This is a spinoff thread to demonstrate that it isn't just religious types who suffer from irrational unfounded belief. People believe in all sorts of things for which there is no evidence, even some who take pride in their rationality and skepticism.
The classic example is time travel. People believe in the possibility of time travel despite the total lack of supporting evidence, and they are quite unshakeable in this belief. They dismiss all evidence or logic that challenges what is in truth a conviction, and they can be utterly dogmatic about it. Once you recognise this behaviour, the parallel with people of a religious disposition becomes apparent, and is rather astonishing. It's only then that you realise that what you're up against is a deep-seated desire for mysticism and magic, and an irrational fervour for woo. People just love it, whether it's heaven and hell and sweet baby jesus, or stuff like astrology and new-age spirituality, or even parallel worlds and quantum weirdness.
Or of course, time travel. There's no evidence whatsoever for time travel. There's certainly no evidence for travelling backwards in time. I'm sure everybody will agree on this. But what everybody won't agree on, is that there is no evidence for travelling forwards in time either. This is the nub of it. We don't. Time travel, even "forward time travel", is science fiction. Ever heard of a stasis box? That's science fiction too, but it's useful to point out the obvious: get in the box, and the "stasis field" prevents all motion, even at the atomic level. So you can't move, your heart doesn't beat, and you can't even think. When I open the box five years later, to you it's like I opened the box as soon as you got in. You "travelled" to the future by not moving at all. Instead everything else did.
And clocks don't clock up "the flow of time" either. That's just a figure of speech. I can hold my hands up a metre apart and show you the gap, the space between them. Then I can waggle my hands and show you motion. I can show you space and motion through it. But you can't show me time flowing, or any travel through time.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying relativity is wrong. The thing we call time dilation definitely happens in fast-moving clocks, and we have to allow for it in the GPS clock adjustment. We have direct experiment evidence for it. But we have no evidence whatsoever that it occurs because "the flow of time slows down" or because "we are travelling towards the future at a slower rate". That's wrong. What's also wrong is the inference that closed timelike curves permit time travel. They don't. Godel realised this in 1949, when he said "time cannot pass if you can visit the past". However the myth stuck, and people cite his rotating universe scenario to support their biblical belief in patent nonsense.
OK, I want you guys to state whether you believe in the possibility of time travel, and then if it's a yes, I want you to show me the evidence that supports this belief. When none is forthcoming, I want you to pay attention to the dismissal and denial, and even the outrage and abuse that comes instead.
You really aren't worth bothering with. You've been pointed to the evidence - specifically Godel's Metric which, at the very least, leaves open the possibility of genuine time travel in either direction. There's a simple exposition on Wikipedia and more rigorous treatments elsewhere on the web. Einstein himself was quite intrigued by this solution to his equations and its mind-numbing implications - but if you want to disagree with two of the greatest scientific and mathematical brains of all time, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, I look forward to seeing your detailed rebuttal. I'm a little rusty on metric tensors as it's 40+ years since I've worked with them, but I'm quite happy to brush up on the subject to study your response.Originally Posted by Farsight
What you really mean, is that you don't have any evidence, and you're taking evasive action.
Get brushing. Start by noting that CTCs are hypothetical mathematical abstractions that do not constitute evidence for time travel. Then read A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein This details Einstein and Godel's discussions on the subject, and makes it clear that Gödel's rotating universe was not evidence for time travel, and instead was employed by Gödel to demonstrate that time is not something we travel through. Search-inside on 141 or other page numbers to read various sections. Not that the title is a little sensational. The inside flap says time as we know it does not exist. It exists like heat exists, as an emergent proprty of motion. Temperature is a measure of the average motion of say gas molecules in a container, whilst the time is a cumulative measure of motion calibrated aginst the motion of light. You can't literally climb to a higher temperature, just as you can't literally travel through time.
But don't do that now. Save that for later, after you've shown us the evidence for travelling forward though time.
So what you're saying farsight, is that there's no evidence for time travel apart from the evidence that that clocks tick at different rates in different frames as predicted by the theories of relativity.
That's rather like saying that there's no evidence for the sun rising tomorrow apart from the evidence of of stellar mechanics as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity.
Last time you were on this forum you made a total dickhead of yourself and crawled off having been shown to be wrong.
You'll forgive me, I'm sure, if I don't bother taking any notice of what a buffoon like you wants me to do.
No it isn't. It's nothing like it. Take a look at a clock. What's it actually doing? Measuring the flow of time? No. Take the back off that clock and look. Can you see time flowing? No. All you can see is cogs and gears and things moving. That clock is merely "clocking up" motion through space.
OK, so does a clock show how fast we're travelling through time? No. Read what I said about the stasis box. Then imagine we have identical clocks. You take your clock on a fast round trip through space while I sit here at my desk. Then when we meet up our clocks are no longer synchronised. Do you think you travelled forward through time slower than me? Because if you do, you're going to have a job explaining why when we meet up, we meet up at the same time rather than forever missing each other by half an our. You don't end up living in my past.
Come on guys, let's see some evidence for time travel.
Croydon Bob: LOL.
And to continue my analogy all you've said is that the sun doesn't rise all that's happening is that the earth is rotating showing a different side to the sun.
We still have evidence that we can reach a future point in time without personally experiencing as much time as as would elapse through the normal course of events.
That's something that would commonly be called time travel.
Yes, but take it further. The earth is rotating, "sunrise" is a figure of speech. So is "time travel".
No problem.
Yes, it's commonly called time travel, whereafter people start believing in the possibliity of travelling backwards in time. But like I said, time travel is just a figure of speech. You "experienced less time" than me because your out-and-back travel through space meant that you experienced less local motion than me. That's why our clocks are no longer synchronised. But you didn't actually travel through time at all. Nor did I. Nobody does.
So we agree then, time travel is a figure of speech (perhaps more but that's irrelevant) What is described by that figure of speech with regard to "travelling" to the future is not only entirely possible but has been proven to happen in scaled down experiment and even everyday technology.
As for people introducing, travelling backwards in time, I'll point out that you're arguing against a straw man. No-one here has said they believe in it. Only that relativity doesn't rule it out. We're all interested in how you manage to rule it out as your take on relativity is always amusing.
I don't like Yourgrau's work - it isn't very clear, and probably for that reason you've rather misunderstood Godel's ideas. Since you're apparently averse to maths, try "Einstein, Gödel and the Disappearance of Time" by Andrej Ule which lays out the consequences of Godel's work in a very straightforward way - closed time loops, time travel and the unreality of time included.
http://tinyurl.com/27qydor
Of course these ideas - closed time loops, time travel etc - have yet to be tested, but don't forget that they are mathematical predictions of the General Theory of Relativity, and every prediction of that theory tested so far has checked out. It really will be interesting to see how things turn out.
If I got in a spacecraft, accelerated to near light speed and returned to the earth after what, to me, was the passage of 1 year, I would find that perhaps 10 years had elapsed on earth due to relativistic time dilation. I've aged a year, the earth and everyone on it is 10 years older. From my point of view I'd have jumped forwards 9 years, and that is time travel in a very real sense, not just a figure of speech - and it has been shown to be real.
It remains to be seen if Godel's predictions of closed time loops and time travel to the past or future are mere theoretical curiosities applicable only in some idealised universe, or really do exist in our universe. But until they have been tested and shown to be false, they cannot be dismissed.
Or everybody does.
Dickhead Duffield stuggling to grasp the basics again.
I have conceptual difficulty with that. 'True' time travel as depicted in the popular imagination requires that several timelines exist simultaniously. Like parallel universes one can jump from one to the other. What has been descibed is that from one standpoint, time has relatively advanced at a different rate.
If the capacity to move back in time is similarly only a relative concept, how does this move us closer to 'real' time travel?
Your conceptual difficulty is your problem as is your preconceived notion of time travel derived solely from popular fiction. If I experience a jump forwards of 9 years relative to everyone and everything else, that's time travel in my book. And please note that it is not just "from one standpoint". Anyone who had accompanied me would experience the same - and on my/our return others who had stayed on earth would readily be able to see that I/we had aged considerably less than they had.
If, for example, I'd taken one of my 1 year-old twin sons with me, then on our return that son would be 2 while his twin who'd remained on earth would be 11. The same outcome as I'd have achieved in H.G. Wells' fictional Time Machine if I'd put one of my 2-year-old twins on my knee and moved forwards 9 years - one twin would still be 2, the other 11. The fictional machine would achieve the 9 year shift in a few minutes, the hypothetical spacecraft would take a year - but the outcome is precisely the same. It is real time travel.
From one standpoint refers to the traveller - so the possibility that there is more than one traveller does not alter the argument. In essence what you are saying is that to you time dilation and time travel are identical - is that correct?
I would find the argument you are advancing easier to understand if we were to discuss moving backwards in time - how would that look? If we are simply discussing a senario where the traveller(s) aged relative to the rest, this is rather different to going from 2010 to 2009. In the former both have aged just at different rates, in the latter 2009 must still exist somewhere.
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