Friday, November 12, 2010

How to travel in time: Expansion and contraction of possibilities space

As you may know, November 12 is a very important date. It will forever be the iconic date people will think of when they think of time travel. In all seriousness, it should be November 5th, but V for Vendetta went back in time and stole that date before Back to the Future could really claim it. November 5th was the day Marty went back in time and November 12th was the day he came "back to the future." Not only is this one of the best movies of all time, it is also one of the greatest discussions on Time Travel Philosophy.Today's blog post is dedicated to this topic.

Traveling in time is of course impossible. At least any useful time travel. Special relativity says that if you go really fast then return to your planet you will have aged much faster than your Earthling peers. This is about as interesting as it gets. This is just a nuisance and, to my knowledge, is not very useful. Using special relativity you can do tricks with time so that it moves at a different rate than other times, but there is no way to actually go back in time according to modern science (that I'm aware of).

While this is sad, you may have read my post explaining the Banksian Sphere, which challenges humanity to adopt new ways of thinking. This suggests that we may be able to discover time travel if we simply go at it from a completely different direction than simple scientists would. This means that time travel may still be possible using alternate dimensions or other methods, but we just haven't discovered it yet. That being said, we can continue our one sided philosophical discussion.

I think that deja vus are really cool. I love it when I get one because for a minute you feel like you have the superpower of predicting the future. It feels like sometime a long time ago you predicted that this situation would happen. I would claim (using my Banksian Sphere (B.S.) methodology) that you never predicted the future and that it is also not just a mind trick. But rather, it is the extreme deformation of possibilities of reality, allowing one part of the universe to come near to the universe at some time in the past. If you have an infinite dimensional "possibilities space" with infinite possibilities of outcomes for the universe traveling along a single time axis, then it would be possible for a certain point in the "possibilities space" to line up with the same point at a time in the past. This would be possible if the timeline loops back so it's close to where it was before or if the possibilities space expands an contracts throughout time.

I would tend to believe the expansion and contraction theory. If the possibilities space expands and contracts, then it means that it would take more or less effort to go from one point to another. For instance, in this part of the universe (Denver, CO, USA, Earth, Milky Way...mmm milky way) it is very easy for me to fill up my water bottle and drink clean water. A few thousand years ago, it was much more difficult to go from point one (sitting in my chair) to point two (sitting in my chair drinking clean water). These two points in possibilities space have come closer to each other over time. Contrarily, it was much easier to find a record player at the store 40 years ago than it is today. The two points of not having a record player and having a record player have gotten farther apart.

You can see that the naturalness of going from one point to another in possibilities space is not necessarily constant (and not necessarily varying either). I don't currently have any evidence that time loops back on itself, but I'd be interested in hearing theories on that. So if you believe my scientifically flawed argument for the expansion and contraction of possibilities space, then you can easily deduce the possibility of time travel. If a possibility line expands so much that it actually spreads back to the same possibility at a different time, then it may be possible to travel in time.

I hope this inspires all you peeps to figure out how to travel in time.










I wouldn't believe me if I were you. I'm starting to feel ashamed of my weird ideas that should be a disgrace to science.

1 comment:

  1. That of which you speak is where a great number of science fiction writers (real science fiction, not fantasy with a science fiction label) have gone before. Isaac Asimov being the greatest example. He had enough scientific knowledge to know that there was some remote possibility of a thing happening, but had no idea, like the rest of us, how it really could. So he wrote about it, made it up, and...ta-daa...some of the things he wrote about in the 50's and 60's are actually quite close to reality today. Concerning your "possibilities space" and the place where infinite possibilities of outcomes exists, you should read "The End of Eternity" by Asimov. He writes of that possibility. Also "Dune" has the concept in it. Keep thinking, son. Though I don't think we'll ever travel in time, some people thought we would never go to the moon (of course, some people still think it was only a conspiracy and that we never have gone to the moon...)

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