Large Hardon Collider

[Max™]

It isn't actually a paradox to go kill your grandfather, it's just mean.

Time is not a process, and it is more resilient than you may think, but less concrete as well.

More like taffy, or bubblegum.

Man I'm hungry, I need some gum.

[Waef]

You can kill your grandfather, you just need to make sure you sleep with your grandmother before you return.

[Max™]

You would not be able to return to the same history you left.

You would be able to travel forwards to a history in which you were never born though.

You could also pull a Philip Fry, or worse, a Rant Casey.


Though my favorite part of Rant (which I just read recently, after hearing it was right up my alley) was the bit at the end, about how it is possible that this entire story could become disconnected from it's own past due to people party crashing into the past and fucking things up.

That it could wind up on a fiction shelf somewhere, when it was actually an autobiography from a history that was undone.

[Kryssan]

You would not be able to return to the same history you left.

Of course not.


http://www.firsttvdrama.com/show2/history/lango.jpg

[Max™]

Well, that is ridiculous of course.

Right now you're several moments in the past from where you will be observing this post in the future.

Are you being eaten by langoliers?

Are you fading out of existence?

Why do people assume time only exists in the present?

[Kryssan]

At the relative speed I'm currently travelling, my past future is relatively safe from my future's past.

[Eliseos]

Why do people assume time only exists in the present?

Because we can't observe the future or the past? (devil's advocate etc)

[Evensong]

Because we can't observe the future or the past? (devil's advocate etc)

If we observe the present don't we observe both the future and the past?

[Eliseos]

Uh, how? What we rely on as our past is what a certain patterns of neurons firing in our brain tells us happened, which may either be skewed or missing data, and unless you are Ms. Cleo, you can't accurately predict the future.

[Kryssan]

Uh, how? What we rely on as our past is what a certain patterns of neurons firing in our brain tells us happened, which may either be skewed or missing data, and unless you are Ms. Cleo, you can't accurately predict the future.

C'mon Eli, you should know better than that.


http://www.musowls.org/library/images/foundation.jpg





And lol @ my boredom, I'm posting replies using Google image search.

[Eliseos]

Oh Asimov, you devil.

[Evensong]

Generally speaking, I'm just wondering how we decide what point in time is the present? Is it this very second? Or what fraction of this second is the present?

[Talka]

Generally speaking, I'm just wondering how we decide what point in time is the present? Is it this very second? Or what fraction of this second is the present?

I think there's no present. There is a progression of time, and we are constantly moving through it, so that there is a past (relative to our current - though transitory - temporal position) and a future.

[Max™]

Because we can't observe the future or the past? (devil's advocate etc)

When you read the post that you replied to with this post, that was the present.

Your act of posting it and my reading it was in the future.

Now this is what I am viewing as the present.

Your act of posting that reply is a real moment off in the direction I label as the past, and your act of reading this is a real moment off in the direction I label as the future.

Just as you can't be here, there, and somewhere else, you can't observe then, now, and later simultaneously.

But being here does not mean there or somewhere else stop existing, nor does observing now mean that then and later stop existing.


You are traveling at the speed of light, but most of your motion is in the direction of time, with the remainder in your spatial movement, and your mass.

[Eliseos]

I think there's no present. There is a progression of time, and we are constantly moving through it, so that there is a past (relative to our current - though transitory - temporal position) and a future.

This is almost how I view time also. There is a single point in time that is the present, but by the time you try to see it, it's already gone. I think of it as a line, something like the derivative, where you approach the limit as delta t (some arbitrary time interval that you choose as what to consider the present) approaches 0. That small, but still existing time frame, is what I consider the present.

When you read the post that you replied to with this post, that was the present.

Your act of posting it and my reading it was in the future.

Now this is what I am viewing as the present.

Your act of posting that reply is a real moment off in the direction I label as the past, and your act of reading this is a real moment off in the direction I label as the future.

Just as you can't be here, there, and somewhere else, you can't observe then, now, and later simultaneously.

But being here does not mean there or somewhere else stop existing, nor does observing now mean that then and later stop existing.


You are traveling at the speed of light, but most of your motion is in the direction of time, with the remainder in your spatial movement, and your mass.

That's pretty much what I was saying in response to the other quote in this post, but my point was that we have no direct way of measuring the past or the future (like looking into a microscope or something).

[Kryssan]

If my relativity pun post didn't make you realize I was joking about the time thing... well I guess it won't be the first time I got whooshed by my own humor.

[Evensong]

I was also perhaps trying to say, that when we observe, measure, whatever the present, we are also measuring the past and the future at the same time. The deductions we make in the present will be the past that will influence the future. I think all observations affect the future in some way or other.

[Eliseos]

I was also perhaps trying to say, that when we observe, measure, whatever the present, we are also measuring the past and the future at the same time. The deductions we make in the present will be the past that will influence the future. I think all observations affect the future in some way or other.

You are still relying on your memory of the events though, with respect to the past.

[Evensong]

It depends how recent those memories are. If something happening in the present is being recorded reliably and at that very instant, then isn't that a sort of retainment of the present, which retainment in turn will become the past?

[Eliseos]

Two different people will see the event two different ways, since they can never share an exact position in space. They may agree or disagree on what happened, but you can never prove that they will both always see the exact same thing, or remember the exact same details (and all details especially). I don't think you can scientifically say that it's reliable just because it only happened an instant ago.