(Dec 7, 2017 09:18 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]I think if there was some way to either travel to past events or observe them that we might be able to close the book on a few things. Don't know where I'd go/look first but I sense that the beginning might offer up some good viewing, that's if camera or person can survive it. Might clear up a few things or even create a few more puzzles.
However my gut feeling is this: Even if we were able to observe the past in some capacity, there would be those who doubt that it's the true past. I'm thinking along the lines of an alternate/parallel universe becoming more in vogue. I say this because when things believed in are debunked that there might be some reluctance to accept any TM observed events as actually having occurred on our Earth, in our timeline, in our reality.
Things like crime for instance. Imagine being able to zoom in on Jack the Ripper, or go to any unsolved crime and find the actual perpetrator. Still I can see a good lawyer using for his client's defence the 'prove to me this really happened in our universe' doubt factor. I'm afraid that observing or experiencing past events would not have the greatest of impacts on civilization as I would hope. Beliefs would be shaken but all it takes is a few well constructed retorts emphasizing the TM observations prove nothing, and things return to normal. This is how strong I think beliefs are and it's because of this I that I can't see people giving them up. Maybe I'm wrong...thoughts.
I don't believe time travel is possible. So, I wrote a science fiction book about time travel, and a way it might be possible. I'm also about halfway finished with another involving a possible method of viewing past events.
There are several different conceptual types of time machine. When Stephen Hawking said, the reason we have not seen visitors from the future is that the time machine has not been invented yet, I laughed. Wouldn't a time machine allow you to visit any time in the past? So what difference would it make when it was invented?
I later realized that he was talking about the type like a worm hole, where you can not go back any earlier than the time of its creation. For that type, I predict it would go up in a huge explosion at the instant of its creation. This would not be because of any instability with the worm hole. It would unfold like this.
The inventor, in his future, would use the portal to go back and change something. The result would not be what he expected, so he would try again, to warn himself to do something differently. Things would then turn out even worse, and eventually a crowd of his future selves would be trying to emerge all at once, shouting warnings, at the instant of the creation. Inevitably an outsider would find out and try to use it for his own purpose, and on and on. Finally in desperation someone would send back a bomb.
Certainly matter cannot be sent back in time because it already exists. Although individual atoms can't be tracked, they are very long lived and sending one back would mean it would then be in two places at once. Which is not allowed.
I think the only hope is possibly sending information through time, using the eyes and ears that already exist, but even that is dubious. Once occupying a mind in the past, the traveler would leave a time capsule with records of the events of interest, which he could find and open after returning to the future. This would also be proof that the events did in fact happen in this universe.
(Dec 9, 2017 09:29 PM)C C Wrote: [ -> ] (Dec 7, 2017 09:18 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ][...] However my gut feeling is this: Even if we were able to observe the past in some capacity, there would be those who doubt that it's the true past.
As a warg in Game of Thrones, Brandon Stark seems to have the quasi-omniscient ability to view the past (as well as the present) without his traveling virtual avatar usually impinging physically upon its events.
Often with the trope in fiction, though, it's the future which the seers claim they can't be certain about -- only perceiving one possibility among several. So a switcharoo in this topic with respect of it being the past instead that's afflicted with variable realizations.
Quote:I'm thinking along the lines of an alternate/parallel universe becoming more in vogue. I say this because when things believed in are debunked that there might be some reluctance to accept any TM observed events as actually having occurred on our Earth, in our timeline, in our reality.
Things like crime for instance. Imagine being able to zoom in on Jack the Ripper, or go to any unsolved crime and find the actual perpetrator. Still I can see a good lawyer using for his client's defence the 'prove to me this really happened in our universe' doubt factor. I'm afraid that observing or experiencing past events would not have the greatest of impacts on civilization as I would hope. [...]
If many people literally believe in that "flowing river" analogy of time, where we're like boats constantly moving upstream with a past copy of ourselves moving up from behind to replace us in the moment we just left... Then our particular "boat" we're riding in would never be affected by alterations to boats in the past. Those radically altered boats and the new future they're generating can't catch up to us. However, the past we remember would be eradicated and no longer exist, despite the future that original version engendered still being in play or unfolding for us.
In that river context, time travel alterations would be doing damage to the Eternalism view of time, where all temporal parts of oneself co-exist and do so in perpetuity. But since the moments prior to the time travel interference would still remain the same as always, those would eventually repair the timeline as they moved into the slots of the damaged segments of the past as they flowed forward.
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In contrast to the flowing river analogy, some consider time to be a moving moment. Everything exists in a continuous rolling now. Past and future don't' actually exist, so there is no place to go. There are no leading or following boats as in the river analogy. We notice the changes from the current and old now and construct the concept of a future and past, but time has no dimension that may be traveled, it is simply change.