters of perceptual habit. And, yes, whatever we dream up, it has to be something we ultimately can go and test, to know whether we really want to expand our worldview in that way, or we should try again.

I'd tend to guess that there are no frames in time. We use frames to make an illusion of time in a movie, but that might just be because we don't know how to do the real thing.

And, yes, I'd guess that the answer to time travel would probably be found in a deepened realization that things just weren't how we thought they were. That there weren't really anything such as the frame-by-frame perpetually forward moving experience we took for reality. That there probably isn't really anything fundamental that keeps a point 10 parsecs away or 10 million years ago from being possible to reach. Probably isn't really even anything to travel, and distances might just be an illusion altogether. Once we figure out how to adjust the dials, there might be no place or time that would inherently further away than any other.

Posted by: Flemming at July 17, 2005 01:39 PM

Hopefully science can also help us understand some new things, rather than merely have good explanations for the things we think we already know.

That's pretty much how David Bohm felt. And as a result, Bohm was largely ignored by *most* of his colleagues. So for sure, Flemming, there is *lots* of room for thinking outside the box. (The rascally maverick Paul Feyerabend -- he wrote "Against Method" for example -- was adamant about that.)

Once we figure out how to adjust the dials....

Hear hear! ;-) Fare forward, voyagers.

-- TJ

Posted by: TJ at July 17, 2005 06:08 PM

My understanding is that the many worlds theory, the theory where for every decision there is created parallel universes etc, is wrong. It makes no sense that 'indecision' or available choices should be the fuel for exponential development of Universes.

The way iv come to see the Universe is that its a multidimensional 'froth' of space, time, matter and energy, and anything else that might happen to exist, all linked together fundamentally and completely. Time exists not just 'now' in the 'present' but all times exist, and any change in the past affects the future, just like any change in mass would affect motion etc. This means that our current actions already have 'set' the future, however any changes will simply make the universe react, and come to a new status quo.

Basiclly the past, present, and future, as well as all of space, and everything contained within it, plus possibly plenty other things outside of it, are all linked completely and are constantly finding a new balance and a new status quo.

If I pull a brick out of a wall, it might come tumbling down soon after, this is the universe reacting to a change.
Just the same as the wall might fall down, so the universe forces me to pull a brick out of the wall just previously..

Ofcourse my view might be wrong, but it makes more sense to me, a heaving reacting ball of reality, than does an exponentially increasing number of near duplicate universes.

Think of the photon that is forced to choose a path, it behaves like a wave. If the dividing universes idea was true, it means one observer can view both universes at the same time.

Posted by: eventhorizen at August 3, 2005 06:52 AM