Cnn screw up

hehe the maths of it isnt really that hard at all. You just get the speed of the runner (v) and apply the Laurentz contraction factor (which is in one of eons links). The hard part is working out which way everything goes round and what gets faster/slower bigger/smaller etc..

o_O
 
"I think that if we can break the speed of light, we'll eventually be able to go backwards in time! Or is time travel only future? Can one never go to the past? "

w00t! Time Travel...the FINAL frontier!
tounge.gif
 
How the heck did this go from a mistake CNN made to rocket science?! This one takes the cake for the "Wacky Off-topic" award.
 
lol does anything ever go to topic...

as for time travel i think the current theory is... that it is theoretically possible but you could only travel backwards and only as far as the point when it was first discovered. So pretty pointless.

Of course with time travel theres the whole paradox thing then which doesnt even bear thinking about
 
Why would you only be able to go back as far it was invented? Is it like from that show '7 days' where the pod has to be "caught" after it goes faster than the speed of light around the world for a while?
 
EH? Never saw 7 days....
I just realized, a lot of time travelling movies came out in the 80s: The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Back to the Future 1-3...wow.
 
I dunno i just read it like about 5 years ago im sure some new and wild theories are about now
 
I'm no rocket scientiest, nor am I a physicist, but I've been trying to understand relativity for a while now with very little success, but I do have a few ideas, and I will be looking into that Bartleby link.

Time. Isn't it just a concept like negativity? You cannot have negative dimes, but in your head, if you take 1 dime from none, you have negative 1 dime. In the same way, isn't time just a concept where its man's attempt to keep track of the history of motion? Like a minute ago, I was back there, now I am here, and a minute later, I will be there. Time doesn't seem to be a tangable property like matter, and as such I can't see it being manipulated.

So when a person goes up to and exceeds the speed of light, that person can turn around and watch the light reflections of their past reach them, but in actuality, they are still in the present are they not? The only thing that has changed is the input signals from the light, but in actuality, his mass has not moved backwards in the mass of time and thus cannot change anything mass-wise.

Anyhoo, that's my 2 cents from an un-educated mind. Somebody please help show me the light. :)
 
From what I've read (which isn't much), time travel IS possible. One book I read even explained a possible procedure. It's long, so if anyone wants to hear it, let me know (I rarely have time for long posts anymore).
 
Ok, here's what I heard.  It's highly theoretical, so feel free to bring arguments against it, if you wish.  I'm just recounting what I read.

 The procedure involves a wormhole, basically a bigger cousin of a black hole.  A wormhole is a tunnel through the space-time continuum (the fabric of reality, you might say), allowing (I think) instantaneous travel between the two end points.

 One must understand that by their very nature, wormholes tend to be unstable (generally the bigger they get, the more stable they are).  Anyways, imagine a wormhole which has one end that is stationary, while the other end is thrashing around at a great speed (let's say, for the purpose of conjecture, at about three-fourths of the speed of light).  Apply the theory of relativity here: the faster an object travels, the slower time moves.  Time is literally moving at a slower rate around the thrashing end.  Now imagine that (again, for the sake of conjecture) you've been camping for month on an asteroid that somehow has been orbiting the thrashing end of the wormhole.  Remember relativity again: what has been a month to you could be years to the stationary end of the wormhole.  Now you fire up your jetpack and launch yourself into the wormhole.  You come out the other end.  For you, a month has passed.  For those near the stationary end of the wormhole, let's say that it's been ten years.  You have essentially cheated time - you've traveled nine years and eleven months into the future.  Again, highly theoretical and strange.

 Another, "cleaner" time travel scenario (that I read so long ago that I don't remember how it works) involves creating a wormhole, and then using some gravity generator (natural - a planet or star - or artificial) to drag one end of the wormhole around the other until the tunnel of the wormhole is kinda twisted around itself, with the two ends right next to each other.  The book said that a ship could fly in the unaffected end and come out the affected end a month into the past.  Even though I haven't a clue how it all works, something tells me that gravity's correllation with the space-time continuum has some affect on time travel.  For those who don't know, gravity is the warping of the space-time continuum, hence bent starlight.  This is why black holes have such massive gravitational pulls - they are literally holes in the space-time continuum (stuff, in a sense, falls into them).

 Any thoughts?
 
that would create an endless philosophical paradox.

you're beginning to train to travel back in time, you train for months and months. woops. one day you suddenly appear. so you decide to not train anymore. why bother, right? *zip*, it's gone. BUT, you needed to train to get there in the first place, so how did you appear in the first place?
 
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