It is impossible to travel into the past...

[Chaos_Luigi]

ok, I know this may be stupid, but it's actually really simple and kinda interesting (or silly) as an idea .
When you go to the other side of the world, you travel 1 day forward (future) when you come back you travel 1 day back (past) so if you move from here to *let's say china* you lose 1 day and go to the future, and viceversa. LOL That may sound stupid, but it does happen also it not applies the normal "travel in time" rules but it's another way to see it.

[Deacon]

It has absolutely nothing to do with the passage of time, only the devices we use to measure it and their settings, designed to normalize daylight and night time. You only "gain a day" because you're over the international date line.

[Blaze]

In this case, Deacon is right, but of course I'm sure you knew that too. Now, depending on the speed of the flight, you may gain infinitely small nth's of a second, but that's true no matter which way you're traveling.

[Il Palazzo Sama]

well, I don't think I'll continue to follow this thread any longer....

[Martin Blank]

All of you -- even those who should know better -- are really slipping on some important points.

As velocity approaches c, mass increases towards infinity. The faster you go, the more massive you become, and the more energy you need to continue accelerating, because of special relativity. At the speed of light, one's mass becomes infinite, and so the energy required to reach this point becomes infinite.

However, presuming you COULD travel faster than light (impossible, but for the sake of argument), then you would at least appear to be traveling back in time. In this thought experiment, imagine that in your spaceship you have a screen that can pick up photons along your path as you reach them. When traveling below c, the screen picks up the photons coming from behind you -- you see the present, for want of a better term. (I know it's technically the past, but close enough.) When you pass c, you then begin to pick up photons that have passed you, and you begin seeing things that happened before -- including the same things that you saw when in sub-light speeds, though these are now seen for the second time.

Now, have you gone back in time? I'm not quite sure. Frankly, so many laws are broken at this point that I don't know that anyone can figure it out. I do know that Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking did not believe it to be possible, at least as of a few years ago when I attended a lecture given by Dr. Hawking at CalTech (it filled two auditoria and there were still hundreds of people standing outside in sprinkling rain to watch on two large televisions erected for them).

And a clarification on flat/open/closed universes. An open universe continues expanding and never stops. A closed universe eventually stops expanding and begins collapsing on itself. A flat universe is a construct that is effectively an open universe, but expands for an infinite amount of time, at which point it stops expanding but does not collapse.

There are competing ideas on whether the universe is open or closed. I've read some interesting things that suggest that there is an identical you, the person viewing this page, reading exactly this post, at exactly this time, having led exactly the same life as you have, and with exactly the same future as you, some 10^10^38m from here (I think that was the distance). Others have postulated that our universe exists on a "brane" (similar in concept to a membrane) among other branes, and that the universe is the result of a collision between two branes (which is what caused the initial disturbance that allowed matter to clump up). There are also the classic bubble theories, as well as those that postulate that we do not, in sum, exist, as the sum of all forces in the universe is zero (that one I've always had trouble with, but some of those guys also forgot more math than ten math majors will probably ever know).

[Deacon]

Observing the past is not the same as going back in time, which implies that you're actually IN the past, capable of interacting with the world at the time.

[Schmuck]

Assuming that it was possible to do what blaze want to do with time, let's consider what blaz would observe, and what everyone else would observe.

blaze is traveling through time at 0.5s/s. everyone else is traveling through time at 1s/s.

Blaze would never experience "the past", because at all times he is observing things for the first time. it would merely appear as though everything else was really slow.

anyone else in the universe who cared to look would see Blaze moving faster than normal, and ageing very quickly.

[Blaze]

I don't think any of us ever claimed it was possible, MB. We all understand relativity.

blaze is traveling through time at 0.5s/s. everyone else is traveling through time at 1s/s.

Blaze would never experience "the past", because at all times he is observing things for the first time. it would merely appear as though everything else was really slow.

anyone else in the universe who cared to look would see Blaze moving faster than normal, and ageing very quickly.

You haven't read enough of the thread. I'm proposing accellerating ALL of time. Past, Present, and future. This means that as there becomes more area for time to fill up, past seconds would have to move in.

[Schmuck]

>>I'm proposing accellerating ALL of time. Past, Present, and future.<<

that's meaningless. time is a dimension. you could change the rate at which time passes, but not "all of time".

imagine trying to accellerate any other dimension. can you accellerate height? depth? width? no, but you can accellerate along one of those.

[Blaze]

that's meaningless. time is a dimension. you could change the rate at which time passes, but not "all of time".

imagine trying to accellerate any other dimension. can you accellerate height? depth? width? no, but you can accellerate along one of those.

Of course not. The pure energy consumptions would be beyond comprehension, not to mention the technology doesn't exist. Point is, could it be done, it would indeed take you "into the past" to accelerate all of time.

I already said that. Like I said, you didn't read.

[Grumlen]

MB, about your faster than light theory, the reason why we've decided that such speeds are impossible is because according to current theory you would end up travelling through time at an imaginary speed. Literally.

[quote]But I would be occupying seconds through which I had already traveled.[/i]

You would be occupying seconds that the rest of the universe had already traveled, but which you have not yet traveled through. The reason why my train analogy is a perfectly acceptable one is because it is, simply, the translation of your time stunt into a different dimension. No matter what you do, even if the tracks themselves start moving faster than your train, you STILL won't see the back of your own train. Sure you may end up in a time period that everyone else had already passed, but because of the inherent nature of time you would still be able to interact with other people as though both you and they were in your present.

Accelerating all of time is fine and dandy, but unless you propose throwing the entireity of physics out the window and creating a universe in which your own rules apply and are absolutely correct, then what you are proposing is STILL impossible. And if that is the case, then this entire arguement is jutterly pointless as you can make up whatever rules you want to counter our arguements which are based in rules that are already set.

You wanna slow down time for yourself only and nothing else? Fine. Enjoy being The Flash, cuz thats all you're doing. Relative to us, you would move faster, talk faster, and age faster. You wouldn't suddenly disappear or cause us to remember having seen 2 or you (the only 2 outcomes possible if you truly traveled into the past depending on whether we observe before or after you do this). There are only two ways to actually travel into the past: have a NEGATIVE "speed" in time, or cause time to instantly "shift." Both are blatantly physcially impossible, because doing either defies not only the theory of relativity, but many of the basic laws of physics as well.

Addendum: If, by the way, you are merely speking of your PERCEPTION of time, then it may be possible. However it would be like watching a recording as you see everything you ever did done backwards and you gradually grow younger, eventually re-enter the womb of your mother, and slowly degenerate into nothing. You wouldn't actually be travelling into the past, just perceiving it backwards. Big difference, like the difference between watching a war movie and fighting in one.

[Deacon]

[quote="Blaze";p="440591"]Point is, could it be done, it would indeed take you "into the past" to accelerate all of time.[/quote]
I was trying to think of an appropriate analogy for how patently silly this line of thought is, but then I realized that you'd pretty much taken the best example I could've used.

[Spongiform]

Between MB's and Grumlen's arguments, I'm pretty sure that Blaze has lost by now.

[Blaze]

[quote="Spongiform";p="440666"]Between MB's and Grumlen's arguments, I'm pretty sure that Blaze has lost by now.[/quote]

Incorrect. I in no way disagreed with anything MB said. Grumlen is directly challenging all points of my idea, which is different. And Deacon still has yet to give ANY reason whatsoever why he contests my idea. So for now, I ignore him.

[Martin Blank]

You're hurting my head, Blaze.

Maybe we should go back to the old evolution debate.