Researcher Discusses How Time Travel Could Prevent a Pandemic like Covid

erek

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"Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice

The theory of general relativity predicts the existence of closed time-like curves (CTCs), which theoretically would allow an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self. This raises the question of whether this could create a grandfather paradox, in which the observer interacts in such a way to prevent their own time travel. Previous research has proposed a framework for deterministic, reversible, dynamics compatible with non-trivial time travel, where observers in distinct regions of spacetime can perform arbitrary local operations with no contradiction arising. However, only scenarios with up to three regions have been fully characterised, revealing only one type of process where the observers can verify to both be in the past and future of each other. Here we extend this characterisation to an arbitrary number of regions and find that there exist several inequivalent processes that can only arise due to non-trivial time travel. This supports the view that complex dynamics is possible in the presence of CTCs, compatible with free choice of local operations and free of inconsistencies.

We have developed a characterisation of deterministic processes in the presence of CTCs for an arbitrary number of localised regions. Our proofs have demonstrated that non-trivial time travel between multiple regions is consistent with the absence of a logical paradox as long as once the outputs of all but two regions are fixed, at most one-way signalling is possible.

The most significant result of our work is our discovery of distinct non-trivial quadripartite process functions which are compatible with the presence of CTCs. This demonstrates that when multiple local regions communicate with each other in the presence of CTCs, there is a broad range of communication scenarios which still allow freedom of choice for observers in each region without the development of a logical inconsistency such as a grandfather paradox. The range of distinct communication scenarios which are consistent with the presence of CTCs proves that the way CTCs allow multiple observers in distinct regions to communicate is not overly restricted by a conflict between locality, freedom of choice, and logical consistency. As a result, we have demonstrated that there is a range of scenarios in which multiple observers can communicate without causal order in a classical framework. Our results are derived in an abstract framework, that does not depend on the details of the dynamics or of the space-time geometry. Further studies will be necessary to find genuine physical scenarios realising the acausal processes we have discovered."


https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/amp34146674/paradox-free-time-travel-is-possible/
 
Out there, right now, people are getting paid government grants to think on bullshit like this.......and I am jealous.

No this was done by a actual grad student. And they have the receipts (the math). The math is actually super complicated and all it does is prove that the sci fi paradox troupe isn't likely the result.

Instead the other sci fi time travel troupe is.... the adjustment bureau may well be real. Or we are dealing with one timeline anyway.

They say basically if you went back to say stop patient zero.... good chance something else would happen someone else would become patient zero. Or like all good sci fi you yourself would be. Basically the math supports things staying the same no matter what you do. And probably if you go back to stop patient zero you where always patient zero. lol

From the first line of the article;
" In a new peer-reviewed paper, a senior honors undergraduate says he has mathematically proven the physical feasibility of a specific kind of time travel. The paper appears in Classical and Quantum Gravity. "
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/uoq-yp092320.php
From that article;
" However the researchers say their work shows that neither of these conditions have to be the case, and it is possible for events to adjust themselves to be logically consistent with any action that the time traveller makes. "
 
Time travel is possible. The problem is that there is only one timeline, so you can't change anything.

So even assuming you went back in time, you would have always went back in time, and may actually just cause whatever you were trying to prevent.

I'm a multi-verse believer and if you go back in time and change something it starts a new timeline IMO. The original timeline will still be there.
 
No this was done by a actual grad student. And they have the receipts (the math). The math is actually super complicated and all it does is prove that the sci fi paradox troupe isn't likely the result.

...

From the first line of the article;
" In a new peer-reviewed paper, a senior honors undergraduate
Actually not a grad student either. "senior honors" basically means a student who does a little extra above and beyond the scope of the class, which often ends up writing a paper or doing a presentation on a particular subject nothing anywhere close to the rigors of a doctorate thesis though, and reading through the paper a bit... yeah not anywhere close to the rigors, looks like they add a bit of math (and not much) to what two guys would talk about while sitting on the couch stoned :D Translation: These ideas have been run through before.

The article referring to this as "peer reviewed" makes it seems a lot more lofty of a paper than it really is. Which reminds me, I need to tell some students that I don't do honors projects, because yeah...

On an aside note though, WTF is with that popular mechanics site, I feel like I have ADHD and OCD simultaneously after looking at the layout.
 
I'm a multi-verse believer and if you go back in time and change something it starts a new timeline IMO. The original timeline will still be there.
Explains it, go back in time give yourself the winning lottery numbers (but in another timeline), come back home wonder why your bank account isn't stacked, you made yourself rich in another timeline. Now the trick is to convince all your timeline selves to do the same thing but infinities are tricky that way, and chances are you help out one with money they're not going to be motivated to try and jump into another timeline (yours) to help you out.
 
Time travel is possible. The problem is that there is only one timeline, so you can't change anything.

So even assuming you went back in time, you would have always went back in time, and may actually just cause whatever you were trying to prevent.

This is essentially what I get out of reading the article. It's one big Deus Ex Machina. Somehow some sort of "fate" or "destiny" will keep things from getting out of whack.
 
I once heard time travel and disease explained as follows:

"The reason time travel will never work from an epidemiological perspective is because how immunity builds in human populations over time. Travel to the future and you could easily be infected by something others are immune to, and die. Travel to the past and you could start a global pandemic causing everyone else to die from a bug their immune system isnt ready for."
 
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I once hear time travel and disease explained as follows:

"The reason time travel will never work from an epidemiological perspective is because how immunity builds in human populations over time. Travel to the future and you could easily be infected by something others are immune to, and die. Travel to the past and you could start a global pandemic causing everyone else to die from a bug their immune system isnt ready for."
isn't that what probably happend with covid then? Zarathustra[H]
 
Covid is not an extinction level event. The vast majority of people who have or will contract it will not die.

Agreed. it is worth taking seriously, because you never want people to die from diseases, but it is not an extinction event by any stretch of the imagination.
 
Time travel is possible. The problem is that there is only one timeline, so you can't change anything.

So even assuming you went back in time, you would have always went back in time, and may actually just cause whatever you were trying to prevent.
My understanding was that current consensus was that time travel was possible, but that you could only travel forwards in time - not backwards. But I do concede the hypothetical nature of the entire discussion.
 
Yes, forward time travel is no problem. We are traveling in time at exactly 1 second per second.

Also, once you consider near light speed space travel, according to Einstein, time is not a static value (at least going forward).
 
I want there to be a movie about a someone who travels back in time by accidentally aspirating
agedefying.jpg
 
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Zarathustra[H] PhaseNoise UltraTaco cybereality DooKey

"Time perception and prediction errors are essential for everyday life. We hypothesized that their putative shared circuitry in the striatum might enable these two functions to interact. We show that positive and negative prediction errors bias time perception by increasing and decreasing perceived time, respectively. Imaging and behavioral modeling identify this interaction to occur in the putamen. Depending on context, this interaction may have beneficial or adverse effects.

The perception of duration in the subsecond range has been hypothesized to be mediated by the population response of duration-sensitive units, each tuned to a preferred duration. One line of support for this hypothesis comes from neuroimaging studies showing that cortical regions, such as in parietal cortex exhibit duration tuning. It remains unclear if this representation is based on the physical duration of the sensory input or the subjective duration, a question that is important given that our perception of the passage of time is often not veridical, but rather, biased by various contextual factors. Here we used fMRI to examine the neural correlates of subjective time perception in human participants. To manipulate perceived duration while holding physical duration constant, we employed an adaptation method, in which, prior to judging the duration of a test stimulus, the participants were exposed to a train of adapting stimuli of a fixed duration. Behaviorally, this procedure produced a pronounced negative aftereffect: A short adaptor biased participants to judge stimuli as longer and a long adaptor biased participants to judge stimuli as shorter. Duration tuning modulation, manifest as an attenuated BOLD response to stimuli similar in duration to the adaptor, was only observed in the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG) of the parietal lobe and middle occipital gyrus, bilaterally. Across individuals, the magnitude of the behavioral aftereffect was positively correlated with the magnitude of duration tuning modulation in SMG. These results indicate that duration-tuned neural populations in right SMG reflect the subjective experience of time.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT

The subjective sense of time is a fundamental dimension of sensory experience. To investigate the neural basis of subjective time, we conducted an fMRI study, using an adaptation procedure that allowed us to manipulate perceived duration while holding physical duration constant. Regions within the occipital cortex and right parietal lobe showed duration tuning that was modulated when the test stimuli were similar in duration to the adaptor. Moreover, the magnitude of the distortion in perceived duration was correlated with the degree of duration tuning modulation in the parietal region. These results provide strong physiological evidence that the population coding of time in the right parietal cortex reflects our subjective experience of time."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200914131929.htm

https://www.quantamagazine.org/reasons-revealed-for-the-brains-elastic-sense-of-time-20200924/
 
Time travel is possible. The problem is that there is only one timeline, so you can't change anything.

So even assuming you went back in time, you would have always went back in time, and may actually just cause whatever you were trying to prevent.
This.
12 Monkeys (1995) got it right.

c2e09929642d2cb2fd0d42-19-12-monkeys.rsocial.w1200.jpg

Also worth noting - the Cassandra Complex.
...a person whose valid warnings or concerns are disbelieved by others.
 
I'm a multi-verse believer and if you go back in time and change something it starts a new timeline IMO. The original timeline will still be there.
The multiverse and theories of time are two fundamentally different concepts. A multiverse would mean multiple separate, completely independent bubbles of time that are each isolated to their respective verse. Time is just measurement of motion from the point of our universe coming into existence.
 
Reminds me of a video short where a guy on a park bench uses time travel machine to pick up on a chick. Show's the aftermath where this dude's version of time machine is like the movie Prestige and he just creating a copy of himself back in time while original him dies. Don't get why original would die if just making a copy, but whatever fit the story.

It would be hilarious or morbid depending on how you look at it if say in Avenger's End game, every time an avenger came back they show new parallel universe just collapsed as the only reason it was created because of time traveler (once they leave, boom gone). Then Avengers traveling back in time would be way worse (2x more people dead and universe gone) than Thanos snap.

Edit: On second thought if new universe didn't exist in the first place, no harm no foul other than new universe people going 'wtf' as it collapses.
 
So thought experiment: if you could get a 1 way ticket to 200 years in the future, would you take it?

There is no going back, and you can't take anything or anyone with you. There is no guarantee of anything, the world could be a barren wasteland. Would you still do it?
 
Guess they could go back and expose Xi and the WHO for falsely covering up and then blowing up the actual impact creating world wide economic chaos. Then we could just ignore it and have carried on as normal the last year.
 
Traveling forward in time is relatively easy....Just get up to 99.9999% the speed of light or fall into a gravity well. Technically, we''re all time traveling a little bit both on our speed through the universe and the gravity of the earth. Time traveling backward requires exceeding the speed of light without using a warp bubble. Then of course you have the competing theories of singular verse branching timelines. Personally, I believe in the branching timeline. Once you go back in time, you can never go back to your original universe. You essentially vanish from that timeline entirely. Aka...Star Trek Kelvin Timeline. However, you could essentially go back in time and cause virtually no effect which would allow the new universe to play out the same until you vanished.

Or it could be like Quantum Break...destiny, fate, etc.

Let's just all hope it's not like Dr. Who.
 
Time travel is not only possible, but utterly pointless. Time is merely the 4th spatial dimension that presents itself like a change in the other three. When in reality, The future and the past is and always have been. Like a video file, the ending of the video exists before you play it. Every frame and sound clip already existed before you hit "play". The causal links between action and reaction are just the 3-dimensional manifestations of 4th dimensional structure: and our perception of time (and perception of everything, really) is just a manifestation of the resultant chemical states of these 3-dimensional manifestations of Temporal structure.

Just like the time-slider on a video file, if you move it along, it jumps between different states of the video that existed before you opened the file, and the characters and entities within the video behave exactly as they would have had you simply left it playing, move the slider back in time and the characters don't know what happened, they don't now have a different set of input variables, they don't know the future. They won't change how the video file will play out, because their future is already set in the file, it exists at the same time as their past and present. Its the slider that manifests their current perception of "present".

Thus 'traveling' in time would result in re-winding the chemical reactions that lead to your awareness of the current moment, and the entire string of causality that makes the universe exist as it does. Essentially, you couldn't change anything, because it would be like moving a time-slider on a video, thus the difference between a universe wherein you did manage to "time travel" and a universe where you didn't "time travel" would look identical at every point in time, and your perception of the timeline would rewind with the traveling, thus making it pointless.
 
Time travel is not only possible, but utterly pointless. Time is merely the 4th spatial dimension that presents itself like a change in the other three. When in reality, The future and the past is and always have been. Like a video file, the ending of the video exists before you play it. Every frame and sound clip already existed before you hit "play". The causal links between action and reaction are just the 3-dimensional manifestations of 4th dimensional structure: and our perception of time (and perception of everything, really) is just a manifestation of the resultant chemical states of these 3-dimensional manifestations of Temporal structure.

Just like the time-slider on a video file, if you move it along, it jumps between different states of the video that existed before you opened the file, and the characters and entities within the video behave exactly as they would have had you simply left it playing, move the slider back in time and the characters don't know what happened, they don't now have a different set of input variables, they don't know the future. They won't change how the video file will play out, because their future is already set in the file, it exists at the same time as their past and present. Its the slider that manifests their current perception of "present".

Thus 'traveling' in time would result in re-winding the chemical reactions that lead to your awareness of the current moment, and the entire string of causality that makes the universe exist as it does. Essentially, you couldn't change anything, because it would be like moving a time-slider on a video, thus the difference between a universe wherein you did manage to "time travel" and a universe where you didn't "time travel" would look identical at every point in time, and your perception of the timeline would rewind with the traveling, thus making it pointless.

Block Universe Theory?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...eory-time-past-present-future-travel/10178386

Definitely seems more rational than stuff like the multiverse / string theories.
 
Block Universe Theory?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...eory-time-past-present-future-travel/10178386

Definitely seems more rational than stuff like the multiverse / string theories.
There very well may be a multiverse, and Thinking of time as a 4th spatial dimension does not preclude the absence of a 5th or 6th or higher spatial dimensions, and with something like a 5th dimension acting on the 4 dimensions below it in the same way that the 4th acts on the 3 below that, that would result in a multiverse of sorts, where one would be able to visit two locations in the exact same coordinates in 4-D space but have both appear completely different because the 5th coordinate is not the same.
 
Time travel is not only possible, but utterly pointless. Time is merely the 4th spatial dimension that presents itself like a change in the other three. When in reality, The future and the past is and always have been. Like a video file, the ending of the video exists before you play it. Every frame and sound clip already existed before you hit "play". The causal links between action and reaction are just the 3-dimensional manifestations of 4th dimensional structure: and our perception of time (and perception of everything, really) is just a manifestation of the resultant chemical states of these 3-dimensional manifestations of Temporal structure.

Just like the time-slider on a video file, if you move it along, it jumps between different states of the video that existed before you opened the file, and the characters and entities within the video behave exactly as they would have had you simply left it playing, move the slider back in time and the characters don't know what happened, they don't now have a different set of input variables, they don't know the future. They won't change how the video file will play out, because their future is already set in the file, it exists at the same time as their past and present. Its the slider that manifests their current perception of "present".

Thus 'traveling' in time would result in re-winding the chemical reactions that lead to your awareness of the current moment, and the entire string of causality that makes the universe exist as it does. Essentially, you couldn't change anything, because it would be like moving a time-slider on a video, thus the difference between a universe wherein you did manage to "time travel" and a universe where you didn't "time travel" would look identical at every point in time, and your perception of the timeline would rewind with the traveling, thus making it pointless.
If you accept b-theory of time, which I do not. A b-theory of time assumes an actual infinite of things since it does not differentiate the past from the present, or future. It's just an attempt to rebrand the eternal universe which was advocated by scientists and imploded when the redshift was discovered laying evidence for a finite past.
 
500 years ago someone looked at the moon and talked about going to it. guess what the other people said.
They said it can't happen, and it will never happen.

and the speed of light... its just a measurement

just because the door has not been opened yet, does not mean the door is not there.
 
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