The altering of time, Is it possible for someone to do so?

I only want to know if someone has already discused this topic yet

If I get enough infermation on this topic, I will give you my theory. I just don't want to make an ass -ideat out of myself

Depends entirely on the nature of the universe.
Many Science Fiction writers depend on the 'many worlds' view that states that a new universe branches off at any decision point, in this type of universe it would be possible to 'change the past'.

However, many other writers and I might guess the majority of scientists believe in a 'cosmic time policeman' (an example of pathetic fallacy if I ever saw one.)
In this view altering the past is prevented by some mystic unknown, a rule set up at the building of the universe.
For some reason this belief is not considered a mystical or unscientific belief and I am probably impugning quite a lot of scientific dogma when I call it a fruit-loop theory.

For my self, I feel that time travel is very probably impossible for other reasons.
I believe we live and exist in the eternal present and that there is no past or future times to travel to.

To be honest, you must consider mine a fruit-loop theory too as the only ones sharing this belief are some american indian tribe.

There is of course, always the possibility that there are enough universes existent that a duplicate of all possible worlds and or times could be gotten to. That gets into that very special realm of 'we have no clue'.

Every day I change my past and future as I live the present. I am a traveler in the time called 'now'.

Pretty philosophical, eh?

But on the larger scale, you should be able to move forward, but moving backward would require breaking out of the natural progression of time (note that I am not putting a measurement on it). To do so would require science that is beyond the laws of the physical universe. If you could, since we have a part to play in the history, we may not be able to change our own past, but you may be able to the past in a different thread of history (aka our universe may not be the only one). Of course, if there were a god, he might object to you tampering with the past, but that is an entirely different subject.

Personally, I'd love to have a time traveling Dalorian. It is much better than the system in The Terminator movies.

Yeah that dalorian rocked. Mind you I have no idea what it had to travel at what 88mph?

Anyways, my view is kinda simple.

You can travel forward, not that you are really traveling forward but you kinda cheating, by slowing the aging of your self. You know how this is done...

As for getting back, I don't think so. I feel that everything is in the here and now. Everything advances with time at the rate it should.

I don't buy parallel universes. There is no logic in it. Even if there were...pffff.... we could not travel to them anyways.

I merly want to know if you think it is possible to alter the future. If you can travel through time, like in back to the future. Oh, by the way, it was 88mph.

Well, let's see. The many-worlds interpretation would say that you could do it, in a way. But if you travelled back in time and changed something, the rest of us wouldn't feel it, because you'd have spun off a separate branch universe. From then on, you could travel forward only on that branch. To get things back to the way you left them, you'd have to go back again, and stop yourself, hopefully creating a new branch identical to the one you left.

I don't particularly like the "many-worlds inteperpretation" (MWI), though it is quite interesting. Especially the immortality theory, which I won't go into here unless someone asks about it. (Wikipedia has a great deal of info on MWI.)

So, without it, you could still change the past. But you wouldn't change the present by way of doing so. Because the present as it is actually depends on you eventually going back to do something. It's kind of a a big loop. The grandfather paradox appears, according to some people. But it's not an issue in my view: You can't go back and kill your grandfather before your father was born. You just flat out can't do it. Whatever you do when you go back in time will be exactly what is required to cause things to unfold exactly in the way that brings about the "present" that you left from. So regardless of your intention and dedication, you are destined to fail to kill your grandfather. If you were to succeed, you could not have been born at all, so it's not possible to do so. The time-line enforces its own consistency.

I don't particularly like that one either though, because it seems to mess with free will a little bit.

So I prefer just to believe that time travel into the past is very likely impossible. Obviously time travel into the future is possible, according to relativity. You just have to move real fast. But don't plan on coming back.

Nice. See thats the problem I have, especially the grandfather scenario you mention.

If you go back in time and kill your grandfather, so your dad is not born. So what. You are a living being. Your existance no longer depends on your grandfather or father, that is just HISTORY. The fact that your travelling through time made that history actually some time in the future, does not change the fact that it is still history. Infact if you really thing about this abstractly, if you jump back 50 years... according to YOU, there will habe been TWO periods in time that spanned from 1955 to 2005. To everyone else the time line would have been constant.

The parallel worlds idea is kinda kewl. You travel back 1000 years. Change something, travel farward 1000 years, hey stuff is different - cos you are on the altered timeline. Question is, where is the previous timeline? Can you really erase from existance an entire timeline by traveling back? If not, how can you make more than one time-line existing in the same universe? If you are talking multiple universes, then you would have to create a new universe would you not? Else you would have to jump into another universe which you could not do.

So I agree with you. You can travel forward, but back is a no no for me.

Just an interesting thought, I wonder if it would be possible to rewind the universe. It would not actually be like taking current matter and moving it back as in sci-fi time travel, but rather running time in reverse. Of course if someone did it, the rest of us would never know, because the chronological order remains the same. It would be just like rewinding a movie, and likewise, rewinding it does not change the story.

Yeah, this is the thing that gets me. I cannot but help conceive time as just a measurement between things that happen when they happened as fast as it is possible to.

A simply way I guess I could describe my feeling is to consider a simple clock. Seconds is the fastest measurement, so with a watch you can only record time in seconds and therefore minutes and therefore hours.

But, things happen faster than a second, so a watch is probably not a good thing to record the movement of light. Light would have performed a number of movements in one second.

Now if you have a clock that pulses as the same speed as the fastest possible speed, whether that be light, or whatever, then you kinda have the basis of time. Everything pulses (for the use of a better expression) a different rates, yet they can all be measured by time... This is a really difficult gut feeling to describe.

In either case, I don't think there really IS time. I think it's more the speed that things pulse (ughh.... help me with expressions here plz).

I feel that things at higher speeds pulse (ugh) faster of slower due to forces/etc, thus creating the idea that time speeds up or slows down, but in reality things HAPPEN faster or slower...

I really cannot descibe this. Perhaps someone can pull my idea out clearly from this?

I've been relating this exact problem in the other forum Wasted Time. Currently all of our measurements are based off a constant ratio of time to distance, the speed of light. But distance is measured by time, and time by distance, so if one is constant, measuring something is easy. But if one is not, neither are, and thus our units of measure break down entirely, leaving only the constant ratio between them. c = m/s

Unfortunately what we are left with, is no units of measurement that have any real meaning. If you want to measure something, you must have something constant to measure by.

Ah.... finally a good description. Alright.

A lot of questions:

In that experiment with the two atomic clocks. One on top of the tall building, one on the ground.

Why the time difference?

According to howthingswork, the atomic clock measures the oscillation of the nucleus of an atom and the surrounding electrons. The oscillation frequencies within the atom are determined by the mass of the nucleus and the gravity and electrostatic "spring" between the positive charge on the nucleus and the electron cloud surrounding it.

So... gravity will affect the oscillation. So is it really that time slowed/increased, rf simply that the clock at a higher altitude is less affected by gravity? Is it anything to do with speed ... would not also the speed that the device is moving also affect this oscillation?

Again, it goes deeper than this in my mind. They are no doubt syncing the time based on one full oscillation, back then forth. Voilla there is one unit of time... but... can the oscilation of the atom change in speed?

Well, I think that the idea is that for a given set of environmental parameters, such as gravitational field, electromagentic field, velocity/intertia, etc. relative to the observer, there is a constant period of oscillation. I would assume (where's the blink tag??? ) that this has been confirmed experimentally at some point. But I don't know of any specific experiments off the top of my head. Anyone willing to dig around for a reference?

Yes, very nice, clear and concise, MW. Almost "Zen". You're on a roll today.

You mean that they calculate the oscillation they expect to occur given the knowledge of gravitational field, em field, velocity etc?

You mention being relative to the observer..

Can you help me consider this scenario?

Imagine that I am floating in space. There are two atoms. I am able to observe both of them. One atom is stuck to my eye ball (no movement at all). The other is 1 light second away.

I always face that atom in the distance.

It is traveling in a circle which has a radius of 1 light second around me, at the speed of light. As it turns, I always turn to face it and the pivitol point at which I turn, is directly centered on the atom stuck to my eye ball.

When I observe the oscillation of both these atoms what will I see?

Does the observer really have anything at all to do with the oscillation that is occuring in a atom, caused by external things, and if so, how?

This is a very important statement. To truly observe the phenomena, either you are part of it, or totally separate (remember that all objects within a "construct" of space time will influence it).

This is your first mistake, you are part of the problem. You exist in the same space time construct as what you are observing, thus the construct's parameters (it's current values of distance and time) will make a direct effect on your observation.

Now, you should be able to prove that space-time is stretch from within the construct, because you can do so relative to yourself. However, without breaking out of it entirely, you have no way to determine a constant measurement. All you can do is measure it relative to, (again) yourself.

For oscillations, how far is an oscillation? For simplicity take a one meter wave (VHF), and that the universe is expanding at double each minute (a bit absurd, but simple). How far is one meter? To you the observer, the meter stays constant, and you calculation says 1 oscillation = 1 meter. However if you were god, you would see that when the calculation began, 1 meter = 1 oscillation, but by the end, 1 oscillation =2 meters. So now I ask again, how long is one oscillation?

Hey anyway, I'll talk to you guys again on Monday. I'm out of touch for the weekend.

It gets tricky doesn’t it.