Time Enough For Love

this doesn’t really have anything to do with Schrodinger’s cat. Schrodingers cat is used as an example (all be it, a poor one) of the properties of quantum mechanics. so you have an initial state, you perform some kind of operation on it and then you get some final state. however, you do not know the properties of the final state until you measure those properties. before which, the final state is considered to be any number of possible outcome states. after measurement, your left with the actual final state and the other possible ones break down. this only applies to microscopic systems. quantum mechanics does not work on things like cats or people, time or universes.

it could be argued that in fact that there is no such thing as past, present and future; there are all one. light takes billions of years to travel the vast distances across the universe for us to see it. so inherently, the past exists in what we would call "the present" and will still exist in our enterpretation of "the future". in fact as long as the universe itself exits, light from those first ever stars and galaxies will always exist.

most people are so caught up in the concept of time. they think it must somehow exist as we relate it to our everyday experiences. it only exists because we say it does, it has no real meaning outside of that. its about time that physicists realise this.

as for "time" travel, why would it ever be possible to do such a thing? you go back in time, you kill hitler. now hitlers dead, you changed the future, so in the future at the time when you decide to go back and kill hitler you don’t do it because hitler died anyways, so therefore hitler is not actually dead because you thought hitler was dead but you never went back and killed him. so the cause and effect cancel each other out and its as if you never went back in the first place.

you go into the future to meet your grandchildren. now lets say you can’t go back into the past for reasons like the one above. you can only go forward. now that your in the future, your not in the present actually doing something about having children, therefore your grandchildren don’t exist because you were in the future not having kids of your own. so therefore you have no reason to go into the future in the first place and so you never actually went, and so on and so on. yet again cause cancels effect, or actually its in reverse, effect would cancel the cause. this is natures built in mechanism to stop people from doing it, cause and effect.

Ross Little
MPhys Theoretical Physics, Newcastle UK

If anybody is wondering who Heilein is, check out a brief bio on wikipedia. He appears to be a Naval Academy (ewwww) grad of 1929 that worked with Asimov during WWII. Then he began writing sci-fi to include the novel Starship Troopers. I didn’t catch any references to any of his works involving time travel – but I don’t read much sci-fi. Anyone care to fill in that blank?

Hmmmm…Heinlein has quite a character.

I’m not sure if time travel is possible though. Even though I’m a science fiction fan, time travel seems too much far fetched. I believe the existence of mirror universe and dimensions. Maybe when someone travels to another time, they are actually travelling to another world or mirror universe or another dimension even.

If time travel was possible then someone would have came from the future and told us already…there’s no way that the government could keep a lid on something that huge and for all of time b/c once invented time travel would always be possible meaning that the human race would have thousands of years to travel back and forth through time strengthening the chance that even if the government was trying to cover it up it would just not be possible….so why waist your time and money trying to discover the undiscoverable, when you can put a brilliant mind to go use trying to cure cancer or some other cause that is effecting people in the here and now.