May 6 2010Pfft, I Know How To Get Around That: Why Time Travel Is Allegedly Impossible

FIRST

I dont get it......

Stupid physicists, don't know you can't breath space air.

Hahahah, this is so true.

So that's where John Titor went!

so i'm guessing that this time machine is designed to only transport its contents through time and not itself, which is a pretty bad design for a time machine, considering then you'd then have no way to get back to the present. unless of course you only traveled into the future where you would still have full access to the machine, which kind of puts some limits on your time traveling options. besides that, i suppose this comic does have a point.

Would'nt the device used remain static and follow the Earths natural rotation a'la H.G. Wells?

Would'nt the device used remain static and follow the Earths natural rotation a'la H.G. Wells?

Ok that is kinda stupid, who is the dumbass who would make a time machine that only move in the through time. The TARDIS people, TARDIS!

Even if you move to date in which Earth was in the same point of rotation around the Sun you would still (probably) end up in dead space since our solar system revolves around the center on the galaxy and our galaxy floats in space. So, if your a time traveler, your pretty much fucked.

The problem with traveling to when the earth was in the exact same place relative to the sun is that the sun is also traveling through space relative to other stars, and the milky way too is traveling through space relative to other galaxies.

Time travel is impossible because the past and the future don't exist, there is only 'now' and nothing but 'now'.

Spider Robinson already did this gag in one of his Callahan books.

14TH !!!!!!

Wow... that's about as funny as reading a physics text book.

Slow news day GW?

@12 Where did you get such knowledge? Obviously not from a physicist because that is an utter fallacy.

That's why I am building a space / time machine. Because where you are standing now relative to the center of the universe you will never be again. You can travel back in time but you'll need to change your location in order to end up where you want, It's freaky and cool at the same time.

Everything a scientist says is not the complete and total truth just because a scientist said it. You don't need a scientist to tell you that the sky is blue, all you have to do is look up. The past and the future only exist in our minds.

Man, did I eat too many fortune cookies last week or something? I sound like a damn monk.

Mistake of rookie time traveler.....

isnt this like years old?

@20 no u time machine is wrong

@ 16 Sean

Explain your reasoning. Don't just say something is an "utter fallacy" and attempt to sound intelligent with your use of the word "fallacy" and then not even counter what was said.

Please. Explain yourself. The floor is yours.

I'll return.

I read this concept in some sort of short story format back when i was a kid. Could have been the Spider Robinson one that Lisa commented on. /shrug

why cant he just wear an astronaut suit

It is TRUE! It works! I used the time Machine to tell myself the exact time this was going to be posted in order to be FIRST! Now, I know I broke the rules of time traveling, but who the F**k cares! I"M FIRST! And that is all that matters! MWAHAHAHA....
Well, now I'm stuck here and I missed my episode of Lost...damnit....

@20 yes. It has dinosaur turds on it, it's so old. That's why it's on Geekologie.

I blogged about this recently. Just by staying completely still on the surface of earth, we are traveling in a squiggly, rotating, wobbling, looping, swirling path hurtling through space generally pointed away from the center of the universe at a tremendous speed. Our galaxy is hurtling through space at 630 km per second. Because of this, the earth travels 51.84 million km per day. (And we’re worried about an asteroid hitting *us*?)

http://jordanbalagot.com/blog/2010/03/31/a-quick-note-on-time-travel-and-universal-coordinate/

Say what you want about the Bill & Ted movies, but at least the writer took geographic location into account when figuring out their time travel device.

Hmmm....so if i time send a burger to myself in the future, I will actually need to time send it a million miles away (notes in little book). Good to know. Oh, wait...here it is. Mmmmm....deliciousness. I'm so glad I....wait another. Mmmm....and another....and....

F-ing awesome.

Doesn't work like that... If he was on Earth, then went back in time he'd still be on Earth...

for some reason I really thought the people who followed geekologie would be a bit brighter than the average lot, but I've never really read the comments sections before. Imagine when, to my surprise, I read the comments to this comic strip and see people actually arguing about the theoretical possibility of time travel. Hey morons, ever heard of a little thing called "einstein's theory of general relativity?" It's not exactly new, and has been proven many times over. Just take a look at the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites, or y'know, maybe try reading a book or something.

Hell, strictly speaking we are all constantly "time traveling" or else all of existence would be completely static.

@12

"Now" is what doesn't exist - it's a purely arbitrary concept created (and perhaps necessitated) by the bias of human perception. Or, to put it another way, every 'point' in time, past and future, is no less "now" than now is. The Arrow of Time model has all but completely fallen apart over the last several years of experimentation and is only still held up by the small-minded and frightened. Oh, and by the jealous and irrationally embarrassed.

Check out John Kramer's work on retrocausality for a glimpse.

@32

General relativity is incomplete, inadequate, and out-dated. (Moron.)

uh, aren't we traveling through time right now? or is someone making the argument that time is standing still?

They did bear that in mind in the TV movie version of the german Science Fiction novel "Das Jesus Video" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Video). Here you only had a certain window if you wanted to go to a certain point in the past (and you had to stay completely still unless you wanted to end up as a twitching blob of flesh like an unfortunate labrat....).

In case anyone's interested - this is nocturnal-devil's (http://nocturnal-devil.deviantart.com/art/Time-Travel-142276758) - check out his gallery here: http://nocturnal-devil.deviantart.com/gallery

@32:
The only "time travel" involved in relativity is traveling forward, and that's only if you define time travel to be:
"calculating (in your own reference frame) a shorter time-like separation between t and (t+dt) than an observer on earth would measure."

@33:
1. "Now" is the only possible time to make observations, so it is the only point at which we can collapse the wave function. The past is just as uncertain as the future.
2. Arrow of Time model fallen apart?? All that model states is that there is a direction in the degree of freedom we call time in which (1)entropy increases, (2) The universe is expanding, (3) we perceive time passing. To deny the arrow of time model, you must deny entropy, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics, neither of which, I assure you, has "fallen apart."

Also, "now" is defined BY human perception, so what you said was silly.

@34:
It is true that there are now several other competing theories regarding gravity (quantum loop gravity being one of them), but Gen Rev is hardly outdated. It provides an accurate framework that produces all (with very few anomalies) the observables we want it to. Its only issue is one of seemingly not being coupled with quantum. Its incomplete only so far as any scientific theory is. Outdated? Not by a long shot.

Also, the comic is silly, it assumes that there is one grand stationary reference frame that this dude was stationary with respect to.
That being said, I don't know how his time machine works, so bully for him.

There was a show called Seven Days that dealt with this... dude could go back in time, but his 'Chronosphere' always ended up in space and he had to reenter the atmosphere every time.

It'd be even worse really. If the galaxy is spinning and the universe is expanding you'd be even further away from the planet...

Jeez, he didn't enter the coordinates correctly. Everyone knows its Beep Boop Beep not Boop Beep Beep.

Sheesh

It was also explained pretty well by atomic robo. I linked the comic. Argue how you want but it makes sense.

Well I tried to link the comic but it failed. Attempt 2
http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/04/27/fcbd-09-page-1/

I was just thinking....if we invent a time traveling machine, we could also use it as a super advanced warp drive. Let's say we travel 5 years into the past or future(and we move an entire space ship) we would end up light years away from the Earth. Pretty kickass imo

ITS A COMIC STRIP! lighten the hell up, nobody is going to come across as clever, all it shows is you can Google "time travel for faux intelligent bell-ends". Discuss.

@38

I know, I know - classic arguments. But all of that assumes that there's something inherently valuable and authoritative about our perception, which is a conceit. Again, Kramer's work is demonstrating that "now" is not the only time at which we can collapse the wave function.

There is no such thing as green - it's simply the result of a neurological process.

Alright, I suppose you're right. I should have said, general relativity SHOULD be outdated. We've got enough experimental data at this point to show that we've been barking up the wrong tree (even if we're in the right copse), if only we could get over the fear of admitting that we don't know as much about the world as we like to think we do.

So basically time travel DOES work...Ur just gonna die when u do it LOL

I was just explaining this EXACT thing the other day regarding Back to the Future. Disregarding the technologies that don't exist yet, time travel would have to happen upon a space craft. Then, once you determine your destination, you'll be able to travel back to Earth. Though, extensive research would have to be done to find an "anchor' point in space. Otherwise you might just end up in the middle of a star. *fizzle*

Mr. Hanky: That's a neat idea, you're right, it would be similar to jumping off an extremely fast moving train. You'd have to be able to jump back to the future to get back home though, and be careful of what you might run into!

The earth is moving all the time. Seeing as it would be impossible to anchor a time machine to the earth you would have to have some way for the machine to be able to exist in space. Also the earth wouldnt be in the same place in 364 1/4 days... The earth also moves up and down while going around the sun. This means it could take about 7,500,000 years to be in the same place it started.

Comment 39 is most relevant. Even though general relativity is going to have to be altered in order to get a theory of quantum gravity, it's generally expected that the result will be generally covariant. Even if it's not, you're still not going to have a preferred rest-frame (the problem with the comic is that it assumes a preferred rest-frame).
It's a bit odd that Eccoli and John both endorse relativistic and quantum arguments while attacking each other for doing just that. So Eccoli's statement that the "now" is a peceptual bias is a result from relativity, i.e. the relativity of simultaneity. But then he says that relativity is out-moded.
John, on the other hand, is defending relativity, but then in comment 38, he endorses the quantum requirement that now is different from the past and the future. He's right that standard quantum mechanics requires a preferred "now", but this is one of the ways in which it's incompatible with relativity. (Although Roderich Tumulka has recently developed a limited version of quantum mechanics which is compatible with special relativity, as it doesn't require a preferred reference frame).
I can't figure out why John thinks that quatum mechanics treats the past and future as equally improbable. Sure, the wave equation can be evolved into the past or the future. But the Born rule only works for collapses in the future. You can't use the Born rule to make predictions about the past.

You need a machine that travels through both time AND space. Also relative dimensions. I think I've heard of one of those... Oh, wait...

http://www.workdance.com/Downloads/tardis_model/Tardis_800x600.jpg

LOL you all are wrong. I have already made time travel possible. Its very easy indeed. If you would like to try it out I have left the ingrediants below.

@echo off
title Delorean Executable
goto menu

:sstt

:menu

@echo off
cls
echo ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ»
echo ºWhat Would You Like To Do? º
echo ÌÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ͹
echo º 1.Start Time Travel º
echo º 2.Stop Time Travel º
echo ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍͼ
echo.

set /p userinp= Please choose a number and press enter.
set userinp=%userinp:~0,10000000000%
if "%userinp%"=="1" goto start1
if "%userinp%"=="2" goto start3
if "%userinp%"=="exit" goto end
goto menu

:start1
echo powering flux capacitor
:start2
set hour=%random%
if /i %hour% GTR 24 goto start2
if /i %hour% LSS 0 goto start2

:minnie
set min=%random%
if /i %min% GTR 60 goto minnie
if /i %min% LSS 0 goto minnie
echo %hour%
echo %min%

time %hour%:%min%

goto menu

:start3

net time /set /y
cls
Echo You have successfully returned to your own time press any key to continue...
pause>nul
goto menu

:end