Time Travel

[Foxtrot]

What is an atomic clock? It doesn't tell time the same as a normal clock does it? Because a normal clock would tell the same time in space and on the surface of Earth, right?

 

[Pauly]

yea ive been wondering of what an atomic clock is

 

[Direwolf]

An atomic clock measures time via the half-life of certain elements. Its the most accurate thing we've ever come up with.

 

[Foxtrot]

Alright, thanks for the info Direwolf. I searched on google and couldn't find anything.

 

[Fender357]

What Direwolf said.

Atomic clocks can messure time down to ( i cant remember exactly what), but around millionths of a second (possibly billionths too)

And by using them you can see the extremely small amounts of change in time from the 2 tests i talked about.



[edit] In the tests I talked about the clocks weren't off by seconds, they were off my extremely small fractions of a second (into the millionths of a second)
[/edit]

 

[GhostValkyrie]

/me steps in and disrupts the conversation by mentioning Walking Clock.
/me steps back out.

 

[Maskirovka]

i don't really get the plane experiment...how does that prove anything? if the clocks in the planes are measured relative to each other, then why bother having 2 planes and not just having a clock on the ground?

and if the clocks are measured relative to their ground speed, then why have 2 planes when you're measuring relative to the ground anyway?

 

[Frank]

/me says something intelligent...

 

[Direwolf]

I would imagine that having two planes magnifies the difference just enough to be able to detect it.

 

[Dedalus]

ok guys.....im skeptical about john titor....but.. what he had to say...is about worldlines..... this could make time travel possible....basically there are infinite amount of timelines or worldines....someone else as i speak is expeirencing your life...right now....your worst day...your happiest moment anything.... So, anytime we time travel, according to john, we go to a different worldline that is at the moment at where we want to travel to. TIME TRAVEL IS IMPOSSIBLE! but you can go to different worldlines at different times....and u could change their worldline..or whatever but we cant change our own. I believe its possible... this and next year....there should be signs of a CIVIL war in the united states breaking out. Starting slowly as arguments...eventually becomming a horrible war(According to john titor) WE will see if its true, very shortly.
OH yea...we could ask when hl2 gets released!!!!!!! i wish he was still here
Want to read up on the supposed time traveler, John titor? link is here: http://www.johntitor.com

erm, you just raped my entire post on the previous page

2) Even though we talk about space and time like they are 2 different things, they aren't. You must have one to have the other and cant seperate them. When somthing happens to one, it affects the other.

you lot always say that, but you never actually put it into practice. time is not a forwards and backwards kind of thing. stop thinking like that! when you time travel you're not winding back the hands on your clock. that's for fairytale land. in the world of science you need to disregard a clock.

that atomic clock experiment was a good one, although i thought they kept one clock on the ground and the other flew to tokyo.

 

[PvtRyan]

We have proven that time is not constant, but the speed of light is. Like the plane example before, we have seen it in satellites as well.

Facts:
The faster you go, the slower time "appears" to move around you.
The faster you go, the thinner you "appear" to get.
The faster you go, the slower you age.

This will hurt your brain:
It is impossible for something to accelerate to light speed; however once you are going faster than the speed of light, it is impossible to decelerate your speed to a point slower than light speed.

It's all just relative. Time is relative to the observer, it's not really time traveling since time passes normally to the person that moves, but to the observer, time appears to go faster. Theoretically, a person who rocks in a rocking chair, will get "older" than someone in a regular chair.
At the speed of light itself (which only massless particles can reach) time stops. This brings an interesting problem, from the point of view of a photon it arrives at exactly the same time it leaves. If a person were to travel at lightspeed, he would arrive at his destination the same time he leaves. And since there is no time to steer, he would literally be everwhere and nowhere in the universe at the same time. But to the observer, light still has a speed (and doesn't travel instantaneously) and isn't everywhere and nowhere.

Your last example isn't correct as far as I know. If you travel faster than light (like the theoretically possible tachyons) it would require adding energy to slow you down, but it's possible. It's also possible to slow photons down themselves, don't know how that works though, but scientists manages to "capture" and hole a few photons for a short time at the same place.

 

[A True Canadian]

Bah... I guess my examples weren't too accurate. Then again these are basically theories and assumptions.

I didn't mention the 2 observers (which I probably should have), and I forgot completely about photons. That's what happens when you're trying to remember physics classes from a year ago.

 

[Korgoth]

Well in my eyes for time travel to work you would have to believe in parralel time lines/deminsions that exist, OR, you would have to believe that you don't control your own fate: IE

Say you time traveled forward 1 week to meet yourself at a specific location (your living room or something) and you saw yourself said hello and went back to your original time. Now as you get back you realize that in one week at that exact time you will be in your living room saying hi to your self, you decide not to do that so your fly to another country for two months. Now since no matter how you look at it you have already said hello to yourself at that time, you must be on a different timeline/deminsion since you didn't do it this time. Or you could say you don't control your fate/destiny because no matter what you say or do you have already said hello to yourself.. otherwise when you time traveled you wouldn't have seen yourself and said hi.

 

[qckbeam]

well we are all time travelers seeing as we all travel forwards through time at a constant rate

The way I look at it though, there really is no such thing as time, there is no universal clock. Time is something we invented to measure the rate of change in any given objects state(s). Time is a tool we use to measure change, it doesn't actually exist, and it isn't something we can control. I think the best we may be able to pull off would be to stop the effects of time, the effects of change, by stopping all motion in an object, thereby keeping the object in a sort of 'frozen' state. I think the trick there is to figure out how to slow down motion without destroying the object in the process, so it can be kept in a state of perpetual youth, or whatever period it had been undergoing when the motion was halted.

I don't know if I'm right or wrong, it's just what I think as of right now.