More Time Travel, less serious

bluescat48 corrects me: Of course!!! I think it's still there. Let's get together & go see it.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

If there were a lot of time machines, we'd need traffic regulations to prevent them from crashing into each other.

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"It appears that many of you turn to Hebrew to escape the English...." -- Joseppi

simple from monday to friday you can go backwards or fowards in time from the present but on the weekend you can come back from the future or the past.

If anyone ever does figure out a method of time travel into the past, there will be a battle between the guys who study Dinosaurs and the guys who study Dragonflies over who gets to go back first. Us Dragonfly guys have all talked about wanting to see live Meganeura monyi (27+ inch wingspan) from about 325 million years ago. It would be cool to stop periodically check out the evolutionary history of various groups of Odonates. Of course, the time travelers would not age during their time in the past because it would take more than a lifetime to do that kind of study.I wonder how many memory cards for my camera I will have to pack?

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What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty PythonYou can't build a Time Machine without Weird Optics -- S. Valley

you realy do not think that the battle would be betwean atheists and christians atheists wanting to learn more about the past and the christians wanting to wittnes the resurection only to be dissapointed.

nahhh....those guys would be at the back of a long line.

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What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty PythonYou can't build a Time Machine without Weird Optics -- S. Valley

The first ''butterfly effect'' was pretty good, if I remember correctly.

Ringo observes: I read a story in Analog about this. You could not book a trip to witness the Big Bang, because all available slots had been taken.Then the protagonist wanted to see the Birth of Jesus. He was in luck. There was still 1 slot available, inhabiting the body of the last of the sheep.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Not to be a wet blanket, but there's a fundamental flaw in any time machine story that I've never seen anyone even mention, much less overcome.The Earth is moving. If you move in time, the Earth will have spun beneath you, and changed to a different place in its orbit about the sun. In addition, the rotation of the galaxy will have moved the entire solar system. If you move in time, you'll end up in empty space. If you some how manage to overcome those things and transport yourself in space as well as in time and manage to perfectly synchronize those movements so that you're in the same place as you were when you began your trip through time, you'll also have to account for the fact that that place will be moving in a different direction and at a different velocity than it was when you left. Thus, you also have to synchronize the direction and velocity of your movement to coincide with your movement through time and space.This time travel stuff is a lot trickier than most people even consider.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

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We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

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...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

Teleportation and time travel are basically the same, so it seems like if you have one you get the other for free.That said, Larry Niven wrote a bunch of stories about a teleportation technology that can't violate the conservation of energy, and the result was that if you teleported off the top of a mountain (for instance) down to the valley, you'd come out of the machine and burst into flames, due to the release of potential energy. Conversely, you'd emerge a frozen block travelling from the valley to the mountain.Come to think of it, they weren't very good stories.Anyway, you raise an interesting point, but I think the problem is best resolved the same way Asimov's Three Laws are best understood - not as good rules about time machines or robots, but good rules about good stories about time machines or robots. The story where they get in the DeLorean and boom - they're in the future, except they're in the middle of space isn't a very good or compelling time travel story.

Are time and space not one and the same? If you travel in one dont you travel in the other? Or is time travel all about separating the two?

Interesting. When I first considered this topic, it was only for superficial novelty. But after reading through some of the posts, it appears this subject may have more weight than I originally thought.Cool.

Thanks CS. You haven't been posting too much lately, but I knew if you saw this thread you would contribute at least one good movie.I checked The Time Traveler's Wife via your link. Thanks, the plot sounds good (if there ever was a bad time-travel plot, I haven't heard it!). I will put it on my time-travel-movie list. What do you most want to see technology do?Besides bringing back a wooley-mammoth, personally, I am hoping medical-science will have learn't how to graft eagle-eye-genes and mountain-goat-knee-genes to humans in the very near future.

woopy goldberg goes back in time in to some medievil era, eh? If there ever was a bad time-travel plot, maybe this one is it!I'll google it, maybe it is better than it sounds.

First a disclaimer. I know nothing about physics other than what I can remember from high school. So I'm sure much of what I'm about to say is not even wrong. But as I understand it, yeah, I'd guess that since time and space are the same, in essence we're all time travelers and space travelers. But while we move in space differently, we all move through time at the same rate, 24 hours per day. It seems to me that time travel is about separating the two, moving through time at a different rate than everyone else, and in a different direction as well.Now, having given the matter some small amount of thought, I suppose one could postulate some sort of space/timey explanation for why time travelers typically find themselves in the same spatial coordinates relative to the Earth when they move in time. Perhaps the deep gravity well the Earth creates bends space/time in such a way that objects moving in time tend to stay where they are, kinda like a Newton's Fourth Law.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

​

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

​

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

​

...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist