RE: The speed of light and discovering
August 10, 2016 at 10:07 am
(This post was last modified: August 10, 2016 at 10:08 am by RozKek.)
(August 10, 2016 at 9:18 am)Alex K Wrote:(August 10, 2016 at 9:01 am)RozKek Wrote:
Which paradoxes are we talking about here, and what would some possible solutions?
Generally, if you have a means to send information or travel faster than light, it is possible to send
information into your own past. This will then form a time-loop which would feed into itself like an infinite
feedback loop. We are literally
talking about the "killing your own grandmother" thing, after which you wouldn't exist, obviously preventing
you from travelling back and killing her, which means that
your grandmother is still alive, which means that you can do the going back and killing her after all, etc., you
get the idea. Though much more subtle influences will already change the past by so much that it would
cause everything to become inconsistent.
Ways out? Maybe whenever you do that, the universe splits up and you create a new timeline (i.e. you don't really send
the info back to your own past, but instead cause a forking where one parallel version of you receives the message.
This is somehow imaginable if the many worlds picture of quantum mechanics were true. Another thing that could happen
is that this timelike causality loop will oscillate wildly through all kinds of realities until it settles in a self-consistent state
where past and future including the time travel are self-consistent, and that's the reality you'll think you were in the entire time
(this means that upon further investigation you will find out that you were indeed messing with your own past, but that's
precisely why you exist now as you do, and you have no free will to not go and do the time travel.
I think there is the possibility to have faster-than-light without time travel paradoxes, namely if faster-than-light travel is only
possible with respect to a certain frame of reference. I haven't done the maths, I'm not 100% sure and need to check.
It would certainly require a drastic modification of relativity theory.
I thought wormholes only "bent" space and made the distance between two spots closer, but didn't actually make you travel faster than the speed of light. If that is the case (that it bends space) then why would/would any paradoxes arise?
