A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
It takes more energy to go further back in time.
Everyone just assumes time travel is frictionless, but that doesn’t make sense. You want to go back ten seconds? Couple AA batteries. Want to go back an hour? Nuclear fission required. Seven days into the past? Microwave electronic resonance craft. A year? Forget about it.
Seven days into the past? Microwave electronic resonance craft
I feel like that's a reference to a supremely underrated and long forgotten television show...
It’s a reference to a patent held by the navy. It’s concentric shells of nickel or something like that, then microwaves bounced inside that cavity. According to the patent it ends up producing power on the order of a hundred atom bombs per second.
If the Multiverse is a thing, then that timeline has happened somewhere and our future selves visited us. Ahahaha. That would be trippy.
In this Multiverse though, it looks like we become the Borg, so they would have already collected all the info they needed and thus have no need to go back in time.
also because it is genuinely impossible to move faster than light as matter, let alone survive it
All those random scraps of metal you find lying are just the end result of someone trying to travel back in time and the time machine not surviving
That's why you make the space move around you instead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
That's not related to time travel though, but that's a link to an actual irl concept of a warp engine.
that's so cool
Time travel within the same universe is not possible, it is a fun fiction which is always contradictory in some way. The only time travel possible would be the one that William Gibson uses in The Peripheral. His idea is that every time you go back in time a new parallel universe is created, and it doesn't impact your current universe because of that.
My theory is that we're one of the most advanced species in our galaxy, and yet we still can't reach another solar system. The probability of intelligent life forming from unintelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we had life on Earth for a LONG time before humans evolved. Intelligent life is very difficult to form, you need the perfect conditions and perfect stressors over millions of years. Then on top of that intelligent life which can reach another solar system is even less likely.
There's life out there thinking the same thing right now:
Time travel within the same universe is not possible
Not exactly true. Technically, paradox free time travel would theoretically be possible.
As long as the time travel follows the Novikov self-consistency principle, there's no need for parallel universes.
Essentially the type of time travel employed in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. So you wouldn't be able to change anything, even if you did do things — as if you did something, it had always already been done previously (before you travelled back).
It is true, don't waste my time.
"it's a fun fiction which is always contradictory in some way" <-- that is not true.
General relativity allows for closed time-like curves and the existence of those means time travel isn't necessarily impossible, and if that is the case, it has to abide by the Novikov self-consistency principle.
Willfull ignorance wastes only your own time.
In that case time travel would be meaningless regardless, impossible to prove, and doesn't matter.
Dumbledore disagrees. The type of timetravel that happens in HP: Prisoner of Azkaban is self-consistent. Same as with Rick's timetravel in the snake episode of Rick & Morty (specifically excluding the snake time travel, which is an example of non-consistency, leading to endless paradoxes).
Now ofc having a timeturner and/or a timemachine would be the impossible part there, but again, CTC's are technically allowed by GR.
One of my favourite theory about human evolution is the stoned ape theory. It delivers the conditions of the evolution. Apes were forced outside of the jungle and ventured into open field and had to depend on different nutrition. So they ate some mushrooms and eventually ate ones with psylocibin. Small amounts increase your eyesight - so you can hunt better, bigger amounts are very sexuall arrousing - so more reproduction :)
You don't even need that hypothetical for it to make sense. Look up how chimpanzees fight against each other for territory. It's survival of the fittest over millions of years, simple. Cold weather in the north, requiring the development of technology for survival, learning how to use fire to cook clean food, learning how to use alcohol to purify water, etc. We split from chimpanzees millions of years ago, and chimpanzees can only survive in very lush jungle areas because of the food sources they rely on, which is why they're endangered.
Isn't there some theory that says the reasons why we don't see advanced civilization is because they destroy themselves with technology.
Yep. Look up the Great Filter theory.
I've begun thinking that time travel can only be possible if all of time were to exist simultaneously. Like a singularity. Then with complete knowledge and ability to influence matter you can rewrite time anyway you would like.
Like spreading the frames of a film out and altering them as you see fit.
Yeah but is there evidence to suggest that this is not the case? My understanding is that we don't really understand time.
I think, lots of people these days have an inflated understanding of time, because of the time travel trope in pop culture, as well as videos and simulations with time sliders being readily available.
Without getting into Einstein's theories for a moment, time is something we measure, we never modify time in reality.
In particular, we measure the progression of causality. Say, you kick a ball, then the atoms in your foot push the atoms in the ball, the whole ball rapidly accelerates and then takes 0.6 seconds to hit a wall.
You can't just set the whole process to -1x speed and expect it to happen in reverse. That breaks causality. The ball would need to fly towards your foot without anything giving it a push.
With our time sliders, this may seem like a small difference, but it's just completely different from anything we've ever observed in the universe.
Now, about Einstein's theories, all of the above is still true. However, Einstein has discovered that travelling through time is possible, but only going forward in time, at a different speed than everything else.
Basically, causality has a speed limit, which happens to be the speed of light. (We believe photons to be massless, so with our usual acceleration formula, any acceleration would make them go at literally infinite speed. They don't, which is why a speed limit for causality is assumed.)
Gravity and your own speed can influence this speed of causality for you, meaning at a lower speed of causality, things happen less quickly for you and you'd age more slowly.
So, theoretically¹, you can get into an extremely fast spaceship, spend 5 years-as-perceived-by-you in there and then land on an Earth that's in the year 3000.
That is a one-way trip, though, because going backwards is not a thing.
¹) In practice, you need to go at speeds for this, that are magnitudes higher than anything humanity has ever achieved.
I don't know. I'm just some guy.
fair enough haha
you do definitely have a point though
The universe seems to be keyed to disallow time travel. The speed of light limit, in relativity, is sat exactly at the limit where time travel would become possible. Conversely, quantum mechanics does allow for FTP transmission. What it doesn't allow is information to flow along those links. It's hit with a 0.5 error rate, which completely blocks FTP communication.
General relativity does allow for a few time travel options. However, these are sat well off in the sticks, where quantum relativity would dominate. Since we don't have such a theory yet, our predictions are likely wrong. Even within these theories, a time machine would require a "closed timelike curve". These can, in theory be made using several rapidly rotating black holes. Any ship traversing it, would never be able to leave before the time machine was built.
Basically, time travel is almost certainly blocked by our laws of physics. Any loopholes would be limited to the lifetime of the "machine" and would require stellar level engineering for even a few seconds of travel.
As I understand, the FTL "transmission" in quantum entanglement is equivalent to just ripping a photograph in half, sticking the halves into envelopes and sending one of them to Australia.
By measuring the envelope you kept, i.e. opening it and seeing which half is in it, you gain instant knowledge, what the other half in Australia is.
This is mostly useless for communication, though, because the person in Australia does not get this information instantly.
In the case of quantum entanglement, the photograph halves are a particle, which has decayed into two particles, each of which have kept a shared property, like a spin of -1 and +1 respectively.
This is the hidden-variables hypothesis and specific tests were made to check for it. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
Quantum mechanics does not allow for FTL transmission. Disallowing information flow is the same as disallowing transmission.
It seems to allow it, in a sense. The errors are also left on the transmission end. By transmitting them normally, the 2 signals can be combined to recreate the data. Something is shared, at some point.
It's definitely a "we're not sure what's actually going on" type situation though. Either both ends are drawing on some (otherwise) hidden data layer, or FTL transmission is allowed, so long as no information flows (information as defined by quantum mechanics). It just turns out that weird entanglement based systems are the only ones (we've found so far) able to send infomationless transmissions.
Both solutions would give deeper insights into reality, and its underpinnings. Unfortunately, we've not actually teased out which is happening.
My gut feeling is that the speed of light is a side effect of a fixed/stable causality across all rest frames. Hidden information seems to be a lot more cumbersome.
I'm not sure what you mean. If something is "shared", but this something contains no information, how can we know that it was shared? In what sense does this something even exist?
The perfect correlation of entangled particles is well established, and very cool, but perfect correlation does not require sharing of "something". The perfect correlation is baked into the system from the start, from local interactions only.
The 2022 nobel prize was given to experimentalists that observed the violation of Bell's inequality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality
I'm genuinely not an expert but I get it to mean that there aren't hidden variables created alongside the entangled particles.
That's actually not quite accurate, although that is how it is commonly interpreted. The reason it is not accurate is because Bell's theorem simply doesn't show there is no hidden variables and indeed even Bell himself states very clearly what the theorem proves in the conclusion of his paper.
In a theory in which parameters are added to quantum mechanics to determine the results of individual measurements, without changing the statistical predictions, there must be a mechanism whereby the setting of one measuring device can influence the reading of another instrument, however remote. Moreover, the signal involved must propagate instantaneously, so that such a theory could not be Lorentz invariant.[1]
In other words, you can have hidden variables, but those hidden variables would not be Lorentz invariant. What is Lorentz invariance? Well, to be "invariant" basically means to be absolute, that is to say, unchanging based on reference frame. The term Lorentz here refers to Lorentz transformations under Minkowski space, i.e. the four-dimensional spacetime described by special relativity.
This implies you can actually have hidden variables under one of two conditions:
The first view is unpopular because special relativity is the basis of quantum field theory, and thus contradicting it would contradict with one of our best theories of nature. There has been some fringe research into figuring out ways to reformulate special relativity to make it compatible with invariant hidden variables,[3] but given quantum mechanics has been around for over a century and nobody has figured this out, I wouldn't get your hopes up.
The second view is unpopular because it can be shown to violate a more subtle intuition we all tend to have, but is taken for granted so much I'm not sure if there's even a name for it. The intuition is that not only should there be no mathematical contradictions within a single given reference frame so that an observer will never see the laws of physics break down, but that there should additionally be no contradictions when all possible reference frames are considered simultaneously.
It is not physically possible to observe all reference frames simulatenously, and thus one can argue that such an assumption should be abandoned because it is metaphysical and not something you can ever observe in practice.[4] Note that inconsistency between all reference frames considered simulatenously does not mean observers will disagree over the facts, because if one observer asks another for information about a measurement result, they are still acquiring information about that result from their reference frame, just indirectly, and thus they would never run into a disagreement in practice.
However, people still tend to find it too intuitive to abandon this notion of simultaneous consistency, so it remains unpopular and most physicists choose to just interpret quantum mechanics as if there are no hidden variables at all. #1 you can argue is enforced by the evidence, but #2 is more of a philosophical position, so ultimately the view that there are no hidden variables is not "proven" but proven if you accept certain philosophical assumptions.
There is actually a second way to restore local hidden variables which I did not go into detail here which is superdeterminism. Superdeterminism basically argues that if you did just have a theory which describes how particles behave now but a more holistic theory that includes the entire initial state of the universe going back to the Big Bang and tracing out how all particles evolved to the state they are now, you can place restrictions on how that system would develop that would such that it would always reproduce the correlations we see even with hidden variables that is indeed Lorentz invariant.
Although, the obvious problem is that it would never actually be possible to have such a theory, we cannot know the complete initial configuration of all particles in the universe, and so it's not obvious how you would derive the correlations between particles beforehand. You would instead have to just assume they "know" how to be correlated already, which makes them equivalent to nonlocal hidden variable theories, and thus it is not entirely clear how they could be made Lorentz invariant. Not sure if anyone's ever put forward a complete model in this framework either, same issue with nonlocal hidden variable theories.
Indeed. I'm not completely sure what point you are trying to make, but my point is not a hidden variable point. The states can be in a perfectly correlated superposition without any hidden variables, and still not "share anything" upon collapse into an eigenstate.
I will concede that it looks a lot like one particle somehow tells the other "hey, I just collapsed into the |1> state, so now you need to as well", but at a closer look this seems to happen on its own without any such message being shared. In particular, while the collapse of one state causes the collapse of the other, there is no physical way to distinguish between a state that was collapsed due to entanglement, and one that wasn't. At least not until you send a sub-FTL signal to explain what happened.
So if physically, the state of particle 1 before and after particle 2 was measured is indistinguishable, how can we say that "something" was shared from particle 2 to particle 1?
I mean you can setup a source of entangled particles and two very far detectors that would do measurements roughly at the same time on each particle in such a way that information traveling at the speed of light wouldn't have time to travel the distance between both detectors.
You can then just gather roughly simultaneous measurements and at a later time join the datasets from both detectors to see what one measured vs the other for each pair.
If I understand correctly the current observations show that collapsing the state of one of the particle influences the other all the way at the other detector. Since there's no hidden variables that predetermine the result of measurements while the result of the collapse is random, and the fact that particles still respect the correlation over any distance is why there seem to be a FTL communication between the particles.
Something has to be communicated between the particles for the influence to work FTL, but it also seem we cannot leverage this phenomenon to send "actual information" this way :/
edit: Important point with that experiment: once the particles have been observed, if you try the experiment a second time using the same particles, then you'll get different results, this time in line with hidden variables because the particle's state already collapsed.
I fully understand the concept of entanglement and the experiments you mention, but I'm still to understand what you mean when you say "something" is being transmitted between the particles.
As you say, this "something" cannot contain information, and it also cannot influence the particle physically, since there is no way to distinguish the physical state of the particle before and after it receives this "something". So the signal contains nothing, and has no effect on physical reality. That sounds a lot like "nothing" rather than "something".
I completely get the argument that somehow the two particles must agree on what result to give, but in the theory this is just a consequence of how entanglement and measurements work. No transmission required.
The message transferred between the particles supposedly FTL does contain information though. What I meant was that we cannot encode our own arbitrary information on top of it. The message has a physical effect on reality, without it the state we find the particles in cannot be respected.
Just reconsider this: If we agree that the result of a measurement is totally random (no hidden variable predetermining the result of the measurement) but that once we measure and know the state of one particle then we know with certainty the state of the other particle (entanglement): information about the collapse of the first measured particle was shared to the other so that it's no longer random.
edit: If your argument is about "sharing information doesn't imply transmission" then let's stop here and leave this thread agreeing that "information was shared" :)
I have no opinions on what shape the information sharing takes. Nor am I interested in guessing.
The "message" does not have any local effect on reality - when you measure your particle, you have no way of figuring out if its partner was already measured elsewhere. The effect it does have is on the global state, maintaining the correlation that was encoded from the start.
If you write up the density matrix for the system before and after measurement of one of the particles, you can see that while the density matrix changes, it does not change in a way one can measure.
What I will concede is that before the first measurement the global state is |00>+|11>, afterwards it is |00> or |11>. This projection appears to happen instantaneously, no matter the distance, which is indeed faster than light.
But calling the wave function collapse a signal or a message or a transfer of information is misleading, I would say. In your example, we know that the initial state is |00>+|11>, and that the result of the first measurement is then, say, 1. Then no further information is required to know that the other measurement will result in 1. No messages required, no hidden variables, simply the process of elimination.
I would like to say that this is indeed a confusing subject, but that the math is clear, and that I am arguing what is my impression of the mainstream view in the field.