Time Travel
Let us beat on this theme again. Scientists have no self-awareness. First it was quantum mechanics, and now it is time travel. The problem is the same; physicists have gotten so far ahead of themselves, with their cyclotrons and their bosons and their fancy degrees, that they think they can ignore the basic principles of science. If your impossibly complicated theory seems to prove something impossibly stupid, well, that can't be something wrong with your theory; it must just be one of those things.
I'm not sure whether time travel is as popular in the physics community as quantum superposition. I know there are some physicists who are into that sort of thing, but I'm not sure whether they are considered "rogue" physicists. Maybe normal
physicists are all concentrating on building the X-ray laser. If so, awesome. But assume this is a big thing in modern research.
Time travel theory comes from a pretty simple idea: Other times are just like other places. Not *just* like other places, of course. With time travel, for instance, you might meet yourself when you were a baby. But basically like other places. Other times, in this reading, are places you can go, and return from, with the push of a button or whatever. It's a tempting idea, when we're talking about the age of the dinosaurs. You can practically see those dinosaurs, just on the other side of the temporal divide.
This picture runs into huge problems, of course, when you get into the what-if-you-kill-your-own-grandmother questions, and others. But it underlies every attempt to prove that time travel is possible. There's just no reason to think it is, otherwise. Scientists may say that tachyons can travel backwards in time, (and I am not up to date on tachyon theory, so I can't say how justifiable this claim is, if it is coherent at all. And how do you tell that a single particle with no identifying marks has gone back in time?) but I have no doubt that it never would have come up at all, if it weren't for the H. G. Wells model of time travel.
As I said, I have no idea what the evidence for time travel is, that these intrepid scientists have uncovered. I also have no idea what evidence they could find. "'It has gone back in time' the scientists said", is not a sentence we are likely to hear, or to verify, in the near future. All they have is their unbelievable theories, based on the readouts from cyclotrons and electron microscopes and space telescopes. I'm no fancy, big-city particle physicist, but I'm going to on the record and say, time travel is a big diversion.
I'm not sure whether time travel is as popular in the physics community as quantum superposition. I know there are some physicists who are into that sort of thing, but I'm not sure whether they are considered "rogue" physicists. Maybe normal
physicists are all concentrating on building the X-ray laser. If so, awesome. But assume this is a big thing in modern research.
Time travel theory comes from a pretty simple idea: Other times are just like other places. Not *just* like other places, of course. With time travel, for instance, you might meet yourself when you were a baby. But basically like other places. Other times, in this reading, are places you can go, and return from, with the push of a button or whatever. It's a tempting idea, when we're talking about the age of the dinosaurs. You can practically see those dinosaurs, just on the other side of the temporal divide.
This picture runs into huge problems, of course, when you get into the what-if-you-kill-your-own-grandmother questions, and others. But it underlies every attempt to prove that time travel is possible. There's just no reason to think it is, otherwise. Scientists may say that tachyons can travel backwards in time, (and I am not up to date on tachyon theory, so I can't say how justifiable this claim is, if it is coherent at all. And how do you tell that a single particle with no identifying marks has gone back in time?) but I have no doubt that it never would have come up at all, if it weren't for the H. G. Wells model of time travel.
As I said, I have no idea what the evidence for time travel is, that these intrepid scientists have uncovered. I also have no idea what evidence they could find. "'It has gone back in time' the scientists said", is not a sentence we are likely to hear, or to verify, in the near future. All they have is their unbelievable theories, based on the readouts from cyclotrons and electron microscopes and space telescopes. I'm no fancy, big-city particle physicist, but I'm going to on the record and say, time travel is a big diversion.
posted by apk01004 at 2:41 PM
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