Re: Is time an illusion?

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 09:30:17 -0600, Matthew Scott
<scott.m@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rumpelstiltskin wrote:

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 00:07:30 -0800 (PST), mg <mgkelson@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Time, according to conventional wisdom, only exists inside the
universe. So, my question is what would happen if you went to the edge
of the universe and put one leg inside the universe and one leg
outside?

That's like asking what would happen if you went to the edge
of the earth and stuck one limb over the precipice.


Whether or not time is illusory would seem to me to be basic to
accepting or rejecting the possibility of space travel (Warp factor 8,
Mr. Sulu). As a 20th century primitive, I cannot conceptually visualize
travel in anything other than our immediate back yard due to the "time"
factor.

If quantum theory research leads ultimately to development of a method
of propulsion/navigation that effectively amounts to "time travel", then
good on it.


Then we run into the "grandfather paradox", of
course, in which you go back in time and kill your
grandfather before he reaches puberty. If you do
that, how could you have been born so that you
could go back to kill your grandfather?

I don't at all buy "time travel" because if it were
possible for people in the future to travel back to our
time, we should have seen countless incidents of
visits over history. One might say that with many-
worlds, they could pop into alternate histories which
would eliminate the "grandfather paradox" since the
history from which the son came wouldn't be the
same history as that in which that son killed his
grandfather. It still wouldn't explain why our universe
of all the possible universes just happened to be one
of the very few in which nobody from the future had
ever visited and left evidence of their visit.

One sci-fi story I read got around this by postulating
a "corridor" starting at, say, 1980, and continuing into
the future up to, say, 5020 when the corridor ended.
In the story, the good guys were chasing a criminal
who kept popping into the corridor and popping out
at some other time. They finally got rid of him by
keeping him trapped in the corridor until the time
in 5020 when the corridor ended, after which he was
stuck in normal time in the far future and couldn't
get back into the corridor.

In QM, of course, time travel, or perhaps more
accurately "space/time avoidance" does take place,
on a minute scale in quantum foam and on a bigger
scale in entanglement and in effects that precede
their causes. These all have in common that no
information, even in principle, can be transmitted by
which it could be possible to retroactively change
the conditions in the train of causality so as to
produce different effects from what had actually
been observed. The fact that no information can
be thus transmitted seems curious and arbitrary to
us at present, but I suspect the reason is all tied up
with Heisenberg's uncertainty and with the splitting
of realities, in a way that, when and if it's finally
understood, will make people say "of course!".

Somewhat similarly, we now say "of course" to
the increase in weight of wood after it's been
burned, because we now understand that process.
It was, however, a huge mystery to our ancestors,
who could see the smoke escaping from the wood,
so it seemed to them the wood should weigh less
after burning. One famous conjecture trying to
explain the bizarre situation was that something
tentatively named "phlogiston", that had negative
weight, had escaped amid the smoke during the
burning.

.

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