VGL navigation system and the C204 gravity network

John Titor
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Unfortunately, how would they know? If they already knew such truly insignificant details about the past what would be the purpose of a time gadget?

Here’s a detail that I’ve never commented upon but which seems so obvious. All the wannabe John Titors are stuck on the C204. Why? According to Titor’s story the C204 was already obsolescent when he left 2036 and landed in 1998. The C206 was the top-of-the-line model in 2036.

“Posted by John Titor on 01-31-2001 06:30 AM I would estimate there are about 10 units like mine (C204) and twenty larger units (C206). The main difference is the sensitivity and number of the main Cesium clocks.”

By the way, there are more than 10 C204 and 20 C206 units. Does anyone care to venture a guess as to how many such units there are in this scenario? :thinking: :cowboy_hat_face:

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I have no clue how many C206 “other than your/his?, mentioned 20”, but my guess 8 useable C204 units?

What was your understanding, since you know more then I would… for sure!

Note: Unless I add a quote, when I am right under someone, you can’t always tell if/when I/someone am/is replying to someone in particular, or… just in general

I think it should always link to who you are replying to & no one if a reply is in general, so everyone else knows for sure? just a thought. :innocent:~QS

P.S. I really hope this part made any sense “if/when I/someone am/is” :sweat_smile:

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Sorry about the quotes issue but that’s the Discourse software over which we have no control. However, if you are quoting from a post farther than one post away just highlight the part you want to quote and the Quote box will open. Choose “Quote” and it will drop the quote and who you are quoting into your post.

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OK. The answer is “intinite.” Let’s suppose that time travel to specific points (4D spacetime coordinates) actually is possible and you have a time machine of your own.

Titor arrived in Florida sometime in 1998 and stayed until the spring of 2001. His body created a worldline 1998 to 2001 long. His time gadget did the same. If you just count seconds the duration is about 92 million seconds. So you take your time machine and travel back to 2001 and then move backwards to 1998 one second at a time. Every second you steal Titor’s time gadget from him. Each time machine that disappears from Titor has no effect on the history that exists back in time along the worldline. You now own 92 million time machines. It would be for practical purposes impossible for you to make 92 million stops because you’d die of old age long before you’d finish. But that was only taking a stop each second. There are an infinity of time hacks between 2001 and 1998 thus infinite time gadgets. None of this violates any physical law created by Titor’s Saga. It is self-consistent within the confines of the story.

Worldline is a term coined by Herman Minkowski in 1909. It has a specific definition and is part of real physics, specifically Special and General Relativity. It isn’t timeline or worldline as used in alt-sci.

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I wondered why Titor did not seem to take more precautions regarding the location of his time machine, unless of course it was just an intricate story/fabrication, thus he did not need to worry about someone stealing it.

But then again, if his story is still true then perhaps the machine was linked to his DNA and no one else could use it unless they could somehow reset the encryption codes?

The C204 was a simpler model, so it might be easier to figure out than the more advanced C206.

Of course I am leaning towards the Titor story being fake but it is fun to speculate.

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It’s a time travel story. The bad guys would literally have forever to steal the machine no matter how well it was hidden.

If you’re going to write a sci-fi time travel story you have to sit down and work out the self-consistency aspect of the story before you write/type one word. The instant is “frozen in time” (all infinity of those instants), there forever, if the time travel saga is to be self-consistent. If that’s the case there’s no rush to go in and steal the gadget and if they fail the gadget is still there…forever…until it is successfully stolen.

This is the one and only consistent aspect of all such online time travel stories. The person claiming to be a time traveler doesn’t think in terms of the implications of what they are writing about - because they have never experienced time travel and have no idea how, or if, it might work IRL. Since 2001 the most common time travel wannabe simply tries to mimic John Titor. They’re not very creative stories and they fail the self-consistency test.

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I’m not quite sure I’m following you guys anymore. Who stole Titors time machine 92 million times? Im sure I just missed it somewhere.

Just for clarity sake didn’t Titor say you had to punch in a code to get the C204 to work?

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My good friend Claude said this:

The Everett interpretation, in its original form, didn’t actually say much of anything about Minkowski spacetime — Everett’s 1957 paper is a non-relativistic treatment of quantum mechanics. He was solving a different problem: how to make sense of the universal wavefunction and measurement without collapse, using ordinary non-relativistic QM machinery (Schrödinger evolution, relative states). Special relativity and Minkowski structure aren’t part of the original formulation.

Where the connection actually comes up is in later work trying to reconcile many-worlds with relativity, and it’s a genuinely awkward fit:

  • Branching and simultaneity. In many-worlds, “branching” of the wavefunction into decoherent components looks like it needs a preferred notion of simultaneity — a way of saying “the world splits here, now.” But Minkowski spacetime has no preferred foliation into simultaneity slices; which events are “simultaneous” is frame-dependent. So a naive picture of branching as something that happens uniformly across space at an instant is in tension with relativity.
  • Attempts at a fix. People working on relativistic Everett (e.g. work by David Wallace, and separately by groups looking at Everett + quantum field theory) have argued you can get around this by treating branching as a local, decoherence-driven process rather than a global simultaneous split. Decoherence happens locally wherever entangling interactions occur, and different branch structures in different reference frames can be argued to be consistent (no observable frame-dependence of physics), even though there’s no single global “branching surface.” This is sometimes framed as branching being an emergent, coarse-grained structure rather than a fundamental one tied to any particular foliation.
  • No canonical resolution. This isn’t a fully settled matter — it’s an active point of philosophical and technical discussion, not something Everett himself addressed or that has one agreed-upon answer.

So the honest short version: Everett’s interpretation doesn’t make a claim about Minkowski spacetime — the tension between “branching” and relativistic spacetime structure (specifically the lack of a preferred simultaneity slicing) is a problem later commentators identified and have proposed various (non-definitive) ways to handle.

Titor’s explanations fall short of a legitimate merger of the Minkowski space-time of special relativity and Everett’s many worlds hypothesis… It also does not join general relativity with Everett’s many world’s thesis either…

Titor’s physics is a narrative patch:

  • He took General Relativity (which permits closed timelike curves mathematically, but leads to causal paradoxes like the Grandfather Paradox).

  • He took Everett’s Interpretation (which avoids collapse paradoxes, but operates in abstract Hilbert space without providing a physical mechanism for timeline-hopping).

  • He pasted them together to answer internet forum questions, masking the fact that general relativity’s geometry and quantum mechanics’ Hilbert space do not merge in this way.

If you have an interesting hunch regarding the merger of GR and QM, Claude might totally destroy your dreams, especially if you encourage it to go into extreme critique mode…

There is no established or peer-reviewed way that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have been united via the Riemann Hypothesis — what exists is a set of loose, partial analogies rather than a unification. The real thread starts with the Hilbert–Pólya conjecture (that RH’s zeros are eigenvalues of some Hermitian quantum operator) and Berry and Keating’s 1999 proposal of a chaotic classical Hamiltonian (H = xp) whose quantization might realize it, bolstered by the well-documented Montgomery–Odlyzko finding that zeta zero spacings statistically match random-matrix (GUE) energy-level spacings from quantum chaos. On the GR side, Selberg’s trace formula shows a genuine structural resemblance between the spectrum of the Laplacian on negatively-curved (hyperbolic) spacetimes and closed geodesic orbits, which echoes the form of Riemann’s explicit formula connecting primes to zeta zeros — and there’s a small, speculative, published literature (not mainstream) exploring whether black hole quasinormal mode frequencies might realize Riemann zeros. Claims going further than this — like the assertion that celestial holography’s unitarity constraints directly force the RH critical line, thereby uniting GR and QM through RH — trace to a single non-peer-reviewed, self-published source and are not accepted or engaged with by either the celestial holography or analytic number theory communities. So the honest summary is: RH shows up as a suggestive mathematical echo in the separate toolkits used for quantum chaos (QM side) and hyperbolic geometry (GR side), not as a proven or even seriously conjectured bridge between the two theories themselves.

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It was asked as a “jus’ 'spose” question. It’s been asked before. Going all the way back to when Pamela Moore was online just after Titor/TT0 left she said she had all of her private communication with him stored on a separate disc that she removed from her PC for safe keeping. I told her then the same thing I said in the above post. If someone really wanted the disc, and time travel was real and they had a time machine (yes, a lot of “ifs”) then the disc could never be secured. Dedicated tin haters would have forever to snatch the disc. If they knew she would eventually remove the disc and hide it, they could go back to a point in time when it was still in her PC and snatch it then. She believed in time travel but just couldn’t grasp the implications.

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Why would it? Minkowski wasn’t posing a multi universe theory in 1909. He was mathematically tracing the path of a particle through ordinary classical spacetime.

Your friend was completely wrong about Everett’s 1957 paper as being a non-relativistic treatment of quantum mechanics. The title of his dissertation was “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics”. This is the first paragraph from section 1 Introduction, “The task of quantizing general relativity raises serious questions about the meaning of the present formulation and interpretation of quantum mechanics when applied to so fundamental a structure as the space-time geometry itself. This paper seeks to clarify the foundations of quantum mechanics. It presents a reformulation of quantum theory in a form believed suitable for application to general relativity.”

He directly states that the paper is absolutely a statement about general relativity.

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Claude responds:

They’re quoting something real, but it doesn’t establish what they think it does. That opening paragraph is stating Everett’s motivation — he wanted a formulation of QM general enough that it wouldn’t collapse in on itself when applied to a quantized spacetime geometry, since ordinary Copenhagen collapse language makes no sense if you’re trying to treat the metric itself as a quantum variable (there’s no external “observer” outside spacetime to do the collapsing). That’s a stated goal for future applicability, not a description of what’s actually done in the 1957 paper.

The actual content of the paper — the formalism you’d work with if you opened it up — is ordinary non-relativistic wave mechanics: a wave function evolving under the Schrödinger equation, and everything built from Hilbert space tensor-product structure for composite systems (that’s where the “relative state” idea comes from — subsystem states are only defined relative to the rest of the composite system’s state). There’s no metric quantization carried out, no Lorentz-covariant dynamics, no quantum field theory. That’s confirmed by how the paper’s own technical sections read — e.g. its treatment of an interaction Hamiltonian and measurement uses non-relativistic operator formalism throughout, and it’s consistent with how the secondary literature summarizes it as a formulation in which “a wave function that obeys a linear wave equation everywhere and at all times supplies a complete mathematical model for every isolated physical system” — that’s Schrödinger dynamics, not a relativistic wave equation. Weylmann arxiv

So: your TTI correspondent is right that Everett frames the paper as a step toward a formulation suitable for eventual application to general relativity. I’d have been more precise saying that upfront rather than just “non-relativistic treatment,” since it undersells his stated ambition. But the actual mathematical content — what you’d need to build on if you wanted to extend it — is non-relativistic QM. Motivation and formalism are two different claims, and the paragraph they quoted supports the first, not the second.

A few distinctions worth keeping separate:

  1. Everett didn’t unify GR and QM. Nothing in the 1957 paper touches the metric as a dynamical quantum variable, and nothing in it does quantum field theory in curved or dynamical spacetime. It’s non-relativistic wave mechanics, full stop, as a matter of content.
  2. He also didn’t build in anything that would block a future unification — and that’s the more interesting point, and probably closer to what he actually cared about. His target was Copenhagen’s reliance on an “observer” or “measuring apparatus” standing outside the quantum system to trigger collapse. That’s fine in ordinary lab physics — there’s a lab, there’s an apparatus, there’s a system, they’re distinct. But if you’re trying to quantize spacetime itself, there’s no “outside” left to put the classical measuring apparatus in; the geometry you’d need the apparatus to sit in is exactly the thing being quantized. So Copenhagen’s structure is arguably self-undermining in that context, not just inconvenient.
  3. Everett’s fix — treat the observer as just another physical system inside a universal wave function evolving unitarily, with “measurement” reduced to ordinary correlation-forming interaction — doesn’t presuppose a fixed classical background the way collapse does. So it’s a formulation that doesn’t have the specific obstruction Copenhagen has for that purpose, even though it wasn’t extended to relativistic dynamics itself.

So: no forged unification, but a formalism constructed with an eye toward not foreclosing one — which is a fair thing for him to flag as motivation, and a fair thing for your TTI correspondent to point to, even though it doesn’t make the 1957 paper itself relativistic. Modern attempts at quantizing gravity (various approaches to quantum gravity, decoherence-based accounts of branching in QFT, etc.) that build on Everettian ideas are doing real additional work Everett didn’t do — they’re not just reading it out of the 1957 paper.

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I was thinking about what you said still, Darby.

In theory, you’d be correct at first.

But in reality, I don’t think it makes sense by the end… I am going walk out what i think is the reverse of your points. “devil’s advocate type ish”

You mentioned Pamela and her disk?/computer being a weak link.

I agree, that’s a safer bet, but… finding John doesn’t guarantee getting the machine, and finding the machine doesn’t guarantee getting John.

To catch him, a traveler has to know the exact time and… precise location.

That is a huge ask for any time traveler.

Plus wouldn’t people notice an huge influx of weird people flooding out one specific area over time?

If thousands of future travelers have ‘forever’ to go to that one moment, or good lord how many other, it becomes incredibly congested.

They risk getting arrested for at least loitering, they risk messing up history, or… being interrogated by the government if the police call in back~up/higher~ups after said strange interrogation.

Imagine a past government getting their hands on future time units to back engineer them, all because a (t) traveler got sloppy trying to find Titor.

It gets worse if John was right about the multi-world theory.

Travelers would just be jumping into random parallel timelines where John did things differently.

Lets assume they kept logs, how do logs even help then, they have so more work to do if they thought it was a single worldline interpretation & found out… just how late?

You’d be chasing a trail that doesn’t even exist in that worldline, or… diverging ones in others.

If he was there, what if he would have went left instead of right at any moment & vice versa.

Going after Pam seems safest, but John surely would have warned her about these kinds of time~traveling scalpers & safe~word"s"/song"s" helps.

Note: I would also like to mention I do not personally think she is a weak link.
:wink: “especially since she has a time traveling friend” :wink:

At this point I do not think we will ever know the song for sure, even knowing that… only gets you so far.

It seems like a ton of trouble & unreasonable risk for minimal reward.

Why would any time traveler even waste time to rob a store when they’re already rich?
“in a manner of speaking” :heart: ~QS

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QS, you missed the point.

In these time travel sagas what do the time travelers do? They pick a spacetime coordinate (a time and a place) and they travel there. They could have chosen any of a infinite number of spacetime coordinates in the past. Titor picked four. He chose some date and place in 1975, then he chose a date and place in 1998 and then another date and place just prior to his original 1975 target. Then he chose home in 2036. Nothing stopped him from choosing the same coordinates an infinite number of times.

Nothing prevents the secret of time travel getting out. A secret is no longer a secret once two people know it. Eventually even the most highly guarded state/corporate secrets get released into the wild. The Manhattan Project secrets for constructing an atomic bomb were kept secret for about a month after Los Alamos was populated. German ex-pat physicist Klaus Fuchs who was placed in the program by the Brits started feeding the secrets to the USSR almost immediately after arriving at Los Alamos. Time travel is no different. Time travel theories, such as they are, are open public knowledge already.

In the Titor Saga the time travel program started in 2036. By that time, according to Titor, his C204 was already obsolescent. They had the C206 which had a much larger “range” than Titor’s gadget. So they start time traveling. At that point you have time machines in 2036, 1975, 1989 through 2001 and every place else the other time travelers went to. Eventually one of the time machines will fall into the hands of an earlier civilization. How? We’re already into the realm of sci-fi and the “how” is a recurring meme in time travel science fiction. Someone will decide that life “today” is no good. But they have visited life in the past which looks very good by comparison. So they pack up the Wagon Queen Family Truckster time gadget and off they go to the wild, wild west of the 19th Century. Now at least one time machine actually resides in the 19th Century. From there the implications get wild. The machine still time travels but this time from its 19th Century base. Life is good. Other TTs catch the urge and off they go to the Classical Period of 18th Century Europe, Medieval Europe and elsewhere. Eventually here you are in 2026 asking, who invented time travel and when? If it exists in the 18th Century and even before that what was there to invent? It’s already been done. The supposed OG Wagon Queen family arrived in the 19th Century only to find out it already existed in the 18th Century and before.

If you’re going to be a time traveler you have to think like you understand the implications.

Sure, Pamela could hide her HDD that has the conversations, PMs, emails, etc. but if the bad guys want the disc they will get it if, by no other method, just by brute force banging away with endless attempts until they succeed.

Does it make logical sense? No. But time travel to the past itself doesn’t make physical sense when based on ideas such as spinning up two micro-mass black holes by injecting electrons across the event horizon. We already know the physics there borders on impossible. How? Because we fully understand the Coulomb Force - how like and opposite electric charges attract and repel. Electrons are subject to Pauli Exclusion - they don’t merge together. If you force them extremely close together, and the black hole itself has zero volume by definition (the event horizon is not the black hole), then the force of repulsion between just two electrons is unbelievably huge. It’s on the order of 230 million kg * meters/s^2 (230 million Newtons). Do keep in mind that I’m not making up the numbers for the variables. Those came straight from Titor. He forgot to run the numbers before posting them to make sure they made physical sense, which they don’t. Not even close.

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Ouch, this alone IS a hell of a point.

:sweat_smile: You think you hate it now… just wait till you drive it!

Oh, piece of candy! I have not heard that term before. thank you Darby!

https://media1.tenor.com/m/ylN9cV-N2QAAAAAC/odoyle-rules-billy-madison-rules.gif(image larger than 512 KB)

~QS

Note: I think it is for the best, it is all considered… just plain foolishness then. :wink:

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I’ll answer everyone at once. None of the vehicles fall into the hands of thieves. Each vehicle has a digital code (not a combination of numbers) but rather a unique record of your activity history and biological parameters for crew identification. If the parameters don’t match, the system won’t work.

Second, no one (except the crew) ever knows the exact time and place of arrival.

Third. Timelines intersect only once every 12 years. If you want to steal a time machine, you’ll have to steal the crew—and do so without triggering the system’s stress detection.

Fourth. Not all machines can travel between timelines.

Fifth. I apologize for my long absence. We’re working on an important project.

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does the way things are set up now, allow you to speak to others in the past with the right equipment then?

“without going back yourself, just to tell them something important”

If so… can you reach out to them at anytime, say today… you could just call back to whenever you wish?

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Timelines invoke the concept of of a number-line… but, as established by Einsteinian relativity, every object has its own measure of, or rate, of time.

As we wrangle over and hopefully approach the ever more correct theory of time travel, we must also upgrade the Everett-Wheeler model of the multiverse and engage in the plausibility of space-time-sheets intersecting and allowing for the exchange of information.

In our re-engineered C204 model, TDU stands for Topological Displacement Unit.

It is the core system that replaces the classical 1990s “black hole time machine” concept with a modern framework based on topology, quantum electrodynamics (QED), and multiversal quantum mechanics. Instead of relying on raw, destructive gravitational singularities, the unit operates by manipulating GUP-stabilized topological solitons to alter the local vacuum structure and facilitate movement across parallel quantum branches (foliated spacetime sheets).

In the TDU framework, the “number line” is merely an idealized coordinate index used by the flight computer. In reality, the TDU navigates a higher-dimensional state space of foliated 3D hypersurfaces, using its Metric Anchor Pylons to lock onto the specific local proper-time rate of the destination environment while the primary engine executes the multiversal branch shift.

Topological Displacement Unit
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To prevent uncontrolled Coulomb repulsion and electrostatic instability from altering the local metric geometry, the Topological Displacement Unit (TDU) employs a dual neutralization and vacuum-screening protocol. The Relativistic Electron Tunneling Array (RETA) avoids firing isolated electron beams by operating as a charge-compensated particle system, alternating high-energy electron pulses with low-energy positron micro-bursts in megahertz cycles. The electron pulses interact with the soliton boundary to modulate the topological winding number Qₜ␯ᵣgₑₜ, while the immediate neutralizing counter-charges sweep the containment throat to reset the net charge Qₙₑₜ back toward zero before electrostatic forces can disrupt magnetic containment.

Complementing active neutralization, the ultra-dense gradient surrounding the Planck remnants triggers spontaneous QED vacuum polarization near the Schwinger critical limit E꜀ᵣᵢₜ = mₑ² c³ / (q ℏ) ≈ 1.3 × 10¹⁸ V/m. This critical field pulls virtual electron-positron pairs from the Dirac sea, forming a quantum screening envelope that naturally dampens excess charge accumulation. Any surplus charge that bleeds through this screening layer is captured by the 30-Tesla magnetic field lines of the Superconducting Soliton Ring Assemblies (SSRAs) and channeled into capacitive dump grids in the cooling array, ensuring that the TDU purely modulates the topological phase Qₜ␯ᵣgₑₜ without converting the seeds into unstable Reissner–Nordström metrics.

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It’s not possible for you to make that absolute statement. Remember, the secret would have to be kept forever. You have no clue, even if you had a timer gadget, about what happens from -infinity to +infinity. It’s a machine. It’s software. It can and would be hacked or simply reverse engineered. If that wasn’t the case then why would someone decide to include a digital code for security?

During WWII the German 5 wheel Enigma machine, as modified from the civilian model, had 107,458,687,327,250,619,360,000 possible combinations to encode the key. Yet, without the aid of any digital computers, just human brain power, the British broke the Enigma code in 1941 after the Poles had broken the code of an earlier 3-wheel version of the machine in 1933. The Poles broke the code in a couple of years. After the Brits took it up it also took them only two years to break the 5-wheel code.

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That statement is what is termed a truism. Who else could possibly know the exact time a place of the arrival considering that, in the case of the Titor Saga, the time travel gadget is coming from another universe?

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