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This is like saying we will never fly a plane. Do you really think people in the 1200's could fathom a phone or the internet or access all information that ever has been on a device that fits on your phone? Its incredibly naïve to think that time travel isn't possible purely based on "laws of physics".
> Nikk Effingham’s book is an exploration of all things time travel (where time travel is to be read as backwards time travel, that is, travel to an earlier time). I'd be interested to know if forward time travel is easier than backwards time travel. Seems to avoid a lot of paradoxes.
forward time travel is perfectly consistent with the laws of physics and in fact we've done it experimentally. backwards is only possible observationally (ex. building a big telescope we can look at the past) but we cannot effect it
This is like saying we will never fly a plane. Do you really think people in the 1200's could fathom a phone or the internet or access all information that ever has been on a device that fits on your phone? Its incredibly naïve to think that time travel isn't possible purely based on "laws of physics".
> Its incredibly naïve to think that time travel isn't possible purely based on "laws of physics". Huh? Would you argue that it's "incredibly naïve" to think perpetual motion machines aren't possible purely based on "laws of physics"? Because I think it's incredibly naïve to think perpetual motion machines would be possible, precisely because they do violate the laws of physics.
"The law that entropy always increases—the Second Law of Thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
But hey there's a lot we still don't know about the universe. I mean these unbreakable laws are only a few hundred years old for us.
This is like saying we will never fly a plane. Do you really think people in the 1200's could fathom a phone or the internet or access all information that ever has been on a device that fits on your phone? Its incredibly naïve to think that time travel isn't possible purely based on "laws of physics".
It’s essentially Occam’s razor. Of course we could currently be wrong, but the entire point of the western scientific mindset in which this article is written is that we can be reasonably certain that in this case we’re not. If you want to dedicate your efforts to showing otherwise, have at it. No one will stop you. They probably won’t fund you though, and on the minuscule chance you end up being right unless it’s blindingly obvious it’ll take a while to convince people (we still haven’t convinced everyone that the standard model matches experimental data as well as it does, and that’s more or less been settled for how many decades now?)
This is like saying we will never fly a plane. Do you really think people in the 1200's could fathom a phone or the internet or access all information that ever has been on a device that fits on your phone? Its incredibly naïve to think that time travel isn't possible purely based on "laws of physics".
> Its incredibly naïve to think that time travel isn't possible purely based on "laws of physics". Huh? Would you argue that it's "incredibly naïve" to think perpetual motion machines aren't possible purely based on "laws of physics"? Because I think it's incredibly naïve to think perpetual motion machines would be possible, precisely because they do violate the laws of physics.
By all means, our physics works (now) and its the best we've got so lets bet on it and drive our society that way, but to suggest some things will never be possible not only creates 0 value for society (perhaps even negative value), but is also the stance proven wrong so many times needlessly. The truth is, we really just don't know and can only make our best guesses.
> Nikk Effingham’s book is an exploration of all things time travel (where time travel is to be read as backwards time travel, that is, travel to an earlier time). I'd be interested to know if forward time travel is easier than backwards time travel. Seems to avoid a lot of paradoxes.
Egan seems to fall in the camp that A) the direction of time might be a purely cosmological phenomenon rather than a local one and B) time paradoxes in a universe that admits causal loops can possibly be resolved by just making them unlikely. His pitch is fairly compelling.
This is like saying we will never fly a plane. Do you really think people in the 1200's could fathom a phone or the internet or access all information that ever has been on a device that fits on your phone? Its incredibly naïve to think that time travel isn't possible purely based on "laws of physics".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
forward time travel is perfectly consistent with the laws of physics and in fact we've done it experimentally. backwards is only possible observationally (ex. building a big telescope we can look at the past) but we cannot effect it
That'd correct. Not only, that we can not influence it, we also know that it has already happened.
> Nikk Effingham’s book is an exploration of all things time travel (where time travel is to be read as backwards time travel, that is, travel to an earlier time). I'd be interested to know if forward time travel is easier than backwards time travel. Seems to avoid a lot of paradoxes.
That's "relatively" easy to do. Get in a space ship that could quickly get to a fraction of c, travel for a short amount of time and then return back to the starting point. You would have traveled to the future from the point of view of some one at the starting point.
You'll have better luck with gravity wells.