Awesome Stuff: Time Travel

from the 1.21-gigawatts dept

Sat, Oct 11th 2014 9:00am — Mike Masnick

For this week's awesome stuff post of interesting crowdfunding projects, we decided to look at time travel. There are actually a bunch of crowdfunding projects for people writing (yet another) book about time travel, but here are three other types of interesting crowdfunding projects related (somehow) to time travel.

A Brief History of Time Travel A Brief History of Time Travel is a documentary that's not about the concept of time travel itself, but how time travel has become such a big thing in popular culture. It looks at the history of time travel within popular culture and how it's changed over time. Given how common time travel is in so many books, video games, movies and tv shows, this looks pretty cool.
Save the Time Travel Institute I had no idea this existed, but the Time Travel Insititue is an online forum all about (you guessed it!) time travel. And apparently the website may go away, as its current owner has announced plans to shut it down. So there's a crowdfunding effort to save the Time Travel Institute and raise enough money to keep the site alive.
Time Travel Experiment Okay, look, we can't do a post about crowdfunding around time travel projects without at least one project that claims to be about actually trying to do time travel, so here it is. It includes references to an unpublished theses, entangled particles and superluminal communication. Personally, if I were asking someone to fund my time travel experiments I might actually put a lot more information into the pitch to actually explain who I am or what I'm doing, but whoever put this pitch together decided to keep it simply and leave out such details. Perhaps that's why it's only raised a grand total of $2 out of a requested $150,000.

That's it for this week... unless you've figured out a way to travel back to the beginning of the week.

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Filed Under: awesome stuff, time travel

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JoeCool (profile), 11 Oct 2014 @ 10:50am

My theory
I call my own theory of time travel the "Big Bang Theory" - time travel is impossible. Why? Because particles moving backwards in time are indistinguishable from the corresponding anti-particles moving forward in time. That's been a staple of physics for many decades and is well established. But people don't consider what that means to time travel - the moment you try to travel backwards in time, all the particles composing your body become anti-particles and you go BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM!!!! Hence, the Big Bang Theory: Time travel isn't impossible, per se, but the moment you try to travel through time, you explode with a force greater than any atom bomb, thus making time travel impossible in practice.
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John Titor, 11 Oct 2014 @ 11:45am

Anyone with a spare IBM 5100 PC they might have laying around, PM plz.
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Zork, 11 Oct 2014 @ 12:08pm

patent minefield
I was thinking about giving my 297 IQ brain a brief workout by creating the world's first time machine, only to discover that many other people already beat me to it. On second thought, maybe I'd better spend my brain-energy finding a good patent attorney to help navigate through this minefield of time travel patents (yes, even geniuses have their limits).

http://www.google.com/patents/US20090234788
Practical Time Machine Using Dynamic Efficient Virtual And Real Robots
US 20090234788 A1
Abstract
A method for time travel, which allows an object or a group of objects to travel into the past or the future, as well as a method to cut objects from the past or future and paste them to the current environment. The present invention, called the practical time machine, requires teams of super intelligent robots that work together in the virtual world and the real world to generate a perfect timeline of planet Earth. The timeline of Earth records all objects, events and actions every fraction of a nanosecond for the past or the future. A time traveler will set a time travel date; the time traveler can be one object or a group of objects. Next, atom manipulators are scattered throughout the Earth to change objects in our current environment based on the timeline; and incrementally, change the current environment until the time travel date. Each atom manipulator is intelligent and manipulates the current environment as well as generating ghost machines to manipulate the current environment. Also, components of the practical time machine can be used to create technology for the purpose of: building cars, planes and rockets that travel at the speed of light, building intelligent weapons, creating physical objects from thin air, using a chamber to manipulate objects, building force fields, making objects invisible, building super powerful lasers, building anti-gravity machines, creating strong metals and alloys, creating the smallest computer chips, collecting energy without any solar panels or wind turbines, making physical DNA, manipulating existing DNA, making single cell organisms, controlling the software and hardware of computers and servers without an internet connection, and manipulating any object in the world.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Oct 2014 @ 4:27pm

Re: My theory
Time travel is impossible because time is nothing more than a concept created by humans to gauge change.

Time is no more real than math. Math is a logical construct we use to evaluate things, but just like time that evaluation exists separate of any known physical force.

In order for a force called time to exist then several things are required. Infinite matter and energy at every point in the universe and a mechanism to harness and control it.

Time travel is every bit a religion of pseudoscience and a religion with less foundation than any of the theological ones!
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Oct 2014 @ 6:52pm

TTE
I'll fund R. Bertematti's Time Travel Experiment ("Build an experimental apparatus to test whether sending back information in time is possible,") with the remaining $149,998 he needs...

On one condition. Bertematti sends me an email from the future with the message "Thanks, it worked!" and full design specs for his completed time travel mechanism.
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 11 Oct 2014 @ 8:18pm

Re: because time is nothing more than a concept created by humans
If humans created a concept, they can uncreate it.

The only way time travel would be impossible would be if time was not a concept created by humans.
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 11 Oct 2014 @ 8:22pm

The Nature Of Time
There is a paper by Lorenzo Maccone of the Quantum Information Theory Group that you will find online somewhere. His basic argument, as I understand it, is that the arrow of time is defined by memory, and the mechanism of memory is intimately tied up with the second law of thermodynamics.

In short, recording a memory in a physical system increases the entropy of the physical system. This is why it is impossible to remember time going backwards.
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OldMugwump (profile), 12 Oct 2014 @ 9:47am

Re: patent minefield
Wow. Somebody has too much time and money to waste on filing patents.
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Adam Johnson, 12 Oct 2014 @ 10:34am

Another great Crowfunding Time Travel idea !!!
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/send-me-an-original-web-series-season-one/

SEND ME is a web series about Gwen (Tracie Thoms), a woman who has the power to send fellow African Americans back in time to slavery as a character building measure. The power has been passed down through her family. Her best friend and confidant Katherine (Gabrielle Carteris) is keeping her secret. Her husband, Peter (a role played by creator Steve Harper), thinks she shouldn’t do this anymore. They’ve sent two people back – one never returned. Over the course of the series we navigate the marital conflict and see the candidates. Secrets are revealed and betrayals take place. The drama plays out in the front and back rooms of the comic book store Gwen and Peter own - and in some flashbacks to the 1800s. Someone from present day gets chosen to take the journey by the end of the six-episode season.
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Rekrul, 13 Oct 2014 @ 8:47am

Time travel story...
I once read an interesting time travel story, which I believe was by author Fredric Brown. I don't remember what the title was, but it was only a couple pages long.

A scientist has developed a small, prototype time machine that can send small objects forward and backward in time. He first demonstrates it to his colleagues by placing something (maybe a coin?) on the platform and setting it for a couple minutes in the future. The object disappears and then re-appears at the set time.

He then tells his associates that ten minutes into the future, he will send the object back in time eight minutes. Two minutes later, the object appears on the platform. He says that now he just has to complete the operation by sending it back at the appointed time.

One of the other scientists asks what would happen if he decided not to send it back. Would it cause a paradox, considering that the object had already appeared in the past? The scientist thinks this is an interesting question and decides to test it by not sending the object back as he had originally intended.

There was no paradox, the entire universe simply blinked out of existence. :)
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coward (anon), 13 Oct 2014 @ 12:17pm

Re: Time travel story...
This is Fredric Brown's "Experiment", a one-page short-short. Project Gutenberg etext here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29948/29948-h/29948-h.htm.
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Rekrul, 14 Oct 2014 @ 11:54am

Re: Re: Time travel story...
Thank you for the name and the link. :)
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Cosmo, 14 Oct 2014 @ 4:47pm

TTI isn't going away
Hey everyone!

Time Travel Institute isn't going away - We scrounged up the money ourselves and we've been online for a few weeks now :)
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