Random thoughts about the universe
 

I guess everyone here is interested in Scifi......which has at least something to do with actual science.

On some nights I lie in bed awake and think about this and that...... I am really into science. As you know I am studying energy engineering at university. I am very interested in physics in general but also in biology, math .... well science ....
So I am thinking about what would it be like to actually have time-travel and I think about two major concepts of time demonstrated in „Back to the future“ and the other one in „Time-trax“.(or however it is spelled)....
It is very interesting to watch scifi and think about the physical concepts behind the series.

I spent some nights doing so
Has anyone of you read some popular-science books?
I have.....like the ones from Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene and the books are really interesting to read....I also read them in English language which was quite a challenge. Not that I understand everything in them but I really like thinking about the concepts and build my own little bubble....

So I want to know from YOU what you are thinking about such questions like „does the universe have an end in space or in time?“ or „what would the future of space travel really be like?“ or „what could be concepts or time and how would the manifest themselves?“, „what could black holes be and what could you do with it“
We can also go into philosophy here ....

We could have some little discussions here....I am very interested in hearing (or reading) what you think.

So get it on ..... if you like

(everyone who finds a typo can keep it)

Personally, I'm a firm believer in alternate universes...I have my own little theories about Fate and AUs and some about angels and demons that would probably physically hurt a devout Christian.

I don't believe in AUs in the standard most people seem to. On the contrary, I believe that all the universes are already created, and their destinies set. Each dimension is divided into various universes. Every 'sub-universe' after the main one shares many of the same major events of the main one, but perhaps has some minor insignificant differences. Not every possibilty exists, but there are a great deal...

Oh, and every encased dimension is encased in an even larger area with similar dimensions (same people, different events) in a larger bubble. Those bubbles make up existence...

Clearly I have too much free time.

MaverickZer0's Angelic/Demonic Definitions

Soul Angel: An angel that was once human. They possess a human soul and the same personality as the last one they incarnated as, appearance too. Peaceful, fluffy white wings, etc. (Note: None of the angels I write have haloes.)

Battle Angel: An angel endowed with battle magic, usually from birth. They cannot be have been human, with rare exceptions (see below). All of them are elemental, and either fight demons or fulfill prophecies as necessary.

Elemental Angel: A natural born angel (...leave me alone) with a set element. There are eight elements (four main and four sub), plus four (three main and one sub) elements that can be added when the angel is promoted. Many choose to be battle angels due to their powers, but some do not leave their homes.
Main Elements+Subtypes:
Fire: Main-Flame Sub-Solar
Water: Main-Aqua Sub-Ice
Earth: Main-Ground Sub-Wood
Air: Main-Wind Sub-Thunder/Elec
Promoted Elements/Subtypes:
Light
Dark: Main-Darkness Sub-Chaos
Destiny (RARE!)

Archangel: A promoted elemental angel. Standard archangels take on the other part of their element as well. Council Archangels take Light as their primary element and their original becomes secondary. Demon hunters take Chaos as their primary and their former becomes secondary. Specially appointed soul collectors take Darkness as their sole element and discard their former.

Destiny Angel: An angel, formerly elemental and likely battle, handpicked by Fate to assist in maintaining timelines. Wings appear large and black, but are actually every color possible, being coated in liquid Time. They take Destiny as their primary element and keep the old one secondary. Destiny angels are very rare, as the characteristics Fate claims they need do not show up often.

Fallen Angel: A cast out angel, not necessarily evil, who has obtained the help of or worked with an evil-allied being deliberately. Wings darken considerably. Darkness becomes secondary element.

Forbidden Angel: An angel who has broken a strict taboo of behavior not involving the evil sphere, such as falling in love with a human, tweaking time without permission, entering a forbidden realm, etc.

Godling: A demi-god allied to a particular sphere with special powers granted to them. Such powers are not infinite, and if imprecise in use, can cause trouble, especially if used by a Chaotic. Cannot be born, one of the very-high ups (Fate or higher) must be in a Soul Debt to them.

Soul Debt: Simply a debt that can never be repaid, no matter what is done. Such a thing can be caused by Fate accidentally or deliberately messing up someone's life horribly (such as making an error that causes them to die but as they are not supposed to they cannot move on and are stuck), or one's soul being removed (temporarily or permanently, the debt is not cancelled even if it is returned) through some means.

Cursed Soul: Any unnatural creature, always cast into the evil sphere, forced with the curse of harming others to survive. Such examples include vampires, werewolves, etc.

----

That's only an excerpt from my files. You get the general idea. (Sorry.)

There is a bunch of suestions I want to know, but, astronamy being one of my better subjects, few involve the universe

but there is one universe question I always wanted the answer to, but could never figure out or learn:

The the Big Bang created everything, what created the Big Bang?

The universe is a harsh mistress, and has a rather cruel sense of humour.

It also conspires to annoy me (see also: Murphy's Law)

Of course, I have no idea if this is true, or even the most popular theory. It's probably even dead wrong, but here's how I think the universe might be.

The universe is infinite in both space and time, but I'm not sure if time is infinite backwards. It's easier for me to imagine a starting point for time, but that doesn't say anything.

Space has three dimensions, time has one. Time, however, is not the same as space, because of its one-directional nature. What happens in the future can't affect the past, whereas every area of space potentially effects every other.

Timetravel. I don't know if it is possible, but if it is, there are the two possibilities, lets call them theory 1 and theory 2:

(1) Travel into the past will create an alternate reality. The traveler cannot go back to his own. If he travels back into the future, it will be the future that he's created.

(2) Travel into the past will be travel to your actual past. Same reality. This will create temporal paradoxes, and cause the end of time itself. You can't think it will only cause paradoxes if you kill your own grandfather. Limiting the danger to that sort of thing is just naive. At the very least you cause air molecules to move or something. Even in a vacuum you will probably effect some fotons or neutrino's. This will create an alternate future, from which the traveler will start his journey. This will effect the traveler, and the traveler will effect his surroundings differently when he goes back. Etc. Etc. There is no longer a fixed shape of the future, and thus there will be no future. This stopping of time will stretch throughout the entire infinity of the universe, since everything in space potentially effects everything else.

Travel into the future will be the same in both cases. It would be like spending time in suspended animation for a while, time not passing for yourself. No problems there. But, of course, you can't go back to your own time without one of the consequences mentioned before about traveling back. Traveling into the future with theory 1 cannot cause you to meet your older self, because if you ever travel back to be that self, it will be in another reality. In theory 2 it's not clear to me. Does time 'know' you will eventually travel back? Hm.. Tricky.

In any case, timetravel will cause mass from a certain stretch of time to move to another stretch of time. Moving mass to the past even enlarging the amount of mass overall. I don't know if that matters, though, the universe being infinitely large and all. Moving a finite amount of mass from now to then should not matter in the grand scheme, but of course, could have local consequences. Bringing enough mass from future earth to the past could mess with the earths orbit, for example.

Mass, of course, can be completely converted into energy, Star Trek style. This, combined with bringing mass to the past, however, cannot create an infinite local energy source in theory number 2. If you bring mass from the future and convert it into energy, the same amount of mass will be taken away in the future anyway. Not that this matters, time having stopped and all. In theory 1, I suppose it's possible to create an infinite local energy-source this way. Not that your fellow humans have any use for it, you bringing it into another reality.

Well, let's stop here for now. :)

Oh oh. I must post my thoughts about time.

My thoughts don't necessarily involve the destruction of anything and everything like Michiel's do, but they served to confuse me to no end and realize that time makes my head hurt.

Think about the past, the future, and the present for a minute. On the surface they are the 3 phases of time. According to most works of fiction, if you change the past, the present and the future will be affected. If you change the future, nothing is affected.

Ahahaha. But wait. Let's ponder this for a minute.

Changing something in the present changes the future, because the present is a past. But technically, the present is a future, because there's a past behind it. So if we changed it, nothing should happen, right?

And if you changed the past, lots of drastic things would happen... except... the past is also a future, because there's got to be more past behind that past. So if you changed it, nothing should happen because it's a future...

And it's even worse for the future! Who says the future you're in doesn't have more future in front of it!? This would make the future a past, therefore making the consequences of changing the future very very bad! But then again, the future is a future because both the present and the past are behind it, but then again, those are futures, too, because there's more present and past behind them.

THEREFORE, I can skillfully deduce with my now monster-sized headache that time is everything, and if you change it anywhere at any point, the universe is screwed. Now that I think about it, I couldn't even deduce that the first time I pondered this. I guess my headache was worse than I thought.

Thank you, Temporal Prime Directive, for keeping us safe.

I, too, have read books by Brian Greene, and I agree with him.

If somehow you were to travel back in time, no matter what your intention is, you will end up creating the timeline you came from.

For example, you won't be able to kill your father no matter what you did. Even if you had to drop a a-bomb on the city your dad is in, he'd be out of town, or something to that effect.

So I think traveling in time is purely for observation, you won't be able to actually affect anything that would change your timeline.

Well, there are other theories about time travel floating around.

For example, the idea that time itself would work against you if you, say, went back in time to kill your own grandfather (before he met your grandmother). You might, upon traveling back in time, find he's left the room, or be waylaid in some other way. Basically, your grandparents got hitched, so your parents and you exist, so you can't go back and interfere.

Anything else strikes me as rife with grandfather paradoxes. The interconnectivity of events could cause the slightest change to balloon into a substantial change in the timeline.

Although, you could probably travel forward in time without too much of a problem. You could just never go back.

There's also the Observer Paradox. Someone theorised that if time travel had been invented in the future, all sorts of famous events would be surrounded by massive crowds from the future watching them. Since history doesn't record hordes of gawking tourists from the Tuscaloose of 3050 watching Lincoln get shot, it's a safe bet nobody Up The Line invented time travel.

Take that as you will.

Pfft, everyone knows that they will all have personal phase cloaks.

Re: Random thoughts about the universe
 

If you haven't already, try reading Timothy Ferris' The Whole Shebang. It may not be quite as current on string theory as Greene's The Elegant Universe, but it's much more readable than Hawking's A Brief History of Time which, though full of all kinds of fascinating details, I found to be a bit thick.

Tourists from the future? I think that was Clarke. ;)

Schroedinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality by John Gribbin is a very interesting, if (hopefully!) dated read. The author eventually suggests that every electron ever in existence is constantly communicating with every other electron throughout spacetime, past, present, and future, and that this explains some paradox(es) or another. Wacky stuff.

OTOH, apparently they were still perplexed by quantum entanglement or whatever back when the book was written.




There was a paper a few months back, unfortunately densely written, by some guy named...Peter Lyons?...who claimed to have very compelling arguments that time is continuous and cannot be divided up into indivisible segments the way matter can (maybe?). The arguments aren't entirely airtight, but after sludging through the paper four or five times I think they're pretty good points. But I had been leaning toward the "continuous" model of time anyway...

I don't believe in this 'time will make sure you don't mess anything up' stuff. Is time an intelligent being? Does it know anything about humans and reproduction? For that matter, does it know anything about leaving a room, or about rooms at all?

I find it more likely that time will not allow a paradox by not making time-travel work at all.

My money's on parallel universes. If every time travel creates a new one, it's by definition impossible for temporal paradoxes to occur.

Gatac

I also believe that timetravel to the past will not be possible....
I heard about a theory about a time-machine that will allow you to travel back to the time you finished building the time-machine and starting to work with it....
so when you built your time-machine 5 years ago it will only allow you to travel back this amount of time

I also think that it will self-prevent paradoxes..... in the movie "the time machine" the guy has to watch his soon-to-be-wife die all the time....I think that this could really be the state...

It could also be that you, when you travel back or forward in time, go to this time in an "alternate universe" or a different dimension...todays physicists believe in 10 spatial dimensions I think and also if these dimensions are curled up they could provide enough "space" for timetravel to happen.......

I also think of time as a mesurable "distance" between two happenings at the same place..... and you make that time linear by giving it a starting point of 0 entropy and an ending of infinite entropy.......and time evolves from lower to higher state of "chaos" ..but this also leaves space for some questions.... for example if time is a messure of change, what happens on temperature of 0K? is there time at all?
or when the universe does not contain enough mass to lead to a big crunch someday there will no change anymore because pressure and temperature are the same in every part of the universe...does time then exist anymore?

or what about the space beween particles making up for example a neutron? does time exist in such infinitly small areas of space where not even the vacuum energy could "create" particles and anti-particles that annihilate a short period of time later?

so many questions so few knowledge.....I definetely want to talk to a particle-physicist or something like that.....
I guess such discussion may last forever.......


@gatac: yes that could be a possibility...... but then you could have an infinite amount of parallel universes......

Time itself doesn't actually do anything, it's all chance.

It's all in Quantum Probabilities, which means anything could theoritically happen, but most of the other options are highly unlikely...but not impossible.

I was only saying time 'did' things because I didn't know how else to put it into words.

So, anyway, a test. You decide you will travel back an hour in time to put a piece of paper with your signature in your vault if, and only if, there's no such piece of paper in your vault already.

Of course, you set this up so you won't meet yourself, or any people, at all.

What will happen?

are we talking about that you only go back in time if you do not find a paper??

that depends what time-model you are in.....

lets think for a moment that you create an alternate universe in going to the past then you will not find a paper and so decide to go back in time (to the other universe) and put one there......now it could have happend that you live in the alternate universe created by yourself going back in time and put the piece of paper there...in which case you do not go back........

on the other linear time-model you run into a f....ing paradox but they may be prevented if the time is not so linear......

omg this is tricky indeed

maybe you would not be able to put the paper there at all because you may be delayed by something.......
that would be the best possibility to prevent those paradoxes in linear time....

Then of course there's the "Back to the Future" theory, whereupon a paradox is something that could potentially end up obliterating the universe and anything else you may believe to be outside it.

...On second thought, I'll go with the one from "Thrice Upon a Time", a book where they send messages back in time. If the possibility that the paper is not there is eliminated, the timeline that resulted from that ceases to exist.

It's a great book, if a little headachey to understand. I got it secondhand. Plenty of theory to debate there.

At one point in the book, they got a message that said "Watch the vase." from the future, about ten minutes from then. One of them was absentmindedly playing with the vase and froze when they got the message, thereby resulting in it not being broken. Seeing as the vase was never broken, as all times before that that could have led to it received the message, that timeline ceased to exist.

It's a little scary to think about, but the fundamentals make sense.

John Wyndham got there first - "Pawley's Peepholes", anyone?

I'm firmly of the belief that the universe is the most sublime headfuck ever concieved. The Creator is one scary bastard, if you ask me.

oh that leads us directly to another problem: who or what created the universe......or was it even necessary to create it.....
many people believe it was "created" 15 billion years ago or so....has somebody or something created the universe or was is there forever?

others believe that the universe was there the whole time but was only going through contraction and compression phases over and over again

that is another aspect of our time problem....if time is infinite to both directions or if it was created through the "big bang" and will end in a "big crunch" or does not end at all
in case of the second possibility the question of what happened before the "big bang" is not relevant....

it also blasts our minds if we think about the expansion of the universe...our term "expansion" describes that something expands in another room....in the case of the universe what room would that be?
it could also be that the universe expanses into no space at all

another problem is the size of the universe....is it infinite? is it finite? is it finite but does not have boundaries?
I would vote for the third possibility.....it could be described by the relations between the 2dimensional structure of the earths surface and hypothetical 2dimensional beings.....you might already have read about it.....

that is it for this time :wink:

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

Indeed.

And here I was already to quote Douglas Adams.

"In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded."

Watch the entire RedVsBlue seires.

"nough said on the topic of time travel right there.

okay than we can go to another subject :wink:

I have to think a bit

okay I thought a bit and decided to go on to some not so light subject......

what do you think about our existence as human beings....for example yourself...how far back reach your memories?
it is difficult to believe that *boom* our mind just pops into existence and with the same *boom* disappears when we die...

I find it very difficult to accept that our existence will end in a single moment later on...then there comes believe into play......could it be that after death we will exist further in another of our many dimensions?
will there be a rest of our existence left in this one?

it is also difficult to grasp what our so called "free will" really is
some scientist say that an impulse for for example arm moving an arm is there before we even realise that we want to move our arm

and is the uncertainty principle really imporant in telling if there is a free will or not.....


philosophy a bit :wink:

I am an atheist. Or, as some call it, a bright. I do not believe in an afterlife. I do not believe in 'free will', in that I think that our brain is just a biological computer. When it is born, it can transmit electrical signals through itself and the body. It is just running a program, which evolved by chance. It makes decisions based on memory and five senses.

When you die, you die. The elektrical impulses stop, and that which some call your conciousness is no more. You don't go to an afterlife. In my opinion, this is just something made up by people who fear death, later also used to control people.

I would also consider myself as an atheist but science as I know does not exclude the possibility of a so called "afterlife"
I think it could be possible to for example transfer the whole personality of somebody into a computer, maybe grown from neural cells.....
that would make "life" neverending....

Actually, an atheist is defined as one who does not believe in a supernatural being.

Science could never disprove God, or an afterlife. Just like we could never prove it if we were really all inside the matrix, if the simulation is precise enough.

Therefore I cannot say with 100% certainty that there is no God, or no afterlife, but I choose to believe they don't exist. If there were a God who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, the world would be a different place.

And naturally, if we have learned enough about the human brain, and it really is just a computer, we could copy it, like you say. But it is possible that mechanical circuits could never handle it, and that we would need to replicate our biological brain.

My way of looking at it is that although we can only percieve them in a linear fashion, all moments in time exist at once, so therefore nobody ever really dies in the sense that they disappear forever - they're still existing out there somewhere, even though you can't percieve themm. Immortality of a sort, if you like.

You just made my brain explode.

Imagine that you are sitting in a train on a completely straight track, and you are fastened into your seat. All that is visible is a narrow slice of countryside through slit windows on either side of you.

The train moves along this track in only the one direction, and so you can see everything out of the windows, so long as you are patient enough to wait for it to come into the LoS of the windows level with your seat.

Now, say there is a windmill off to one side. You will see it just the once, as the train passes it. However, when you can no longer see it through the windoes, it is nevertheless still there - it is just somewhere you cannot see.

I think this is a fairly accurate visualisation for PHJ's view on things - if you assume that the train is your passage through time, then you can only ever experience the slice of time you are in now, but the times you have already passed are still there, regardless of whether or not we are in them.

Or to put it another way, just because you cannot turn around, doesn't mean that the world behind you isn't there...

Nice explanation!

Then my work here is done.

That is exactly what I mean, whoiam. Nicely put.

@pointy
but doesn't that mean that also the future moments exist somewhere?
so do you even have choices to make without those moments change all the time?

and if it is so ... why is it that the "past" moments are sensible to us but not the "future" ones? maybe it comes from the fact that the "future" moments like I said change instantly when we make a decision..... so they are not sensible to us at all

(I like torturing my brain with all this :wink: )

I think I said this already, but: I think the entire Space-time-continuüm is fixed. So, the future doesn't 'change' at all.

We can no more 'decide' to do something than a row of dominoes can decide to fall down. When the first one is pushed, they just do. Our brains are just part of the equation.

Time could be like a neverending movie. You are just along for the ride, playing your part in the movie.

Time travelling could be like a movie on a DVD. You can't go back to change something because technically the change already occured when the event took place the first time, which brings up a paradox

No, the paradox is if you can change the past in a way that invalidates the future you came from. If your meddling succeeds only in producing the (exact) same timeline that existed originally, then there is no paradox.

Of course, in a completely deterministic universe, there is no other way such a time travel could turn out... the end result would have to be the same as it was originally.

Like I said, I don't believe in the "Time will fix everything" theory. If you travel into the past, you have changed the future, no matter what you do next.

The fixed space-time-continuüm of which I speak does not exclude either time-travel theory that I posted about earlier.