Physics: Time Travel

This is a copy/paste from a post of mine on ENTP.org, but I was so excited about it I had to just announce it to the world:




Ok, I got to thinking today, and I'm no physics expert (aspiring to be some day), but I thought about a particular physics problem, and then unraveled it. It seems to be evidence for time travel, the multiple universes interpretation of quantum physics, and extremely poetic (when it hit me I almost cried because it seems so beautiful) at the same time:

Imagine a subatomic particle. We'll use an electron just for simplicity. Now imagine that we send that electron moving through space/time. At some point, we transport it 1 second back in time, and that 1 second ago we actually observed 2 electrons, until the point we sent it back in time, where the original disappears and leaves the transported one.

For 1 second, there were actually 2 of the same electron. My objection to this is that it violates the law of the conservation of energy. We have created a second electron...doubled the mass/energy of what we originally had. The universe contained more mass/energy then it did before. It's a violation of physical law...

But then as I was reading the wording of the law of the conservation of energy: "the total energy in an isolated system remains constant" it immediately, suddenly, and forcefully hit me: the universe may not be an isolated system. Of course, I remembered the multiple universes interpretation and this seeming contradiction just seeped to the inner core of me and I had one of the most intense moments of clarity in my life. I realized that the particle may not have been created, but instead had been transferred from another layer of the multiverse, and then the electron from our layer was transferred away from our layer. The total energy in the true isolated system: the multiverse, remained constant, and so does not violate the law of the conservation of energy.

Because there are infinite universes according to the interpretation, it seems we could find one that is exactly how this universe developed, only is still is stuck, say, 1 second behind us. It seems as if it would be "near" us in the multiverse, and this is then where the electron actually went/came from. It just transferred between mutiverses, but did not actually time travel.

Now, I'm not saying time travel is actually possible/impossible and I'm not saying the multiverse interpretation is right as I am no where near as educated as I'd like to be in physics, but this to me is staggeringly COOL. It opens up a world of science fiction to me...a reality that is constructed in such a way that is intensely phenomenal and foreign...yet is the reality we've always lived in.

I feel great today...

 

See, and my hypothesis here isn't a paradox...it just assumes that our universe isn't an isolated system...that interaction with the multiverse is possible, and that is what is actually happening when we "time travel." We just go to another universe in the multiverse that is exactly the same as ours, just stuck in a time that is earlier then our's...in the example it is t-1 second.


I've studied physics very little, but it's something I'd love to study in-depth one day. I do the same sort of theorizing (though from a non-educated standpoint), and I know exactly what you mean about the "intense of moments of clarity." It's an amazing feeling.[/quote]

This is why I love being an INTP, so I can understand your sentiment here! We are full of our own unique gifts.

 

Oh, I understand what you meant. Time travel as is normally thought is paradoxical. Even mathematically it doesn't work out as location can't be a function of time if time travel is possible (try graphing what an object being thrown back in time would look like as location being a function of time...you'll have a graph that the independent variable: time, has 2 values for a given range of it, because there are 2 of the same object...it's not a function). I inserted an image to demonstrate what I mean.

 

From what I'm reading, this is debated...it's unlikely but not strictly impossible to interact between the universes.

Hmm, if time travel is possible, and we can not interact between universes in the multiverse, then we are presented with one of the following possibilities:

1. The law of the conservation of energy is untrue.
2. There is some interaction between time, energy, and matter on the same level that there is between energy and matter. Time would have to somehow come into effect to the extent that throughout time the amount of energy remains constant, but that from one given time to the next energy would not necessarily be constant. The law of the conservation of energy would have to be amended to say something FROM:
At any given time, the amount of energy in an isolated system is constant with any other given time.
to
Throughout the totality of time, the amount of energy in an isolated system is constant to an average, forever trying to balance itself to that average.
3. We're missing some piece of information.