Shows about time travel

Although, he adds, it’s hard to know in advance what to measure.
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Todd Brun's statement sums up the problem with an AI in the future knowing how to monitor changes it can make to its own past (along with humanity itself).

The morals behind the show Travelers are well-worn: can you trust a machine to save the world? The show introduces this problem right away, the first traveler chooses not to carry out the mission, instead deciding to go to war against the machine. So now who do you trust? This first traveler obviously represents a bug in the programming--can this AI correct itself by being reprogrammed? That's what the good guys (who are they?) end up doing, maybe.
 
Q-reeus said:
In all the so-called resolutions proposed there not involving traveling somewhere else i.e. 'parallel universes', it's assumed either CTC's are possible (requiring GR to be fully self-consistent - it aint), or restrict to very simple quantum interactions where degrees of freedom are at the binary level. Try transporting even one complex molecule say a protein, and watch the argument fall apart. Further, such simple scenarios neglect that the mere presence of even one particle from the future will gravitationally effect it's surroundings. Unavoidably then altering the future state of the universe. All still bunkum.
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Similar to pure mathematics, time-travel constructs do not entail being application-based to begin with. They fall somewhere on a spectrum between a professional study of a particular class of abstractions (or the problems they output) to recreational physics.

It might be unusual, however, that Seth Loyd and related teams managed to set-up lab simulations of his model. (But not being a necessity of such conceptual activity doesn't preclude the potential of either that or full-blown "testable" occurring). David Deutsch could even be an outright realist, due to an intermittent history of railing against the lingering influences of positivism or anti-realism, instrumentalism, etc. But his personal philosophical stances don't formally elevate "time-travel" intellection beyond its native range of "from serious to recreational investigation of an abstract / speculative territory in physics", to a literal pursuit of a substantiated object slash affair.

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My favourite time-travel story is "The Time-Machine." A scientist's wife is killed so he builds a time-Machine. He traverses time to save her, only for her to be killed a short time after. Every time the scientist saves his wife, she soon dies shortly afterwards in a different manner. Distraught and in need of answers the scientist travels into the future when he meets a Morlock who explains how his wife's death was the inspiration for his time machine. Had she not died, he would not have built the time machine. Cause and effect...
 
C C said:
Similar to pure mathematics, time-travel constructs do not entail being application-based to begin with. They fall somewhere on a spectrum between a professional study of a particular class of abstractions (or the problems they output) to recreational physics.

It might be unusual, however, that Seth Loyd and related teams managed to set-up lab simulations of his model. (But not being a necessity of such conceptual activity doesn't preclude the potential of either that or full-blown "testable" occurring). David Deutsch could even be an outright realist, due to an intermittent history of railing against the lingering influences of positivism or anti-realism, instrumentalism, etc. But his personal philosophical stances don't formally elevate "time-travel" intellection beyond its native range of "from serious to recreational investigation of an abstract / speculative territory in physics", to a literal pursuit of a substantiated object slash affair.

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Rrrrright. Needed to do a fair amount of mental language translation there. So ok if theoretical scenarios with severe restrictions imposed produce interesting/novel results, keeping these bods locked away in labs thus off the streets is probably a good thing.
There is though a fundamental philosophical flaw in all such schemes imo. Attempting to devise 'safe' particularly simple situations that notionally avoid inconsistencies, requires ignoring that a more 'realistic' example - employing the same time-travel 'technology' - say transporting a free-will agent back in time to e.g. murder his/her younger self, should also be possible. Since the latter is a 'logical' extension of that TT 'technology', but is manifestly self-contradictory, the 'technology' itself cannot really exist.
Unless one introduces a mysterious entity known as 'Fate' that always intervenes to thwart free-will. But let's leave mysticism & Hollywood out of it.

Bottom line; one counterexample is enough to kill the whole idea. Future Grandpa's (funny how sexist bias never has a future Grandma example) need have no fear of death via homicidal time-travelers.
 
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Counter said:
My favourite time-travel story is "The Time-Machine." A scientist's wife is killed so he builds a time-Machine. He traverses time to save her, only for her to be killed a short time after. Every time the scientist saves his wife, she soon dies shortly afterwards in a different manner. Distraught and in need of answers the scientist travels into the future when he meets a Morlock who explains how his wife's death was the inspiration for his time machine. Had she not died, he would not have built the time machine. Cause and effect...
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You mean the re-worked version of the H.G. Wells novel, which has only a slight resemblance to the original story?
 
Michael 345 said:
The past does not exist
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Right. I recommend the "ALMA" thread on alternate. page #35 the universe has moved on through time, there is no past universe now. The past is empty. Even if we could reconstruct past events, stuff now, it would not be the past, happening again. it would be a new now.
Stories are great, entertainment, it used to be talking snakes, now it is other past unrealistic scripts. .
ALMA
 
Counter said:
My favourite time-travel story is "The Time-Machine." A scientist's wife is killed so he builds a time-Machine. He traverses time to save her, only for her to be killed a short time after. Every time the scientist saves his wife, she soon dies shortly afterwards in a different manner. Distraught and in need of answers the scientist travels into the future when he meets a Morlock who explains how his wife's death was the inspiration for his time machine. Had she not died, he would not have built the time machine. Cause and effect...
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The original novel of Wells' may at least be the granddaddy of a machine being involved, if not *time-travel* itself. Might also have been the first introduction in a fictional work of the view of time as a fourth dimension. Gets obscured by his socio-political allegory, which was the actual centerpiece.

Corey S Powell: Other late-19th-century mathematicians began to imagine the fourth dimension as something far more familiar: the passage of time. The pages of *Nature* and other scientific journals featured speculations about a four-dimensional amalgam of the three-dimensions of space along with an additional dimension of time. These notions eventually received a concrete mathematical treatment in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which enabled physicists to reclaim higher dimensions from the spiritualists. Long before then, though, they left their own imprint on popular culture. H G Wells took note of the idea of a temporal fourth dimension when setting the stage for the Time Traveller’s journey in his novella *The Time Machine* (1895). --The Occult Roots Of Higher Dimensional Research In Physics

HG Wells: “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35/35-h/35-h.htm​

And of course, a concept that was seemingly unavoidable for Wells, if time-travel was to be proposed, period. Even if there had been a precursor of possibilism (aka GBU) available back then, that view wouldn't feature a future to transit rapidly through / to. Aside from current, radical alternatives like Julian Barbour's temporal eliminativism not existing, either, such could hardly sport "time-travel" when there is no modifier like that for "travel". (Later on Barbour occasionally started referring to the "snapshots" as differences rather than changes. The latter could be confused with the sequence of occurring changes that replace / annihilate each other in the naïve realism of presentism; wherein inter-consistency and regulatory coherence of the content from one obliteration of the universe to the next are apparently magically maintained.)

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hansda said:
Past may not exist but the past data is not lost. The past data is stored as a memory in the present.
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True enough
But you can't travel there
As the also applies to the future, which can be imagined, but is also non existent

:)
 
"Quantum Leap" involved time travel, I think. Never could watch an entire show. And the Goddidit ending sealed the tomb.
 
Here is what gets me about the whole time-travel thing.

Everyone gets into a time machine, they go back in time, do whatever, etc etc... cool.
Problem is, that PERSON isn't going back in time, the universe is. You are still moving through time normally... unless you want to back a few thousand years when your atoms were scattered around in random places... at which point the universe wouldn't be going back in time, only you would be...

Think about how complicated it would be to move the UNIVERSE back in time.

Personally, I don't think it is possible. Best thing we got is relativity.
And if we're talking about going back to a random past (so some random variable), then I'd just consider that multi-verse hopping.
 
BTW, if you are looking for a movie (low budget)... Primer is a really good one, as well as Time Lapse... both very interesting takes. Last I checked, they were on netflix (awhile ago though...)
 
goose said:
Everyone gets into a time machine, they go back in time, do whatever, etc etc... cool.
Problem is, that PERSON isn't going back in time, the universe is. You are still moving through time normally...
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Isn't that analogous to saying this?

Someone gets in a car going direction A. They turn around and go direction B.
But the person isn't going backwards, they are still moving forward normally.
It's the universe that's travelling backward.
 
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