A flaw im nearly all Time Travel theories

[trikster35]

Ive read alot of theories, all are very excellant but they all never mention the the position of the Earth when traveling MY POINT: We travel to another time period we need to calculate the position of the Earth, (the Earth rotates around the Sun 365 days a year, "Yes i know you know") the we need to figure the position of where we are on the Earth(the Earth rotates a full evolution every 24 hours"Again i know you know...sigh") Now when traveling in time you need to know exactly when the Earth is going to be in the exact spot when traveling otherwise you may end up floating in outerspace, materializing in an ocean, or a rock, etc etc etc. If there are Time travelers they may only be limited to particular exact times.

 

[Einstein]

The scientific evidence does not support your claims. The Michelson Morley experiment clearly refutes your beliefs.

 

[1122]

trikster35,

I've mentioned this more times than I can count, but a lot of people like to ignore the problem. Better make your time machine into a space ship..

 

[Einstein]

1122

Yes, there is widespread belief that the solar system exists within a 4-D type of stationary space. Kind of like Newtonian space. If this was the case then a spaceship would be needed to calculate a safe entry point into the new time period. But the Michelson Morley experiment clearly shows that this ether type of space does not exist as we would like to perceive it. Nowadays they use lasers with micro precision to detect any drift at all. The earth appears to be sitting still in space. Almost as if the earth were dragging its spacetime with it. Since the experiment is performed with lasers, it could be interpreted that the type of space that "light" traverses apparently rotates with the earth, also orbitting with the earth around the sun. How far this region of spacetime dragging extends outward from the earth, I believe is being investigated with gravity probe B

I believe RMT mentioned that there exists a device called a laser gyro. If the time machine references off of the laser gyro then it would stand still with that reference point while moving through time. Now this would be very similar to JT's VGL system. Kind of surprising that he would be so close with a navigational system. But his system references off gravity. I would choose the laser gyro instead. Any detectable drift on the lazer gyro should initiate an exit from time travel mode to avoid unnecessary accelerations through space.

 

[IgnorantSentient]

This is simply an old science fiction novel idea. I read the same thing, I hold with what the above post says.

 

[NoTime323]

actually...it only appears as though the earth is "still"
einstein's theories say there is no such thing as "state of rest"
we are infact always in motion you just have to find an inertial frame to set your "motion" to
but it's a tumbling effect in a way....like we could say standing next to a rock you are motionless....but next to the sun you are in motion or even next to a body just outside the atmosphere you are in rotation, and then there's the sun's inertial frame which is relative to other bodies outside the solar system. so in otherwords...if you put a flag on the earth...but theoreticly it did not "stick" and did not apply to the laws of gravity, given enough time..that flag would not be on the earth at all, given the earth's "inertial frame"...of course this is not possible because of the laws of gravity and inertia, but when traveling through time...I would think you would not be subject to the gravitational pull and inertia, you would "appear" wherever you plotted. and if you didn't calculate the motion of the earth in some sort of inertail frame you would not be anywhere near the earth when you "materialized"

so in short you would indeed need to calculate motion based on some sort of inertal frame in order to successfully "materialize" to a specific desired location, because infact time....has everything to do with motion...without motion there is no time

 

[NoTime323]

ok before I get jumped
Einstein I did see that you said APPEARS to be still
but I'm just not sure how you could say it "pulls" spacetime with it
if other objects outside the earth's inertial frame end up being further away from us...
how could we REALLY be in the same spot in the future?
this is not a retorical question I'm looking for a response...I don't quite grasp what you're trying to say


"ain't life grand" - WSP

 

[NoTime323]

I like this post for some reason...it's neat
anyway here's another point....
if you were to calculate the earth's position in a relativly near future...like 100 years or something..even a thousand...that's not quite so bad....but if you were a real pioneer and wanted more, which as humans that seems to be all we want...what if you were shooting really far into the future...like 2,000,000 years...which isn't even too bad but in terms of how far we have "moved" the toughest thing I think would be the cosmic variables.... wow what an equation that would be...everything in the universe that contains mass has gravitational pull...so if anything in the universe was "pushed" or "pulled" closer, or even further away from our solar system at all or even our galaxy...that would cause an outside force to either push or pull us in a very hard to predict path, if you pull a mass that contains gravity away from us...now I assume gravity's pull is very much relative to distance from the source.....then our course would appear to be altered due to less pull from one side, unless the other side was equally weakened in which they would cancel out, but that cancellation would have to be true for all 360 degrees around us at all times.....or am I completely wrong hah...I don't know...just throwing stuff out there....
what do you think?

 

[Einstein]

NoTime323

I can see you still don't grasp the concept that the spacetime around the earth moves and rotates with the earth. I suggest you spend an hour or two and read up on the Michelson Morley experiment. Lots of info in a Google search can be found. Originally the experiment was performed to determine if there was an ether and if there was any ether drift. The results were very surprising at the time. It appears that the earth sits still in space. Even the earth's rotation through space cannot be acounted for. The spacetime is assumed to be a local phenomena about the earth. It is too far fetched an idea to believe that the earth is the center of the universe and the universe rotates about the earth. The mathematical reference frames you talk about are easier to comprehend. But they are not supported by the observational experimental results. Lots of mathematics is just pure fiction. It takes a very very good mathematician to constrain the limits of the observations to a concise mathematical description. As I said before, the idea that the earth rotates through a 4D newtonian spacetime around the sun has been shown to be false. It is starting to appear that mother nature makes her own reference frames, and they are different and more strange than we can imagine. But I believe it is time to throw out the fictional reference frames that mathematics gives us and constrain our mathematics to the way mother nature does things.

You know this is similar to a 15th century belief that the earth was flat. So believing something doesn't make it true. Experimental observations are the source of the facts. Also trying to interpret the observations is an artform in itself. The interpretations are just theories. A theory is not a fact. When trying to interpret an observation, I find it is best to apply several interpretations. Usually the best interpretation is held onto untill later observational updates can be applied which would allow for an even better more refined interpretation.

 

[NoTime323]

thank you I will, I don't claim to know anything
besides it's all just perception, and everything we calculate or try to figure out all boils down to being relative to perception, the best example is the speed of light right? no matter how fast you are moving it will pass you at the speed of light, that is probably an answer to what I wasn't grasping, I did read up a bit after I posted and shortly before you posted, I read about einstein's follow-ups as well, his theory of special relativity, it does make sense when I drop all the "education" and just think about it for a while, and see that we are only a product of being "aware" and whatever we percieve is we can try and calculate but the labels we use and the equations we come up with only apply to "our" point of view, simply because there is no way to prove it outside of a human head, thank you for the response though, very helpful in my little mission to learn more about what we think is going on

 

[jmpet]

>>Ive read alot of theories, all are very excellant but they all never mention the the position of the Earth when traveling<<

Titor alludes to it many times- heck, this is what "Variable Gravity Lock" means. You park your car near some structures that you know existed in the target timeline, turn the machine on and the cesium clocks record the relative gravity- relative to you in the car, the planet and these structures around you. Then a Teslean application comes on that amplifies the exact gravity in your spot and you zip from one time to another without moving. As Professor Farnsworth puts it "You don't move, the universe moves around you".

>>MY POINT: We travel to another time period we need to calculate the position of the Earth, (the Earth rotates around the Sun 365 days a year, "Yes i know you know") the we need to figure the position of where we are on the Earth(the Earth rotates a full evolution every 24 hours"Again i know you know...sigh") Now when traveling in time you need to know exactly when the Earth is going to be in the exact spot when traveling otherwise you may end up floating in outerspace, materializing in an ocean, or a rock, etc etc etc. If there are Time travelers they may only be limited to particular exact times.<<

You run into Heisenbergian problems if you did it that way. What made Titor's machine actually work is that his time machine is based on and built from the IBM 5100 computer, this is why it looks like a 1960's computer. And we all know what made the 5100 so unique- it's ability to quantify time in a quotent we understand: the second. As time goes on, computers will be based on the predictable spin of an atom instead of time making time travel (or more succinctly, safe time travel) impossible; computers will run into pi-related problems while trying to quantify an exact Planck-like moment in time instead of the second.

 

[Knowledge]

What made Titor's machine actually work is that his time machine is based on and built from the IBM 5100 computer, this is why it looks like a 1960's computer.

Huh???????

 

[RenUnconscious]

couldn't we just guesstimate where the earth is going to be and time travel in a ship capable of traveling in outer space? Who the hell cares if your close to earth or end up in San Fran as long as you don't end up explosively decompressing in the vacuum that is Outer Space. Dun dun dun, dah dah!

me, I'll take my UFO and time traveling equipment along with me, if the earth and close maybe I'll end up on another planet with green aliens who look like Goldfish Crackers and speak only binary, get rashes often on their heads and soil themselves when they are scared. ohh I want to meet a green guy like that!

 

[Darby]

iqbalgomar

I used to see this as a flaw too, but as I've become more familiar with physics I've also become more effectively intuitive in my speculations about same.

Intuitively, it seems to me that such calculation of the Earth's position would be unnecessary. Why? Because we're within the Earth's inertial frame. We share the planet's momentum. Gravity is a four-dimensional waveform, not three...

If you're standing on the roof of a moving train and you jump into the air (disregarding wind-resistance) you land in the same spot when you come down. I picture Earth as the train, in four dimensions. I think the analogy is apt. Physics experts? Correct me if I'm wrong.

You're on the right track (pun intended

).

If we're going to travel in time then we have to face some consequences. Turning a knob to "2359 hrs, 31-DEC-1999" so we can go back and celebrate Y2K New Year's Eve isn't going to work. Hours, minutes, seconds and Gregorian Calendar dates are arbitrary time measurements. We humans made them up.

But if we look at the situation from the POV of Special Relativity it becomes a lot simpler. Space and time become space-time. We can express any "event" as a 4D Cartesian coordinate. We rotate our system of coordinates and we travel along the "x" axis, rotate 90 degrees and we travel along the "y" axis, another 90 degree rotation and we travel along the "z" axis and another "rotation" of 90 degrees and we travel along the "t" (time) axis. That last (hypercubic) rotation isn't something that we can easily picture in our mind but we sure can do it with a computer.

If we rotate less than 90 degrees in any direction we can use trig "sine" (or cosine) funtions to travel in both space and time (something that Boomer, writing as Titor, didn't realize).

So, traveling to an earlier (or later) Earth is a "simple" rotation of the system of coordinates to go from point "A" (hear and now") to point "B" (there and then).

NOTE: Scare quotes on "simple" because it's only simple in the sense of Cartesian coordinates and geometry. It's obviously hugely complex to actually pull it off in the real world.

However, it's a simple process to determine where the Earth is (or was) at some point in time. If we can dial in the 4D coordinate we can get there. The problem then become one of accuracy. We can dial it in, but can we dial in, say, "1975" from "2036" with a degree of accuracy sufficient to avoid a catastrophic "landing". Those two spacetime events can be said to be seperated by 61 years.

They can also be said to be (more accurately) seperated by 61 light years (that's a valid 4D coordinate seperation of the two events).

A light year is ~9.5 * 10^12 km. So 61 light years is ~580 * 10^12 km.

If our instruments are 99.9999999% accurate we'll miss the alternate Earth by only...hold your hat...580 million kilometers, or we could arrive at the right location but miss the time by 122 days, 15 hours, 21 minutes, or a sine function of the combination of the two, i.e, somwehere in between 580 million km and 122 days (assuming that the world you left and the world you arrive at are at rest WRT each other...which may not be a good assumption).

So, in your analogy, you jump up in the train and land at about the same spot. But the jump (event "A") and the landing (event "B") are seperated by a very small period WRT a light year. In that case "almost the same spot" is a very accurate approximation.

If, however, you jumped up and hung in the air for 61 years in some form of Hilbert space you will not land in the same spot by any estimation. Your intuition has to be supplemented by some very complex forms of analytic geometry.

And then you have to hope to God that the linear and angular velocity that you had when you left point "A" is the same as when you arrive at point "B" (in the alternate universe).

There's no guarantee that the angular and linear velocity of point "B" is the same as point "A". You could have a soft landing or you could scream in at Mach 10 and an odd angle for a rather "difficult" landing. I think that Rainman would agree...pilots call this "augering in".

 

[jmpet]

The 5100 is special because it only quantfies in second increments, nearly all other computers don't. Imagine two time machines, one based on 5100 technology, the other based on a laptop. You set the destination and travel through time. The VGL gets a reading of the relative gravity of the area you're in and drops you off in another time. The difference is while the laptop is trying to "quantify the spin of atoms" to find the exact moment of the millions of possible exact moments (Planck Time), the 5100 just drops you off in a second of time. More simply, if you stood on a rooftop and dropped 1,000 quarters to see if they're heads or tails the laptop would record every single quarter that landed while the 5100 would just say "50% are heads, 50% are tails". It's a shortcut to time travel. Considering Titor said the divergence was 2.5% or less, he was basically telling us this. Finally, look at a picture of the Titor time machine "remote keypad" and a 5100 computer. Don't know how to post pics here but it's pretty obvious.

 

[jmpet]

>Intuitively, it seems to me that such calculation of the Earth's position would be unnecessary. Why? Because we're within the Earth's inertial frame. We share the planet's momentum. Gravity is a four-dimensional waveform, not three. In fact, it's speculated that this is why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces: much of it bleeds away into higher dimensions.<

In practicality, you're exactly right. As Sagan said, other stars may have more gravity than the Earth but the Earth is a lot closer to us. Basic physics teaches us that gravity is the weakest of the four elementary forces, this is because it's distributed everywhere throughout the universe. But in small quantities, gravity can be very powerful and with time travel, you're amplifying localized gravity to "traverse time".

The practical concept behind time travel is akin to an atomic explosion. While we can't control individual atoms and make them fuse or split, we can put enough energy in one spot for a short enough period of time to where it does. Like shooting at a tank- an RPG may bounce off a tank's hull but a stream of particles would go straight through it unimpeded.

 

[newbie_0]

I always assumed they did that in those movies and just didn't talk about...?