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Props on the article man. I'm always game for some good science conjecture. I have read Enstien in depth though it hard to get through his genius. Its too bad he never really finished many of his thoughts. Even his standing theories of specific and general relativity are almost mutually exclusive. Oh well, unviserval theories will develop as our understanding grows with time. Good article though.
it's not hard to time travel really... all you need is to "bend" time... this is much easier then a worm hole... i'll see if i can find that theory about "bending" time, it was quite fun
Punchthebaby, I actually think it is very possible. The technology nor the energy source is readily available now, but in the future there may be many different sources of energy.
I myself have made it a dream of mine to do work at CERN or whatever the largest accelerator is in 3 years time. Using gravitational time dialation you can bend spacetime to pretty much whatever you want. Using a particle accelerator you can speed particles very close to the speed of light, thus increaseing its mass and energy, thus creating gravity.
Don't ask me what this has to do with worm holes, well actually it has to do alot with wormholes. If you take this same idea of creating a gravity field, and use dark matter to hold the worm hole open, then........ my head hurts..
Okay, I'll give you that, gravitational time dilation makes sense. But the article sites "Time Travel In Einsteins Universe" by Gott, which i read, and in the book he states basically that if you could decompress and then form a 4 foot ball out of JUPITER, you'd have neough mass to bend time to a serious degree, and then if you could find your way out of the center of the sphere, you'd be in the future. Only a supercivilization could bend that much matter to it's will.
Now, on the other hand, if we were to find a way to convert energy to matter, and a way to open a wormhole, we could harness unbelievable amounts of energy from the farthest reaches of the universe lickety split. Then we might be going somewhere.
However, we have to keep things constant. If we create this big of a ball right next to us, by the time we're halfway done we'll already have stopped aging to a point of being dead to the now-future world.
OR, if we did have one made out of Jupiter, who's to say that jupiter right now isn't affecting our timestream (ie: all bodies act on each other gravitationally, so perhaps we all experience differnt times even at the same velocities, to combine the wisdom of Newton and Einstein.)
I think it's possible, but the means we have now are theoretical and not fit for consumptino by any race, truthfully. The ultimate solution to this quandry will probably be based on lower-level universal laws that we're not yet farmiliar with, and that make what we're discussing now look like mindless babble.
Which it almost is.
If you're intersted in more physics talk, I'd love to chit chat about things. Email me sometime, xmaddness.
"punchthebaby" LMAO... Now thats a funny nic.....
Anyway to the point. Here is an interesting site on time travel theorum.
http://merlin.alfred.edu/degraff/TimeTravel/
My favorite crux in this issue is the "grandfather" paradox. Ie... If I travel back in time and kill my grandfather. Do I still exist in current time or do I return as an unknown in current time as I was not born due to my grandfather not producing an heir being my father. Or do only exist at that point in the time that I commited the murder? Now my brain hurts too.........!
Ahhhh....but with a better understanding of quantum theory this all may change due to the fact that quantum mechanics shreds the laws of physics and then tosses them out the window...
JMHO
if you kill your grandfather.... wouldn't you cease to exist completely... potentially though, this sort of an action could even cause a rip in the fabric of time according to some theories. crazy stuff...
The "grandfather pinciple" is something of heated debate in the physics world. Another hot topic in the scheme of time travel is the "jinn"
A Jinn is an object without a time. Example: The classic story of an old woman who gives a man a watch before she dies, and the watch sends the man back in time, where he meets a woman, and falls in love with her, and then he gives her the watch as a gift and she dissappears. This was the old woman who gave the man the watch, and thus we must ask, "where does the watch exist?"
In response to allenb1963, i agree that quantum mechanics does obliterate much of classical mechanics. For the uninformed, quantum mechanics is the mechanics (study of movements) of tiny, tiny, microscopinc objects (like electrons).. for some reason, we can't explain in the same set of rules how planets move AND how electrons jump. The search for the grand unified theory, a hugely important part of theoretical physics, is the search for a set of underlying rules that explains ALL forces in the universe. It may turn out some day that quantum mechanics is as similar to classical mechanics as biology is to botany: same basic ideas, different focus and scope.
GReat reading! I somehow keeps some of my dreams alive!
But you guys sure know how to take them away again, don´t you? :D