Excerpt from an article by Lisa Zyga, Copyright 2006 PhysOrg.com entitled “Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century”:
“The Grandfather Paradox [where you go back in time and kill your grandfather] is not an issue,” said Mallett. “In a sense, time travel means that you’re traveling both in time and into other universes. If you go back into the past, you’ll go into another universe. As soon as you arrive at the past, you’re making a choice and there’ll be a split. Our universe will not be affected by what you do in your visit to the past.”
Think.
If we were to assume this to be true, then going into the past to change something would thrust you into a new universe and you could never get back into your own, so essentially you changed nothing, and anything that happens differently in that universe as a result of your actions would merely be an illusion of change. So what’s the point?
Ron Mallett stated that the grandfather paradox would be irrelevant, given the possibility of parallel universes, which is entirely possible. On a single molecular level, the molecules do not appear to be bound by the rules of space and time, which would suggest that they had somewhere else to go. If this is the case, going back to see your grandfather would have no bearing on what was still going on in the current universe.
Exactly my point, but so it begs the question of whether you could ever get back to the present universe (if you just wanted a visit to the past and not to change the past), how would you know if you made it back, and if you did want to change you’d just be in a new universe, would it be worth it? I don’t know, maybe it depends on the individual. Basically, it makes /me/ feel that time travel would be pointless if his theories were true. So I guess my final conclusion was meant to be–> Time travel = pointless, why bother, or why risk it?
i would want desperately to go to the past to be with my beloved spouse. he was 20 years older than i. so if i were able to do this and go back 20 years, we would be the same age because he JUST died one week ago. i could save him from the stomach cancer that developed as aftermath of his living conditions coupled with a vagotomy prior to our meeting. i don’t care if THIS universe would be affected or not. i just want to be with HIM again.
It’s important to remember that the whole multiverse concept theorizes an infinite number of parallel universes. That means that if you were to go back in time and did almost nothing, the resulting changes would be minimal. Subtlety is the major point here, so even if Mallett can succeed in sending some neutrons back into the past, it doesn’t mean much will change in the world. Another VERY important point is that he believes that a time machine is the route into the past, so you can only travel into the past as far back as the time machine has been operating, which would certainly not allow you to visit your grandfather or prevent your own birth. Give it another 300 years, and then that might be a problem.
I dont understand how you can theoretically create a loop in time if that loop exists between two (the destination universe and the source universe) different planes. And if the same concept will someday transfer even such small particles through time, when he turns it on will and infinite number of particles come pouring out of the machine? how can you measure how close to the invention of the machine you send back a particle? weird stuff. maybe i havent read into it enough
well my ? here is why do u caree???
I care because the laws of the universe have effects on us and the technologies we create are governed by those laws so we should probably strive to understand them. For instance, we should know before turning on such a machine whether something potentially bad might happen like the pouring out of a near infinite number of particles.