time travel: possible???????????

janeway kicks ass. i don't care what you say.

Yeah, she's ok. And that cyborg babe is ok too.

I like your signature, by the way. True.

somebody really hope it's the truth,because they feel like compensating for what they did in a unproper way in the past,or they want to predict what's the unknown in front of them thus they can vanquish the barrier without difficulties.
but i think others don't from heart like having a tour in the time,forget the past and meet the new challenges in their coming life way is their life style.
do you belong to which kind?

What??

Are you talking to me?

hi,wolf.
i just posted my opinion about time travel.that's what i think about it.
do you think so?

Let me pick this thread up again. Time travel, as far as I know, can only be possible to review the past events sans you being a active part of it. You would be merely an observer. This might be appealing to those who demand an unbiased and highly facts based perspective of history study.

truth
Time "travel" suggests that we are thinking in terms of space. USAHokie, I think, used the metaphor of a river with an upstream (future) and downstream (past). And all one must do--metaphorically speaking, of course--to time travel is to disembark from one's boat (the present) and run upstream or downstream to "travel" to the future or the past, respectively. What about a different metaphor? Say that instead of a river we visualize time as a lake, with no upstream or downstream. There is only "now" but with continuous CHANGE of the surface of the lake. In this metaphor, time travel is meaningless, there is only the constantly changing NOW.
A zen master once depicted change and time with a pencil balanced on his finger. One half of the pencil, he said, is the "future" which doesn't exist yet, and the other half the "past" which no longer exists. There is only the present, BUT, he said, that future is the non-existent future becoming the non-existent past. The present is therefore empty, consisting only of non-existent moments. Yet if is there is anything it is in that empty present.

JLN, using metaphor to illustrate the time travel doesn't seem to cast any light upon this arcane matter.

actually 'time travel' is something we do constantly, without even acknowledging it.
It is only evident in a 'macro' scale.
when one moves, one travels back in time relative to the objects in one's path, and into the future relative to objects retro to your direction of motion.
Admittedly, an immeasurable amount, but in science, quantity is insignificant, if the theory works.
To see this on a larger scale, consider a quasar at the distant reaches of our capacity to percieve light in the universe.
If we leave earth, going as fast as we can, under constant acceleration, toward that quasar, we are actually travelling backward in its time, and as we accellerate faster, and faster, we travel toward its origin.
(bring a lot of nurishment and warm clothing along guys; this may take a while!)

This brings me to my theory of time, in that it is merely the spacial relationship of objects, nothing more.

Acepoly, I suppose you're right when it comes to the issue of "time travel" which is essentially a problem for physics, not philosophy. Nevertheless, I used the metaphor of river vs lake because that's how it was presented earlier. Bogowo's equation of time "spatial" relations of objects (do you refer, BoGoWo, to the "time" it takes to move from one object to another in space?). But I DO see a contradiction between the physicist's T and our phenomena of future, present and past. I don't FEEL that any of them have substance. And I guess this says something about my ontology of Being: there are not substantial objects (nouns refer to fictions, as well as do their adjectives); only verbs (and their adverbs) refer to "reality." BECOMING is where it's at, but we must think primarily in terms of BEING. Process cannot be captured adequately in language. Does this have to do at all with the Indeterminacy
Principle of Heisenberg?

JLN, are you a postmodernist? look like so.

Bo, you interpretation of time travel can be put in a much plainer way. If we could ever travel at a speed that is higher than the light does, then time travel would be possible. Traveling as fast as possible, you might catch a glimpse of Socrates addressing the crowd several thousand yeas ago. Usually we talk about locomotion relative to some object assumed beforehand to be static, and in the case of time travel, that static object is the light.

truth
Acepoly, I guess I am a "post modernist" when it comes to philosophy, particularly issues in epistemology. My "heritage" includes Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and their descendants, such as Foucault and Rorty, but also James and Pierce (the pragmatists). But I am decidedly NOT a postmodernist when it comes to art.

jLn; to your
" (do you refer, BoGoWo, to the "time" it takes to move from one object to another in space?)";
not actually; i refer to time as being the 'definition' of the relationship between objects which changes as the point of view moves.

and Ace; as for watching Socrates, 'in person';
travelling back in 'earth' time would seem to be possible only from a geat distance away from earth. Since travelling toward earth, in order to go back that far in 'earth' time is not possible, there is nowhere to go - a paradox!

It really depends upon your frame of reference and not a philosophical argument.
Time travel is accomplished routinely in laboratories and particle accelerators all over the world every day.
The thing is that it's only travel into the future from the point of view of the particle.
No one has succeeded in backwards travel yet.

Bo, why exactly is it that we have nowhere to go? To review the past, to my knowledge, we 've got to travel away from the earth. Chase the light which is reflected back from the earth and which shows the activities of a particular time and space, and we could even run the gamut of human history.

Heliotrope, from your post, I see a connection between time and space, either of which, if taken separately, will be deprived of their meanings. I have the hunch that the acceleration of physical acitivities will enable people to watch a shortened process that usually takes a much longer time. But some doubts still linger. The mind boggles when I think how we perceive this acceleration if we ourselves are a part of all this acceleration of physical world. What exactly would we feel about this?

Each time I travel back in time via nostalgia, I return to look for little clues as to what might have changed to gauge if I've entered another universe. One time I found my trinket box missing, and have yet to determine whether I might have misplaced it. It remains a mystery to this day.

actually deni; i've got it, send me your address (yeh, right! ), and i'll return it!
(always good to encounter a 'new' sense of humour; i like your 'stamp'!)

truth
Deni, the best thing about the past, that is to say, visiting it nostaglically, is that it was perfectly safe for us. Proof: here we are. Trouble is, we didn't know that then; we know it now, but we can enjoy this fact retrospectively.

Hello to you, Bo ( Glad you like my stamp and I hope you enjoy my belly dancing waist chain ) and JL.

For me, going forward in time would be almost as possible as going backward, if one subscribes to the theory that time is cyclic in nature. Where does time begin and end? We only know time as being a linear progression, being accustomed to three dimensional space, with the added one of time, but can we really understand eleven dimensions? It's hard enough picturing a fifth.

After all, there were those who pooh-poohed the idea that computers could ever become commonplace at one time, and now we're texting messages on palms. Who's to say what the future will bring?

I intend to keep an open mind, and if anyone should make a snide remark about my brains falling out...why, I'll simply tell them that that's why I carry a collapsible portable bucket with me at all times.