51–60 of 215 posts
Why time travelers in sci-fi also move to the position and rotation of the Earth at the given moment? They should end floating in space.
If reality is infinitely branching, then time travel is merely a way for the traveler to perceive and move between those infinite branches.
If you kill your grandfather in an alternate timeline your grandfather is still alive in the timeline you came from, hence no paradox. You (an alien in the new timeline) can then watch a world develop in that alternate reality where your grandfather died.
If time travel were in fact possible, this would be the only way my puny brain could conceive of it actually working.
If there’s only strictly one path that reality takes even from the perspective of an outside observer (God) then I can’t see how time travel could be possible in such a construct. If it is possible it seems you must implicitly admit that there is not in fact a singular thread of reality/time.
Just because we define some equations where t can flow in reverse and fit them into the standard model doesn’t seem to me to be persuasive evidence one way or another.
Is there any similar data that can be used? Perhaps global weather records?
I'm so agnostic concerning the concept of time itself at the end of the day. I feel that we're so busy struggling to find a way to make time travel work, that we forget that time itself isn't a mechanism of the universe, and that it's just a word we use to describe some sort of effect or bi-product that we're observing. Here's a can of worms... Compare the concept of time travel to something like 'smell travel'. Is i…
I've never seen the past or future. Only physical things still or moving, combining with other things or not ... What we call 'the past' is a mental picture of where physical things used to be positioned and their condition. But everything in 'that now' has changed. Just as when we 'travel' in physical space, when we get 'back home' it has changed. If I were to 'time travel' I'd be gone from now. But everyone else wo…
This suggests concepts like fate and the universe having a will and intent. It seems absurd. Wouldn’t a branching creating a new universe with its own timeline make more sense? Each unit of influence you exert as a time traveler branches a new universe in which you continue to exist and which has a completely new and separate timeline without paradoxes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The article mentions the grandfather paradox, but doesn't really address it at all. Can't "self correct" shooting your past self in the head.
Think what they're getting at is that it won't happen that way. Gun will jam, you die of a brain aneurysm. We don't exist in a universe where impossible things happen, so we can't bring them about. But yes, the article doesn't really sink its teeth into it.
The only explanation I can think of for why we haven't seen any, if we live in such a universe, is that we need to build an "arrivals hall" first, and that as soon we manage to do that, people from all over start popping in for a visit.
Are there ideas out there which "explain away" the problems arising from planetary/stellar movement? My naive understanding of time travelling back a single day would put me in a spot where earth will be a day later.
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/11/23/124-...