If you could go back in time....when/where?
- Thread starter hoytinak
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Brian Pfleuger
Moderator Emeritus
April 20, 1889, Braunau, Austria with a Luger P08.
My apologies to all of us who will never be born.
My apologies to all of us who will never be born.
DaleA said:
Not exactly true. If you want to go back and watch, that's clearly possible, and that is time travel. If you want to go back and 'touch someone', that's a problem. The most cited logic that you can't is called the "grandfather paradox" (going back, killing your grandfather so you don't exist, so if you don't exist you therefore couldn't go back and kill him, therefore you do exist, therefore you could go back to kill him... ... ...).
If viewing past events 'as they unfold' (not on video tape), then that's possible with a deep space telescope. You're looking at events that happened eons ago and the light from that event is just reaching you now. The corollary is that if you had a mirror 'way out there' you could see events happening on earth a long time ago also (ala OK corral). This is because light travels about 1 foot every billionth of a second. If you want to see something that happened 1 second ago, then you need to have a telescope looking out about 190K miles (~~ the moon).
Lorentz time dilation is another way to experience a difference in time through travel, based upon moving faster than another observer. For any appreciable time differential to be noted, you have to travel really fast, or you have to travel faster for a long time. But the speeds are typically very high (high % of C). A experiment was done ~40 years ago where 2 atomic clocks showed the difference when 1 was put on a long haul aircraft for years: One clock was shown at the end to be slightly older than the other.
So you might not be able to intercede in the OK Corral or any other event that occurred previously, but you could see it with the right optics. So if you wanted to go back to the OK corral, you'd need a serious telescope with a mirror (130 years x ..... you do the math) a long way out in space.
Brian Pfleuger
Moderator Emeritus
If the mirror is 130 light years out in space it would be a 260 year round trip... you'd be long dead before the light got back... and since you can't get there before the light does you'd have to have foreknowledge of what event you wanted to see and head out to place the mirror before hand... and if you hadn't left to go place the mirror you could have just stayed to watch the event....
In any event, real, backwards time travel MIGHT be possible. The verdict is still out. We won't know for sure unless/until we have a Quantum Gravity theory. The bad news is that many scientists no longer believe there IS a Unified Theory. The good news is that there's at least one physicist who thinks he found it.
In any event, real, backwards time travel MIGHT be possible. The verdict is still out. We won't know for sure unless/until we have a Quantum Gravity theory. The bad news is that many scientists no longer believe there IS a Unified Theory. The good news is that there's at least one physicist who thinks he found it.
I'd just make sure he got admitted to art school, thus having a more constructive outlet for his anger issues.
I'd go back 1930 or so and tell the NRA what was on the horizon, so they'd get involved in politics before it was too late for things like the NFA and the downward slope that followed.
I'd go back to 1957 or so and convince the board at Fairchild that the rifle they planned on pushing really needed a gas piston.
I'd go back to the late 1980's and convince the board of directors at Smith & Wesson that they were wasting their time going after Taurus, when it was a certain Austrian upstart they needed to compete with.
kilimanjaro
New member
Since Hitler's natal day is taken, I'll settle for going back just a few days ago, win the big lottery, and go to some gun shows with the loot.....
Friend of mine, though, is certain all Adolf needed was a puppy, would of saved a lot of bother.
Friend of mine, though, is certain all Adolf needed was a puppy, would of saved a lot of bother.
Single Six
New member
Furthermore, I'd go back and scoop up an extra Smith and Wesson 3rd gen or two, when they were all NIB and more reasonably priced. Next, I'd go back and study a bit harder in school...that way, I'd have a better chance of actually understanding everything TXAZ said about time travel!
Single Six, it's actually pretty easy, you've probably seen and understood it in different terms.
Ever seen the flash of a muzzle while hunting 300 yards away from another hunter, then heard the report 1 second later? That's the same thing we're talking about here: It takes the light about 1 millionth of a second to reach you from the time it actually occurs, and the sound takes about 1 second after that, again after the time it actually happened. So if you could see far enough (like with a really powerful telescope), you to could see what happened in the more distant past. Just as you saw the muzzle flash which actually happened in the past relative to when you saw it, same thing with a really powerful telescope and the OK Corral. However, the distances get pretty large when you want to go back more than a second or two
As far as 'Gorgon Stare', that's a system that uses a lot of very high end cameras to see most everything that happens in a small city. The trick is having serious cameras and the processing to back it up. If you were looking back in time through a serious telescope with such a system, you'd see a lot more. The way the US military uses it is not with a telescope but with effectively the largest digital video recorder ever made.
Does that help any?
Ever seen the flash of a muzzle while hunting 300 yards away from another hunter, then heard the report 1 second later? That's the same thing we're talking about here: It takes the light about 1 millionth of a second to reach you from the time it actually occurs, and the sound takes about 1 second after that, again after the time it actually happened. So if you could see far enough (like with a really powerful telescope), you to could see what happened in the more distant past. Just as you saw the muzzle flash which actually happened in the past relative to when you saw it, same thing with a really powerful telescope and the OK Corral. However, the distances get pretty large when you want to go back more than a second or two
As far as 'Gorgon Stare', that's a system that uses a lot of very high end cameras to see most everything that happens in a small city. The trick is having serious cameras and the processing to back it up. If you were looking back in time through a serious telescope with such a system, you'd see a lot more. The way the US military uses it is not with a telescope but with effectively the largest digital video recorder ever made.
Does that help any?
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Brian Pfleuger
Moderator Emeritus
Yep, we hear "back in time" constantly. See it too, it's just such tiny fractions of a second that we could never recognize it.
If you could set up mirrors to reflect light around the earth, you'd have to go around the equator 7 1/2 times to see back 1 second.
If you could set up mirrors to reflect light around the earth, you'd have to go around the equator 7 1/2 times to see back 1 second.
Single Six
New member
TXAZ: Actually, that helped a lot. Thank you. Please excuse my initial lack of comprehension; when all you have is a high school diploma, one of your most oft-repeated phrases is "Could you put that in layman's terms?".
Herr Walther
New member
The same thing is done every day with optical telescopes. Objects that are tens or hundreds or thousands of light years away are what they looked like that long ago.
Not what they look like today.
What is being observed that far away may not even exist today but we wouldn't know that until the light from that incident arrived.
Not what they look like today.
What is being observed that far away may not even exist today but we wouldn't know that until the light from that incident arrived.
Brian Pfleuger
Moderator Emeritus
True, but I intended the illustration to be a more imaginable example of the distances involved.
The whole concept is fatally flawed.
Normal light would be far to dim and far too diffused to be usable at any great distance. Even our best lasers are miles wide before they get to the moon, say nothing of 130 light years.
Plus, even if you could gather the light, if you're looking at this event from 130 light years away and you want to be able to see it as if you're only a 1/2 mile out, you'd need magnification of roughly 1,528,409,950,000,000 times. God forbid you want to be able to see it like you're 100 feet away.... You'd need 80,700,000,000,000,000 magnification.
kinggabby said:
kinggabby is right. The original post asked if you could go back in time, not how. The how of it all is a topic for a completely different forum, and that forum isn't on TFL.
At this point there have been dozens of posts deleted because they didn't adhere to the intent of the thread. Any further discussions of time travel itself will join them.