Time Machines: a small yet critical detail
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- cherub
One small detail has been overlooked about time travel, and about how time machines work. How could we have missed something so obvious.
The way we think it works: You step into the time machine, pull the lever and *poof* you transport back to the age of dinosaurs. You whip out your mobile and take pics so you have proof of this amazing world you just visited.
Problem is, if you travel back farther than the day of your birth, there is no "you" yet, "you" haven't been conceived.
We've been thinking that we would be allowed to take our present day brains, memories, and everything else from the here and now, and somehow bring it to another time period. As if we can carve stuff out of the 4th dimension with an exacto knife.
How time travel actually works: You set the machine to go backwards 20 years, you pull the lever, and *poof* you go back to being a teenager *WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE TIME TRAVEL* All the progress you made over the last 20 years would be wiped out. Better name for time machine would be a "Progress Eraser."
If it worked at all, it would be dangerous in the extreme.
- scarabin2
Thanks for clearing that up
- grafician0
lol nothing in the Math says time is linear...
- so you don't actually go "back" in time, just a different timeline of "now" in a waygrafician
- also there is no concept of "you" you're just matter, you're moving matter if you refer to your actual bodygrafician
- "time" as we refer to it usually is tied to the 2nd law of thermodynamicsgrafician
- I don't understand the math. Help me out. If time isn't linear, what is it? Doesn't that break cause and effect? I drop the ball, ball falls to the ground.cherub
- well the physics work the same if the universe goes forward or backwardgrafician
- @cherub what are u describing is the 2nd law, entropy increasedgrafician
- we might never solve time travel as we are part of the space-time, thus we are in the systemgrafician
- Entropy is confusing. One the one hand they're talking about an object's energy being "spent", and the other is talking about all the possible configurations ofcherub
- a system.cherub
- then let me give you a real mind bender: you have undo in Procreate with you draw, but not irl with pen in paper - same Universe, different rules?grafician
- also irl you can play ping pong and the ball comes back, but you can't put back a bulletgrafician
- in a gun after it fired...grafician
- Same with us, you grow old, but Benjamin Button grows younger defeating entropy? lolgrafician
- https://www.imdb.com…grafician
- It seems like the undo button should exist IRL too, now that you put it like that.cherub
- If undo button did exist we would fight about whether to undo only locally, or system wide(undo the whole universe by 5 minutes). Think of the most unpleasantcherub
- thing you've ever experienced. Would you want to re-live that again?cherub
- cherub1
Lol utopian. I've been watching too much Issac Arthur lately.
- Interesting concepts on Isaac Arthur's channel, I'm also subscribed.utopian
- This was interesting
https://www.youtube.…utopian - Ohhhh yeah I saw that one. Silicon based life seems to be the ticket.cherub
- grafician1
I'm actually looking forward to see TENET, to see how Nolan explains - if - time travel, causality, etc.
