the legendary shark
Registered Member
Hello, everyone.
As this is my first post on this forum, I thought I'd first type a little about myself to add some context.
I am not a scientist or academic in any significant sense. In fact, I am a simple, 50 year old, truck driver who was recently made homeless. I have always, however, been fascinated by cosmology and astrophysics although my understanding is shallow. When driving, instead of listening to mindless radio I enjoy listening to podcasts and lectures and it was whilst listening to one of these (TGC's Impossible - Physics Beyond the Edge, I think) that the following idea occurred to me.
I do not even dignify the following with the description of "hypothesis" because it is simply an idea that crossed my mind as I was listening. I know that my knowledge, and therefore my understanding, is poor and so I do not present this idea as "something I've worked out" or even as something demanding serious scientific consideration. I am fully aware of the fact that this thought is based upon an incomplete understanding of the topic and may not, given the depth of scientific knowledge and thought already extant, and the billions of minds on the planet, even be an original idea. Indeed, I don't even fully understand this idea myself so I hope you'll forgive me - and educate me - for the misconceptions and errors it contains.
Thank you for your indulgence.
Time travel, as far as I understand it, is not specifically "outlawed" by current understanding but does seem to be highly unlikely due to the potential paradoxes inherant to such an idea. Leaving aside the "Many Time-Lines/Universes" hypothesis, I wondered if time travel might be possible in this universe.
Let us imagine a time-telegraph - an instrument capable of sending a single particle back through time. Current thinking is that, if a particle is sent back through time from Wednesday to Tuesday, a paradox may be constructed. The receiver on Tuesday detects the particle from the future (Wednesday) and must answer a question based on the received particle, for example, is the particle positively or negatively charged? If the equipment receives a positively charged particle and the scientist reports it as negatively charged, then a negatively charged particle would be sent back from Wednesday. This means a negatively charged particle could be sent back from Wednesday to Tuesday, where it would be received and misreported as a positively charged particle, therefore a positively charged particle would be sent back and so on, creating a paradox. (The charge could be used as a yes/no answer to a question, for example.) Sorry if that's not very clear.
However, this is what occurred to me. In the time between Tuesday and Wednesday, everything has moved. The equipment (and let's imagine that the transmitter and receiver are the same instrument) is on a planet which is spinning and orbiting a star which is itself orbiting the galactic centre, the galaxy is also moving and the universe is also expanding. Therefore the chance of calculating all this motion so that the particle ends up finding the correct point in spacetime might be very difficult to calculate with sufficient accuracy - but not impossible. However, if a particle was sent back from Wednesday to Tuesday on the correct vector, that particle must, at the point of transmission, have to pass through itself (assumption), to briefly occupy the same point in spacetime.
My idea was that the particle cannot do this (assumption) and so would be somehow perturbed from its course by atomic charges or forces. Given the change of vector, and the motion of the equipment in expanding spacetime, might this mean that the particle would travel from Wednesday to Tuesday but emerge at least one light day away from the receiver? A particle sent back one second might "emerge" at least one light second away from the receiver - or miss the receiver by the same distance. This would make time travel possible without the danger of causing a paradox. Unfortunately for science fiction authors, this would mean that if a temporanaut was sent back 65 million years to study the dinosaurs, he or she would emerge at least 65 million light years from the earth. The information sent back in time would be too distant to impact past information and therefore be incapable of affecting it in any way. Indeed, without a receiver, the particle travelling back in time might never "emerge" and continue its course right back to the Big Bang (assumption).
This idea might be tested by constructing a seperate time telegraph and receiver one light second apart and sending a particle back in time by one second. The receiver, upon receiving the particle, signals the transmitter. Given perfect timing and equipment, the transmitter would only know if the experiment had been successful at the same instant the particle is "sent back," if that makes any sense. Given the slight delays caused by real-world equipment, however, the transmitter would probably only know if the experiment was successful after transmission. Again - time travel without the paradox.
Thank you for your indulgence, I hope this post made some kind of sense and look forward to your comments. (I'd also like to know which fields of mathematics I should study in order to try and figure this out properly - if it's a viable idea which, of course, I'm not sure it is.)
As this is my first post on this forum, I thought I'd first type a little about myself to add some context.
I am not a scientist or academic in any significant sense. In fact, I am a simple, 50 year old, truck driver who was recently made homeless. I have always, however, been fascinated by cosmology and astrophysics although my understanding is shallow. When driving, instead of listening to mindless radio I enjoy listening to podcasts and lectures and it was whilst listening to one of these (TGC's Impossible - Physics Beyond the Edge, I think) that the following idea occurred to me.
I do not even dignify the following with the description of "hypothesis" because it is simply an idea that crossed my mind as I was listening. I know that my knowledge, and therefore my understanding, is poor and so I do not present this idea as "something I've worked out" or even as something demanding serious scientific consideration. I am fully aware of the fact that this thought is based upon an incomplete understanding of the topic and may not, given the depth of scientific knowledge and thought already extant, and the billions of minds on the planet, even be an original idea. Indeed, I don't even fully understand this idea myself so I hope you'll forgive me - and educate me - for the misconceptions and errors it contains.
Thank you for your indulgence.
Time travel, as far as I understand it, is not specifically "outlawed" by current understanding but does seem to be highly unlikely due to the potential paradoxes inherant to such an idea. Leaving aside the "Many Time-Lines/Universes" hypothesis, I wondered if time travel might be possible in this universe.
Let us imagine a time-telegraph - an instrument capable of sending a single particle back through time. Current thinking is that, if a particle is sent back through time from Wednesday to Tuesday, a paradox may be constructed. The receiver on Tuesday detects the particle from the future (Wednesday) and must answer a question based on the received particle, for example, is the particle positively or negatively charged? If the equipment receives a positively charged particle and the scientist reports it as negatively charged, then a negatively charged particle would be sent back from Wednesday. This means a negatively charged particle could be sent back from Wednesday to Tuesday, where it would be received and misreported as a positively charged particle, therefore a positively charged particle would be sent back and so on, creating a paradox. (The charge could be used as a yes/no answer to a question, for example.) Sorry if that's not very clear.
However, this is what occurred to me. In the time between Tuesday and Wednesday, everything has moved. The equipment (and let's imagine that the transmitter and receiver are the same instrument) is on a planet which is spinning and orbiting a star which is itself orbiting the galactic centre, the galaxy is also moving and the universe is also expanding. Therefore the chance of calculating all this motion so that the particle ends up finding the correct point in spacetime might be very difficult to calculate with sufficient accuracy - but not impossible. However, if a particle was sent back from Wednesday to Tuesday on the correct vector, that particle must, at the point of transmission, have to pass through itself (assumption), to briefly occupy the same point in spacetime.
My idea was that the particle cannot do this (assumption) and so would be somehow perturbed from its course by atomic charges or forces. Given the change of vector, and the motion of the equipment in expanding spacetime, might this mean that the particle would travel from Wednesday to Tuesday but emerge at least one light day away from the receiver? A particle sent back one second might "emerge" at least one light second away from the receiver - or miss the receiver by the same distance. This would make time travel possible without the danger of causing a paradox. Unfortunately for science fiction authors, this would mean that if a temporanaut was sent back 65 million years to study the dinosaurs, he or she would emerge at least 65 million light years from the earth. The information sent back in time would be too distant to impact past information and therefore be incapable of affecting it in any way. Indeed, without a receiver, the particle travelling back in time might never "emerge" and continue its course right back to the Big Bang (assumption).
This idea might be tested by constructing a seperate time telegraph and receiver one light second apart and sending a particle back in time by one second. The receiver, upon receiving the particle, signals the transmitter. Given perfect timing and equipment, the transmitter would only know if the experiment had been successful at the same instant the particle is "sent back," if that makes any sense. Given the slight delays caused by real-world equipment, however, the transmitter would probably only know if the experiment was successful after transmission. Again - time travel without the paradox.
Thank you for your indulgence, I hope this post made some kind of sense and look forward to your comments. (I'd also like to know which fields of mathematics I should study in order to try and figure this out properly - if it's a viable idea which, of course, I'm not sure it is.)
