Saw Time Machine earlier today. I was a bit disappointed in the story line as well as the ending. The special effects were good, but the plot never really developed and was no comparison to the original. It is a totally different story with few similarities to the classic. Perhaps I was disappointed because I expected a similar story line.

nor seen the 1960's film but after watching Time Machine 2002 I couldn't help but to think that many changes were involved. I think I will read the book first and then watch the 1960's film and make my final judgement. I did want more from this movie as well.

I watched original as a kid. Always loved it. I watched it recently and I'm still impressed by it. The video was very good, sound was good and of course the story is great.

Deron

The original 1960 version of The Time Machine is a great movie. The DVD is also good quality and it has some extra features that are fun to watch. I saw this back when it first came out in theaters when I was 14, and fell in love with Yvette Mimieux. It's a great story though, and very good acting as well. The special effects aren't up to today's standards, but they are still very good.

The new one is alright but nothing compared to the original, anyone who loved the original is going to be disappointed in the remake..

I beg to disagree - now that the DVD version of the 2001 Time Machine is out, I consider it to be superior to the 1960 George Pal version (which the moviemakers pay homage to in this film).

At first, I was considerably upset to see the realization of the machine itself - as a US Coast Guard veteran who has seen many lighthouses and lightships, I recognised the Fresnel lenses used in the machine construction as pieces of a light! However, it turns out (and is so documented in the production notes) that they used polycarbonate lens reproductions, no historic light was sacrificed (as may have been - probably was - the case in the 1960 version, as the two time machines bear more than a striking resemblance to one another).

IMHO in general, the new version is superior in every aspect of filmmaking and plot to the original film. The first film was in fact a film version of the H.G. Wells novel, while the second film is a new and more elaborate script with a different plot, is transported from London to New York, and there are but a few superficial resemblances between versions.

Purely as an action film, the new version is very much better. The Morlocks are scarier, and cannibals. The time travel scenes benefit greatly from computer animation and morphing software. As SciFi, the new version goes places the original never dared, and even addresses the basic paradox of time travel.

It's a keeper for me - and I'm going to pick up the 1960 version as well, as I've always been fond of it. They are a pair. For those letches amongst you (and I include myself in the classification) the girl Mara in the new film is not the leggy Yvette Mimeaux, but she's quite sexy enough, and wears an intriging sort of see-through top.

I think perhaps the only thing that is missing versus the 1960 version is that sense of wonder that comes from a new concept - had we all seen the 2001 version first, the 1960 film would be a poor imitation by comparison. But they are after all, seperated by 41 years in our lives.

The only downside to the new DVD (2.35:1 anamorphic, and I listened to the DTS soundtrack) is there has been a healthy dose of edge enhancement applied to this film - but the plot kept me well enough enthralled not to notice.

Gary

Glad to see someone really liked the film around here (it apparently did earn some money and it has some staunch defenders). The people involved with its production include Arnold Leibovit, who was responsible for the excellent soundtrack of the original film's score, released a decade or so back. Enough love for the original meant that the makers knew that they needed to do something other than just slavishly remake it. In some respects this one addresses things in the book (some aspects of Eloi vs. Morlocks, f'rinstance) better than the original.

But ultimately the film fails to pay off. The ending is simply rushed- I was crushed when I realized the film was over. It seemed the studio lost faith in it and squeezed it into an hour and a half. The film lost the arc of departure, return and irrevokable departure that the book and the original had. The music is no good. The photography alternates between brown and blue. Guy Pearce is distressingly distant in contrast to Rod Taylor's emotional, totally committed performance.

Yet I will still get the DVD. I find enough in it to like to have it. It's just that it should have been so much more.

Well, although all of the reviews I've read of the new movie aren't very supportive, I just put it on my Netflix rent list, so I'm anxious to compare. Since the 1960 version was one of those on my all-time favorite list, it will be a tough sell, but in the previews, the special effects look promising. In the original, the acting was so good and convincing that it really made the movie a classic. Sure, the special effects were sort of hokey, when compared to today's, but it was a great story as well.

Highlights of new version: Much better special effects. The Orlando Jones hologram is a winner. Guy Pearce's stopover in 2030-something was very interesting. There was a nice-looking blond chick who referred to Pearce's outfit as retro. He should have invited her aboard for a ride. The cave was ok but not that dramatic. Jeremy Irons' character provides a new slant on the history and breeding of the Morlocks.

Strong points of old version: Rod Taylor has more screen charisma than Guy Pearce. A British scientist (turn of century) seems more colorful than a US scientist in the early 20th century. Guy Pearce looks unhealthy and uncomfortable in his role. It was like he stepped out of the set of Ravenous. There is no strong female character in the new movie. In the old movie, Yvette Mimieux was a delight to watch, and you could understand how Taylor would risk his life to save her. This is not to say that Mara is bad looking, she just wasn't as appealing. Emma was completely forgettable.

Perhaps because we had "lowered our expectations" before watching the new Time Machine on DVD, but frankly we really enjoyed it. Though a number of homages to the first film occur in the new version, this is a very different story and that helped keep our interest. Though clearly dealing with budgetary constraints, (i.e. lack of major stars...except Jeremy Irons), the producers spent their money well.

I've been a fan of the first film since I was a kid. After renting the new version and watching it last night, I'll be placing an order for the DVD today. Not GREAT, but an enjoyable entertainment.

Comparing it to the original is almost apples vs oranges.
Good Viewing,
John G

Bob...WAKE UP!...I think you may be suffering from narcolepsy...pretty funny.

Thanks to all the dreadful reviews I skipped this one in the theatre in anticipation of the dvd. Although I enjoyed this new version, I found the story pretty lacking. I absolutely love the topic of time travel, and am a sucker for all related topics.

The original George Pal production will always remain a special film that I remember fondly and still love today for its charm, attention to certain detail, and the performances. It was nice to see Alan Young again...I wish his part had been bigger!

I still find myself waiting for the ultimate time travel film. I think we need a story truly grounded in science, that cleverly bends back around itself, and still provides us with plenty of action and surprises.

H.G. Wells was a very good story teller, and his stories were some of my favorite as a child. Most recently, Michael Crichton's 'Timeline' has come across as one of my new favorite time travel stories...the upcoming film adaption of his novel may finally provide what these other films are lacking!

Howie

I'm glad someone else noticed Alan Young. That was a nice touch; that and the dress shop. Of course, only those who have a warm spot for the George Pal version have any idea what we're writing about :)
Good Viewing,
John G

Originally posted by Digital Howie

I still find myself waiting for the ultimate time travel film. I think we need a story truly grounded in science, that cleverly bends back around itself, and still provides us with plenty of action and surprises.

H.G. Wells was a very good story teller, and his stories were some of my favorite as a child. Most recently, Michael Crichton's 'Timeline' has come across as one of my new favorite time travel stories...the upcoming film adaption of his novel may finally provide what these other films are lacking!

Howie

Digital,

Have you read some of the classic stories? I think John Varley's "Air Raid" is one of the best ever (although the subsequent novel and movie were so-so.) And Heinlein's "All You Zombies" is very clever. "Timescape" by Benford is an excellent time travel novel in the hard SF vein. (And by the way, the vanity plate on my 911 says TACHYON, so you can see I enjoy physics and SF a little too much.)

Oh, and of course Kip Thorne's book is a terrific factual source of info on the possibilities of real time travel using wormholes (but what if we meet the worm while we're in the hole, eh?)

If you are talking about Kip Thorne's "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy", I definitely agree that its a great book, and would recommend it highly. Its not very technical at all, though you do need to have that 'visualizing a 2-D representation of 3-D' gene to get the embedding diagrams used throughout the book, or in some cases 'visualizing a 4-D representation of 4-D'.

Dean,

Yup, that's the book. Guth's recent popular book is VG also, if you're attracted to gravitation...

But we're way off topic.

Back on topic, I only give The Time Machine 2 stars. The effects and art direction were fine. The new machine was a nice blend of the 1960s conception with modern effects (and Fresnel lenses are always popular with us RPTV owners), but I thought the hacked up plot was inferior to Wells' original and I don't think they bothered to think through the logic as pertains to causality and the relative immutability of past vs. future.

I know, it's just a movie.

R. Aster,

Thanks for the reading suggestions...great vanity plate...I'm sure you've gotten more than the average response on that one...excellent.

Robert,

The practical applications for real time travel seem endless. The question of when travel in time will be (or was) invented is quite intriguing.

When I think of how this entire concept could better unfold in a film, I imagine the scientific discoveries that will ultimately lead to it;

As a starting point I am often reminded of the classic David Lean film The Sound Barrier. As technology continues to allow us to move forward at higher rates of excelleration, the closer we get to "light speed" etc. At the same time there is an obvious need for generating enormous amounts of energy to support this technology, and so on.

I mention all this in terms of being able to watch a film that provides us with technology we can at least begin to swallow...versus a guy who simply jumps in a chair and poof!... he's four years in the past. My own reaction to the success of such an experiment would lead to a multitude of reactions (not to mention plot devices)!

Although not necessarily a time travel film, I think pictures like Stargate have done a much better job of building up the early suspense/explanation factor. Even the George Pal version included a little demo of the time machine for the assembled dinner guests.

I'll continue to keep my fingers crossed.:D

Howie

Bob,

Your very argument has been often expressed by skeptics -- we'd expect to see great crowds of curious time travelers at, say the launch of Apollo 11 or Kennedy's assasination or at the Cavern Club in 1961. Where are they (echoing Enrico Fermi in his question about putative ETs)?

Couple thoughts, also not orginal: Many physicists seem either to think time travel must be impossible, primarily because it would seem to lead to tremendous paradoxes that we have no way of resolving.

The other school has pointed out there are relativistic solutions of time travel all of which apparently restrict you to traveling to the future or to past times only after a time machine/portal has been built. (See Thorne's book for a discussion of a wormhole based scheme.) So they're not here because we haven't invented the machine yet.

And in any case every discussion I have seen seems to depend on feats of engineering that would appear to be thousands of years away, if not impossible (e.g, the wormhole solution or massive rotating cylinders in space of a hyperdense substance.) No one think a time machine can be made from a leather chair and some prisms.

I didn't explain all that very well, but there are now lots of good, serious books on time and time travel (Davies has written a few, in addition to Thorne.)

And lastly, there's the "They're already here." idea--Who do you think flies around in those glowing round and triangular objects? To me, this is slightly more likely than the thought that they're ETs, maybe a .5% chance vs. .1%.

Bob,

Physicist David Deutsch (http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html) believes that we live in a "multiverse", that is composed of quite possibly billions, trillions or more number of universes. In some of these universes, Abe Lincoln wasn't assassinated, the dinosaurs were never made extinct and Nazi Germany won WWII. In some of these universes, you exist. In others, you do not. In some of those universes in which you do exist, you are quite possibly president of the United States. Anyway... David Deutsch believes that time travel is possible. But, if we were to travel into the past, it would be the past of another universe! :D Hopefully I haven't mis-stated his position. Check out his book, "The Fabric of Reality", for more details. I wish Art Bell would interview David Deutsch. That would be awesome.

Bob,
When I look back into history, I see all kinds of indications that the past is loaded with time travellers. Like the US Patent issued to the inventor of the junction transistor on January 28, 1930. It's quite clear - the instructions for fabricating the devices, and radio receiver circuitry based on such devices, are described in the documents on file. It's true that the semiconductor materials available in 1930 were crude - these devices had a beta (current gain) figure of 3-5 or thereabouts, whereas a similar device fabricated from silicon might have a beta of 40+. (They used Selenium and Copper Oxide, and the only large-scale application was power supply rectifier diodes, not transistors.) Check it out:

http://www.jmargolin.com/history/1745175.pdf

Think about what it would have meant had someone realized the importance of the "discovery". World War II fought with portable, solid state devices. Lightweight radios for aircraft and foot soldiers - and robust and accurate guidance systems for turning German V1 "buzz bombs" into precision-guided cruise missiles. It would have been a very different war. A more primitive point-contact transistor was instead fabricated in 1947 by some Nobel-winning physicists at Bell Labs, along with a wildly improbable description of sub-atomic "holes" in a crystal lattice. Damn shame they didn't listen to the time traveller trying to "fix" WWII in 1930!

History is just loaded with anachronisms that can satisfactorily be explained only if time travel does in fact exist. But what do we do with a Good Samaritan time traveller who stops people on the street to warn them of the giant asteroid which will strike the Earth in February 1, 2019? Why, we put him in an insane asylum, while "cooler and wiser" heads publish follow-up stories that say, "We've refined our calculations, and it's definately going to miss us!"

Gary

Adding to the above postulation...there really is no reason to not believe that any number of past events have been either directly or indirectly changed via a displacment of matter through space.

For example, who's to say that the assasination of a prominent figure is not the result of a planned changed event. Our understanding of the universe is at best primitive, and subject to mere speculation.

Time travel hypothesis always leads me to the bigger question: How the hell did everything come into existence? I can comprehend how various types of molecules inadvertantly met to form what we know to be the basic building blocks of life...but how did these base structures come to be?

The answer to this question falls back upon the basics of quantum physics and trying to understand how time travel might actually work...events folding upon themselves. One day our planet will cease to exist...this in turn will eventually lead to the birth this same world.

I imagine a practical use of folding/bending time in order to record significant events in the time stream...formation of stars, the history of our world etc...now what were we saying about that new film?;)

Howie

What film is that?
Oh now I remember. You must mean that film whose entire script was far less fascinating than the thoughts expressed in the posts of Mr. Aster, Larry, Gary and Howie (not to mention those which might be awaiting in the "future"). :)

Bob

Time travel, huh?

Well, Einstein made provisions for it in his work. I believe that given enough time ( If we don't blow ourselves up first) Everything that is physically possible will be practical.

Imagine what a roman emperor would say if you told him we have the power to destroy a city by virtually just wishing it was gone? Tell that to a 10 year old now and he will say " Oh, you mean nuke it?"

Now imagine how utterly primitive we will seem to a person living in the year 3000? or 5000? Imagine the things that will be possible to them??


Gus

Man,
You guys are DEEP. But I gotta tell ya', that movie sucked!!! Guy Pearce looked like a stunt double from "The Goofy Movie". Nice hair. No character development, no historical explanations. Completely choppy and random. Worse still, after then watching the almost equally wretched "Collateral Damage", (and I'm a big Arnold fan) the lamp on my PJ blew up right in the middle of LOTR. I think it was my PJ's response to making it endure showing the entire length of "Machine" and "Damage". The irony was not not lost. If I had a time machine, I'd go back to the day I rented those two turkeys, NOT rent them, and at least get to see the whole "Rings" movie.
Jim S.

I find this thread very interesting and enjoyable. It just occurred to me yet one more possible explanation, not yet mentioned, as to why we have not yet seen time travelers yet.....

If I had the ability to travel back in time I would be extremely careful about maintaining stealth and a low profile as to not change the progression of events as they will in fact occur. More likely, I would not even consider going back in time unless my life depended on it. There would be just to much peril, too much uncertainty and risk involved. An inconsequential action on my part might very likely cause later events to cascade into causing me not to even exist. And once I accidentally erased myself, I would be totally gone... unable to recover myself back again. A very dangerous technology with lots of wild cards.

So to me, that would be good reason (assuming the time travel technology will be invented) why the time travelers would be rare events and that these people would take extra effort and life threatening concern not to be noticed.

Just a couple of thoughts I had.

Originally posted by RVonse
find this thread very interesting and enjoyable. It just occurred to me yet one more possible explanation, not yet mentioned, as to why we have not yet seen time travelers yet.....

If I had the ability to travel back in time I would be extremely careful about maintaining stealth and a low profile as to not change the progression of events as they will in fact occur. More likely, I would not even consider going back in time unless my life depended on it. There would be just to much peril, too much uncertainty and risk involved. An inconsequential action on my part might very likely cause later events to cascade into causing me not to even exist.

RV,

This has been the plot of more than one SF tale -- I recall one that had two scientists operating some time machine that sent an instrument to the past in a sort or pendulum or cyclic manner every few minutes. With each roundtrip of the device, subtle and then gross changes in the lab and the scientists took place until finally they were two unrecognizable blobs of protoplasm gibbering incomprehensibly, apparently continuing their earlier discussion of the unlikelyhood of the tiny device changing anything important in the past.

Time travel, though interesting to think about, is one of those things that is likely to remain completely out of reach, and is probably inherently disallowed by the physics of any universe which remains in existence for any amount of time. The problem is that time travel is like a chain reaction. Once it becomes possible, and its being possible assumes that time is laid out and that we just travel along it, then almost 'immediately' (in the sense of immediate in a world where time travel can occur), all of time would be filled with travelers. Anyone who goes back and who knows the mechanism can then offer people further and further back in 'time' the ability to travel as well. It would effectively almost immediately (from any one person's real 'time' perspective) self destruct due to a massive feedback loop. Because, if time is already there in a linear path, then the entire future was there from the start, which means that time travel would have been possible from the very start as well.

Of course, its completely possible that time is not laid out in a row, and that it doesn't exist at all. i.e. that its purely a experiential side effect of the laws of thermodynamics coupled on a self aware storage mechanism. It could be perfectly likely that there is only now, and that's it. In that case, there would no such thing as time travel, period, because there's nowhere to go.

Or, as some well known physicists have said, the chair you are sitting in right now is a time travel machine. Just sit it in for an hour, and you will have traveled into the future one hour. But it doesn't have a reverse gear.

On the 'many universes' theories, which have been put forward by many people, I don't buy it. Its not just that its irrelevant to us even if it happens, but the problem is that the many universes don't just branch off on major, macrosopic events, such as Lincoln getting killed or an asteroid hitting the earth. They have to happen in response to every phsysical event, and for every possible outcome of every physical event, down to the deflection of one molecule off another in a gas. Do you have any idea how many variations that would be? I would have created so many alternative universes just typing and sending this e-mail, than there would be atoms in our universe right now. That is profligacy of gargantuan proportions, when you consider that an (at least) 15 billion light year radius universe must duplicate itself for everyone one of those possible futures, and every one of those must duplicate itself for every possible future, and so on. It is pretty inconceivable that such a thing could be possible.

Of course, its completely possible that time is not laid out in a row, and that it doesn't exist at all

At least in the way that it's portrayed in popular science fiction, "time travel" seems to me to be a contradiction in terms. That past no longer exists. And that future does not yet exist.

However if I had lived during, for example, the 10th Century A.D. - I would be equally convinced that the edge of the world was just beyond the ocean's horizon. Our knowledge just in that one millennium has changed rather dramatically. What we will know a thousand millennia from now is altogether "inconceivable".
One thing which is conceivable is that our present day "laws" of science and our present day understanding of our existence could all go the way of the dinosaurs.

Bob

But what I was saying isn't based on any kind of knowledge advance. The arguement is, if time isn't just 'now', if it exists linearly, then time trivial 'already' exists and has from the beginning. Therefore, from the very first, time travelers would have been all over the place, causing all kinds of effects, and would immediately self destruct the whole system in a huge feedback loop. Its an argument that it cannot be possible, because if it was, it would already be happening on a massive scale, and would have been happening on a massive scale since the beginning of 'time', since the end of time already existed at the beginning. Therefore, anyone who wanted to time travel, from the point on that line at which it was invented, until the end of that line, would already be traveling through time, and would have been for billions of years. The result would be feedback loop of truely epic proportions, that would have ripped any civilization apart before it could even begin.

I just re-read your earlier post in this thread in which you said
Its not very technical at all, though you do need to have that 'visualizing a 2-D representation of 3-D' gene to get the embedding diagrams used throughout the book, or in some cases 'visualizing a 4-D representation of 4-D'.

This is an intellectual exercise in which I'm ill-equipped to participate. But hell that's never stopped me before. Give me a little time to digest what you've said in your last two posts.
Right now I'm pouring over your comments in the Unbreakable thread again.

Bob

A lot of diagrams that are used to demonstrate the aspects of relativity in which gravity warps space, require that they reduce the number of dimensions, because you cannot (even in 3-D) reproduce the effects of gravity warping space, because that is a 4-D effect. So they use embedding diagrams, in which one or more dimensions are thrown out, so that they can represent the effect. So you have to kind of translate it back to 3D in your head, to the best degree you can. Some people just aren't born with that gene I guess, since some folks I've talked to about these things just don't get those diagrams. Not that that's a problem per se, since everyone has their specialties.

My lacking is math, unfortunately since I have a great love for physics. Its not that I'm not capable, but I just never got into it, and it doesn't come up in my daily life, so what capabilties I had have atrophied badly.

I think I understand the concept. If time is linear and time travel is possible... it would exist and be occuring all during that timeline (beginning to end). And that would have effects ("feedback loop") which would result in self-destruction. Since that has not happened, it's an argument that time travel has never been, is not now, and never will be possible.

And the implied contradiction is that, if the feedback loop can happen, which it will if time travel is possible, then time cannot be linear and have any 'nows' that you can travel to, because they are changing all the time by time travelers who are already causing changes.

To deal with that contradiction, you have to accept the 'many nows' conjectures, which were discussed above. And the problem with that, even if it happens in contradiction to all the arguments I mentioned against it is, which past are you traveling to? If there are infinite nows, it might end up being easier to travel to the now where things worked out best for you than to try to go back and make the best happen for you, since, according to the many nows theories, the now in which everything worked out the best for you must exist. So if they are correct about the multiple nows, there is a variant universe out there, where you are a gazzillionair, hung like a French Bread, and have 25 Penthouse pets as lovers (all at the same time.)

I'm formulating an argument for all of this. In fact I had begun to organize my thoughts around "what I was saying isn't based on any kind of knowledge advance".
About that time you made me loose my train of thought. I'm now stuck on this idea of what it would be like if I was hung like a french bread.

I'm not through yet. But will now need a little more time.

I'm still formulating.
I've got the bread thing out of my mind. But while doing a little surfing, unfortunately I've now found THIS (http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm). It's going to be a long night.

If you want to go back in time, put instant coffee in a microwave. Works for me. Yeah, that was a Steven Wright joke. I am skeptical of explanations (pro or con) that ask us to rely on magnitudes that our brains consider reasonable. Going back in time might be tricky. I really don't know. But going forward in time is possible. If we were in a spaceship that teetered on the point of no return on a black hole (I think it's called the Schwarzchild radius), we could take advantage of the fact that time slows down the closer you get to the "hole". At the edge of the radius, you and I (in the ship) would think that only a few seconds or minutes had passed. In reality, perhaps decades or even centuries had gone by on earth. This way, you could jump forward centuries or perhaps millenia. Time was slowed near the precipice of the black hole, but not on earth. This is my understanding and I could be wrong. Don't take my word for it.

You are correct. Acceleration and gravity are effectively the same thing in relativity. So accelerating to the speed of light or sitting just above the event horizon of a black hole will both slow down time for you relative to others. But, you have to find a very big black hole in order to do it, because otherwise, the gravity will kill you if you try to get close enough to get the effect you want. Gravity diminishes by the square of the distance, so you want to get a really big one so that its event horizon is a large distance from its center. The only ones like that are at the center of galaxies. It is becoming pretty certain that we have one, but its 60,000 light years away unfortunately. So even if you could travel at the speed of light, which you can't, it would take you 60K years to get there. And those are 60K years your time, so you actually have to experience them.

And its not time travel in the way that its generally thought of, i.e. it does not prove or imply that time is linear and exists outside of the now. You are just making your nows very long compared to other people's nows. You aren't 'skipping over' any time in that way that is implied in time travel as its usually represented in movies like we are discussing.

"what I was saying isn't based on any kind of knowledge advance"

I think that's exactly my point.
Why does it have to be an absolute given that IF time is linear and time travel is possible and is discovered... that this would certainly and necessarily result in self-destruction? Why do you reject even a possibility that some "knowledge advance" would provide us a means to avoid that?

I think this applies to everything we think we understand. Simply because we understand it only in the context of present day knowledge.

This forward "time travel" is really just sitting in the chair for a hundred years and making it feel like two minutes. But it would get the job done. What if there are many worlds? If you were able to travel into the past and kill your parents before you were born, it wouldn't be a paradox. They are the parents of another "you" in another universe. I don't have an opinion on the likelihood of many universes. But it would be the ultimate mind blower (IMO), if true.

For the same reason that I don't think that a cold cup of coffee will spontaneously become hot. You cannot travel back in time without affecting what happened. Its not possible. Our physical universe is a massively chaotic system (the butterfly effect is the standard example), and any change, over a sufficient period of time, can have massive changes. So the only way you could avoid the feedback system is if you don't ever go back. You might get lucky a couple times, but do you really think that if such a powerful tool existed that people wouldn't use it? But once you change even the slightest thing, then you reach the contradiction that the past couldn't have existed for you to travel back to, because you changed yourself, and therefore you very possibly don't exist.

And it can be the slightest thing. You get out of your time machine and step on a bee. But, had you not stepped on that bee, it would have flown off 1 second later, flew into a car, stung the driver, caused him to lose control, and crash, and kill a child who would have cured cancer. Even if that child wasn't important directly, all of the many generations of his/her descendants, and the efects they would have had on others, and so on, has now changed.

You might be able to go back in time to the middle of one of the massive million light year sized voids that exist out in between the web of galaxy structures without affecting anything. But even then, given a hundred million years (a drop in the bucket), some effect that you caused could migrate outward and affect something important.

If you were able to travel into the past and kill your parents before you were born, it wouldn't be a paradox. They are the parents of another "you" in another universe.


But, since in such theories, every possibility that could happen already has happened, and all of the possible alternate universes are there, then those alternate universes would have to include those caused by you coming back in time and causing other alternatives. I'm sure you can see how that would lead to not just a feedback loop, but an exponential explosion of what is already an exponential explosion of alternatives.

So, in those scenarios, you cannot go back and 'kill your parents', because you've already killed your parents, since that's one of the possibilities that could have happened. So you've not changed anything, everything that could have changed was changed and all of the alternatives already exist.

"do you really think that if such a powerful tool existed that people wouldn't use it?"

"People" meaning what? People on Earth in 2002? Of course I don't think that. They would do it as sure as the next Shymalyan (or however it's spelled) movie will make money.
But don't you understand? If it's discovered a thousand years or a million years from now; neither you, nor I, nor anyone has any conception of what "people" will be or will know or will do at that time.

Everything you've postulated is based only on what you know in 2002.

But although all possible outcomes do occur, they don't all occur in the same universe. There will be a nearly inifinite variety of outcomes, just as there are a nearly inifinte variety of universes. Isn't that consistent with the many worlds theory?

Everything you've postulated is based only on what you know in 2002.


Not so. Everything is based on the fact that, if it ever happens, it would be so destructive that we wouldn't be here to talk about it. But, no matter what you think about 'people' of the future, do you think that they would go through the massive effort of creating such a device and never even test it? What would be the point of ever even trying, if you never try it? You couldn't prove it worked until you tried it. And, once you do, you've opened Pandora's box, and all of the psychotic results will ensue. Also, once you've created it, and knowledge of it becomes public, then it will exist for all time after that, until each civilization that discovers the principle is destroyed. That means that all 'people' of that civilization, for all the time the entire civilization exists, will have to do exactly the perfectly correct thing. And even if that civilization manages to be perfect (yeh right), there will be plenty others that will be given a chance to screw up. You think that when the asteriod heads their way, that anyone who can escape to the past won't do so?

And, once they go back in time, that means that knowledge of time travel will immediately travel back further and further in time as well. So early and earlier times will be exposed to it, since once a time traveler arrives, don't you think he/she/it is going to want to have an escape route if possible? Or do they just stay forever where they wind up? Time travel will necessarily, if it can be done, require manipulation of space/time, which will require that they either send a machine back with them in order to get back (and none of them will ever in all of time fall into the hands of someone of the native time by accident?) or build a new one.

But although all possible outcomes do occur, they don't all occur in the same universe. There will be a nearly inifinite variety of outcomes, just as there are a nearly inifinte variety of universes. Isn't that consistent with the many worlds theory?


It is, but think about the results if every single possible 'coming back from the future and changing things' alternative had to exist. There are already an incomprehensible number of alternative universes branching off every microsecond. Now, every possibility that any atom from any point in the future could interact at any spot anywhere in every current moment would have to be added in. And, since everyone of those new alternatives creates an entirely new future, each of which in turn can send back any combination of atoms of its future back to interact with every possible atom of the current now.

Its a feedback loop that cannot ever be completed. So as soon as you started it, it would immediately begin to expand hyper-exponentially (if that's a word) and would never be able to stop. That's so ridiculously worse than the already ridiculous altnerative universe scenario that it approaches stupid.

You have an advantage on me. 2 hours time difference (no pun intended). Let's pick it back up tomorrow.

I'll use the time machine in my bedroom to achieve a low state of metabolic activity and travel forward to the time coordinates you indicate.

And, once they go back in time, that means that knowledge of time travel will immediately travel back further and further in time as well. So early and earlier times will be exposed to it"

What if it becomes possible to visit the past without the visitor's presence being visible to those who live in the past. In other words, what if right this moment a time traveler is standing immediately beside you?

If the visitor could prevent his presence from being known, why then would the past necessarily be altered by that visit?
What does that do to your contention that the "feedback loop" is a given?

p.s. I realize that this thought contradicts what I said in my third post to this thread (on page 1). But that post is now in the past. And my thinking has now evolved beyond that.

__________________________________________________

Completely aside from the above, I'm curious about something else. What's your take on this phenomenon of so many of us from all walks of life claiming to be witness to what they believe and describe as being "unidentified" (flying "saucers", lights, "beings", whatever form it takes)?
Do you believe that each and every one of these claims is either insincere or mistaken? And that not one of these people has actually been witness to something for which there is no current human understanding?
Or do you believe otherwise? If so, can you explain?

Just because someone can't be seen, doesn't mean that they don't interact with the environment. I might not see you, but can still crush that bee that was going to kick off that horrible series of events. I pretty much completely reject that any future technology would allow one to be in an environment physically and have no effect on it whatsoever. The laws of physics are pretty absolute in those very fundamental aspects, and advancing technology isn't likely to help.

It cannot be disproven that aliens aren't watching us right now. But, that's a long way from it's being true. Most people don't understand how fully 'reality' is what your brain tells you it is, and if your brain tells you you were probed by a gorgeous alien, then that's your reality, and it will seem as real to you as any memories of real events. When it comes to the past, there is no reality outside of our memory banks. And if our memory banks become corrupted, then that new past is just as 'real' as the actual past would have been.

Personally, I find it incredulous that there could be any significant alien presence around earth for any great length of time, without there being some undeniable proof. I don't care how advanced one's minds and technology are, the universe is a dangerous place and accidents happen. Also, has many have pointed out, don't you think its a little overly convenient that man's obsession with aliens being all around didn't start until we ourselves created the image of space flight and alien invasions in the 1950s?

I think we're at an impasse on the question of time travel. I'm trying to think outside of the 2002 box. But I'll admit that you're making an interesting agrument that doing so may be to no avail.

"Also, as many have pointed out, don't you think its a little overly convenient that man's obsession with aliens being all around didn't start until we ourselves created the image of space flight and alien invasions in the 1950s?"

Could well be an explanation for much of it. But in all fairness, the
literature does include references to many such claims which occurred before, and sometimes long before there was any mention of "aliens".
For example when WW2 pilots were reporting sightings of "foo fighters", that was before any popular notions of space flight and before anyone had seen the 1950's "alien invasions" on movie screens. Those individuals and the other claimants who preceded them make no suggestion of aliens or extra-terrestrials or space ships as being what they saw.

I don't know what to make of it all. But I am of the opinion that IF it is all just in the minds of those involved, then that scenario is even more remarkable than one in which some people actually are occasionally seeing things we truly cannot understand.

Bob

There are certainly things that cannot be explained easily. However, the problem is that, if something is not explicable, that means that the possible explanations fall into all of what we don't know. The likelihood that it is explained by aliens, as apposed to some not well understood, but completely normal, physical effect, is low.

As an example, the 'sprites and fountains' effect that occurs above the lower atmosphere above electrical storms is something that was only recently understood, but which could have easily freaked people out in the past if they saw them, and easily assigned a supernatural or extraterrestrial cause. They are really impressive looking and not something that you'd ever expect to see naturally, but they are completely normal.

I think man has had this obsession a lot longer than the 1950's. Take the bible for example, it is filled with supernatural events and I beleive that God is described as not being of this world which by definition automatically makes him an advanced alien? The bible was printed a long time before the 1950's and by ancient people who recorded events as they thought they saw.


____________________________________________________________ ______
"Most people don't understand how fully 'reality' is what your brain
tells you it is, and if your brain tells you you were probed by a
gorgeous alien, then that's your reality, and it will seem as real to
you as any memories of real events. When it comes to the past, there is
no reality outside of our memory banks. And if our memory banks become
corrupted, then that new past is just as 'real' as the actual past would
have been. "
_________________________________________
I respectfully dissagree as well. How do you reconcile this to all of mankinds abilities to record the past, such as measurements, print and video. For example, if I am part of the audience of Jay Leno and then later I watch this on tv and that recording agrees perfectly to what I remember....this is more than just my memory of the past event. The video recording is infact tangable proof that the event did occur.

Both Time Travel and UFO's are still a question.
However, I think extra-sensory perception may indeed exist. I site as evidence of it: my post to this same thread made on July 31st (4th post down from the top on page 2). :)

Bob

For example, if I am part of the audience of Jay Leno and then later I watch this on tv and that recording agrees perfectly to what I remember....this is more than just my memory of the past event. The video recording is infact tangable proof that the event did occur.


Unfortunately, despite the ubiquity of video recorders and cameras, no one has ever managed to record any unambiguous evidence of any of the things that we are discussing. Therefore, they are all based on human memory, which I promise you is horrible. It can be fooled very easily even in a perfectly functioning brain, and when stress or other factors are involved, human memory often isn't worth much at all.

The bible was printed a long time before the 1950's and by ancient people who recorded events as they thought they saw.


Exactly. And that's exactly why now instead of seeing firey wheels in the sky, people see aliens exactly as they were portrayed in those 50's movies and books. The reason that they all see in the sky what they are familiar with is because what they are seeing comes from their own imaginations, which are informed by the civilization around them. Do you really think that people in Biblical times were so stupid that if a UFO really landed and little green people really got out that they understand this well enough to report: "This vehicle came down from the sky and little green people got out"?

Unfortunately, despite the ubiquity of video recorders and cameras, no one has ever managed to record any unambiguous evidence of any of the things that we are discussing.

Up until his death, Allen Hynek was probably our single most reliable compiler of all the known UFO evidence (photographic or otherwise).
While he was convinced that he was unable to explain much of it (and he was a respected astronomer), he was also deeply frustrated that he could not provide any "unambiguous" evidence. Even after devoting most of his later life to the search for it.

The reason that they all see in the sky what they are familiar with is because what they are seeing comes from their own imaginations,

But what if some of them are actually seeing something that is not within the realm of our understanding? Then they too will report it in a way that is consistent with what they are familiar with. "It was shaped like a saucer". "It was shaped like a cigar". That is the only way any of us would be able to describe it.

Earlier last century when people of primitive island cultures in the South Pacific began seeing airplanes in the sky, they reported instead seeing giant shiny birds which moved very rapidly. The airplane was unknown to them. Birds were known to them. So all they could describe was a bird.
Would you tell us that when they witnessed seeing these objects in the sky that it was only in their imagination? Just because they described it as being something they were familiar with?

I was speaking of things more explicit. If anyone just sees something fiery or shiney in the sky, I put no stock in that at all. People seeing something fiery or shiney in the sky today would probably describe it just like they used to, and such things are easily explicable.

But if something that really was indicative of an unambiguous alien presense was seen back then, they would be just as capable of describing it in an unambiguous manner as we would be. If they said, "A box come down from the sky, landed, opened up, and small green men got out of it", I think that would be completely within their mental capabilities. But basically, they never saw any more than people manage to get pictures of today, which are all just interesting or wierd physical phenomenon, a long way off.

In particular today, its almost impossible for anyone to claim that they saw a UFO. There are automated sky surveys going on all the time, using very sensitive telescopes and sophisticated software to watch for local changes in the positions of objects in the sky. Anything obvious enough for a human to see well enough to claim it was anything remotely alien would clearly show up on these surveys occasionally, and be flagged in a major way by the software, since it would be a changing light source very close to the earth and would stand out like a sore thumb. I.e. if they are here, then they have to be wearing their "Romulan Cloking Devices" in order to avoid being constantly caught in these automated surveys, which means that people wouldn't be able to physically see them anyway.

What I want to know is, how come the aliens only probe hillbillies?

Lord. As we speak I'm trying to prepare a response to one post and now y'all (my hillybilly vernacular) have thrown out two more posts.

Exactly! BTW, that little bit in "Best of Show" with the guy talking about being probed is so hilarious that I'm cracking up right now just thinking about it.

Whoa. Before the two of you get too confident with this, it's a myth that only hillbillies make the claims. It's all walks of life. It includes airline pilots who've never set foot in the Apalachians. It includes astronauts. It includes both Presidents and Presidential candidates (well maybe one of those was a hillbilly. I can't remember).

I think a distinction is called for here. Dean, you keep using the word "alien".
I prefer the term "unidentified".

I think the distinction is important because there is a huge difference between someone claiming to have seen (or been probed by) an extra-terrestrial being and someone telling us they see something they cannot explain (and maybe even none of us can explain). The latter is inherently easier for me to accept.

No one to this point has produced even a shred of worthwhile evidence (ambiguous or otherwise) to make a case for "creatures from outer space" (which is verbatim one of Websters definitions for "alien").

However, I don't totally discount all of the claims of seeing the "unidentified". And I'm not convinced that in each case it can be explained.

And btw, it's not uncommon for UFO sightings to coincide with radar reports of the same thing.

Carl Sagan, when asked if he believed in UFOs, typically responded "of course". He, and many others, think that a lot of sightings were due to military test aircraft or spy planes which would never be admitted to.

And hillbillys aren't the only targets. Cartman, for example. And it would go a long way toward explaining Sect'y Rumsfeld's facial expressions.

M


P.S. It seems like there was not too much disagreement on the movie, huh? Pretty weak.

I speak only for me but I fell asleep twice (once for a rather extended period) while watching it.

Since 1950's movies were mentioned earlier, I'm wondering if (like me) any of you are ancient enough to have been around to see them back then. If so can anyone else relate to my last post in this thread...
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=160375

Bob

However, I don't totally discount all of the claims of seeing the "unidentified". And I'm not convinced that in each case it can be explained


Well certainly if you see something, and can't identify it, its a sighting of an unidentified object. But its pretty syllogistic to derive anything else from that fact. I hold that in all cases, if the event were subject to careful examination, it wouldn't be unexplained anymore. One off events, that never repeat and which leave no physical evidence are not subject to examination, and are therefore in the 'bleeding Jesus statue' area.

You're about to wear me down again (I'm gradually running out of bs for this too).

But you know what? It would tickle me to no end (more hillbilly vernacular) if some day you yourself were to see something in the sky that is so unusual that you're stumped by it. If that ever should happen and there is still an AVS Forum I hope you'll let me know about it.
I say this because exactly that happened to someone I know. At the time he was the local medical examiner here. He too gave no credence to any of this before that. And then he saw it.
I know. You will tell me that what he saw is just anecdotal and could be easily explained. But you can believe me that you will never be able to get him to accept that.

I did see such a thing. One night when I was say 17 or something like that, I was taking my younger sister somewhere. As we pulled out of the driveway, we say this thing in the sky, which had this weird scintilating light pattern on it. It looked like it was about trailer sized and maybe a mile away up in the air. We watched it for a while but couldn't figure it out.

So, I took here where she was going, and on the way back I saw it again. But this time it was much closer, and it was a blimp with a lighted aftertisement on the side. I lived in a very small town, and nothing like that had ever come over that area, so there was no way I'd have expected it or thought that it might be such a thing. If I hadn't seen it again, it would be yet another of those anecdotal stories that drive these myths. But, of course it was nothing mysterious at all.

I know when I'm whipped. :)

OK, so in summation:

1. We are the center of the universe.

2. We are the sole inhabitors of this great expanse.

3. We are the smartest beings to ever exist.

4. Only we, and we alone, are capable of coherent thought.

5. We are the HT elite.

6. HT is our favourite hobbie.

7. HT is the hobbie of the elite of the smartest beings in the center of the universe.

8. HT is the hobbie of the gods.

9. The gods are not pleased with "The Time Machine"

Gus

I think the general public would say that there is proof of extraterrestrials having visited the earth and having progeny to show for it! How else could there be an explanation for the existence of the audio/videophile?:D
Art

1. We are the center of the universe.
2. We are the sole inhabitors of this great expanse.
3. We are the smartest beings to ever exist.
4. Only we, and we alone, are capable of coherent thought.


I hope you didn't get anything like that from my comments. I was implying almost the absolute opposite. We are nothing. We are so irrelevant that to think that super-intelligent civilizations out there have nothing better to do that keep up with our transactions is the height of egotism.

And even if they were that bored that they would want to come here for vacations, this assumes that they have come up with a faster than light transport system, which is very unlikely anyway. We can be pretty sure that there are no or very few alien civilizations out there anywhere in our local galactic neighborhood, or if they are nearby and are visiting us, they would have had to create a super-advanced technology without emiting the huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation that such a civilization would almost certainly be spewing out in droves. But we've not found any such emanations from any nearby stars.

But clearly, given that that are an estimated couple hundred billion galaxies out there, each with from tens of billions to trillions of stars in them, we could hardly be the only place in all of that where local chemicals formed a more perfect union. I think that, even from just a purely statistical point of view, the odds of us being the only ones is unbelieveably low. However, if you go through the Drake equation, there are plenty of factors that could contribute to keeping the number in any one galaxy relatively low and spread out, both in time and space. Given that that would start getting into distances of thousands to tens of thousands of light years spread among them, the likelihood of their interacting could be very, very low.

Despite its casually existing in every sci-fi epic out there, I think that we can safely say that the odds of faster than light travel being possible for macroscopic, complex entities like ourselves and our machines, is probably well below 50/50. So it might be possible, but all evidence of how the universe currently works says its quite likely not to be. If that's the case, or if doing so basically kills anything that is subjected to it, or it cannot be controlled and you end up at some random destination, or any number of other things that would make it not workable or impossible, then the likelihood of us ever meeting another civilization other than through radio communcations is basically nil. It doesn't have to be nil, but the current preponderence of evidence says that it will be.

Your last post would be a very cogent argument

But only if you change this...

all evidence of how the universe currently works

to this...

current evidence of how all the universe works

In my humble opinion, that is.

Actually, "evidence" means:

"Plainly visible; to be seen"

so it implies that which is current visible or known to us. If its something beyond our knowledge, it is not evident.

My semantics stand corrected.

What I keep trying to emphasize is that evidence may be discovered in the future which possibly will refute what you now believe to be evident.

It's a simple point. But not an insignificant one.

Bob,

I think you might enjoy this website: http://www.mkaku.org/ It is the official website of Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at CUNY. He has written on time travel, wormholes and more.

Thanks, Larry. I'll take a look.

Then maybe what we think are extra-terrestrials are our progeny from the distant future time-travelling? This might explain the rumors of them breeding with us. Possibly one of their dictums, us or them, is to not appear in situations where their existence is totally verifiable. They could have been around for thousands and thousands of years and simply have hung out in unexplored areas; by the fifties, there wasn't much left unexplored.

Although apparently Nostradamus predicted somewhere (this is what I heard from someone else- much of Nostradamus seems so obscure that it can predict most anything), as did A.C. Clarke in Childhood's End, that we as humans will persist for only a couple of more thousand years. Whether we will evolve into something else and go somewhere, or simply destroy ourselves (a much more believable scenario to Dogfood), who knows?

Its very probably unlikely that our descendants from far out in the future would be able to breed with us. It won't be because of genetic drift, because there probably won't be that much within another 10K years (unless some serious environment stress causes it, but if survive another 10K years, its likely that our technology could protect us from most things), but because of direct manipulation driving changes in the human genome.

I cannot imagine that even 200 years from now we won't have bowed to the pressure to improve ourselves via manipulation of the human genome. Its too powerful a tool to go unused. And, just like any 'weapon', it will be overused, justified by the need to breed super-warriors (because the other side is doing it already.) But, of course, the super warriors might eventually wonder why the hell they are dying for us whimps and getting very little pay and just kill us.

Its all been covered ad nauseum in the sci-fi books, but its been covered ad nauseum because its a completely plausible scenario, based on man's past and even conservative projections as to where our technology is going.

What I keep trying to emphasize is that evidence may be discovered in the future which possibly will refute what you now believe to be evident.


But anything is 'possible'. Monkeys really could fly out of my butt. However, that's not a useful argument really. What you have to look at is what is likely and what is not likely, and the odds as best we can see them. Its clear that we will develop amazing means of manipulating matter on very small scales, which will allow for things that will blow our minds.

But that's piddly compared to direct transportation through time or space. Its possible that such things could be developed. But the odds are very low. Every age of course thinks it knows everything, and has to eat crow in some way. But, the gap is continuously closing. Assuming that what is knowable is not infinite (and I do not belive it is, though it is large), every age gets closer to that limit, and thus has less and less crow to eat as time goes on.

We are beginning to get a pretty damn good feel for things by now. Definitely our understanding will deepen, tremendously. But the odds are still low that we are going to discover how to cheat the laws of thermodynamics, for instance. And, in the case of time travel, I've already presented my arguments for why it could never become possible, because if it ever can, it already has, and the results would be tremendous and all around us.

But anything is 'possible'. Monkeys really could fly out of my butt. However, that's not a useful argument really. What you have to look at is what is likely and what is not likely

I found these quotes with the link Larry provided...

Newton believed that time was like an arrow; once fired, it soared in a straight, undeviating line. One second on the earth was one second on Mars. Clocks scattered throughout the universe beat at the same rate.

Einstein gave us a much more radical picture. According to Einstein, time was more like a river, which meandered around stars and galaxies, speeding up and slowing down as it passed around massive bodies. One second on the earth was Not one second on Mars. Clocks scattered throughout the universe beat to their own distant drummer.

http://members.cox.net/xanadu/TIMELINE.JPG

Bob

Sure, you could point out a million such steps forward. But the thing is, the differences between Newton's phsics and Einstein's physics is very small, and only comes into play around very dense objects or at very high speeds. Newton's physics were completely legitimate and remain so today, its just a subset of Einstein's physics.

The only way that you could move beyond Einstein's physics is to go faster than light or find something more dense than infinitely dense (which a black hole is.) Neither of those things seem likely. Einstein's predictions have been carried out to very high levels of accuracy, and it seems to be quite correct. And it does not allow for anything to travel faster than the speed of light. There is no guarantee at all that he didn't make the ultimate step forward in terms of understanding gravity on the macro level, or that any better theory will ever have more predictive power. Everyone hopes for a quantum theory of gravity, but there's no guarantee that such a thing even exists. The micro and macro worlds might really be permanently on different sides of the fence.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say there is that, using a theory that absolutely guarantees that nothing can go faster than the speed of light and which completely guarantees classical cause and effect ordering, is probably not a good way to argue your case :-)

Anyway, as I was saying, its useless to argue about what could possibly, maybe be. Monkey's really could fly out of my butt, but are you going to base any plans in your life on it? I'm definitely not, other than maybe keep some extra HandyWipes around.

Basically, these types of arguments are like Biblical arguments, in that they cannot be refuted because anything is possible, and no evidence is to be had. We can conjecture all we want, and I do it all the time since its a favorite day dream of mine to go back in time knowing what I know. But, the odds are very low that they will ever come to be.

What Dean is saying is that these are "untestable hypothesis". Too much speculation. It's not a popular or exciting view, but we simply may be approaching a saturation point where we have learned, say, 80% of the physics there is to know. The usual response to this is that it's been said before like in the late 1800s, but there have been huge changes in the approach to science since then. Mysticism is dying in modern society, and hopefully it will not come back.

What I'm saying is that we can now see the edges of the universe, we can see the smallest permanent units of matter and understand even smaller pieces. There are holes and problems to fix in physics, but they are mostly in tying theories to the real world. There is still a lot to explain and learn in nature, but it's growing far less likely that we will uncover a smoking gun that will overthrow a lot of what we know. And what we know, sadly for sci-fi buffs, me included, means a lot of those neat technologies like time travel to the past and transporters are practically impossible.

M

The usual response to this is that it's been said before like in the late 1800s, but there have been huge changes in the approach to science since then. Mysticism is dying in modern society, and hopefully it will not come back.


Yeh, that's something I kept trying to get in there but never quite got it said right. We have moved exponentially forward over the last century, increasing the area under the knowledge curve more since 1900 than it was increased in all previous time put together. Nature is complex, and subtle, but not bottomless. If we are 80% there, the next 20% is really going to be cool, but not likely to fundamentally change the other 80%.

And actually, we should be specific here. I'm assuming that that number refers to the area of core physics, i.e. the nature of matter and energy. There are still huge areas of investigation in terms of biotech and software and other areas of technology application, but none of those things are going to fundamental change the way we look at the nature of our universe, they are just incredibly advanced, very cool applications of what we know.

So, there can still be a mongomerous amount of exploration still ahead of us, despite the fact that we might be getting relatively close to the fundamental truths about the nature of matter and energy. Once we get those fundamental truths worked out, even if they don't cause some massive revolution such as time travel, the applications of those truths are going to be more than revolutionary enough. The rate of change of change is already more than many people can handle, and its just begun.

Maybe. But so is the amount of time which separates the two. Less than 300 years. If instead I had compared what was man's understanding of nature two thousand years ago to that of today what do we find? Would you still describe the difference as being "small"?


But that's kind of the point mmoore and I are making here at the end. Saying that cave people knew squat, and we know a lot more, therefore we are going to know as much more in another thousand years is syllogistic. One doesn't follow the other. The very fact that we know millions of times more about the nature of nature could be proof that we are getting close. The well is not bottomless. It does have an end. We don't know where it ends, but it could end in another 20 years, at least in terms of having an understanding of any fundmamental aspects of nature that are remotely within our grasp to manipulate. Things to know about nature probably will follow an asymptotic curve, and the further you go along that curve, the shallower the slope gets (statistically of course, there can be discontinuities.)

If we discover that there are in fact an infinite number of alternate universes, to which we cannot go, that will be really cool and interesting, but will have no practical effect on our abilities. We are in this one, and the laws of physics of this one are the ones we have to deal with it.

Of, if we discover that in fact string theory is correct and that we live in a 10 dimensional world, but the other 6 are rolled up in infinitesimally small areas that we either cannot every explore, or cannot do anything useful with even if we do, then that will be very cool, but it won't change a thing in terms of giving us super-human abilities.

So there may be many more things yet to learn, but it many well be that many of those things (such as what the conditions were 10x-43 seconds after the big bang), are cool but there's no way we can use that information to do much in practical terms.

Technology of course will continue to explode (as long as it doesn't explode us first), and 1000 years from now might be indistinguishable from magic to us. To me, that is likely to be more important to us in the long run that time travel would be. Time travel would be a very dangerous tool, far more so than nuclear weapons, and could never really be used without huge risk. So even if it existed, in what way would it make your life better than having a 5000x5000 flat walls screen with 64 bit color and 500Hz refresh rate, playing from a 1 cm square cube? I'll take the wall screen myself, because its great fun and probably won't cause the self destruction of our civilization.

It's beginning to feel like we're re-enacting "Inherit the Wind".
But I'm not sure which of is Darrow and which of us is Bryan.

"Once we get those fundamental truths worked out"

"It does have an end. "

"it could end in another 20 years"

"none of those things are going to fundamentally change the way we look at the nature of our universe"

Sound familiar?

Well Dean, I still say "wow" when I see a really amazing picture from Hubble. That all matter may be composed of incredibly tiny, vibrating strings is fascinating to me. You sound almost bored by physics. I think incredible discoveries await humanity.

I screwed up. I discovered that I must have accidentally inserted the "it's beginning to..." comment as both an edit and a new post. When I attempted to delete the insertion I removed a whole post. That has now left Dean replying to (and quoting from) a post which does not exist. So if anyone reads the thread now just use your own imagination. There is apparently no way to restore that post in the order in which it was made.

We have ended (if indeed we have ended) with Dean making a reference to home theater and me making a reference to movies. Lest anyone think we are off-topic.

Bob

Bob,

I think Dean needs to seek out new life and new civilizations. Simply put, to boldly go where no man has gone before! Oh nevermind. I am retiring to my time machine (I call it my "bed").

I love physics. I read about it constantly actually. I've just in recent months read:

1. Quantum Generations. A great, semi-schololarly coverage of the history of quantum theory
2. Uncertainty. A biography of Werner Hiesenburg
3. Great Physicists. A set of mini-bios of the most important physicists from Newton forward.
4. Understanding Relativity. A very good, not overly complex coverage of special relativity.
5. Hubble Wars. Covers the building and creation of the Hubble, and all of the wierd politics involved.
6. Build the Atomic Bomb. Richard Rhode's excellent history of the bomb project.

And I have a lot of other really good ones in my library that I re-read occasionally. In particular I would recommend:

1. Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Definitely recommended book by Timothy Ferris. So readable, and so educational. Also I have his "The Whole Shebang" which is also very good.

2. The previously mentioned "Black Holes and Time Warps" by Kip Thorne. Definitely very good, but probably a bit much for casual readers.

3. Genius. A biography of Richard Feyman. Very, very good.

Oh, and yes, I've stared for hours at pretty pictures from the Hubble. I'm completely amazed by the world we live in. But I'm also pragamatic about what is likely to be possible and what is not.

I'm sorry but there's just more which needs to be said.

To moore,

we simply may be approaching a saturation point where we have learned, say, 80% of the physics there is to know. The usual response to this is that it's been said before like in the late 1800s, but there have been huge changes in the approach to science since then.

Are those to be the only "huge changes"? Just those changes which occurred in that one short span of 100 years? There will be no more. You're certain of that? Is that hypothesis testable (those are your words)?

I have to ask you both this. Is this thinking typical of most physicists and those who study physics? That it's about to all stop with what we know now? That we're close to answering all of the fundamental questions? That those answers won't give rise to any more fundamental questions? That it's like a movie entitled "Search For The Edge Of The Universe" and we're just about to THE END? That once this movie is in the can then no one will ever again propose an entirely new screenplay? With an entirely new plot? And with entirely new questions asked?

Again, do most physicists and astronomers think like this?

Bob

Originally posted by RobertWood
Are those to be the only "huge changes"? Just those changes which occurred in that one short span of 100 years? There will be no more. You're certain of that? Is that hypothesis testable (those are your words)?


I'm by no means certain of that, that's why I said maybe. I don't even necessarily agree. And it's only a testable hypothesis to the extent that we can look back in another 100 years and know, but that's the realm in which this discussion exists.

Is this thinking typical of most physicists and those who study physics? That we're close to answering all of the fundamental questions? That it's like a movie entitled "Search For The Edge Of The Universe" and we're just about to THE END? That once this movie is in the can then no one will ever again propose an entirely new screenplay? With an entirely new plot? And with entirely new questions asked?


I haven't done an official survey, but I'd say yes to most of the questions. What would the new screenplay be? That E=mc^3? F=m/a? It simply doesn't work. Now, I said physics for a reason, that being the most fundamental science. Even then, physics isn't done by a long shot. That last 20% might hold a lot of fascinating, mind-blowing stuff in it, and might take a long time to sort out, but it's really unlikely to uproot the first 80%.

It's not all about to stop tho. There is still a LOT of science out there to learn and a LOT of mystery in the universe. The whole issue of extraterrestrials has got to be one of the biggest discoveries on the far horizon. And within the physics we know, there is a lot of room for technological progress. Nothing forbids travelling to the edges of the universe in the physics we know, it would just take one heck of a ship and you'd be saying a permanent goodbye to anyone left behind.

I also want to emphatically say that scientists aren't 'of one mind' or dullards by a long shot. You can find articles exploring the possibilities of time travel in the best journals, (e.g. Physical Review). Many times, however, the results of these thought experiments, which took bright people months of work, can be summed up by the phrase "doesn't work in our universe". And I hope no one here seriously thinks that the scientific community could 'supress' someone who had discovered real time travel. Anyone who claims that is happening to him is a crank.

Still I like watching movies with time travel themes. :)

M

"maybe" :)

There are two possibilities. One is that we are closer to the final understanding of the basic nature of matter and energy, and the other is that we are closer to the beginning. Given that we have now explored down to the level of quarks, and that there is no reason to believe that they have any further internal structure, and appear to have been created very early in the big bang, leads many scientists to think that we are closer to the end than to the beginning.

Quantum electrodynamics, for instance, despite being a bit kludgy and everyone knowing that its not perfect, has been tested to a ridiculous level of certainty, more so than any other theory in history. It is the theory behind all this cool electronic stuff we have. Even if some new theory came along that moved it from say the 6th decimal place of accuracy to the 7th, it would be an intellectual achievement, but wouldn't make much practical difference to us, because the current theory is doing quite well thanks.

As said above a few times, the further exploration and application of the ramifications of that theory will create some amazingly cool stuff. But those will just be applications of the theory, not a fundamental revolution in how we understand electromagnetic radiation.

The big things, as I understand them, that need to be answered (and that would have some practical effect on us) are:

1. What is 'the field'? No one really knows. Its The Matrix. Its all around us, and permeates everything, and its what electromagnetism vibrates, but no one knows what it is. That's a big question, and answering that could have a revolutionary fallout. Or, it might not. It might be that we figure out what it is, but we never find a way to manipulate it, because perhaps its just our 3D view of a higher dimensional reality that impinges on ours. If we cannot ever get into or see into that higher dimension, then knowing it will be cool, but not of much practical difference to us.

2. What came before the big bang. This may never be answered. Physics cannot answer it, because the laws of physics are of this universe, and are not necessarily applicable outside of it. Even if we did answer it, its highly unlikely that that knowledge would do us much good, though it would be one of the coolest things ever discovered and whoever does it should get a lifetime's supply of Nobel prizes.

3. Quantum gravity (aka The Theory of Everything.) It may never happen. It may be that gravity really is just a warpage of space time as Einstein said, and not be quantized or mediated by a force carrying particle. Or it might, and that would definitely be worth a truck load of Nobel prizes as well. But its not evident that such a theory would have much practical effect. Like relativity, it might only be applicable in areas of super high density or at super high speeds, and no one believes that it will invalidate the rules of either quantum mechanics or relativity, but instead that it will just provide a way to translate between the two, whereas now they are two separate worlds (micro and macro.)


But even if none of these things were figured out, the advances in technology that will come just by completely exploiting what we know already will be unbelieveable, and more than dangerous enough probably.

Oh, and I forgot a big one "Nuclear fussion". If I had to pick one thing that I thought would be the most important discovery that could be made in this century, this would be it. The availability of very cheap, practically inexhaustable, very safe, electrical energy would make more differences in our lives (for the better) than any of the things mentioned above. It would change life forever, and if you think that the dot com ramp up of the stock market was stellar, it would pale in comparison to what would happen if the energy content cost of a product was effectively a non-issue. It would be an unbelievable achievement, and equal to the discovery of electricity and penicillin in terms of its profound benefits to mankind.

Thanks to you both for sharing some of your knowledge.
I hope this discussion has been as much fun for you as it was for me. :)

Bob

Just one lingering thing that is nagging me.
Why was this comment made? Was that intended to offer further evidence that time travel will never happen? Or did I miss something?

I hope no one here seriously thinks that the scientific community could 'supress' someone who had discovered real time travel. Anyone who claims that is happening to him is a crank.

I can't help but laugh at some of the minor time anomalies that have already come to pass over the course of this tread!;) Wouldn't it be funny if we could all see ourselves typing away at the same...time.

So, even a mediocre film on the subject of time travel instigates wonderful thought and debate.

I think for all of us that live in the present time, time travel is a very important part of where we as a society are headed. Time and Travel are two very big constants in our daily lives...this applies to how we spend our "time" each day, and how we physically get from point A to point B each and every day.

As we think about travel in time, how might we actually move closer to it from fiction to fact? The obvious answers are technological breakthroughs in power sources...the ability to travel faster and faster through space. I can't help but think that this will ultimately tie into enormous improvements in mass transportation. I think the notion of being able to move/tavel through transportation devices is not out of the question one day...probably in ways we can not yet conceive.

Time travel as we are discussing it may never come to be, and displacement in time may very well become a reality. I imagine the technology necessary to travel long distances in space, and the amount of time that one might have to sacrifice in order to acheive it; i.e. The astronaut that leaves the earth for a mission and returns only having aged a few years, yet based upon displacement, 30 years or more may have passed by. This might necessitate a space program with travelers that are required to be single (unattached) for obvious reasons...or perhaps the need for travel in space as a group, be it family or friends...I know this is a bit far fetched, but I'm trying to point out how factual time travel into the future might occur.

Another, possibility might be that we may never be able to physically purge the time stream, yet we may figure out a way to view events that have already happened...this has actually already been going on for many years as we photograph and even simply view the visible solar system.

This takes me back to the film again...we need a much much better time travel epic...Peter Jackson are you reading?;)

Howie

Which brings us to this question. Why are more thought provoking movies not being made? I would have had a different answer for that before reading this thread. One along the lines of most moviegoers not giving a rat's ass.
But it's evident from reading the the thoughts of those who have participated not only in this one thread, but in this message board in general, that there is a huge appetite for this. One that's not being satisfied. And I don't really have any elitist notions that we're much different from the movie going public at large.

Bob

I think the notion of being able to move/tavel through transportation devices is not out of the question one day...probably in ways we can not yet conceive.


That would be an immensely dangerous technology. We've seen so many Star Trek episodes that people don't think about it. But if we could effectively do transporters, then it would mean that we can synthesize people from scratch, or make as many copies of someone as we want.

But its definitely one of those things that is very unlikely to happen. Though we are macro objects, we are composed of quantum bits and pieces. Those cannot be measured accurately, only statistically. So there is no way to precisely measure the state of a human body and recreate it somewhere else.

Also, what do you do with the body you just scanned? They gloss over this in Star Trek, but its a huge issue. You can't actually transmit the matter of the original person, even if you could precisely measure his/her state. You could only reproduce a copy of that recorded data on the other end. So do they kill the original one? In order to transmit the actual original content, you would have to convert it to energy, which would be very painful I can assume you.

Not not be very pleasant to look at either. "The Fly" made me loose my cookies.
Although I recall one reviewer saying Jeff Goldblum "looks like an insect before the makeup".

You can't actually transmit the matter of the original person, even if you could precisely measure his/her state. You could only reproduce a copy of that recorded data on the other end. So do they kill the original one?

Yes! I have wondered the same thing. On Star Trek, when they "beam up" and "beam down", they are committing suicide. They are not the same people, they are recreations of who/what these people were. Did you see The Sixth Day, with Arnold Schwarzenegger? The guy playing Steve Jobs (oops, I mean corporate CEO) met his own instant clone with reconstituted memory. I was completely shocked by that and realized that we can NEVER create another "I", just something that thinks it is. Anyway... you'll never get me to beam down, Scotty! I don't want to die and then have a doppleganger live its life thinking it is me. Yikes.

I find this thread quite illogical and full of misinformation. Even a Vulcan child has a superior knowledge of physics compared to the participants here. Transporter technology uses gradient spectral equilibrium and the matter that is reconstituted is the same matter that was deconstituted on the other end. To put the matter in simple terms that you humans can understand, just as the heart of most species can stop for a period of time before death occurs, so matter can be deconstituted and reconstituted over a period of several nanoseconds without harm to the individual. And it does not hurt Mr. Roddey any more than a phosolythic injection.

Originally posted by RobertWood
Just one lingering thing that is nagging me.
Why was this comment made? Was that intended to offer further evidence that time travel will never happen? Or did I miss something?

"I hope no one here seriously thinks that the scientific community could 'supress' someone who had discovered real time travel. Anyone who claims that is happening to him is a crank."



No, there's no further evidence in my comment, it's just one of those things that always pops up when you have some screwball claiming to have invented something fantastic. Like the famed 100mpg carburetor or chewing gum that lasts 10 hours, there's this myth that (1) the science/technology establishment has the power to stop a person from demonstrating their breakthru (which is laughable), and (2) has an interest counter to the discovery (what company wouldn't want to turn a profit?)

Even very destructive technologies, for which time travel may qualify, can't be 'suppressed', even when they come from within a highly secretive establishment. What keeps nuclear arms from being used willy nilly is careful control over sources of fissionable material. The principle is known the world over, and there have been clever, workable designs of bombs by high school students. It's the pandora's box or genie out of the bottle syndrome.

Anyway, it was kind of a tangent, sorry if it added confusion.

M

Larry,

I really liked some of the ideas in the Sixth Day, including the one you mentioned.


I check my eyelids every now and then for gold dots :)


There was a sci-fi story, I forget the name, where you could be 'uploaded' and your mind run in a computer, guaranteeing long life and a paradise of your own creation. Only, what do you do with the flesh-and-blood copy left behind? The procedure was to put the person to sleep, scan their brain, then ... lethal injection. People decide they are OK with this. Fun stuff.

Somebody pinch Spock on the neck.

M

Transporter technology uses gradient spectral equilibrium and the matter that is reconstituted is the same matter that was deconstituted on the other end.


I knew I should read the insides of those stupid soda pop bottle tops.

You guys are completely right about the molecule/human destruction and subsequent resequencing result. However, in science fiction (such as Star Trek) I always assumed that the technology allowed for individual molecules to stay in tact without destroying them. The big loophole obviously is that the technology was never explained...silly or not.

In practical terms (as we might pretend to understand the possible future applications of advanced travel) we might be able to conceive of a way in which we are able travel along points of light without every disturbing our molecules...in much the same way are bodies are excellerated to varying degress by any type of movement/propulsion.

It's crazy to imagine scrambling our dna, but not so hard to imagine being somehow "pushed" or possibly "projected" through space at unbelievable speeds similar to the way light travels.

Howie

That's really thinking outside the 2002 box, Howie. I like it.

Let's just hope it's covered in that last 20% of all possible knowledge.
(or that it hasn't been ruled out by the first 80%) :)

Bob

One interesting point, which most people never think about, but its obvious after its pointed out, is that light does not experience time. At the speed of light, time effectively stops for the traveler. Since light by definition (in a vacuum anyway) travels at the speed of light, photons never experience time. They just zip along until they are absorbed. Until then they are timeless so to speak.

Light does get slowed down when traveling through materials, but still its not a whole lot. BTW, the ratio of the speed of light in a vacuum to the speed of light through a material, defines that material's 'index of refraction', which controls how much the light gets bent when it passes from the air into the substance. This is the basis of IOR numbers for lenses and stuff, and why glasses cause your convergence to be off if you look through the edge of them and whatnot.

No one really knows why IOR causes light to bend though. Its a complete mystery. There's no obvious reason why slowing the light down causes it to bend instantly. There is some belief that it has to do with the 'minimum effort' principle, but no one really can fully explain it. Yet another way pick your Nobel prize, Mr. Feynman.

If we think of travel in time in terms of moving actual mass, then does it not make sense that our eventual evolution as a species may be what actually allows travel via extreme light wave movement to take place.

As an optomist I would like to think that our future holds the end of disease and warfare, and quite possibly the evolution of our minds to the extent that our physical form becomes very secondary...this would open many new doors to types of travel that for now and the near future are completely impossible.

Howie

Of course, it could go the completely opposite way, that if we reached that point of becoming pure thought, maybe we wouldn't even have any real desire to travel. If you are only a mind, and in your mind you can do anything you want, perhaps we would just completely 'vegetate', to the point that something with no body could do something like that :-)

Originally posted by Dean Roddey
I knew I should read the insides of those stupid soda pop bottle tops.
Until you said that I was going to offer to mind meld with you. It's probably best I didn't. With that chasm you humans call a brain, you might have sucked all the knowledge right out of me.

I have decided to endanger myself and mind meld with Robert Wood instead. At least I will have a clean slate to work with.

Actually, the ability of humans to sucks things out of one another is one of our more endearing attributes.

I'm getting sleepy, Spock. I think it's working.
I'm closing my eyes. Yes, I'm getting something. But what is that I'm seeing? Oh my God! It's Sulu and Uhura. And they're...
No, that's not it. But it is a person. Gosh, who is it? Wait a minute. I'm getting a name. Is it John? Yes, that's it. John de Lancie.
Am I warm, Spock? ;)

Yes. What a surprise!! :D

Originally posted by Dean Roddey


If we are 80% there, the next 20% is really going to be cool, but not likely to fundamentally change the other 80%.



WOW! 80% huh?

If we ( as a species) were taking a test to determine whether we were OMNISCIENT, we would pass with a B! doesn't that make us some kind of gods? Ok we are B-class gods.

One question though, how do we know how much we DON"T KNOW? how can we estimate that we only have 20% left to learn?

We haven't even finished exploring THIS planet yet.
In the context of the entire universe, we are babies that haven't even left our crib yet.
We don't even know what's on the surface of Mars!
Come to think of it, we haven't even figured out how our own minds work.

My guess ( and it is JUST A GUESS) is we probably know one twentieth of one percent.

Gus

You probably missed the point, though we made it a couple of times, that we were refering specifically to an understanding of matter and energy, i.e. the fundamental questions of physics. That is a limited and targeted area of inquiry, into which we've burrowed quite deeply already.

But, as was said a number of times, that doesn't have anything to do with the many variations and consequences of what we already know. We don't know this earth completely yet, but nothing the learn about this earth is going to change our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter. We haven't begun to explore where electronics can go, but doing so isn't going to fundamentally change our understanding of quantum electrodynamics.

But within the narrow target that was being discussed, it is quite possible that we are 80% there. Some scientists, who are not egotistical idiots and not given to hyperbole, think that's quite possible. The fact of the 'matter' (pun intended) is that the fundamental nature of matter is probably not a bottomless pit with endless doors to open. The ramifications of the things that we learn on the way to the last door can go on and on and on, but that doesn't mean that the doors keep opening downward, just outward.

Gus,

Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! often comes to mind when I think of our place in the universe.:D

Howie

Actually Horton would be more like our place in a universe of universes, assuming there is such a thing, and if there is that it can possibly have any effect on us in ours. In our own Universe, we can see a long, long way. We can't see to the edge, because light hasn't had time to come to us from more than about 15 billion light years out. But, we can see more or less a sphere with a radius of 15 billion light years, and that's a huge space. Within that space, physics seems to work exactly everywhere as it works here. As is always the case in a system that's young, energy consumption was profligate back in the early days, but basic physics shows no changes back 15 billion years from now.

In general, I'd always make a distinction between knowing more facts, and figure out things that have any practical impact on us. Discovering that there are an infinite number of other universes that we can never get to would be amazing but completely useless in terms of making us better, faster, richer, smarter, etc... And it wouldn't do a thing to change the physics of this universe that we are stuck in, and therefore which rule our lives and set limits on us.

Originally posted by Gus

We don't even know what's on the surface of Mars!
Come to think of it, we haven't even figured out how our own minds work.


Gus,

Ahhh, yes, we do know what's on the surface of Mars. Almost 30 years ago the Viking lander took pictures, analyzed soil, etc. There have been probes since, Soviet and U.S. Another recent lander was Sojourer, and Beagle is next.

Our point, which Dean clarified and I will further, is that the 80% number I pulled from my rectum is MAYBE how much of physics we have down cold. Physics includes mechanics, thermo, electricity and magnetism, optics, nuclear, particle, condensed matter, plasma, etc. I'm not counting the 'stretched' parts of physics like bio-, nano-, etc.

Here's an analogy. People are exploring the world. At some point 500 years ago, Europeans 'discovered' America. At that point, it was clearly known very well how big the earth was, and what kind of geology and flora and fauna existed on the earth. There was still more to explore, more to do, but no one who had done the homework would have expected to sail off the edge of the world, or find another 5 continents between asia and america with mountains 20miles high and seas of liquid mercury or gigantic flying dragons. It just wasn't gonna happen.

I'm not saying we know where the end of physics is that well. But believe me, the physicists I've talked to (and I'm not one btw) say that the majority is over, and they say it with a heavy sigh of nostalgia and disappointment. They would like nothing better than to be part of the next big thing in physics, but lots of really smart people have been trying to find it for a long time. Unfortunately, a lot of what's out there is cleanup work from the big discoveries of the late 19th and early 20th century. Again, I'm just talking physics, but 'just physics' underpins essentially all of the physical and natural sciences and engineering.

I said it wasn't popular. But imagine if it's true. We've been alive at THE MOMENT, practically an instant in history, where a great awakening took place in our understading of nature. Yes, some of us were watching Beevis and Butt-head part of that time, but it's heady nonetheless.

M

Heh, heh... he said rectum, heh, heh.

Dean, you keep emphasizing what is "practical".
Of course we cannot fathom how to put into practice what has not yet been discovered. Any more than the ancients would have any conception of what is practical with most of what we know today.

Moore said:
"What would the new screenplay be? That E=mc^3? F=m/a? It simply doesn't work"

Your great, great, great (to the tenth power) grandfather, Aristotle Moore, said:
"But Mr. Copernicus, what would the new parchment be? That the earth revolves around the sun? It simply doesn't work."

You think my analogy is false because the ancients were unaware of the physical truths (which were to be discovered in "the late 19th and early 20th century").
However, you've both left the door open (and a rather large door at that) to extraterrestrial intelligence. Of course you would say that they will have discovered the same physical truths because there can be no other. But how can you be so certain of that? They may have evolved in a way that is simply inconceivable to us. And that is even if evolution is applicable and we don't even know that. Who's to say what they may have discovered? Can you both keep a straight face and tell me that it cannot be anything fundamentally more or fundamentally different than what was learned on Earth in that period of one lousy century?

moore said:
And it's only a testable hypothesis to the extent that we can look back in another 100 years and know, but that's the realm in which this discussion exists.

Did I miss something? When was that parameter established? If we look only 100 years beyond Sir Isaac Newton then we wouldn't yet see how relativity "radicalized" his thinking. No, that took 250 years.

However in the "realm" I'm trying to describe, they're both just a microsecond.

Originally posted by RobertWood
However, you've both left the door open (and a rather large door at that) to extraterrestrial intelligence. Of course you would say that they will have discovered the same physical truths because there can be no other. But how can you be so certain of that? They may have evolved in a way that is simply inconceivable to us. And that is even if evolution is applicable and we don't even know that. Who's to say what they may have discovered? Can you both keep a straight face and tell me that it cannot be anything fundamentally more or fundamentally different than what was learned on Earth in that period of one lousy century?

Hey! That was no lousy century. And if you stretch it to the period from the enlightenment to today, it's close to 500 years, which I'll grant were filled with discovery. It's just that I think we're on the other side of the peak where physics is concerned, and we won't just overturn all that knowledge because we find something newer and better. It's all refinements and applications at this point (with physics at least).

But, yes, I can keep a straight face and say that 1) we're extremely unlikely to find something that completely contradicts what physics we've learned here on earth, at least in a place we could hope to exist (in which case discussion is pointless, like Dean said with the parallel universes). It's not like we go to the Andromeda galaxy and all of the sudden the less force you apply to something the slower it accelerates. Like is 2+2 going to equal -1 there?

2) Regarding evolution, sure it could be radically different or not applicable, but that's biology. The physics will be theirs to discover, same as us. They certainly may have some new twists on interpretation we haven't thought of and definitely will apply it in interesting ways, but E will still = mc^2.


But how can you be so certain of that?


Because the sun rises every day, things I drop fall down, hot things get colder, etc. Carl Sagan actually does a nice job of answering this question in a way more eloquent style than me in his last book "A Candle in the Dark". Highly recommended read. Part of his discussion in the one chapter is that science doesn't simply discard old theories. It takes them, keeps the parts that work, and modifies the rest to better fit the facts. We do this to better predict physical behavior.

Aristotle was the opposite of a scientist, and no relation 'a mine. He didn't believe in experiments and observation. The difference from even Galileo's time until now is that the line between science and mysticism is very clear now, and the dogmatists aren't in control. The burden of proof is on anyone defending any theory, and it has made science an incredibly strong, very useful tool.

M

Originally posted by Dean Roddey
You probably missed the point, though we made it a couple of times..



Oh, I didn't miss the point at all, I was just trying to create controversy.


But within the narrow target that was being discussed, it is quite possible that we are 80% there. Some scientists, who are not egotistical idiots and not given to hyperbole, think that's quite possible. The fact of the 'matter' (pun intended) is that the fundamental nature of matter is probably not a bottomless pit with endless doors to open. The ramifications of the things that we learn on the way to the last door can go on and on and on, but that doesn't mean that the doors keep opening downward, just outward.

This is where I disagree. I'm not implying that these scientists are idiots, I'm just saying I don't buy it. How can you quantify what you don't know? You could very easily be wrong about what you don't know.

Moore,

No, we don't know whats on the surface of Mars. We have a VERY BASIC understanding of it. We don't even know how much ( if any) water there is. Some scientists say there are vast oceans, others say there is "just a little". That sounds to me like we just DON'T KNOW.

Gus

Carl Sagan actually does a nice job of answering this question in a way more eloquent style than me

I'm not so sure of that. Not after reading your last post! :)

And I get the feeling that you you tossed that all out off the top of your head.
Hell, it took me all night to come up with the new "parchment" quip.

How about what Gus has pointed out? We have only a rudimentary understanding of just Mars. And that understanding is so thin that it seems to change almost on a daily basis.
Go beyond Mars and it becomes like a blind man shooting in the dark.
Let me see if I understand this. Simply because we can squint real hard and just barely identify and measure light waves that come from 15 billion light years out, that nothing can or will ever fundamentally alter this Gospel of Physics we have constructed? Not in a million years? Not in a billion years?

I go back to Dean's comment that "isn't it convenient that UFO reports of aliens coincide with 1950's movie images"?

Well isn't it pretty "convenient" that what oh so very little we see now when our tools look 15 billion light years out, fits this Gospel of Physics we've created?
____________________________

Gospel: "anything propounded or accepted as infallibly true", "something, such as an idea or principle, accepted as unquestionably true". (Websters)

We don't even know how much ( if any) water there is. Some scientists say there are vast oceans, others say there is "just a little". That sounds to me like we just DON'T KNOW.


Actually, we kind of do. The latest results that have come back recently shows at least a Lake Michigan of frozen water just under the surface in the southern hemisphere :-)

But again, you are talking about something different from what we are. Whether there is water on the surface of Mars is like "What is in the hand you hold behind your back?". I don't know, but when I find out, its not going to fundamentally change our understanding of physics. Its an interesting issue related to the evolution of planets in our solar system of course, but not a fundamental discovery in the way that we are talking about.

Well isn't it pretty "convenient" that what oh so very little we see now when our tools look 15 billion light years out, fits this Gospel of Physics we've created?


Its not really convenient at all. There is no reason whatsoever to think that physics would be different in other parts of the universe. The rules of our physics were born in the big bang, and everything inside our universe was created in that original event, so it makes perfect sense that physics would be the same everywhere.

You have to keep in mind that the big bang was probably one of the simplest events of all time. All that was really created in the big bang, matter-wise, was hydrogen and a little helium, and some isotopes. All of the massively complex stuff that we see out there now has come from processing of hydrogen in stars. Its just many, many variations on the same process, working with the simplest of ingredients. Its only in its variation that it is difficult to understand, not because its mysteriously opaque to us. We've long known what the basic ingredients and rules are, its just a matter of figuring out all of the many ways that those basic ingredients and rules can be put together (and its a lot of ways obviously, with us being an example.)


How about what Gus has pointed out? We have only a rudimentary understanding of just Mars. And that understanding is so thin that it seems to change almost on a daily basis.


But those are just new variations on a theme, not anything fundamentally new, from the perspective of an understanding of the raw physics of our universe.

The places where we are likely to learn really new stuff are far out of our reach for a long time, perhaps forever. Black holes and quarsars and such are the places where our physics is stretched to the limit, but there aren't any anywhere nearby, particularly quasars. The rest of the visible universe exists within a range of temperatures, pressures, and speeds, that fall well without our understanding of physics. There are other things out there that we don't fully understand, but those are just macro sized manifestions of the basic rules and ingredients. Its those variations that we have not catalogued and explained fully, not the fundamental processes that created them.

I knew I'd regret not saying "multiverse(s). Now where did I leave my T.A.R.D.I.S.?

Howie

Are we licked, boys? :)

I repeat. I'm not sure Sagan had anything on either of them when it comes to communicating this stuff. I've learned more about physics in a few of their short paragraphs than anything else I've ever read. And I read Sagan's first book (Cosmos).

Bob

Dean,

I undestand fully, trust me. The point that I'm trying to make is not that our understanding ( or lack there-of) of the geology of nearby planets has anything to do with the basic laws of physics. That was just an example I used to put the state of our technology in context. The point is that how do we get the confidence to say we know so much when our capabilities are so humble. I recognize how far we have come in our understanding of the laws that govern the known universe, but there isn't a law that says that there arent 12 billion other laws that we still need to discover.

...and as for the water thing, I read the report too. The way it was presented, it sounded like an educated guess. The week following that report, they reported a very large green patch that they thought may be moss, but I don't hear any scientist saying they have found life on mars yet.

P.S.

I'm not arguing with you, most of your points are well taken, it's just i don't feel we are as advanced as you may think we are, and as far as the veracity of ALL the current theories of science, I keep and OPEN mind.

Gus

I recognize how far we have come in our understanding of the laws that govern the known universe, but there isn't a law that says that there arent 12 billion other laws that we still need to discover


In terms of the fundamentals, we are going the other way. We aren't trying to discover more laws, we are trying to discover fewer of them. The search for fundamental laws of energy and matter is mostly involved in finding simpler laws that cover more things, more generally. There are definitely billions (or A Sagan, billions and billions) of *facts* to discover, but fewer new laws. The laws will reduce, and include multiple previous disparate laws.

Things like 'suns blow up if they are too big' is a fact, not a law really. Laws (general speaking) in science are very fundamental, and there have never been a large number of them. Laws are things like thermodynamics or electrodynamics. They are very, very general.

Eventually, the goal is to have the Theory of Everything, which would be a simple law that describes all of the four forces, and how they fit together, and how that in turn manifests in the matter, energy and fields that exist. At that point, there would be only one law, and everything else would just be facts derived from that law.

But don't we understand from reading Moore that the period of "enlightment" includes the time of Newton? Might Newton have said in his time... "we aren't trying to discover more laws, we are trying to discover fewer of them"?
And wouldn't that seem incongruous now (in light of the later discovery of relativity)? So how do we ever know at what point to make a statement like "we aren't trying to discover more laws, we are trying to discover fewer of them"?

But don't we understand from reading Moore that the period of "enlightment" includes the time of Newton? Might Newton have said in his time... "we aren't trying to discover more laws, we are trying to discover fewer of them"?

And wouldn't that seem incongruous now (in light of the later discovery of relativity)? So how do we ever know at what point to make a statement like "we aren't trying to discover more laws, we are trying to discover fewer of them"?


But Newton's laws were a reduction. It brought many previous ideas about how the world works under one theory of universal gravity that covered them all, more generally.

Relativity was a further reduction. It includes Newton's law but in a more general way that describes more phenoma more generally.

So neither of these created more laws. They replaced multiple, more complex, less explanatory laws into single, more inclusive, more fundamental laws, all on the way towards the ultimate goal of a single theory that describes the most fundamental attributes of matter and energy.

Damn. I thought I had you there. Shoulda known better.
I'm reminded of that old lawyer axiom. Don't ask the witness a question unless you know what the answer is going to be. :)

Are you buying that, Gus? That relativity can be characterized as a "reduction" even though it turned everything on it's head? Couldn't a few more "reductions" like that upset their original apple cart?

Or am I just prone to hyperbole? If it's the latter I can take it. :)

Well, I buy it, in a certain way. Semantics is what we are caught in. I can agree with Dean, but still maintain my possition. I think Dean is too clever for us to debunk though Bob.

I maintain that of all the knowledge there is to be gained in all sciences including physiscs, we are only at the beginning. Of course I can't say that any of the existing fundamental laws of physics will be discarded as new ones are revealed ( which is quite possible, if you keep an open mind), but tons of useful knowledge of how matter and energy tick still await discovery.

Gus

If it turns out that there are trillions of other Bob Wood's out there, all in other universes, that would wipe out practically all religions out there, except maybe Hinduism, or certain branches of it. It would cause every major book on philosophy to be re-written. It would be an epochal discovery. Let's say we knew 99.9 % of all physics. How de we know that the final 0.1 % isn't gonna be a doozy in its implications, both in philosophy and science? We don't know. But of course, even after all the workings of physics are carefully mapped out and understood, from the quantum to the galactic, there will still be scientific discovery and innovation. That's not going to stop.

Amen :)

So you see guys, we DON'T KNOW whats on the surface of Mars!!

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0,12543,236202,00.html

Gus

As much as Dean and Moore might want to believe otherwise, I think "DON'T KNOW" more aptly describes us than does "KNOW".

And by "us" I don't mean only Gus, Howie, Larry and Bob (and you too Mr. Spock and QQQ :) and anyone else I'm leaving out).
I mean all of us.

The thing to understand about relativity is that it completely encapsulates Newtonian physics. It did not really invalidate anything of Newton. All it did is say that, in certain rare circumstances, of very high speed or very high gravity, Newton isn't completely correct. But Newtonian physics never claimed to address any such pathological circumstances. In the day to day world that we live in, and that send probes to the planets and sends the shuttle into orbit, Newtonian physics is completely correct, and its what is used. None of those folks are worried about relativity, because it only disagrees with Newton in extreme circumstances.

So all relatively did was encapsulate all of the day to day physics of Newton, but deal with a wider range of speeds and matter densities. It didn't 'overturn' Newton or anything like that. Its hard to call a theory overturned when its used infinitely more than the one that supposedly overturned it.

Relatively was a philosophical revolution of course, in that it gave a very different set of explanations for the effect that we call gravity. But in terms of getting practical things done, it really only differs under circumstances that none of us will ever experience (for the best in most cases.)


If it turns out that there are trillions of other Bob Wood's out there


Some ideas are best left unexplored, for the good of man.

As I was saying, maybe we do KNOW. :D

Man, you guys have been busy! Where to start?

Originally posted by Gus

This is where I disagree. I'm not implying that these scientists are idiots, I'm just saying I don't buy it. How can you quantify what you don't know? You could very easily be wrong about what you don't know.

Moore,

No, we don't know whats on the surface of Mars. We have a VERY BASIC understanding of it. We don't even know how much ( if any) water there is. Some scientists say there are vast oceans, others say there is "just a little". That sounds to me like we just DON'T KNOW.

Gus

I think we're at a semantic stalemate. We know that Mars is basically covered with rocks and dust. There's evidence for liquid flow in the past. Speculation but no real evidence of life, now or past. Good enough for me, the rest is just details. Was it water or CO2 or something else, and how much of those are left frozen above or below ground? I just don't find those last questions to be fundamental or fascinating. Geology is kind of a crapshoot, to be frank, compared to Physics. The more complex things are the harder they are to nail down, and it's hard to do Geology 'experiments' so it's a lot of observation. And what if they found living moss on mars? Cool, yeah, but in the end, not too mind blowing, is it?

M

Moore,

Are you sincere when saying that the first ever discovery of life outside of the Earth would not be mind blowing? Or are you pulling our collective leg?

I bow to your kind words, Robert, but not sure I deserve them.

Originally posted by RobertWood
Let me see if I understand this.....

Well isn't it pretty "convenient" that what oh so very little we see now when our tools look 15 billion light years out, fits this Gospel of Physics we've created?
____________________________

Gospel: "anything propounded or accepted as infallibly true", "something, such as an idea or principle, accepted as unquestionably true". (Websters)

NONONONONONONO!!!! I'm suprised Dean didn't jump on this and stamp it out. Although I suspect you were trying to get a rise out of us. There is no Gospel of Physics. Physics, and science is a bag of tricks and ideas that seem to work. It's absolutely and unequivocally NOT treated as infallible or unquestionable. It would be the death of science if that were the case. You, and anyone, is welcome to step up to the plate, propose a new theory or radical change to an old idea (E=mc^3). The only deal is you gotta prove it, at least in some small way. You can do this one of two ways. You can use existing theory and something really rigid like logic and math to tie your new piece into the puzzle, maybe displacing the old if it fits 'better'. Or you can do an experiment / make an observation that proves the point.

It happens all the time. There was this Podlenktov (sp?) gravity shield thing. You spin a superconducting coil and it will reduce the mass of anything over it by up to 2%, so they said. NASA bit, and a few others. Most physicists just shrugged and pointed out how badly such an idea fits what we know, and said it was unlikely to work. No one branded the guy a heretic. It's not that it didn't fit some dogmatic world view, it's just like your doing a jigsaw puzzle and someone comes to you with a ham sandwich and says 'here, let me stick this in one of those spots'. To date no one has reproduced or verified the gravity shield, which should have been a cinch if it worked as advertised.

A different example is Stan Pruisner. Over twenty years ago he had this crazy notion that proteins alone could cause some diseases, with no virus or bacteria. Prominent virologists didn't think so, it didn't seem fit with their ideas. Well, he demonstrated very clearly that he was right, and the ideas caught on and refined the old way of thinking. His work had such impact that he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine a few years back.

This is why the things we observe 'conveniently' fit science's paradigms so well. The models that don't fit are chucked or fixed, and the models that do become trusted. But never revered, never gospel. Anyone is welcome to take a crack.

M

Moore,
If they found living moss on Mars it would be way more than just cool to me. It would be the smoking gun evidence of extraterrestrial life and certainly a most important event of my lifetime. And it would be a historic occasion for all of mankind too I think.

___________________________________________
"How can you quantify what you don't know? You could very easily be
wrong about what you don't know."
______________________________________

A most elequent statement made by Gus I think and lacking very little room for argument.

"...but not sure I deserve them"

Hors****t. No one ever explained science in a better way than you just did. Where was your textbook when I was in high school? It might have given many of us an early appreciation of science that we never had.

p.s. but you did not address my last post

p.p.s and I agree wholeheartedly with what RVonse just said about what Gus said. How can we (or I should say you) possibly argue with that?

Originally posted by RobertWood

Are you sincere when saying that the first ever discovery of life outside of the Earth would not be mind blowing? Or are you pulling our collective leg?

Bob,

Totally sincere. It would definitely be very cool. But something like finding a 9x4x1 monolith on the moon would be mind blowing. I mean I wouldn't sleep for days after hearing that. I could sleep after hearing about extraterrestrial moss. Give me something that can move at least. I guess it's just taste/opinion. Artificial Intelligence would be mind blowing to me. Teleportation of useful things. Time travel to the past, definitely. Any kind of psychic powers that were real (ESP, touch healing, etc.) A new fundamental force. Parallel universes. The Cubs winning the world series. A 100% cure for cancer. Invisibility. All of these things would freak me completely. The only one I see happening in the next 100-250 years is AI.

This discussion is interesting guys. I wish I had more time to participate. I'm still trying to figure out how much of our differences are opinion, semantics, confusion or reality.

M

Make the time, damnit. Enquiring minds want to know (at least mine does).

Aren't you forgetting something?

"How can you quantify what you don't know? You could very easily be
wrong about what you don't know."
______________________________________

"A most elequent statement made by Gus I think and lacking very little room for argument."

I think you may have finally stumped him, Gus.

Originally posted by RobertWood
Aren't you forgetting something?

"...you could be wrong about what you don't know."
______________________________________

"A most elequent statement made by Gus I think and lacking very little room for argument."

Well, I thought I hit that with the world exploration analogy above, but maybe it wasn't as clever as I thought. I guess my counterquestion to this is "What else are we gonna discover, fundamentally, physically?" Another force? More dimensions? In a way I think your side of the argument sells our imagination short. If we can imagine it, we investigate it. We investigate, we learn, put it in the bag.

I can ask you, how do you know we won't find a new basic color tomorrow, like red, green, blue, ... ? Or will we find a new major organ in the human body? How do you know someone won't find the last digit of Pi? Or someone will figure out how to fly just by concentrating real hard?

Let's take the human body thing. Is it fair to say that gross anatomy as a subject is pretty well locked down? (disclaimer: I assume so, I've never studied it tho) Would you all accept that it is 95% done?

Now that's not to say anything about wondrous things we could do with genomics and transgenics, and people will argue forever about this liver enzyme does this or that (isn't that endocrinology or something?) but I submit that human anatomy today is basically down to the refinements.

So I'm saying my impression of physics, which seems to be shared by at least some practitioners of that science, is that we're a long way up the curve. It's a much more abstract subject so it's less obvious than the anatomy example, but I think it's still true.

M

I've had this way of thinking for many many years. Since I was a kid I would be outside at night. And then sometimes all I would have to do is just look up and I would enter a state of sheer awe. I knew in my soul that whatever is out there is just too big, too far away and too incomprehensible for any of us to ever understand. Over time I became convinced that the one real truth of our existence is that we always have, and always will, ask ourselves who we are. But just as surely as we will ask, we will never have an answer. And to think otherwise would be to deny who we are.

I always flinched when I read about some guy with his telescope telling me how he had figured it all out. It just seemed like the ultimate audacity.

On the moss on Mars thing. I would find it very exciting, but not stunning. To me, the stats against us being unique are so huge that I don't doubt at all that organic life survives all over the universe. But every solar system is a crap shoot. Ours is kind of limited because its a single star system, which is actually pretty unusual. Duals and multiples outnumber singles pretty soundly AFAIK. So we can only support one relatively thin band where liquid water exists in the open (there are some exceptions where its is assumed that water exists under ice cover, kept warm by radioactive decay heat.)

This kind of limits life (as we know it at least, liquid water based) in our solar system. But to take our solar system as any kind of standard is definitely a mistake. Its always dangerous to base your estimates on a single example, and that's all we've got right now to go on. The number of variations is almost certainly would wobble the mind.

So, if moss was discovered on Mars, to me it would just be proof of the completely obvious, and only people who don't understand the statistics involved would need that proof. You can argue about whether intelligent life has arisen anywhere else, though I believe that its almost impossible to argue that it hasn't because of the unimaginable number of chances it has had and will have, but basic life forms seems to me almost a given. If we don't find it in our solar system because of its limited opportunities, we'll find it elsewhere (and that can be done by looking that atmospheric components of other planets, once we reach the point of being able to identify such small planets.)

On the 'gospel' thing, moore is completely correct. The one reason that science dominates dogma today is that science never believed it had all the answers, and dogma did (and believing that you have a particular narrow area nailed or nearly so is not the same as believing you have all the answers.) Science, though it went through periods of ossification in the past, has generally been a relatively pure meritocracy. There are plenty of stores, even back in the very strictly layered Victorian era, of exceptionally intelligent people proving that they were right and the monied and priviledged upper crust gentlemen 'scientists' (who wouldn't do an actual experiment because they might get their hands dirty), or religious authorities were wrong, and being vindicated in the end by the experiments.

Its interesting that we look at someone like Aristotle as some foundation stone of western intellectualism. In some ways, he was a humongous idiot who believed that experiments were a waste of time, and therefore he held some ideas that were trivially disprovable. But he carried so much weight with the church that his word was taken as 'gospel' for over a thousand years.

But today, where anyone can do an experiment and post their results and get others to confirm or disprove it, the meritocracy can work pretty effectively. Certainly, the longer the cow has been around, the more sacred it gets. But it never gets too sacred to gore if the experiments prove it wrong. And you don't have to come up with a better theory and prove yours is better, you only have to come up with one experiment that proves the current theory is wrong. and that opens the door for theorists to come up with a new set of ideas that fit the new facts.

But, as I said before, things like quantum electrodynamics have been measured to just insane levels of accuracy. It doesn't explain *why* things work the way they do, it just explains the way that they work. If we come up with a better explanation of why it works the way it does, that will be great, but in order to get useful things done and improve people's life today, just knowing how it works is good enough. And given that we've measured to incredible levels of accuracy, even if the new theory is more accurate, that might not have many practical ramifications either.

Still, I would be surprised if most physicists and astronomers would share your's and Moore's lack of enthusiasm if life were discovered on Mars (moss or otherwise).

However, to quote Dennis Miller, "I could be wrong".

I think if that green patch on the surface of mars were confirmed to be moss, it would immediately HAVE to be declared a WORLD HOLYDAY.

Are you kidding me?? Life outside the earth?? Do you realize all the implications that would have????

The religious implications alone are astounding.

1) God has OTHER children out there, we are not ONLY CHILDREN ( even if our closest siblings are moss:D )

2) God didn't create the world,:eek:


And the scientists would have a FIELD DAY, oh maybe a FIELD YEAR OR TWO.

Gus

Well, yeh, people who's thinking has been constricted by mythological teachings, and who take them seriously, would have a hard time this news. But the likelihood of life existing elsewhere is so high that its just a matter of time. If its not found in our solar system, no biggie. It'll still be findable on other planets within all of our natural lifespans. There are major NASA observatories scheduled over the next decade or so that will be able to check for signs of life on planets around nearby stars, definitely for the atmospheric circumstances required for life to exist as we know it.

In a way, finding it on Mars is still a deniable event, since it can be claimed that it was taken there on debris blasted off this planet by meteor or comet impacts in the past. Its probably not true (and might even have happened the other way around), but people desparate to find reasons to doubt will find them. Finding it on another planet will be indisputable pretty much.

Dean,

On THIS subject, we agree 100%. I share the belief that the statistical likelyhood of there being life outside the earth has got to be too high to actually be a surprise, but actually seeing it rather than relying on statistics will undoubtedly convince most naysayers. I agree that the hardliners will never be convinced, but the rest of us that have open minds will enbrace it and the scientific and sociological impact will be astounding.

Gus

A shocking number of people don't think we really landed anyone on the moon.

Bob,

Maybe I'm just jaded and bitter :) I just can't imagine having a huge emotional response to MOSS. It definitely wouldn't surpass watching the Challenger explode, or the Berlin wall coming down, or 9/11, to me. But I can see it having a big impact worldwide. I agree that people would deny it or say it was contamination or whatever.

Europa's been talked about as another candidate for supporting life.

M

A shocking number of people don't think we really landed anyone on the moon.

Moore,

I was pretty shocked recently when a good friend came to me with just that. Apparently there was a TV documentary not long ago which must have been seen by a lot of people. He saw it and believed what was reported. Apparently, along with other "evidence", they examined some photographs taken on the moon and used that to make their case.
The friend is no dummy and it really floored me that he actually accepted this. I politely pointed out what I could think of as evidence that we really did land on the moon. But from his reaction I could tell that he thought I was the gullible one only because I had not seen the documentary.

The power television has to manipulate what we think is pretty scary.

Bob

As long we don't have some kind of "Contact" style freakout :-)

Originally posted by RobertWood

I politely pointed out what I could think of as evidence that we really did land on the moon. But from his reaction I could tell that he thought I was the gullible one only because I had not seen the documentary.

The power television has to manipulate what we think is pretty scary.


Bob,

I didn't see that show but I heard about it. Here's a NASA link http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23feb_2.htm

I guess it's not suprising that the 'when animals attack/no hi-def' network did this. But I don't think TV would have this power if people relied on thier own brains more.

M

Moore,

Read Martin Gardner's 'Fads and Fallacies In the Name of Science' if you have not already done so. It's among the funniest things I've ever read.

George Gillette: "As a physicist, Einstein is not a bad violinist".
Insisted his "Back-screwing Theory of Gravitation" is far superior.

Bob

Many years ago MIT dug into it's archives and gathered together what it called it's "crank" files. An example is the story of Seabury Brewer. What you read below is courtesy of MIT...
_________________________________________________________

Seabury Doane Brewer made no less than 124 discoveries. His poster-sized treatise entitled, "124 Discoveries Made between 1892 and 1930 by Seabury Doane Brewer, of Lake George, New York, and Montclair, New Jersey," contains the revelation "that temperature, with its variations, is one of the most wonderful things, and is always present everywhere," and "that physicians should be compelled to destroy all unfit specimens of humanity immediately upon their birth." At the time of publication Brewer was in his seventieth year and still making discoveries.

Brewer didn't restrict himself to just one field of science, or to even just science. The subjects he explored include: Psychology, Government, Life, Evolution, Miscellaneous, Education, Astronomy, The Laws-of-Nature, Fire Balls,--of Lightning, Shadow Bands,--of Sun's Eclipses, Northern Lights, Radio, Mathematics, "Nothing" and Myself; he also adds a postscript concerning atoms and comets.

Though there isn't room here to list all 124, the following abbreviated list of Brewer's Discoveries is a fair representation of the type of material found in the archive:

1. That our thoughts have been, are being, and will be, thought by other thinkers.

28. That there is no such thing as Platonic love between normal males and females.

30. That umbilical cords should be allowed to wither away naturally. (I will wager that Methuselah did not have his umbilical cord monkeyed with.) Man alone interferes with the impregnation, interferes with the embryo, and interferes with birth. How unfair to the child. Watch the animals, birds and insects; watch all things in their various processes of being born.

39. That the inexorable economic law of supply and demand is a fake,--as well as many another economic law.

52. That phonetic spelling should not be allowed.

69. That twin stars do not exist. That what is seen is the result of (caused by) optical reflection.

70. That Saturn's ring does not exist. That what is seen is the result of (caused by) optical reflection.

Discovery #108, isn't really a discovery; it's the story of Brewer's correspondence with Einstein and a "Mr. Poor," which he carried on under his astronomical noms-de-plume, "Mrs. Mary Bryant" and "Shirley Brown":
108. That a "5 diagramed paraphrase" explains why it is that Einstein has not yet reached the goal. The paraphrase, and the construction of it, occurred under the following circumstances.

Brewer...

On March 27, 1929, (in the name of "Mrs. Mary Bryant," my astronomical nom-de-plume, although it happens to be the only time I ever wrote a letter in that name) I wrote Albert Einstein, enclosing one dollar, for an authentic translation of his latest article, --which I have never received, and he still has my one dollar.
Without looking the matter up, I think that he (Einstein) was reported to have said, at that time, that "gravitation" is "electricity."
In my ("Mrs. Mary Bryant's") letter to him I said that long ago I had discovered that all things (even gravitation, magnetism, electricity, chemistry, and even Life itself) are so interwoven, intermingled, and mixed up together, that it is almost impossible to tell where one thing leaves off and an other thing begins. ...

Brewer is a good example of someone who wants to replace the scary and impenetrable theories of 20th century science with good old-fashioned common sense, or, in some cases, a strange admixture of common sense and strong opinions.

#28 might be true :-)

But seriously folks, after about the last 1800s, physics began to diverge from 'common sense' pretty strongly, and its increased in pace. This has frightened a lot of people off, or made them skeptical. But its just that science has moved into the very small, the very energetic, the very dense, the very cold/hot, etc... all of which are conditions that we never encounter in daily life.

In "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" (as mentioned, one of the most readable and enjoyable histories of science ever), there is a great story at the end. When Apollo 11 went, a lot of people were invited to see it. One of them was an old black guy, who was over 100 years old at the time. He had been born a slave (it would be have been around 1875, only a decade after the end of the civil war), in the era of horses and buggies and no electricity and no way to fight most diseases and lived to see men blast off for the moon.

That really kind puts into a nutshell how fast things began spiralling upwards once science began its move from gentlemanly pursuit to a formal academic career, and far faster once it became a formal industrial and military career, with big bucks behind it. Here is a guy who only missed by a decade having been able to see Abe Lincoln with his own eyes, watching a 7.5 million pounds of thrust taking three men to 7 miles a second, and off to the moon.

Originally posted by RobertWood
52. That phonetic spelling should not be allowed.


I'm guessing this guy wouldn't like the artist formerly known as Prince.

I'm glad others agree with my wife and me and on this one....

Read the book. Be blown away, love the story, etc.

Watch the movies (you pick). Curse Hollywood and how they ruin a good story with absolutely and utter NONSENSE!

HUH??

Gus

Gus,

<whisper> I think he's talking about the thread title. How passe' </whisper>

M

Originally posted by moore
Gus,

<whisper> I think he's talking about the thread title. How passe' </whisper>

M

Oh! Sorry! The thread had taken on such an interesting turn I had totally forgotten about the movie. I guess that doesn't say much for the movie, huh?

Gus

Somebody fire the continuity director!

Did any of you watch tonight's Farscape episode? It had wormholes, time travel, many histories, the whole ball o' wax. We're not the only one's interested in this stuff...

What is Farscape? I've never heard about it. I hardly ever watch television these days, unless its scantily clad models frolicking in high def :-)

Farscape is Sci Fi channels original program. Dean you probably should occasionally watch a little regular tube. I saw that Ed McMahon had been to your house and they showed your home on the news but since you didn't answer the door or their announcements on TV they had to give the ten million to someone else.:D
Art

Ed wasn't scantily clad and frolicking, was he?

Farscape is a science fiction type show on the SciFi channel. It is filmed in Australia with an almost all Australian cast. The "star" of the show is an American (Ben Browder), who plays the role of John Crichton, an astronaut who was shot into a wormhole and landed on the other end of the universe into the middle of a space battle. His craft accidentally kills one of the "bad" aliens and he ends up landing on an alien ship that is alive. It is a prison transport that contains many different types of aliens. Basically the show revolves around Crichton and the alien's adventures around the universe, all while being pursued by someone. That "someone" has changed over the last 4 seasons, but that's the gist of it. The show is very irreverent and funny. It's definitely not "serious" science fiction. It's a fun show and has fun while winking at the audience. It's the only TV show I watch and unfortunately it is off the air until January. The first 3 seasons are avilable on DVD through R2 UK editions. I didn't like the quality of the US DVD's.

In our own Universe, we can see a long, long way. We can't see to the edge, because light hasn't had time to come to us from more than about 15 billion light years out. But, we can see more or less a sphere with a radius of 15 billion light years

Then how do we know where the "edge" of the universe is?
Is it because we know when the "Big Bang" occurred and so the "edge" of the universe is as far away as light can travel from that point in time"?
How do we know how long ago it was that the Big Bang occurred?

If there's an edge, what's beyond the edge?

What happened before the Big Bang?

If the universe is expanding how far can it expand? What is it displacing as it expands?

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Space is curved just as the earth is. Travel far enough along the curve and you end up back where you started. There is what there is. There is no need to distinguish between where space begins and ends because it is based on a misundertanding of the nature of space.

Okay help me to understand this.
Dean said we can almost see to the "edge" of the universe. He said we can see out to a radius of 15 billion light years from where we are.

Isn't an edge a boundary between something and something else. Does that definition not apply here? Whether it's curved or what not, doesn't "edge" imply that there is this thing we're calling a universe and something else is outside of it?

Also when we say the universe started with the "Big Bang" and then began to expand outward from that, are we talking about the matter which was propelled outward or is the expanding universe both the matter and the space it occupies? If the latter then what did the expanding universe displace?

Look in a mirror. You're seeing to the "edge" and back. If we could look far enough in space we could do the same thing.

If you looked like me would you want to look in a mirror?

I don't get it. If I look in a mirror I'm "seeing to the edge and back" and that's the same as the universe?

If I look in a mirror I simply see light reflected back to my eyes.
I don't understand how that gives me a way to understand 1. a universe that is "curved" and 2. the universe having an "edge" but there is nothing beyond the edge?

When I said 'the edge' I was being a little careless. As mentioned there might not be an edge. I really meant 'back to the point of the big bang, which isn't an edge really, its a point in time.

It is possible that our space is a closed 3D space, which is impossible for us to imagine, so its easier to do it with 2D, as is commonly done in books on the subject. If you lived in 'flatland' a 2D world. You would only know about 2 dimensions, and only crazy people on internet forums would talk about 3D worlds. However, your flat world could basically just be the surface of a 3D sphere. You couldn't know that, because it wouldn't be apparent to you at all as long as the sphere was very large (as we know that our space is.)

Light would travel along in your 2D world, and would appear to go straight to you, though it would actually curve along the surface of this 3D sphere. There would really be no experiment that you could do to prove or disprove this theory, because there would be no way for you to measure the curvature of your own world. A 2D world's laser beam would travel along this surface, so though you would seem to be 'out of line of site' to a 3D person looking in from the outside, the light would bend right around along the surface of that sphere.

It is thought that our space is like that, but we are on the surface of a 4D sphere, which unfortunately, our little minds cannot picture, just like the little minds of the 2D people cannot picture a 3D sphere, or a sphere at all since they are at least 3D by definition. So its possible that there is no edge at all, and that if you go far enough, you get back to where you started. Unfortunately, going far enough means at least more than 15 billion light years. And, if many of the 'inflationary' theories are correct, our 15 billion light year radius sphere might be as small relative to the actual space in our universe as the earth is to that 15 billion light year radius area we can see, i.e. it may be immense beyond all comprehension.

We've verified that matter, energy, time, gravity etc. works the same way throughout this little space. And that little space in comparison to the size of the "universe" could be as small as a grain of sand compared to a sphere with a 15 billion light year across radius (or even incomprehensibly smaller).

And because of that we have ruled out any other fundamentally different things occuring outside of that grain of sand sized space? Is that correct?

When we say it started with a big bang and then began to expand are we referring to matter expanding or matter and space?

I now realize that last one was a silly question. The expanding universe must mean not only matter but space too. Because if we weren't talking about space too then it wouldn't be a universe expanding would it. It would just be some lousy matter expanding within a universe. So don't humiliate me by answering that one.

So now on to the next question. If the universe is "expanding" then what is it displacing when it expands?

I'm starting to get some inkling here that maybe I'm asking that last question only because I'm trying to understand it all in 3D. But time (the 4th dimension) throws in a monkey wrench that makes my question stupid? Only because I cannot visualize the whole thing in 4D. Is that correct?

Bob,

It is frustrating when our brains try to understand things by analogy to the tangible (e.g. expanding bubbles = shape of universe in 4D). The analogies always have limits, like you point out, there is nothing to displace. I personally think coming toward better understanding of our world and universe requires climbing a ladder of abstractions. You have to convince yourself of each along the way, and then move on to the next.

Anyway, I don't know a lot about cosmology or astronomy so won't comment more on this line of questioning. But I found proof that Freud was absolutely right about men and the size of their tools.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2116605.stm

M

When we talk about our space being a surface on a 4D space, in that case, time isn't that 4th dimension, but literally a 4th (or higher for that matter.) geometrical dimension. When talking about space/time, then time is considered a 4th dimension. It can get confusing sometimes because, to a scientist, any measurable 'axis' of the problem can be called a 'dimension', because they are using it in the generic sense, whereas we use the word so often to talk about the physical dimensions of our world that we tend to think of any discussed dimension as a physical one, when it may or may not be.


And because of that we have ruled out any other fundamentally different things occuring outside of that grain of sand sized space? Is that correct?


Nothing is ruled out really. Its just a matter of probabilties. If you look at it from that stand point, you come up with things like:

- Given that physics is the same as far out as we can see, how likely is it that it changes just beyond where we can see? Its a low probabiliti.

- If physics is the same in our universe, but there are many others, other than as a huge philosophical issue, the probability that this will be of much use to us is low, because we are stuck with the physcs of the universe we live in. If you are stuck in one room with no food, the fact that there is a feast going on in a room nearby that you cannot get to is just a philosophical matter.


So now on to the next question. If the universe is "expanding" then what is it displacing when it expands?


The universe is not expanded into 'space'. Space is expanding with the universe. We cannot really say what its expanding into. In the larger (literally) scheme of things, our inconceivably large universe might be so small as to be unobservable from the scale of whatever that larger space is.

But getting into these types of arguments is a waste of time, unless you have a bag of good pot around :-) Its an infinitely regressive problem, since what did that 'outer' space expand into, and so on and so on. Basically, the best way to look at it is that you and I don't exist. This is all just a complex halluciation in the mind of a small frog, sitting at the bottom of a deep pool of infinite size, watched over by a dwarf.

I see Dean had found the bag, and isn't sharing.:D

Gus

When we talk about our space being a surface on a 4D space, in that case, time isn't that 4th dimension, but literally a 4th (or higher for that matter.) geometrical dimension. When talking about space/time, then time is considered a 4th dimension. It can get confusing sometimes because, to a scientist, any measurable 'axis' of the problem can be called a 'dimension', because they are using it in the generic sense, whereas we use the word so often to talk about the physical dimensions of our world that we tend to think of any discussed dimension as a physical one, when it may or may not be.

Lord have mercy on my soul, that is so heavy that I can't even begin to even try to even get an inkling. I think I'm gonna have to go with the frog and the dwarf.

If you are stuck in one room with no food, the fact that there is a feast going on in a room nearby that you cannot get to is just a philosophical matter.

It is unless you choose to try and make a hole in the wall and get to the food on the other side. ;)

After reading the replies above I'm not sure if I understand which of these two statements is the most accurate...

1. the universe did not expand into anything

2. the universe did expand into and (may or may not) have displaced some "thing" but we don't know what that thing is.

If the answer is the latter then that thing, whatever it is, used to occupy the same location we're in right now. Maybe it occupies the same location still.
In the future we might discover a way to access that other thing (after all it might be right under our noses). Maybe we would find an entirely new set of fundamentals at work in the "other thing".
That would also be an example of breaking through the wall and pigging out on the food in the next room.

I rest my case, your honor.

p.s. maybe when we learn how to move around in the "other thing" that will put you time travellers back in business too. Who's to say.

Of course, if you poke a hole in the wall and the other room is composed of anti-matter, both rooms will instantly tranform into energy and destroy everything :-) That would always be a philsophical problem with having any sort of physical connection between two areas with significantly different physics. What happens where they touch?

The whole matter/energy thing (e=mc^2) is pretty interesting. The amount of energy in a tiny bit of matter is immense. Matter is to energy what crack is to cocaine, except infinitely more. Its super-condensed matter. When you get energy by burning stuff (wood, chemicals, hydrocarbons), we only convert a tiny fraction of a single percent of the mass to energy. Even a hydrogen explosion (nuclear fussion), the most powerful conversion process we can create, is still less than a percent if I'm remembering my numbers correctly. And even with converting less than a percent of small amount of matter (I assume its still duterium, but I got kicked out of the secret nuclear weapons club) it makes a huge boom.

Matter/anti-matter anhilation is one way (the only way we know of?) to achieve complete conversion of matter to energy, but their ain't much anti-matter around to play with. It is believed that an equal amount of it was created in the big bang as regular matter, but a slight asymmetry in the process created a little more matter. What we see around us today is that little bit that was left over, a very small percentage of what was originally created, most of which 'went up in smoke' very quickly in matter/anti-matter destruction.

Hot damn, it just occurred to me. Maybe those "saucers' so many of us are seeing are moving between our thing and "the other thing".

In the simplest of terms what was the big bang?
Is the currently accepted theory that the universe expanded out so far that it then did an about face and started to contract? And when it contracted back down to the size of a pea it blew up and started expanding again?

Also what is the evidence for the existence of "anti-matter" (and is there a way to explain it so that the guy pictured to the left can understand)?

Bob,

AFAIK the big bang is simply the best theory that fits the facts. The facts are that everything on a super-galactic scale appears to be rushing away from everything else. So we say our universe is expanding. By looking at how fast things appear to be accelerating, or not, we can try to guess whether the universe will stop and re-contract. I read something recently that one group is saying that the universe appears to be very balanced, so that it will keep slowing down and just barely come to a standstill like 15 trillion years from now, when all of the energy is pretty much gone and chemical reactions can't even happen. Why would that be? It's almost like it was made that way. Spooky.

So I didn't really answer your question. I guess it was a huge explosion from a super-condensed state, where matter and energy condensed out. Where did it come from? Will we ever know? Maybe it just happened. Maybe it popped in from another dimension. Will it keep cycling, or has it done that 'forever'? It's hard to imagine that these are all even knowable.

Antimatter I understand a little better. It was predicted in the 20s I think based on a sign uncertainty in a physics relation on particle properties. Basically no one could think of a reason for particles like electrons (normally negative charge) to exist but not positrons (exactly like electrons but with + charge). So they went looking for them in nuclear reactions, and sure enough they came out. The evidence came from looking at particle tracks. Particle physicists can get a lot of info from the swirls particles make when they are created in a high-speed collision. Mass, energy, and charge are all pretty easy to come up with. Charge is real easy since you see which direction the swirls go. So they saw tracks that were identical to the electrons but going the wrong way.

Many more bits of evidence have piled up. Certain radioactive nuclei emit positrons. They are so easy to detect and interact with matter in unique ways that they are a great probe. People get "PET" scans of their brains - Positron Emission Tomography, by being injected with a solution containing these radioisotopes. You can see a particular energy spike when positrons hit matter, and it's energy fits perfectly with the E=mc^2 relation, when m=mass of electron+mass of positron. Pretty cool.

It's pretty hard to get bigger pieces of antimatter, though. I know some antiprotons have been made, and anti-atoms, I think. But just a few, not even a tiny little drop or crystal.

M

Thanks, Moore. As I'm sure I don't have to tell you by now my understanding of some of these things can be compared to yours and Dean's in this way. It's like the size of a grain of sand compared to a sphere that's 15 billion light years in radius? :)
But I'm starting to get fascinated so will begin to try to get that grain of sand up to at least Earth size.

One thing that keeps throwing me for a loop though. It all started with this super condensed thing that went bang. And now it's expanded to an incomprehensibly larger size. But what did it expand into? Where it expanded, what was there before?
If the answer is that the question is not valid because it doesn't take into account a "4th dimension" then I'm having great difficulty with that. The Earth and Solar System and that video projector above my head and you and Dean occupy a 3-dimensional space. Before any of these things existed what was in that space?

Bob

On the super-condensed thing... Something that most people don't realize is that there is very little there there. We are almost completely empty space, even the most dense materials are. Mostly we are electrical fields, not matter (in terms of size I mean, not weight, the weight is all from matter, which in turn is just energy.)

Anyway, the point being that atoms themselves are almost completely empty. The nucleus of an atom, where something like 99.999% of the 'matter' in an atom is, is 100,000 times smaller than the electron shell that surrounds it. And its those electron shells that make up the size of an atom, and where they hook to each other. So an atom is like a grain of sand inside a transparent globe the size of New York. All of the weight is in that grain of sand, and the transparent globe would be unbelieveable thin when blown to that size. In the middle is nothing but electric charges between the positively charged nucleus and the negatively charged electron shell, basically just empty space.

So, right off the bat, if you can strip off the electrons (which isn't terribly hard to do), you can reduce the size of an object by 100,000 times, which is a huge reduction. Neutron stars are one of the most spectacular examples of this. The gravity of the parent star isn't strong enough to create a black hole, but its strong enough to crush the electrons into the nucleus which then bind with the protons and become neutrons.

So, along with the neutrons that were already there, you end up with a ball the size of a small planet, completely composed of neutrons, and now 100,000 times denser ('stuff' per size unit, e.g. per spoonful or whatever) than the original stuff in the star. The gravity is so intense that even though it is the size of a small planet, and usually rotating very fast, if you could survive the gravity, you could reach out and put your fingers on it, because it would be atomically smooth. It won't have a mountain bigger than at atom anywhere on the surface.

The reason that such neutron stars don't collapse is something called 'degeneracy pressure', which is caused by the constant motion of all atomic particles if they are above absolute zero (and they would be very much above absolute zero in a neutron star because of the pressure induced heat.) They always are zooming around like crazy, and will fight like mad from being pushed together and stopped from zinging around.

But, with sufficient force (like that of a very large collapsing star) you can overcome that degeneracy pressure and crush the matter even further. The neutrons and protons (nucleons) in the necleus are themselves made up of quarks, which are held together by the strong nuclear force (represented by force carrying particles called gluons), and are again mostly empty space. And they themselves are in the end just pure energy.

A black hole has sufficient gravity to crush the matter all the way down to its constituent energy (more or less, if any physics majors are reading, don't sue me, we aren't doing this for money), and hence it can reduce all of the mass of that parent star that didn't get blown off in the super nova that caused the black hole (and that's still a LOT of matter), down to effectively a dimensionless point, i.e. not of this 3D universe in any way that we picture such things. The 'black hole' itself is not this 'singularity' (as its called), but just the point at which light cannot escape. Its not a physical boundary, just a point of no return. No one knows what the singularity would 'look like', assuming that term has any meaning at all and it probably doesn't in this case. Time and space are both infinitely warped in such areas, so it would be a place wierder than anything we've ever thought of.

Anyway, the point of that whole ramble is that its not so wierd to think of all of whats out there now as having come from effectively a dimensionless point. Of course, it *is* wierd, but not wierd in the sense that, despite what most people think, matter can be squished down almost infinitely, because matter is nothing but energy.

But I'm starting to get fascinated so will begin to try to get that grain of sand up to at least Earth size.


Go buy "Coming of Age in the Universe", by Timothy Ferris. I've mentioned it a copule times here, and I can't recommend it enough. For you it would be perfect, because it skims over the entire history of science and the characters who made it happen. So it gives you the big picture, from which you can swoop down into those areas that you find interesting.

Okay, time out for just a moment.

You all should be aware that a thread is running on the audio forum which has over ten thousand hits and over 400 posts. It started as a discussion of whether ridiculously expensive speaker wires provide improvement worth the money. And then meandered around the whole question of elaborate audio tweaks. QQQ posted this today...

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1298938#post1298938

That's all basically mumbo jumbo. I'll bet anyone $1000 that they could not reliably pick out any of those tweaks in a double blind test on any system that they want to use. And in fact, I really don't have to, because well respected folks have already run such tests and proven that its all just silliness.

You should go in there and tell em that, Dean. Somebody needs to pound some sense into them.

I've been there and done that. Its a thankless job that just increases my stress level, without any benefit to me and without doing much to enlighten them.

From Scientific American How to Build a Time Machine (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0004226A-F77D-1D4A-90FB809EC5880000&catID=2)

I wouldn't buy tickets yet 8-) Now, back during the dot com boom, you could have opened up timetravel.com, went public, and cashed out a millionaire before anyone bothered to read that version 1.0 wouldn't come out for ten thousand years.

Originally posted by RobertWood
You should go in there and tell em that, Dean. Somebody needs to pound some sense into them.

Bob,

I tried too. That thread depresses me. Compared to seeing the edges of the universe or proving antimatter's existence, evaluating cables is child's play if not easier. But a lot of otherwise educated people would rather just bury their heads in the sand. If you visit some quack audio shops you will see some of the things pictured in QQQ's post. There's one near where I live. What's laughable is that they worry about any change to the sound with cables touching the floor, but then the speakers are audibly resonating with the loose floorboards, in an unpleasant way! I'm by no means an audiophile, by the way, I just like to see these things first hand before I judge.

I actually bought a book because of that thread. "Why people beleive weird things". I just started reading it, looks good. Hopefully it will restore some of my hope in humanity.

M

Interesting article, Larry. With the wormhole-neutron star thing they didn't discuss whether there would be any way for people to go through without being creamed, but even if you could send information through it would still be an incredible feat and would turn a lot of physics on it's ear.

So, it's remotely possible that in our lifetimes we could hop a ship and accelerate close to light speed, and then look for one of these time-loop things, go through, then come back to Earth in the past. If it exists or has already been invented. Otherwise, no luck, but it would be consistent with Dean's observation that the universe hasn't been destroyed by time travel.

M

I don't think any human being will travel at the speed of light or anything remotely close to it in our lifetime. I also don't believe we will be sending probes through wormholes any time soon. But it's fun to speculate on what could be done, if we had the technology and the power.

Here's a question. Some physicists speculate that at the center of a black hole, there is not a spheroid mass, but a doughnut shaped one. What would happen if you passed straight through the hole of the doughnut? Where would you end up?

That SA article is without a doubt the most incredible thing I've ever read. What's really hard for me to take in is that we're not reading pure science fiction but instead what's being proposed is apparently based on actual scientific discoveries. Wow!

It's interesting to learn that Einstein was worried about his work opening the door to traveling into the past. Equally interesting is Hawking already contemplating "chronology protection" and a prohibition on "casual loops". Unbelievable!

And that one paradox which is just a mind-blowing proposition...

Consider the time traveler who leaps ahead a year and reads about a new mathematical theorem in a future edition of Scientific American. He notes the details, returns to his own time and teaches the theorem to a student, who then writes it up for Scientific American. The article is, of course, the very one that the time traveler read. The question then arises: Where did the information about the theorem come from? Not from the time traveler, because he read it, but not from the student either, who learned it from the time traveler. The information seemingly came into existence from nowhere, reasonlessly.

Makes what was depicted in "The Time Machine" seem rather juvenile and pathetic, doesn't it?

I just searched the Net to try to find a used copy of "Coming of Age in the Universe".
While searching I came across THIS (http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html). As I read this page I started to thinking about how many times brain synapses must have fired in the heads of all those who figured this out. This got me in that usual depressed state I get in whenever I think about the human body being just another damn machine. I know full well that at some point my machine (just like that AmPro above my head) is going to break down. My machine is now 53 years old with higher than the accepted blue book annual mileage. For this reason I always avoid reading anything that gets me to thinking about anatomy or medicine. So I've decided to stop reading about universes, black holes and worm holes.

What time does Beavis and Butthead come on? I'm outta here.

Bob! Stop! come back!

I believe in the 'use it or lose it' theory of organs, including your brain. Thinking may hurt, or spook you out, but ultimately it's good for your mental health.

Head to your local library and take a look through their Scientific American back issues. There are always good articles written at the perfect level in that one - not too watered down, not too esoteric. Btw: most scientists can't pick up a journal in a discipline different from theirs and understand much of what is written there. So a lot of scientists read SA.

M

Moore,

Let me tell you about the Bob Wood Theory of Machines.

My Mazda has 138,000 miles on it. I once sat down and figured out that I have averaged driving about 40 miles per hour for all of those miles. At 40 miles per hour (and any automotive engineers reading this don't sue me because we're not doing this for money) my engine is doing about 3000 revolutions per minute. So in 138,000 miles my pistons, tie rods, crankshaft, valves etc. etc. etc. have all cycled 621 million times. Now the Bob Wood theory of machines is the next time you're driving in a car like mine on a long stretch of deserted highway (near Chumuckla, Florida) at 2 AM, think about the 621 million times those parts have done a complete cycle. My theory is that at that point those parts can do about another 1000 revolutions and that's all she wrote.

After making this discovery I don't even want to think about how many times my 53 year old heart has cycled.

Mortality is a b****, I agree, but don't you agree that regular excercise helps the heart? I hate exercise myself, but I make sure to do it because I don't want to end up like some people I know who have had heart attacks and strokes well before retirement.

And it is bad for cars to sit there and do naught. When I was shopping for a sportscar, I saw one 944 that looked nice and only had 19,000 miles. I ended up passing on it because it had clearly been neglected - the guy got it in a divorce settlement after it sat in a garage for three years. It needed a lot of work. I ended up buying one that was at 53,000miles but had been loved and cared for.

Anyway, if you don't use your brain, to me that's like driving a big truck around empty all the time. You might as well haul something in it. :)

How about the eloquent words of our former statesman Dan Quayle, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or to not have a mind is being wasteful. How true that is."

You wouldn't want to end up talking like that, would you?

M

No, I surely would not.

As usual, you have an uncanny ability to see the forest through the trees. :)

Actually, some of us think that he actually had to have that written for him.

"Consider the time traveler who leaps ahead a year and reads about a new mathematical theorem in a future edition of Scientific American. He notes the details, returns to his own time and teaches the theorem to a student, who then writes it up for Scientific American. The article is, of course, the very one that the time traveler read. The question then arises: Where did the information about the theorem come from? Not from the time traveler, because he read it, but not from the student either, who learned it from the time traveler. The information seemingly came into existence from nowhere, reasonlessly"

Ok, this one I know is a big CROCK!

When the time taveler gets to his future destination, THERE WILL BE NO THEOREM ON S.A. Period.
Posing the question that "what if he read..." is like saying "what if monkeys flew out of my ass". Its nonsense. This particular paradox is a fraud.

That is exactly the same as saying:

What if I got into my time machine right now and went to my own house 10 minutes from now and I gave me $10 million dollars, would I come back to now and be a millionair. The fact of the matter is that 10 minutes from now I WONT HAVE 10 CENTS MORE THAN I HAVE NOW, so saying I will give me 10 mil is just plain stupid.

When that traveler pics up SA, he will read exactly what has been developed in the span from when he left to the time he went to. The asnwer to the "paradox" is very simple: It's a figment of the imagination of the person proposing the "paradox"

Gus

Actually, its a lot thicker than that. The problem is that, as I've discussed before on this thread, once you go back through time, you've created a loop. In order for you to go back in time, everything that has passed has to be there. If you go back in time, then by the same mechanism that lets everything that already happened be there, that loop will run over and over and over again. So, either all of reality splits and you create a completely new universe, or time travel cannot be possible, because by definitely once time travel becomes available, nothing of the past can be said to be there unaffected.

But, if you assume it can happen, then you have to assume that this 'person' of that part of the 'person' who lives in that one year, will go around and around and around it over and over, because what has already happened must remain available in order to go back to it. So, it becomes a chicken and egg issue. If the person goes forward and finds the theorum described by someone else, and goes back and teaches it to the student, who publishes it. By definitely now in that 'thread of time' whatever that is, that has been modified, that student will now be the person who discovered that theorum, becuase the change will have to have rippled forward. And once he now enters that loop, he will find that the person he taught the theorum to is now the person he learns it from in the future.

Anyway, all of this is proof of why time travel isn't possible, unless you believe in the infinite realities theorum, which I find even more unlikely.

Oh, and BTW, picked up S.A. today and what's the topic of this issue? Time of course.

And its wierd that they discuss a theorum about time that I seem to remember some strangely dressed guy having told me, and the person who wrote the article has the same name as me.

Yeah, but now you have assigned the theorem to a person who wrote it and the time traveler purloined it. It didn't come from nowhere like the quote said. Your point remains the same though. If the time traveler stole the information and gave it to someone in the past, he just deleted the part in time where the real developer of the theorem did his work. Thus causing a ripple in time changing all the outcomes of that original person having developed the theorem. Indeed a nasty proposition for the idea of time travel.

Yet is is pretty clear that time travel is "legal" by Einsteins laws.

Gus

Gus,

I agree completely. I think a better example would have been, you go a year in the future, look up the Dow and Nasdaq for the past year, then come back and have killer stock pix! But what if everyone caught on and invested in your way, wouldn't that then skew the whole market?

Whenever one of these 'paradoxes' comes up, it makes me think that either (1) it's something totally impossible or (2) we're just not thinking of it in the right way. Like there was this whole 'Copenhagen interpretation' of quantum mechanics. It isn't clear sometimes what 'state' a particle is in until you detect it (up, down, left, right, whatever). So the mystical view of this was to say that it is in all possible states, then 'collapses' into one when you observe it. What nonsense! It was in a certain state, you just didn't know what it was before. So hard to understand? I think some people just like to pretend these things are deeper than they are.

Like that SA article refered to the 'twin paradox'. There's no paradox, is there? It's just weird.

Bob,

Thanks for pumping up my ego again.

M

When I read that paradox it did seem a convolution of smoke and mirrors as I was reading it. But I bought into it anyway. It sounded too good to question.
But it would seem unlikely that this writer presented a paradox in something as prestigious as Scientific American and said paradox is not valid. Wouldn't that have been caught by editors or colleagues before it was published? Or maybe his writing did not clearly present the idea he intended.
Let's all read through it again and the smart one's among us (all but me) take another stab at interpreting it for the rest of us (me).

p.s. as an additional non sequitur I want to point out something which has occurred to me that I think is so ironic.

Twice in this thread (and once it was done by me) we pointed to what seemed at the time to be a very appropriate symbol to help us make a point. Twice we made a reference to Beavis and Butthead. And the implication in each case was that Beavis and Butthead is so devoid of any redeeming intellectual value that it is on a level somewhere below that of Dan Quayle (if indeed that is possible).

What is so ironic about this is that the mind which gave us Beavis and Butthead is the mind of an authentic genius. The fact is there is probably more intellectual value and more sheer entertainment value in any given 20 minute episode of Mike Judge's 'King of the Hill' than can be found in any 90 minute feature film that has come out of Hollywood in the last 12 months (with the one exception being "In the Bedroom").

Paradoxes and other things are not always as they seem.

Bob

Originally posted by moore
Gus,

...the mystical view of this was to say that it is in all possible states, then 'collapses' into one when you observe it.

So I take it that according these guys, If a tree falls in the forest and they are not there to hear it, it never makes a sound?

LOL!!!

Gus

Speaking of outlandish physics, maybe you guys can shed some light onto something that's been in the back of my mind for quite sometime:

About 2 or 3 years ago, I was watching a program in, I believe, The Learning Channel. In that program, the topic of discussion was "Instantanious Communication". Some scientists were claiming that they had made a discovery that made it possible. I can't remember the principle, or even any detail about their discovery. All I remember was the graphical representation they used to explain it. They had two rotating rings ( I forgot what particle the rings represented) But the idea was that if you reversed the rotation of one ring, the other would reverse immediately. Even though there was NOTHING linking one ring to the other. Does this make sense to anyone, or sound familiar?

Sorry I can't remember any details about this, I should have payed closer attention, unfortunately, at the time, I may have been under the influence of a twelve pack of Heineken.:D

Gus


PS: FOUND IT!! Check this out:
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/may98/893249215.Ph.q.html

Actually, though it sounds a bit mystical, the whole multiple states thing is very true. Its the basis for all of the 'quantum computing' stuff that's going on right now. Its all tied back into the uncertainty principle in a way.

The original 'double slit' experiment is very real world proof that this happens. Until you measure the photon, it has take all of the possible paths. As soon as you measure it, all of the other possible scenarios collapse (collapse of the wave function as the quantum folks say.) Even if you let them go for a light year, as soon as you measure one of them, the other disappears, instantly, i.e. the information travels faster than the speed of light (but its just information, not matter so we don't have to reopen that one :-)

I just put both the paradox quote and what Gus wrote into a notepad file and looked at both together.

Gus is correct... "When that traveler pics up SA, he will read exactly what has been developed in the span from when he left to the time he went to."

The "paradox" relies on this false premise... "Consider the time traveler who leaps ahead a year and reads about a new mathematical theorem in a future edition of Scientific American."

There is nothing to support the premise that this would ever occur to start with.

Hold it. I've got that all wrong. The premise is that you could pick out any new theorem published in SA that was not known a year earlier. Then the Time Traveler goes back and tells the student. The student then gets the theorum published a year earlier.
So then what happens?

Okay, Gus is right.

It only works if someone else actually wrote a theorum which was published at that future date. That's not something that comes from "nothingness".

The only paradox is that telling the student about it a year earlier would potentially change the course of the future.

I take back that it's a "mind blowing" paradox. More accurately it's a paradox from a blown out mind.

I still is a mind blowing paradox anyway. The only way you can go back in time is if everything that already happened is sitting there. So, in this view of things, its all a static sequence of events. But, once you go back and change that sequence, where was the place that you went back to? When you get back to the point in time where you went back, that person is still there, going back, because if time is laid out and repeatable, he must still be there, still going back, but everything that lead to his existence might have been changed by his going back.

Anything to do with time travel is a mind blow paradox, now matter how simple.

Agreed.

My initial response ("agreed") to what you just posted was an impulsive one. I'm now reminded of my initial response to the SA writer's quote.
I can no longer (thanks to Gus) take any of this at face value. I'm going to have read what you just said more carefully.

One very good use for the wave function collapse is for cryptography. The problem with this system is that you cannot use it to send a message, because the state that they are both going to collapse to has already been determined when they split, they just won't collapse until one of them is measured. But, for cryptographic purposes, it would be incredible, because two people could take atoms with them in these indeterminate quantum states. At some point they break open the package (which is arranged to 'measure' the state), which will cause both of their packages to immediately collapse to the same states, despite the fact that they are a large distance apart, instantly creating a random encryption key that only they share, that was 'transmitted' by a non-tappable mechanism, and which was never written down anywhere before its use, and which either side can see immediately if the other end opens the package before it was supposed to be (i.e. that probably the other end fell into the wrong hands.)

The problem is keeping atoms in their indeterminate state for a long period. This is also the big deal with quantum computing, but they are making slow but steady progress in this area. The cryptographic use could come a long time before the computing use I guess, since it depends purely upon maintaining the indeterminate state and not upon any artificial manipulation of the state other than the initial setting of it.

That paradox may or may not be "mind blowing".
Because the SA writer was not clear with what he intended to convey to us.

"Consider the time traveler who leaps ahead a year and reads
about a new mathematical theorem in a future edition of Scientific American.
He notes the details, returns to his own time and teaches the theorem to a
student, who then writes it up for Scientific American."

Maybe what we're supposed to assume from this is that the article the time traveler initially discovers is the same theorum the student eventually published. If that is a reasonable premise (and I'm not sure it is) then it would appear the theorum "came from nothingness". Which would be mind blowing.

But whether the whole thing is reasonable is a very big "if". I think this deal is like trying to find reason in how a universe can expand into something that never existed before the expansion.

If you believe that changing the past creates a new future, then in that new future, the loop that they discuss is completely true and the theorum did come 'from nothing', since the future that it came from no longer exists, at least for those 'people' who have traveled down the now modified path, because it will not be written in their future, because it was already written in their past.

Originally posted by Dean Roddey
The original 'double slit' experiment is very real world proof that this happens. Until you measure the photon, it has take all of the possible paths. As soon as you measure it, all of the other possible scenarios collapse (collapse of the wave function as the quantum folks say.)

This is an interpretation of the results of an experiment, not some absolute truth. This specific interpretation always bothered me at a deep level, and then a few years ago in Physics Today someone wrote a nice pair of articles essentially saying the emporer was not wearing clothes, in other words, it's all crap. I felt a lot better. It doesn't change the results of the double-slit experiment of course. The idea is that the wavefunction is determined at the slit given the interference properties of the light, and there is simply some randomness involved (e.g. God does play dice with the universe).

At some level this comes down to what seems reasonable to you, since it seems unlikely that either of these interpretations are provable (or any of the several others). They're just mechanisms for understanding something.

M

If you believe that changing the past creates a new future, then in that new future, the loop that they discuss is completely true and the theorum did come 'from nothing', since the future that it came from no longer exists, at least for those 'people' who have traveled down the now modified path, because it will not be written in their future, because it was already written in their past.

That does appear to be the case, Gus. Something from nothing.

My first impulse is to think that there must be a cousin to the law of conservation of matter which must apply here and which would nullify this. But of course there isn't any such thing.

I'm going to sit down tonight and write a letter to Hawking and insist that he speed up the process of outlawing time travel. Hopefully, Hawking will be more receptive to my correspondence than Einstein was to Seabury Brewer.

Actually, NO. The fact that you distroyed that universe does not change the fact that the theorem came from it. Its like if you get burned by a flame and then extinguish it. Did you get burned from nothing just because the flame no longer exists?

To the people in that new universe, the theorem came from the student. To the student, it came from the time traveler. To the time traveler, it came from the article he read, which did exist until he obliterated the universe. So any way you look at it, you don't get something from nothing. The continuity was never broken except in the point of view of the people in the new universe.

Gus

Actually, NO. The fact that you destroyed that universe does not change the fact that the theorem came from it.

But how did the theorum come into existence? Ideas (in this case a theorum) by definition, must originate in the mind of someone. But this did not. It did not originate in the student's mind because he got the ideas from the time traveler. And it did not originate in the time traveler's mind because he got the ideas from reading the article. So where did it come from? That's the paradox.

Actually after re-reading what I just said I'm becoming more convinced that this proposition is irrational to start with.

An idea MUST originate in a mind (again, as I said before, by definition). Since this proposition makes no allowance for that then the paradox can not be rational. Hence it never would nor ever could occur.

The time traveler got it from an article in SA, it was written by a scientist in that universe. Because of the fact that the traveler changed the future of that universe, it stopped existing. But before that universe collapsed, the time traveler had secured the information and took it with him. It's like a bank robber who blows up the bank after he robs it. The bank no longer exists, but he already got the money.

So the theorem came from a universe that once existed.

Gus

We posted at the same time. Read what I said above and you may look at it in a different way.

Fact: a theorum (or any other idea) must originate in a mind. That is by definition what an idea is.

Fact: in the paradox that did not occur.

Conclusion: The paradox is irrational

Can you Gus (or can you, Dean or Moore) find anything wrong with what I just said?

The time traveler got it from an article in SA, it was written by a scientist in that universe.

That's how I first interpreted what the SA writer was trying to convey too.
But we interpreted it that way only because the SA writer needs to take a writing course.

It's now evident that what the SA writer was trying to convey is that the theorum the time traveller read was in fact the very same theorum the student published. There's no 3rd party scientist involved in this. That is the only way the paradox can even try to make a point.
But further consideration reveals the irrationality of that to start with.

Bob,

I think that the paradox only destroys the universe from THAT POINT ON. it would not change its history. therefore the theorem came from the mind of that scientist, who has no future but had a past.

MAYBE!

Gus

When you're referring to it coming from the mind of "that scientist", Gus, who are you referring to?
The student? The time traveller? Or someone else?
If it's someone else then who is the someone else?

Originally posted by RobertWood
When you're referring to it coming from the mind of "that scientist", Gus, who are you referring to?
The student? The time traveller? Or someone else?
If it's someone else then who is the someone else?

I mean the original scientist that wrote it before the time traveler got involved. That article was there only if someone else wrote it.

Fact: An idea must originate in a mind ( hope I'm quoting you correctly)

Fact: The time traveler did not think of it, he read it.

Fact: the student did not think of it, he was told by the time traveler.

Conclusion: The theorem got there because a scientist that writes for SA ( not the time traveler nor the student) thought of it.

After the time traveler took the information, he went back to his own time and gave the information to the student.

At that very moment that the information changed hands from the traveler to the student, the existence of the other universe ( where the scientist wrote the theorem) ended because of the meddiling of the traveler. But the history of that universe still existed and in that history, the information was thought of in the mind of that scientist.

Gus

This is why I tend to concentrate on more fundamental and important issues, like how I might manage to get laid before I die.