- #1
superpaul3000
- 62
- 1
This is the explanation I give people when they ask about time travel. I am only an undergrad so I just want to ask the more experienced people here if this is correct. Thanks...
Time travel in the context of Einstein's relativity: So we all know that time travel into the future is easy (well given a very fast spaceship anyway). You don't even need a wormhole. The acceleration (not the velocity) causes time dilation so you can accelerate to near the speed of light and travel 10 light years away and come back. The end result is you end up 20 years in Earth's future even though it only took seconds or minutes for you. So given a wormhole, you could keep one end on Earth and take the other end with you for that same ride. Now you have gates A and B next to each other. There is no cosmic censorship keeping this from happening since it does not violate causality. If I go through wormhole B, I find myself 20 years in the past but there is only the one gate A there and I am at the same time I started. So you can't keep going back in time to kill your grandfather or something. You can keep going through wormhole A though and traveling into the future at 20 year increments.
That is only given relativity, if we throw quantum mechanics into the mix things get messy. Anyway, let us consider an alien civilization that is highly advanced and exists a few billion years ago that have all this technology. Say they leave one wormhole at their home and take the other one on a similar ride but 2 billion light years away and back. So they end up in our time and they decide to check out Earth. If we go through their wormhole we end up 4 billion years in the past and we can go to Earth and just go through our entire history right? (Using the easy form of future time travel in increments) Well according to strict relativity yes, but in order to maintain causality the time traveling versions of ourselves would have existed in our past and we should see evidence of this in the fossil record right now. But if we consider quantum mechanics, then we (the time travelers) won’t see our history as it really happened, we will see a completely different series of events since each event is just a random outcome of some number of wave function collapses (however you define that collapse, Copenhagen or MWI). So after 4 billion years you might not even end up with an Earth with life. The only way we can see what happened in our past is to go through wormholes that were made at different times in our past. But as soon as you go through it that universe starts differentiating so you only have a small amount of time to check out your past (this depends on the event you are looking at, the age of dinosaurs is a long age but the time to assassinate Hitler is much shorter). Again none of this violates causality. Even if you travel to see your grandfather before you were born and kill him. This is because as soon as you go through the wormhole that person is not exactly the same person as your grandfather, even though he looks and sounds the same.
Time travel in the context of Einstein's relativity: So we all know that time travel into the future is easy (well given a very fast spaceship anyway). You don't even need a wormhole. The acceleration (not the velocity) causes time dilation so you can accelerate to near the speed of light and travel 10 light years away and come back. The end result is you end up 20 years in Earth's future even though it only took seconds or minutes for you. So given a wormhole, you could keep one end on Earth and take the other end with you for that same ride. Now you have gates A and B next to each other. There is no cosmic censorship keeping this from happening since it does not violate causality. If I go through wormhole B, I find myself 20 years in the past but there is only the one gate A there and I am at the same time I started. So you can't keep going back in time to kill your grandfather or something. You can keep going through wormhole A though and traveling into the future at 20 year increments.
That is only given relativity, if we throw quantum mechanics into the mix things get messy. Anyway, let us consider an alien civilization that is highly advanced and exists a few billion years ago that have all this technology. Say they leave one wormhole at their home and take the other one on a similar ride but 2 billion light years away and back. So they end up in our time and they decide to check out Earth. If we go through their wormhole we end up 4 billion years in the past and we can go to Earth and just go through our entire history right? (Using the easy form of future time travel in increments) Well according to strict relativity yes, but in order to maintain causality the time traveling versions of ourselves would have existed in our past and we should see evidence of this in the fossil record right now. But if we consider quantum mechanics, then we (the time travelers) won’t see our history as it really happened, we will see a completely different series of events since each event is just a random outcome of some number of wave function collapses (however you define that collapse, Copenhagen or MWI). So after 4 billion years you might not even end up with an Earth with life. The only way we can see what happened in our past is to go through wormholes that were made at different times in our past. But as soon as you go through it that universe starts differentiating so you only have a small amount of time to check out your past (this depends on the event you are looking at, the age of dinosaurs is a long age but the time to assassinate Hitler is much shorter). Again none of this violates causality. Even if you travel to see your grandfather before you were born and kill him. This is because as soon as you go through the wormhole that person is not exactly the same person as your grandfather, even though he looks and sounds the same.