Non-Simultaneity Limits

[Junoo]

The genereal consensus is that travelling in time is unlikely. The time dilation experienced by an interstellar traveller is time compression not travel. Straight line acceleration is probably the least informative area of physics to analyse the limitations of time travel. It does provide analysis of the limits and dynamics of mass stability, defining a particles resistance to inertia.

 

A friend described the premise of the game assassins creed as involving travelling in time by displacing one's consciousness to a genetic relative in another time period. This removes the restrictions placed on time displacement by baryonic matter and proposes a scenario that analyses the limitations of the energy expression of fermions and leptons in time displacement applications.

 

The complexity of the DNA access of the game can be simplified by proposing a device that replicates human senses which is interfaced with the operator through an entanglement relay. Assume this device is provided an indefinite schedule of operation and methods of gauging it's capacities to bridge communication outside a definable present moment.

 

The question then would be to which degree entanglement is maintained when removed from line of sight, how wide is the present moment and how blocklike the non-mass characteristics of energy make time. To put this into some context there was recently the recording of the lensing of a supernova event into 4 captured images. It is predicted that this was preceded by another set of lensed images at an earlier date and will be recorded again in a third refractory capture.

 

The principal being tested would be that of non-simultaneity. Can the past be observed in greater detail and the future be referred to in a controlled environment?

 

[CraigD]

Welcome to hypography, Junoo! :) Please feel free to start a topic in the introductions forum to tell us something about yourself.

 

A friend described the premise of the game assassins creed as involving travelling in time by displacing one's consciousness to a genetic relative in another time period.

The idea of sharing the experiences of your biological ancestors or descendants is the central plot device of the classic 1912 novel The Night Land (original novel in the public domain at project Gutenberg). After decades of obscurity, with the internet, this story (one of my favorites since I read it in my teens) spawned a rich pro and fan following – this website seems is the best entryway I’ve found.

 

In Hodgeson and his fans’ fiction, people can share the experiences of either their ancestors or their descendants.

 

Most of the literature people I’ve read or talked with conclude that Hodgeson and similar authors got the idea from putting a western cultural spin on the Hindu idea of reincarnation, in vogue in European and American intellectual society in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Wherever it came from, the idea’s been popping in SF – which now includes video game plots - for more than a century.

 

Having not played the game since 2007, All I know about its “ancestoral memory” plot device is from wikis like this one. From them, I gather that it’s based on a kind of fictional brain-programming computer technology, and works only one way – quoting the wiki, to “ transferring thoughts, skills and experiences from the ancestor to the descendant.”

 

Like essentially all supernaturalism, there’s arguably not a bit of scientific validation of either Hodgeson’s , though. Hard science has its own rich, if less poetically written an beautifully illustrated than the fictional king, time travel lore, much of it coming from work Kip Thorn did in ca 1990, inspired by questions Carl Sagan asked him while he was writing his novel Contact, and trying to keep its science as sound as possible, and involving some famous arguments and bets with Steven Hawking.

 

This removes the restrictions placed on time displacement by baryonic matter and proposes a scenario that analyses the limitations of the energy expression of fermions and leptons in time displacement applications.

I don’t follow your meaning, Junoo.

 

Your particle physics term use looks shaky to me: baryons are a family of composite fermions, leptons a family of elementary ones. Every particle in the Standard Model of particle physics that isn’t a fermion is a boson. The Standard Model is beautifully simple, as pictured in this Wikimedia diagram

 

The question then would be to which degree entanglement is maintained when removed from line of sight ...

Quantum entanglement – which is a experimentally supported, rock-solid feature of quantum mechanics – works over any distance and through any barrier, but can’t be used for communication. Nonetheless, devices that do so – a generic term for these fictional devices is ansible – are a staple of sloppily soft SF. In real science, such communication is a non-starter.

 

, how wide is the present moment and how blocklike the non-mass characteristics of energy make time. To put this into some context there was recently the recording of the lensing of a supernova event into 4 captured images. It is predicted that this was preceded by another set of lensed images at an earlier date and will be recorded again in a third refractory capture.

I’m familiar with gravitational lensing (I’m old enough, and was semi-pro astronomer enough, to remember and appreciate when the first example of it was observed in 1979), but haven’t heard of this. Do you have any links to stuff about it :QuestionM

 

The principal being tested would be that of non-simultaneity. Can the past be observed in greater detail and the future be referred to in a controlled environment?

Simultaneity is usually a term used in Special Relativity, but on the question of observing the past, in principle all you need to do it is a sufficiently large, distant, and properly shaped mirror. Check out the 2006 thread “Time travel” via a really big reflecting telescope for details.

[Junoo]

Welcome to hypography, Junoo! :) Please feel free to start a topic in the introductions forum to tell us something about yourself.

 

The idea of sharing the experiences of your biological ancestors or descendants is the central plot device of the classic 1912 novel The Night Land (original novel in the public domain at project Gutenberg). After decades of obscurity, with the internet, this story (one of my favorites since I read it in my teens) spawned a rich pro and fan following – this website seems is the best entryway I’ve found.

 

In Hodgeson and his fans’ fiction, people can share the experiences of either their ancestors or their descendants.

 

Most of the literature people I’ve read or talked with conclude that Hodgeson and similar authors got the idea from putting a western cultural spin on the Hindu idea of reincarnation, in vogue in European and American intellectual society in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Wherever it came from, the idea’s been popping in SF – which now includes video game plots - for more than a century.

 

Having not played the game since 2007, All I know about its “ancestoral memory” plot device is from wikis like this one. From them, I gather that it’s based on a kind of fictional brain-programming computer technology, and works only one way – quoting the wiki, to “ transferring thoughts, skills and experiences from the ancestor to the descendant.”

 

Like essentially all supernaturalism, there’s arguably not a bit of scientific validation of either Hodgeson’s , though. Hard science has its own rich, if less poetically written an beautifully illustrated than the fictional king, time travel lore, much of it coming from work Kip Thorn did in ca 1990, inspired by questions Carl Sagan asked him while he was writing his novel Contact, and trying to keep its science as sound as possible, and involving some famous arguments and bets with Steven Hawking.

 

I don’t follow your meaning, Junoo.

 

Your particle physics term use looks shaky to me: baryons are a family of composite fermions, leptons a family of elementary ones. Every particle in the Standard Model of particle physics that isn’t a fermion is a boson. The Standard Model is beautifully simple, as pictured in this Wikimedia diagram

 

Quantum entanglement – which is a experimentally supported, rock-solid feature of quantum mechanics – works over any distance and through any barrier, but can’t be used for communication. Nonetheless, devices that do so – a generic term for these fictional devices is ansible – are a staple of sloppily soft SF. In real science, such communication is a non-starter.

 

I’m familiar with gravitational lensing (I’m old enough, and was semi-pro astronomer enough, to remember and appreciate when the first example of it was observed in 1979), but haven’t heard of this. Do you have any links to stuff about it :QuestionM

 

Simultaneity is usually a term used in Special Relativity, but on the question of observing the past, in principle all you need to do it is a sufficiently large, distant, and properly shaped mirror. Check out the 2006 thread “Time travel” via a really big reflecting telescope for details.

 

I probably should have referenced guage bosons before leptons as they are field mediators which leptons are involved with. This relationship provides the dynamics that produce baryonic matter that provide inertial qualities to energy expression. I did not want to overcomplicate the threads I was drawing together so kept that explanation brief. You have provided far more reference than I had expected and I am very muchlooking forward to having digested the material of the links provided.

 

I am particularly intrigued by the last you posted as this is similar to what I was attempting to put together, ie; that time travel may be somewhat more possible by accessing reflective/refractive properties of energy rather than forcing massive particles to do what they have specifically developed minimisation of. This is what I was referring to with the non-simultaneity reference.

 

I do not entirely have the vocabulary to communicate some of these ideas with greater clarity. You've provided much for me to learn from and I look forward to discussing this further. I will throw up an introduction post as you suggest. My story has gory bits so I'll try to avoid being graphic. :)

Edited March 14, 2015 by Junoo

[CraigD]

I am particularly intrigued by the last you posted as this is similar to what I was attempting to put together, ie; that time travel may be somewhat more possible by accessing reflective/refractive properties of energy rather than forcing massive particles to do what they have specifically developed minimisation of.

What I described here

Simultaneity is usually a term used in Special Relativity, but on the question of observing the past, in principle all you need to do it is a sufficiently large, distant, and properly shaped mirror. Check out the 2006 thread “Time travel” via a really big reflecting telescope for details.

simply exploits the fact that an image seen in a mirror is of the objects past.

 

For example, when I look at myself while standing 1 meter from an ordinary household mirror, the scene of me I see (ignoring the neurological mechanics of perception) is [math]\frac{2 \,\mbox{m}}{c} \dot= \, 0.000000006 \,\mbox{s}[/math] in my past. If I could devise an extraordinary mirror – the “really big reflecting telescope” of my old thread – in which I could see as well at a distance of 1 light-year, I would see the scene [math]\frac{2 \,\mbox{ly}}{c} \dot= \, 2 \,\mbox{years}[/math] in my past.

 

The laws of optics are well known, so it’s just an exercise in them to design such a mirror system. The problem with such a scheme is that it can’t show scenes further in the past than you begin building it. In my 2006 thread, I proposed a couple of workarounds to that limitation: first, that the primary mirror array of the system wasn’t built by the people using it, but by altruistic people thousands of light years away; then that it uses a primary “mirror” array that doesn’t use ordinary reflection of light, but gravitational bending of it by a constellation of black holes.

[Junoo]

 

:D Oh yeah no probs I've usually got a constellation of BH's or so in the shed. You can't just borrow them of course. 

 

I have a suspicion that travelling to a former period in time "should" be possible in an "exception that proves the rule" type way. Most obvious would be that if one constructed a teleporting device, this could be applied to time travel from any point in the future of the devices construction to an earlier period following it's construction. That would rely on time being blocklike which is why I raised the question of measuring how deep the present moment is. If time is blocklike then travelling within the block should be entirely possible. If time is a transient presumption then displacement becomes entirely limited outside of say projecting into a recreation of a former time like a holodeck type principal. How to measure the nature of time in this regard is then the challenging question to resolve.

[HydrogenBond]

:D Oh yeah no probs I've usually got a constellation of BH's or so in the shed. You can't just borrow them of course. 

 

I have a suspicion that travelling to a former period in time "should" be possible in an "exception that proves the rule" type way. Most obvious would be that if one constructed a teleporting device, this could be applied to time travel from any point in the future of the devices construction to an earlier period following it's construction. That would rely on time being blocklike which is why I raised the question of measuring how deep the present moment is. If time is blocklike then travelling within the block should be entirely possible. If time is a transient presumption then displacement becomes entirely limited outside of say projecting into a recreation of a former time like a holodeck type principal. How to measure the nature of time in this regard is then the challenging question to resolve.

 

 

One cannot go back into time, exactly, due to the second law or entropy. Time travel will require energy and machines that are not 100% efficient. The trip backwards in time, will add entropy to the materials of the past, as we materialize, so the past will be altered, in ways that might alter the present. Entropy has to increase, with time travel no exception. 

 

One way around this, is hypothetical. At the risk of being misunderstood, again, say the past was stored in memory. Although we can't visit the real or physical past due to entropy, but we could visit a stored version of the past, just like looking at old home movies.

 

This does not add entropy to the past, since the movie is being watch in the present, allowing the past to remain unaltered. Hypothetically, one would be like a ghost walking among the 3-D movie past, but unable to have any physical impact. The ghost was used as a visual analogy for consciousness transport. 

Edited March 19, 2015 by HydrogenBond

[Junoo]

One cannot go back into time, exactly, due to the second law or entropy. Time travel will require energy and machines that are not 100% efficient. The trip backwards in time, will add entropy to the materials of the past, as we materialize, so the past will be altered, in ways that might alter the present. Entropy has to increase, with time travel no exception. 

 

One way around this, is hypothetical. At the risk of being misunderstood, again, say the past was stored in memory. Although we can't visit the real or physical past due to entropy, but we could visit a stored version of the past, just like looking at old home movies.

 

This does not add entropy to the past, since the movie is being watch in the present, allowing the past to remain unaltered. Hypothetically, one would be like a ghost walking among the 3-D movie past, but unable to have any physical impact. The ghost was used as a visual analogy for consciousness transport. 

 

This was one of the topics I did not raise in the OP. The physical consciousness we are most familiar with is an interactive process that is maintained within the body. The consciousness we experience in dreams is not physically restricted, though limits are imposed like not being able to read text while dreaming. The consciousness using genes to relocate throughout time is a particularly organic concept. 

[CraigD]

One cannot go back into time, exactly, due to the second law or entropy. Time travel will require energy and machines that are not 100% efficient. The trip backwards in time, will add entropy to the materials of the past, as we materialize, so the past will be altered, in ways that might alter the present. Entropy has to increase, with time travel no exception.

I’ve heard the thermodynamic argument before, from many people. This webpage, by now-retired academic philosopher Kelly L Ross has a pretty concrete example, using a paradox of how an object – a watch – that is created when its taken back in time. In addition to the paradox of where the watch came from – it wasn’t manufactured like a normal watch – there’s the paradoxical problem of it needing to “unwear” to (exactly) its youngest state when taken back in time. Otherwise, it would be instantly infinitely old and worn into nothing (or something even weirder).

 

One resolution to this paradox is to note that the laws of thermodynamics are statistical in nature, so Ross’s “impossible” scenario of the watch that must “unwear” is not impossible, only improbable, and that the “outside world can expend energy to repair wear/entropy that the object acquires over the course of its history” without, as an entire system, violating the laws of thermodynamics, making such an event less improbible. Acccording to the Wikipedia article “time travel”, Physicist Richard Gott offered this explanation in his 2001 book Time Travel in Einstein's Universe

 

Another resolution is to assume a WMI-like model of the universe in which an object sent back in time has a diminishingly small probability to either being sent into the past of its own “timeline”/”path” or following precisely the same path into its original future. In this scenario, objects could be sent into the past, but would only very rarely travel forward to futures where it is sent back again. In the low probability cases of a watch that is sent back into its own past many times, in nearly all cases it would wear out after a large but finite number of loops, making it impossible for it to be sent back. In only a few timeline would it “magically” self-repair in the way described by Gott.

 

One of the trouble features of the MWI is that it contains “magical” timelines in which very improbable things happen, such as quantum immortality[wiki].

 

…though limits are imposed like not being able to read text while dreaming.

After reading about this many years ago, I made an effort to see if it was true for my deams. Initially, it was. I was also unable to do written arithmetic. After trying for a month or so, however, I found that I was able have dreams in which I could read, write, and do simple written arithmetic, though with the impermanence characteristic of dreams – reading what I had written, or reading the same thing twice, usually revealed a different, changed text. I was ever able to do written arithmetic more complicated than what I can do in my head, without paper.

 

This was one of the topics I did not raise in the OP. The physical consciousness we are most familiar with is an interactive process that is maintained within the body. The consciousness we experience in dreams is not physically restricted, though limits are imposed like not being able to read text while dreaming.

Although experiences in dreams can be of things impossible in normal waking life, such as flying or viewing scenes from changing or many perspectives, I know of no evidence that they are “not physically restricted” in the sense of allowing us to perceive real things we can’t with our waking senses, such as secret numbers written on hidden cards, or seeing the future.

 

The consciousness using genes to relocate throughout time is a particularly organic concept.

Genes carry information from ancestors to descendants. That’s how we have inherited traits, such as looking like our ancestors. In principle, genes could carry information that could be perceived as knowledge or memories, but per our present understanding of genetics and neurology, this doesn’t appear to actually happen in humans.

 

The idea was popular before the discovery of DNA lead to our present understanding of genes. Though there was only a little scientific speculation about it, science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard made it a central tenet of the religion he founded, Scientology, where such a thing is called an engram, and defined as a “permanent trace left by a stimulus on the protoplasm of a tissue”. According to Hubbard, “unlocking” these allows one to remember ones extra-terrestrial origins! ;)

 

However, Hubbard and other’s non-scientific ideas about genetic memory involves remembering, not experiencing time travel.

 

If a purely mental experience of time travel is actually possible, I suspect it would require something that could be described as purposeful self-delusion. If you could deeply convince yourself you had once lived in the future or the past, you would subjectively feel that you really had traveled in time. This wouldn’t be useful for such things as traveling forward in time to learn a winning lottery number, then back to play those numbers and win, but it could be emotionally satisfying, though it would be kind of mental dysfunction.

[HydrogenBond]

Moving the material and physical body back into time runs into the problem of entropy increasing in the past, changing the past. No machine is 100% efficient. To overcome the entropy problem, time travel could not use the material body, but only consciousness. In other words, if you assume you could travel back into time, then the new scenario has the same target, but we use a different arrow that minimizes entropy. 

 

If you sent only consciousness; the ghost effect, the past can still impact you and create new memories and alter old bias, but you can't impact the past, since you cannot move anything and nobody knows you are there. It would be like watching a 3-D holographic movie, based on actual events and actual characters of the past. But since you are a ghost effect, you can yell, look out President Lincoln, but nobody hears you. The events of the past remain conserved. Time travel would be used for verifying the past; history tours. It would not be used to play god by dazzling the past with modern tech and modern ideas. 

 

Just as the DNA has a record of the memories of our biological evolution, the personality firmware of the brain, which define our human nature, contain a record of our brain firmware's past. Under certain conditions, like the disruption of culture, humans would become ferrel, as the firmware of the past are reactivated to help with survival under these more primitive conditions; caveman.

 

One can time travel, in a sense, via the firmware archive. This type of time travel is not so much time travel into a point of history, but rather activating perceptional software from the past, where older filters of the human mind will reappear; flat earth. It can also activate future filters that might someday be common to all; visionary. This does not need machines, but only a path into the mainframe aspects of the brain where the firmware reside. 

 

The idea of history repeating itself, is when old songs in the firmware jukebox are induce. Perception changes and everything seems to add up, but in the end it is not in synch with reality and the mistake repeats itself.

 

On the other hand, revisionist history uses modern firmware to relive the past, causing the context of history to change into the image of the present. The old man may not understand why he took so many risks as a young man. He is no longer using the same perceptional firmware, thereby altering the past via firmware of the present. 

 

This is already doable, but takes years to get into the juke box. It does off a way to gain a better sense of history to walk a mile in the shoes of other times, while being in the present; simultaneity. 

Edited March 25, 2015 by HydrogenBond

[Junoo]

Thought provoking. Thanks for the input folks. :)