Douche McCallister wrote:

Quantinuum wrote: I wonder if getting an almanac from the future would work. What I mean is that the first game you bet on using it would be spot on, but if you bet big money and it turns up on the front page of the paper because you won, then maybe it could alter the rest of the almanac because no one won that game from the future you visited. Urgghhh, Time Travel... If you go by the basis of the movie, since you have a book from the future if anything changed it would change in the book, kind of like the newspaper articles in BttF2.

Yes, you are right. There are many different theories/ideas about time travel. Also, Donnie Darko was good.

Personally I think that you can never go to the exact past, what I mean by that is that to go back to the past you would have to move every particle in the known universe into a configuration that matches a past state of the universe. Even if you had a machine that moved particles on a galatic scale into a previous state, ie. matching the locations of the particles, then you might have something that looks like a past but is still the present as the particles arnt the same age as they were when they were in that past state. It would be the past but a degraded version of it. So, we need to some how make particles in the universe go back in time...

Anyway, the greatest time to worry about is the present, since we can never escape it, though we try by thinking about the past and future.

Yes, its of very bad taste. (Hopes someone other than drewbocop realises what I mean).

GPFontaine wrote:

The question is, if you alter the past, and it changes the future, and that change prevents you from going back to the past, would you then be in an infinite loop of realities? For example lets use Terminator 2 as an example, but for the sake of argument lets assume John Connor is killed. 1) John Connor grows up 2) Machines take over the world 3) John Connor fights the machines 4) The machines send a Terminator back in time to kill John Connor 5) John Connor is killed as a child 6) The machines take over the world 7) The machines have no reason to send a Terminator back in the past to kill John Connor because he is not a threat Go back to #1 and start over

Well, if you go through those steps it indicates that the terminators created an alternate timeline.
According to one time travel theory, the machines just split up the timeline into two seperate lines. One line is where John Connor is fighting the machines and another one is where John Connor is killed as a child and the machines have taken over the world.
According to another theory where there can only be one line, it would be impossible what you say.
But according to another, which I think is what you are thinking of, is that it creates an infinite loop. I think in this theory there are infinitely many time lines.

Also,

I just thought of something, lets go with the story of the terminator films. Now lets imagine that the future John Connor gave the friendly terminator a hand written note with his signature on it before the terminator went to the past to protect the younger John Connor. Now that note tells the younger John that he should trust the terminator, say. Anyway, when the war brakes out and the younger John Connor is now older and already knows that hes going to send a terminator back, he gives the terminator the same note the terminator gave him when he was young.

So, the question is, who wrote the note?

Ok, lets say the first note is written by John Connor, but the note wouldnt need to be written again as the note itself can infinitely (until it degrades) pass through the hands of each John Connor. But each time the note passes on it gets older and older being unaffected by time...

GPFontaine wrote:

Quantinuum wrote: Ok, lets say the first note is written by John Connor, but the note wouldnt need to be written again as the note itself can infinitely (until it degrades) pass through the hands of each John Connor. But each time the note passes on it gets older and older being unaffected by time... Ah, I see what you are talking about now. You aren't saying that he re-writes it, you are saying that he keeps it and then passes it along. Yeah.. that's all kinds of fucked up. But in many ways, isn't the terminator's processor an exact example of this?

The terminators processor could of been, but it was destroyed so no one could build skynet. But then the shitty terminator 3 just ass fucked the plot of terminator 2. Excuse the langauge.

homefry25 wrote:

Almond Act was hilarious! I laughed my ass off when I read that. Yeah, I think I dropped the ball by not adding Donnie Darko to the list, that movie completely slipped my mind. When I created this topic I had the idea that if I were to time travel back in time and hang out with my younger self and whatnot, that when I got back to my time I would just have all the memories from seeing myself in the past. I never thought about completely changing things in the future. Also I read something about time traveling to the future and how it might actually be possible one day. The article mentioned that there is some way to shoot yourself faster than the speed of light from one point to the next point, and when you got there you would be in the future. I can't remember the specifics of the article thought dammit. Has anyone heard of anything like this?

Theres a lot of scientists around the world working on time travel, but everything is just theory. Theres even a guy recently whos got the funding of building a time machine for particles. Its only theoritical if it will work or not. Hes says particles can only be sent back to the time the time machine is built, so he expects messages from the future straight away when its finished. Hes even on you tube if you're interested. I also have heard at my University that theres a physicist claiming to have built one.

Douche McCallister wrote:

Everything I have read was based off black holes and dark matter. "Time Travel" maybe possible through one. I have also heard about the Speed of Light theory, but it doesn't make 100% sense to me. Getting somewhere faster doesn't seem like a logical way to go forward in time, to me anyways.

Yeah, according to the theory of special relativity, the closer you are to the speed of light (which is the highest speed one can go apparently), then the more time dialates and everything slows down around you. So one can go to the future by travelling close to the speed of light away from the earth and then coming back to find that 70 years have passed on earth but only 7 years on the ship. Others effects of this theory is that the faster you go the shorter in length you are in the direction of travel, and the faster you go then the more mass you have.