It is impossible to travel back in time. Not all time travel is impossible; it may be possible to travel forward in time.
Well, despite the terrible movie, the butterfly effect actually teaches something: that a butterfly flapping its wings can change the world. For example, if you place a ball at the top of a hill, even by changing the position of the ball by one millimeter, it could take a completely different course.
Basically, if you go back in time, even by breathing and changing the carbon dioxide to oxygen ratio, you could make something breathe another gas that may have a disease. That something could die from it, setting off a whole chain of events, changing the world in the long run.
Another thing associated with the time travel is the grandfather paradox. If you go back in time, kill your grandfather, and then you would never be born, thus creating a paradox. The universe cannot have a paradox. It is unknown what will happen, but it is known (by known, I mean pretty well accepted) that the universe cannot have a paradox occur, therefore, it eliminates the possibility of the paradox by just removing the factor that causes the paradox.
The butterfly effect and the grandfather paradox are connected as if you alter the universe by being in the past.
Now, one way to get around this is that by killing your own grandfather, you form an alternate universe, parallel to yours. It would be impossible to get back to the other universe as you would have to go back in time to where the skew occurred, but as discussed with the butterfly effect, it might create a universe parallel to the parallel universe.
Another solution is that somehow, your grandfather is still alive, even if his head was chopped off. It would be impossible to conflict the the determined outcome of time. That leads me to the question if it is impossible to conflict the the outcome of time, then you why would time travel be possible in the first place?
Just something to think about. If any of you can come up with a solution to travel back in time without a paradox, I will be amazed.
Ok, so here's something about knowing what the future holds.
If you travel forward in time, you'll know what's in the future. If you know what's in the future, you can change it. But if it's already in the future, it will happen.
So, if you do know the future, whatever you do is just a means to the end-- And what is that exactly? Your death? The end of the universe? The end of reality?
That means that knowing the future is totally unimportant, because you could change it anyway, within the boundaries of the end(which is totally unknown anyway).
So the 'end'. We don't know what it is or when it will happen. So if knowing what happens in between the 'beginning' and the 'end' doesn't affect either the 'beginning' or the 'end' in any way, what's the point of travelling into the future?
So maybe the 'end' is just any outcome or action. So for example, an outcome is that a teacup explodes. The means to the end would be that I dropped it. Or possibly that there was a bomb hidden underneath it. Then you'd need to figure out what made me drop it, or why there was a bomb underneath the teacup.
Oh! Maybe from the 'beginning' it's like a tree-diagram, just with an infinite amount of possibilities. Then it multiplies exponentially until the middle, and then the number of possibilities goes down until the 'end'. So that means that there are an infinite(infinite several times over) amount of ways to reach the 'end'.
However, I'm getting a bit off-topic.
So knowing the future means you can change it, but you can't, since it's the future. Paradox!
So maybe what you do in the future is irrelevant, and what really matters is the 'end'.
But we don't know what the 'end' is, or when it is, either.
Maybe the 'end' is just an action, and once you know what it is, you have to find out other things about it, like how it happened.
Ok, so all of this means that time travel is impossible. There's the paradox about knowing what happens in the future.
Then, if knowing doesn't matter, there would be no point in travelling to the future, unless we could reach the 'end'. But we can't since if we could reach it, there would be repercussions from reaching it, and therefore there would be no 'end'.
However, knowing the 'end' is just an action or outcome, it all can work together and it really isn't an end, just a single happening in time.
Aah, crap! This is confusing me. Maybe if I read it again I'll get it. I'm just gonna hit submit and hope everything goes well. :P
And traveling to the future is also impossible. The Future has yet to happen, so it does not exist. How can I go to a place/time that does not exist? I can't; its akin to me saying that I'm gonna go to the McDonalds behind my house, when there is none.
Agree on this point, however, I don't quite agree with what you say about traveling in the past. I think considering paradoxons and stuff is completely unnecessary, since there is no time, no possibility to revert events in the order they happened. Stuff just happens, it does never 'un-happen'. You say time travel isn't possible because there are paradoxons; I say there are paradoxons because time travel isn't possible.
And traveling to the future is also impossible. The Future has yet to happen, so it does not exist. How can I go to a place/time that does not exist? I can't; its akin to me saying that I'm gonna go to the McDonalds behind my house, when there is none.
OK - you're saying that: Traveling to the future is impossible. Why? The future does not exist, you say. You say that because it hasn't happened yet, that it doesn't exist. This is nonsense. You don't know that the future doesn't exist.
If you travel forward in time, you'll know what's in the future. If you know what's in the future, you can change it. But if it's already in the future, it will happen.
But the problem with this is that the future would already "redict" (well, not predict, but I'm using that for lack of a better word) that you would travel into the future; thus there is no paradox.
OK - you're saying that: Traveling to the future is impossible. Why? The future does not exist, you say. You say that because it hasn't happened yet, that it doesn't exist. This is nonsense. You don't know that the future doesn't exist.
No, the future doesn't exist, because it hasn't happened yet. Just like WWIII doesn't exist, because it hasn't happened yet.
And you can't prove that the future exist anyways, so...
But the problem with this is that the future would already "redict" (well, not predict, but I'm using that for lack of a better word) that you would travel into the future; thus there is no paradox.
It works on whether the future is set or not. If you didn't know what the future held, the future wouldn't be set. But if you did know what the future held, the future *would* be set, because you'd know it would happen.
So if you knew someone would die, you'd want to change it, but you wouldn't be able to.
I read everything on this page, and this is really interesting stuff. From tachyon's to paradoxes.
Well, time travel to the past may be possible if it creates a parallel universe, but if it doesn't, then it isn't possible.
Time travel to the future is impossible, since it has yet to happen and doesn't exist, and since you would have to go at the speed of light instead of 88 mph, it would also be impossible.
So basically, time travel is impossible on all fronts?
How would you imagine a parallel universe could form? I mean theoretically, not whether we are able to do it or not. If you assume, like I do, that there is no time, there is also no time"line" you could follow backwards or forwards; and also, no possibility of a parallel timeline. I remember reading something about distorting space, wormholes from one point to the other, but what would be the point of that when there is no "former" point to which you could travel?
The book 1984 raises an interesting point. It says that if there is no physical existence of the past and no one can remember events from the past, then the past does not exist. If this is true, then time is probably not a linear time line of events. Another known concept is the "folds of time", so if you could break through one layer and then break into the other layer, you may be able to go back in time...or forward for that matter.
Albert Einstein said in the EPR Paper that the maximum speed a particle could reach was the speed of light.
albert einstein couldn't find the link between the physics of the small particles and the super large objects... or figure out gravity... i'm saying this... not to truly knock Al.. but to say that he was human... and fallible. he was smarter beyond anything I'll ever achieve... but he did not know everything. there are people that have surpassed him nowadays... and concepts like string theory account for the things... or at least some of the things he couldn't piece together. i don't know how we would test for something that travels faster then light... according to logic and the info we have now... i would think that its impossible to go faster then light... but we haven't ruled it out just yet.
its one of those things were you take on a 99.9% sure tags onto it
parrallel universes are in fact quite possible. everything in our universe vibrates at a certain frequency. so technically you should be able to put your hand through anything the molecules move around so quickly and since we vibrate at the same frequency as everything else, we cant, but theoretically we should be able to. it is said that if there are parallel universes we could be able to reach them by changing the frewuency at which we vibrate at. it is not known how or what these parallel universes have in them, but a theory may be that it is a portal to a different time period or even dimmension. it is also said that maybe the parallel universe could be an explanation for paranormal activity. my uncle used to be a scientist and was extremely smart at this kind of stuff. this is just some of the stuff that he has taught me.
Impossible is possible making it possible for more impossibles to be done, for all we know there has been timetravel, and this life we live in now is ALL the time travel that happened until either the destruction of humanity or end of time.
Psycho, thats true. However, we're talking more along the lines of "Impossible: never gonna happen, so don't even bother". Under the Laws of Physics, some things are impossible:
1) Escaping a Black Hole 2) Traveling Faster than the Speed of Light 3) 0K
And yes, some of these things *could* be possible, but its generally accepted that its not. Not even Light can escape a Black Hole, so its generally agreed that you or I couldn't do the job any better. As of yet, no particle of any size has been able to reach speeds matching or surpassing the Speed of Light. We've come close, but haven't gotten it yet. And I think the lowest scientist have recorded is 3K, but as of yet, 0K is impossible to reach; it requires too much energy to lower the temperature that much, and its only theroectically possible in the furthest reaches of space, where there is NOTHING. (no stars, dust, planets, or anything to warm up the space)
