Timeline

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by Doc Brown, Mar 10, 2001.

  1. Doc Brown Registered Member

    Messages:
    20
    In Michael Crichton's book Timeline, a quantum computer is used to scan a person's molecules and reconstruct then in a parallel universe in which it is now the past. (I think it could be done in our past because space and time are not independent, but that's another topic) Do you think it could be done? I do.
     
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  3. willakitty Registered Senior Member

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    48
    um...?

    I wouldn't know for sure, but I always just assumed that a trip to the past would be quite difficult because if there is one other dimesion that contains a past moment, there are innumerable others to be sorted through to find the general time and place you desire. I think getting back to the "present" would be easier once you got there. That's a simple chore of having to outrace light for a few moments, depending on how "far" you've come...
    Then there's always that theory about all time lines being connected and, as each meets its ultimate end, fizzling out like frayed thread; a river of time...How fast would it flow? Sorry, I got off on another subject.
    The subject is quite puzzling. Why do something so difficult in the first place? Why not just use the machine to move molecules around in the same dimension and then once the procedure is understood better, adapt it to move thru others? But I don't really understand it anyway...
     
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  5. Time/02112 Senior Member Registered Senior Member

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    298
    A Machine Called "Z"...

    Doc Brown, and perhaps others,
    you might find this article interesting, it deals with a quantum computer, and a new form of hybird fussion reactor core, and from reading the article at the provided Link below, I dare not spit in the wind to dismiss the severity of it's plausability within our current technology, and the knowing that most of what is known to the general market, is at least a quarter of a century behind what is common, and already being studied behind the scences at Los Alamos, CERN, General Dynamics, and other compartmentalized real-life research projects between GVT's & Private Corporations, that are in secret pertaining to National Security issues.

    Bottom Line, it would not surprise me in the least, to discover that this article was based on much more, than just a good story.

    __________________________________________
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    Subject: The "Z" Machine...


    A machine called Z

    Under a ring of water in a sealed chamber in the middle of the New
    Mexico desert lies the heart of a machine that could change the world

    Michael Paterniti
    Sunday December 31, 2000

    The man in the control room on a
    tinny loudspeaker, the Machine speaking through the human.

    'Twenty kV...'

    'Thirty kV...'

    'Forty kV...'

    At 90, the floodgates open: a pulse of electricity surges out of the
    Marx generators toward an inside ring of giant capacitors and then
    through a series of gas switches. The current is compressed by the
    Machine into a wild whitewater of electricity that charges toward the
    vacuum chamber at a speed of 60 million feet per second. On its way,
    it passes through painted sharks' mouths, drawn there by the men in
    white and blue jumpsuits in the way that fighter pilots sometimes
    draw on their warplanes to show their prowess - or hide their
    misgivings. The electricity pours past the sharks' mouths, is
    redirected downward, along the Z axis, into the vacuum chamber,
    blitzing and bombarding from all sides a three-dimensional target in
    a gold-plated can, a delicately strung array of tungsten wires the
    size of a spool of thread, hanging in black space like a tiny
    chandelier. ....

    (You may read the remainder of this article at the following Link)...

    http://www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,416412,00.html
    Science 2001

    ...*If you have already read this, please feel free to comment.
     
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  7. Time/02112 Senior Member Registered Senior Member

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    298
    TAP-TEN Research Foundation

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    (To visit our TAP-TEN Research info.)
     
  8. Javier Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    56
    In my opinion,as long as every event is an unavoidable consecuence of the precedent(at least in the macroscopical realm),and this process is what we identify as time(the ordered proceeding of causes and effects)to introduce in the logical secuence of facts an object(a man)that is not the inmediately following product of the precedents s series would be a contradiction in terms,a paradox...


    Nevertheless I find(and always will,if time keeps functioning the way it did)time travel as one of the most exciting sources for SF stories...


    Regarding the possibility of desintegrating a person in some place and reconstructing him/her in other,that s a nice issue for considering the nature of individuality:as long as we change our constituing atoms as time passes,is their particular configuration what makes us who we are in a moment of time;but if this is so,that would mean that given the total
    amount of information that express our identity,we would be able to reconstruct us disregarding which individual atoms of the proper kind we use;but this would mean the chance of reconstrucing a person not just one time but 2,3,...and of course...simultaneously¡¡¡
    So,would that mean that our consciousness would be splitted,that we would live in several bodies at the same time?
    How can you receive different sensorial impressions by the same senses AT THE SAME TIME?


    But then I realized that if the impressions that the multiplied copies receive are different they meet the requirement to be called different persons,altough they would be as alike as no identhical twins have never been for they would not only share their dna,but all their memories until the multiplication moment.

    And if you are receiving the exact same impressions at the same time you will be the same individual,because you will be receiving an unique set of sensorial informations...no matter how many copies of you may be living at that moment¡¡¡¡

    Now if you make the copies from an original and that s it,you can call the original,in the sense of tracking the post multiplication development of the personality, the individual that was the base to the copy, the guy that actually lived before the experiment;but if you are to deconstitute a person and then make 10 copies,you can t call none of them the true original...
    or all of them.


    If you believe in the soul,the problem gets harder,for how will you send it by time(or space)to catch up with the body?


    Javier
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2001
  9. tetra Hello Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    144
    We will never develop a time/dimension machine

    Well actually, it does depend.

    If there are infinite dimensions, then you cannot travel between dimensions. If you could, there would be infinite monkeys sitting beside you right now searching for a good book review to their Hamlet they just wrote. There would also be infinite everything in all points of space all doing infinitly differnt things.

    If there are finite dimensions, then MAYBE we can. I don't know.

    We cant travel back in time, because then we would be seeing tourists from the future all the time.
     
  10. Mephura Applesauce, bitch... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,065
    Time/02112
    excellent article.
    my thanks.
     
  11. superluminal I am MalcomR Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    10,876
    I thought this was an excellent book. The movie sucked monkey ass.
     
  12. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,328
    another look at the same idea is to suspend the "forward in time movement" of an object thus the universe progresses in time but the object stays still in time.

    after a couple of weeks the object would still exist in the past and would not be seen in the present. [and of course space time would collapse and the universe would potentially disintergrate....]
     

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