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Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

09/03/2007 02:48 GMT

Time Travel is so out there compared to makine astrology scientific that there's little hope of us constructing thought experiments or such.

Any way, the nature of time determines what can be said about travel through it. Pre-20th century or classical depictions of time has it as a measure of decay; time charts entropy. Without theories, fiction from this era tends to use the supernatural to explain time travel (A Christmas Carol), or some function of sleep (Rip van Winkle or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). Wells' Time Machine is treated with a vague description because his imagination was empty.

With Einstien's linking of time to space, it becomes another medium. Relativity makes traveling at different rates into the future possible (the astronauts who went around the moon for instance), but traveling backwards is still problematic. It has been suggested this can occur at quantum level, which unfortunately would also limit its use to quantum effects.

Reading
Robert Heinlein 'By His Bootstraps' and '-All you Zombies-'
Ray Bradbury 'A Sound of Thunder'
John Wyndham 'Pawley's Peepholes'
Harry Harrison 'The Technicolor Time Machine' and 'The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World'
Harry Turtledove 'The Guns of the South'

Viewing
Star Trek: City on the Edge of Forever and Yesteryear
La Jetee/12 Monkeys
The Girl from Tomorrow
Donnie Darko

Comic
Starlord/2000 AD 'Timequake'

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

10/03/2007 05:40 GMT

So we've got time travel's origin as a concept. General relativity was proved pretty much straight off as it described Mercury's orbit (thorough space-time) removing the need for planet Vulcan, and the observation of bending light during a solar eclipse in 1919. Special relativity with time dilation needed the kind of experiments the space race could only provide!

Even if we can prove time travel is practical in the laboratory, we still have the problem that it's only postulated at the quantum level, hence worm hole. This also tells us nothing about the nature of time travel beyond its mechanism, aka the problem of paradox.

Dialtheism as the name implies is the study of two mutually exclusive beliefs (dial theism). An example is "This is a lie."--if is true then it must be false and if it is false it must be true. If time travel exists then it opens the possibilty of changing causality and thus making a paradox.

What does this mean? If I went back in time and killed my grandfather, what would happen to me? Now the same issues I've been introducing in astrology are apparent here. About half the items on the reading list are examples of deterministic time travel. The Heinlein stories both require the time travel to occur to make the causal chain of history work (maybe that's what he believed?), as do Harrison's and 12 Monkeys/La Jettee and Yesteryear. City on the Edge of Forever and A Sound of Thunder both show free will creating changes which are not part of the causal chain and changing history. Additionally Donnie Darko and the Stainless Steel Rat novel introduce the idea that reality can divert as a train track, with the parallel universes existing as equally real.

Stephen Hawking argued against time travel with the spurious logic that a lack of time travelling tourists indicated it didn't work. Pawley's Peepholes and the aforementioned The Dead Past suggest why this may seem so (in the latter story it places Asimov's decade within the viewing range).

 
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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

10/03/2007 16:17 GMT

That was really interesting, dude!

I used to find the whole concept of time travel and its relationship to physics (and the 'new' physics) utterly fascinating. So I read books by Paul Davies, John Wheeler, John Gribbin, John D Barrow, et al.

Now I can hardly remember a thing of what I read (I think I summarised the main points as best I could - which could be done much  better, in an earlier thread  - before Terry began his self indulgent masturbating diatribe). Personally, I don't like talking about things that I know nothing (or near to nothing) about.
........Martin, you did Philosophy, History and Screen Studies at Uni......how the heck did you manage to also develop an understanding of all this quantitative scientific theory you succinctly and cohesively described above?????

 
terry

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

11/03/2007 00:29 GMT

Jimmy,  I`ll forgive anything you say about me or my family or even my dog but I can`t forgive you your attitude of not talking about something you don`t fully understand.
Why the **** not!?
That`s one of the best ways of acheiving understanding. Questions are all well and good but have you ever had a really interesting exchange with anyone when all they do is ask questions?
Furthermore, do you hold yourself in such low esteem that you can`t believe anything you might say to an expert could not give them an idea or two?
  It is this supine deference to the supposed hierarchy which helps them to culture the most arrogant of attitudes to the "ignorant and uneducated classes."
  In short, your reticence and reluctance perpetuates the elite.
  Why not just say " I know my place, Guv`nor, and I`ll stay there."

 
terry

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

11/03/2007 04:57 GMT

Martin,...
        I quite agree regarding the concepts authors had on Time travel. But that is what is generally termed "Grist for the Mill." Had H.G.Wells postulated further about Black Holes or Wormholes, then his publisher (never mind his readership) would have been whispering about ar** holes.
It was, quite simply, beyond their conception.
As for Dr Who ?
Think about it!
A Police call box! An anachronism in any time or world except for the decade that it may have existed in "real life" here on Earth. And yet how many worlds must he have visited ?
Authors may have ideas based on science or whims, but the most enduring concepts have endured, not because of their accuracy, but because they have something to say! And it seems to me that the most popular ARE popular because they speak about the Human condition.
Accuracy regarding the future is irrelevant in Sci-Fi; only the exploration of possibillities is salient. To my mind, that is the WHOLE point.

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

11/03/2007 06:10 GMT

I think I understand Jimmy's choice in his model of knowledge, but questioning his beliefs is more like critiquing his personality than not.

My interest in cosmology predated Cosmos, but that certainly piqued my interest. Understanding how preceding cosmological models (steady state vs big bang in my case) have been abandoned and why made me as much as an expert as any interested layman. The one associated field which I have studied is the one we (or I) am writing on in this thread: philosophy of science.

Reading
Alan Chalmers 'What is This Thing Called Science?'
Alan Musgrave 'Common Sense, Science, and Scepticism'
Fred Hoyle 'Home is Where the Wind Blows'

Anything by Carl Sagan
Anything by Karl Popper
Anything on the Velikovsky business

And I recommended to each undergraduate class I presented to (no matter what the subject):
L. Sprague de Camp 'The Great Monkey Trial'
Ray Ginger 'Six Days or Forever?: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes'

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

11/03/2007 06:11 GMT

So it's possible that time travel may be subject to the same causality that we are, despite its apparent offer of a free lunch. This leads to another anthrocentric theory.

You may have read science fiction stories which end on the note that humanity created itself, whether through time travel or disguising the origins through the story. Micheal Moorcock coined the term "shaggy dog stories" to describe these tales, which often as not end with the two survivors naming themselves as Adam and Eve.

But conversely the opposite is also possible. It may be that the invention of time travel negates itself, if an inevitable outcome is the use of time travel and resulting change of events which prevents its discovery.

Time travel could be in a constant state of flux of discovery and misuse, which prevents it ever permanently surfacing.

 
Tareth

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

11/03/2007 09:43 GMT

I must admit that the best time travel stories I've read are ones were you end up back at the beginning, but in a much worse postion than when you started.

Like, if you hadn't time travelled in the first place and stuffed up continuim with your 'I've got to fix this in the past and make the future better' then when you returned home you wouldn't be in the f**ked up position you're in now.

I will admit to knowing nothing about time travel from a scientific positon (I ain't read none of Martins fancy books), but I love to blather on about a subject I know nothing of - it's how I learn stuff.

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

12/03/2007 09:19 GMT

Fatalism is a separate thing from determinism. In determinism cause matters, where in fatalism it doesn't. The grandfather paradox is a problem in determinism, as removing my grandfather leaves a paradox which must be gotten around. In fatalism it is no problem, as even without a grandfather I am still born!

The example Greg Currie uses to illustrate the difference is a quote from Henry V where the king says it wouldn't matter if they had ten times the number of men when they enter battle. In fatalism this is so, in determinism it is not.

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

12/03/2007 09:21 GMT

I'm not sure I understand your comment that this is "grist for the mill" (something you can grind for profit?), but gather from the context that you're saying science fiction isn't about reality, and if Wells had postulated a current day sounding explanation for his time machine then it would have been rejected. Possibly.

Let's say for the sake of argument that he'd instead written a novel about time viewing rather than travel, using gravitational lensing by a black hole to focus a quantum worm hole. OK, black holes had been postulated by this stage, but weren't seen as significant beyond this as physics was pre-relativity. If he'd predicted 1. relativity, 2. quantum theory and 3. worm holes in addition to time viewing then perhaps he'd have been so spookily visionary that rejection would have not been a bad thing!

While science fiction is notoriously hard to nail with a definition, suffice to say codifications usually include current science. Take The First Men in the Moon. The science is very poor, as Cavorite defies description other than it uses the miraculous sounding element helium as an ingredient. In other regards it hovers at the edge of scientific credibility in its description of the lunar environment being just outside the then range of observation.

However, without Cavorite there is no plot. We can forgive Wells this one point without which there is no story, although Verne didn't and furiously rejected comparison. In From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon there is no miracle ingredient, just a whopping great gun. However, Verne too is guilty of breaking the laws of physics, as the then current understanding of inertia would have killed the travelers. Even in the hard end of SF the occasional dispensation comes in handy.

Wells is lumped in with other SF writers over a very small portion of his output, which in turn are usually analogies for class struggle, imperialism or the effect of mechanation as analogy for the living body.

 
jestear

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

13/03/2007 03:52 GMT

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

13/03/2007 13:11 GMT

The best representation I have seen of causal chains is actually American. The 1990s series of The Outer Limits featured a 1996 episode written by Steve Barnes called A Stitch in Time. This showed the results of time travel in a free will universe, was consistent and written to a tee.

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

13/03/2007 13:12 GMT

What does fatalism, determinism, free will, dialtheism, relativity and the nature of science fiction have to do with time travel. Probably nothing, but it does give us some tools to analyze time travel in fiction. What this begs the question for me is what are the rules of time travel in Doctor Who. In Father's Day the Doctor states that the Time Lords wouldn't allow this state of affairs. However he could mean they wouldn't allow unauthorized time travel, paradox monsters or free will itself!

Other stories which give insight to time travel:

The Space Museum: TARDIS "jumped a time track".

Day of the Daleks: alternate future and invocation (if not an explanation and full statement) of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, which appears to prevent do overs.

The Three Doctors: Time Lord distress at breaking the "first law" of time travel in uniting the various incarnations of the Doctor.

Genesis of the Daleks: Doctor is tasked with changing history.

Pyramids of Mars: Sarah sees alternate 1980.

Time Flight: Adric's death is taken as final, either a Blinovitch thing or indication the fifth Doctor didn't like him much.

Mawdryn Undead: That Scene, explained as being part of Blinovitch if not relevant to Time Lords.

Rose: Time Lords wiped out in "Time War".

 
terry

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

14/03/2007 00:03 GMT

For GODS`` sake!

(the apostrophes are there for those who believe either in Multi-theism or in grammar.For the benefit of jestear, that is Grammar, not Gran`ma`.)
To reiterate;
  For GODS`` sake!

This all started from what I believed was a neglect of consideration or web-space to a (admittedly) flawed but considered programme concerning a possible aspect of Time travel. Namely, Quantum Leap!
You may think that the best aspect that could be cited for this programme is that it contained rules for its own restraint but that would be short sighted.
It dealt with (sometimes hugged too closely in a Hollywood/Disney/Chocolate Box kind of way) human stories and issues.
Regarding the pseudo-Science which accompanies 98% of science fiction (in my own poor experience) it does constrain itself with some rules. Now, I don`t believe that Sci-Fi is a tool to predict the future. Quite the opposite!
Sci-Fi is a tool (and make no mistake, that is ALL that it is) to Imagine possibilities.
Either the future, the past, the present on a different track or even probabilities!
  The Original Question still stands.
If Time Travel were made possible, what form do you think it would take ?!!!!?

As for debating theory and philosophy on this subject,...................................................................................................................................................................................
          I`m up for it !

Last modified: 14/03/2007 00:04 GMT by terry
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

16/03/2007 06:33 GMT

I didn't see much of Quantum Leap; do you know if it was consistant in its use of time travel rules, and if it indicated these were deterministic or free will?

 
terry

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

17/03/2007 00:23 GMT

pretty much. The rules were that he couldn`t travel outside of his own lifetime.
However they stretched this rule in one episode when he travelled back to the civil war but this was excused by the simple(?) fact that he inhabited his grandfathers body.
The final episode opened up the potential to travel to any time at all.
I often think it could be interesting (with a good writer etc) to do a one off sequel.

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

17/03/2007 15:21 GMT

This reminds me of The Time Tunnel. The best and strangest episode had Tony Newman and Doug Phillips fighting a temporally displaced Niccolo Machiavelli during the American Civil War. Mind you that show was so deterministic that the main characters always ended up in the same clothes falling though the tunnel. It was fair to say it was fatalistic, as their outfits would transform.

Last modified: 17/03/2007 16:01 GMT by Martin
terry

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

18/03/2007 01:45 GMT

If you will forgive me for reverting to an earlier "diatribe",....
Just read on the front page of Saurdays (17/3`07) Daily Mail about the death of Sally Clark.
For those down under who may not be aware of the case, Sally Clark was a Mother of three who lost her first two children to Cot Death Syndrome.
Tragic though these circumstances are, what followed compounded such grief. She was charged with murdering her own children and subsequently found guilty. It was only due to an unwavering campaign by her husband and her father that she was eventually freed;"without a stain" on her reputation, according to the judge.
So; why did the Court convict her in the first case....?
  EXPERT TESTIMONY !!!
Professor Sir Roy Meadow testified that to lose one child in this manner was unfortunate; to lose two children in this manner incurred odds of 73 million to one!
Because he was regarded as an EXPERT in paediatrics his testimony (or opinion!) was regarded as law: It in fact came to be known as Meadows Law.
This was pivotal in Ms Clarks` conviction.
It was also subsequently shown to be flawed.
But Hey!,,,, let`s leave it to the experts.
  They all know better.

 
Martin

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

18/03/2007 04:45 GMT

There's a lot to comment on there!
Even accepting Meadow's figures, then once in every 73 million cases an innocent parent will be accused or convicted of infanticide. Which is the same for DNA testing, whose advocates now also demonstrate the figures in terms of how many times greater the population of the Earth would have to be to make a coincidental match as well as single large figure such as Meadow did.

In South Australia we had an incompetent forensic pathologist coroner for decades. And in Western Australia they seem to specialise in unsound convictions. But none of this reflects on science itself. If the Western Australian cops are good at beating prisoners and falsifying confessions, and one coronial expert in SA did the equivalent to the forensic proof it reflects on both the justice system and the prosecution (probably the defence too!). For this reason you don't convict on such evidence alone. And the expected lay people in the jury should have access to exactly what the prosecution evidence means.

Hwang Woo-suk lied about his ability to clone,  Blondlot "discovered" N rays and Columbus is said to have falsified his logs to shore up his claim to have discovered a sea route to Asia. None of these examples passed the repeatability test, let alone peer review. It's not science that's the problem!

This argument boils down to criteria for knowledge, and why I wanted to discuss your belief in astrology--is it part of a larger framework of values or one different belief amongst common ones? Do you believe in science at all or think it's unreliable compared to pre-scientific fields?

Not that I want to put you on the spot or make you answer any particular question, just that knowledge itself is the subject of my preferred field of philosophy, epistemology.

 
terry

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Subject:  Re: Time Travel;..Yeah,No,..Maybe,....

19/03/2007 00:50 GMT

Not a problem; I`ll answer any question I can. But first I have to say that I seem to have misrepresented myself.
I don`t actually have a belief in astrology as such, I just think that if any of its findings about the character of a person born under a particular star sign has any accuracy then it should not be dismissed out of hand. Obviously, no proof has so far surfaced but to me that indicates that it should be put on the back-burner rather than thrown out altogether.
Yes, I believe very much in science. It has given us many of the things we love and loathe. I don`t have a problem with science.
Science is like a tool-box, it contains what we need to create, explore and understand. But a tool-box doesn`t do the work by itself and is only the first step to building.
The most important thing is the interpretation of results. Science says that if something cannot be seen nor measured etc,then it doesn`t exist. This could be said about God (indeed, it often is.) But perhaps the real answer is that science has not yet developed the disciplines required for such an investigation. Let me stress here that I am an atheist (though I wish to God I wasn`t) but I don`t deny the possibility of a Deity or two. I am basically opposed to the unquestioning deference of experts.

 

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