Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Science hopes to change the past

You're right: The Big Bang is impossible. We don't exist.

huh?


Just because nobody will ever exist who can honestly claim to have changed the past doesn't mean the that timeline is never altered by somebody who destroys their own timeline in the process in favor of another.

To detect it you would have to be able to step in some direction other than the left/right/forward/back/up/down directions we are used to and view the world from the side, so to speak. If you could rip free of the dimensions we are tied to, a la Flatland, and see the time line, then you could see a person make a change to their past. But the people living in the instant that was changed would go forward from it without an inkling that anything is out of place. To those people, asking what the previous version of the Universe was like would be like trying to see past the Big Bang - they would need to see outside their timeline, which they can't.

Dan - you often say that electrons that tunnel from one side of an atom to the other instantaneously do so by traveling somewhere outside our normal dimensions where time isn't an issue. Makes sense to me. So why do you have such a hard time seeing the possibility that you might be right about that? Where does the electron go when it makes that teleport? Sounds to me like it leaves the timeline. That's what you're saying, isn't it? So why do you have difficulty admitting that time is anything but a direction?

w

Wayne wrote:
"You're right: The Big Bang is impossible. We don't exist."

What I wrote has nothing to do with the Big Bang. The Big Bang, actually now more correctly referred to as "Inflation" is provable. We have evidence of it and can predict affects and observe them.

You are claiming that people from the future can affect the past and that we can not detect it and that this should receive equal weight. There is no equivalence.

Wayne wrote:
"Just because nobody will ever exist who can honestly claim to have changed the past doesn't mean the that timeline is never altered."

If you are talking about religion and faith based beliefs you are correct. If you are talking about science then the inability to conform your thinking to the scientific method is a fatal flaw.

http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/AppendixE/AppendixE.html

I am not talking about faith based beliefs. I am talking about physics.

You keep dodging the questions I put to you regarding dimensionality of time. It is there that you will find your answers. When the electron teleports across an impenetrable barrier without occupying the space in between the place it left and the place it arrives at, where does it go? It makes the trip instantly. Clearly, it's traveling without being restricted to time. If it can go somewhere that time is not an issue, then clearly time is not omnipresent. If you can go to a place where time can be viewed from outside then you will see that it isn't necessarily a straight line.

But if a person takes advantage of this and changes the past, it won't be visible without that special vantage point. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, it means it happens outside of our observable universe. Just like that electron that travels instantaneously.

If nothing can exist outside our universe, then nothing could have formed the big bang. The formation of the singularity that gave birth to this universe demands that it came from somewhere. Saying that it is impossible for a vantage point to exist outside our comfortable dimensions is to say the big bang is impossible. Thus, you would have to argue we don't exist. Last time I checked, I was still here.

w

Wayne asks:
"When the electron teleports across an impenetrable barrier without occupying the space in between the place it left and the place it arrives at, where does it go?"

The same place it goes when moving around an atomic nucleus. Where does it go when it first appears in one place, then appears in another, without ever traversing the space between.

Honest answer ... we do not know.

But we believe it relates to the space and time being quantized.

That is substantially different from what you are trying to claim with respect to the properties of time.

Wayne wrote:
"If nothing can exist outside our universe, then nothing could have formed the big bang."

I can't think of many physicists in the last 30 years that would agree with your premise. You set up a straw man and then knocked it over but it is pure straw and it conflicts with the majority of the thinking in physics for about 70-80 years. Let me take it apart so you can see what is wrong.

You refer to the existence of stuff and thus the nothing could have formed. But the Big Bang has nothing, nada, zilch to do with stuff. It has to do with space and time. No one in the physics community has ever written that stuff formed. They write that space and time form.

We know for a fact we can pack all of the stuff into the universe into a theoretical point (or if you prefer string). We do that in the lab all the time with Bose Einstein condensate. And it is quite likely that this is precisely the nature of a singularity inside the event horizon of a black hole (we just don't know).

If our best understanding and if our theories are correct mass is the result of a reaction with the Higgs boson and not an intrinsic property of quarks and leptons so the original universe may well have had a zero mass too.

You are making assumptions about what physics is saying that are incorrect and thus drawing incorrect conclusions. Again: The Big Bang had nothing to do with the creation of the stuff of the universe. Only the space it currently occupies and the metric we refer to as time.

Okay. Here's a possibility I'd not considered, and perhaps one that you could agree with...


You split up a team of scientists. You put one of them in the "receiving room" and one in the "transmitting room". You tell those waiting in the receiving room that some time today they will receive a message, but that they are to do nothing about it for ten minutes. After ten minutes, they are to come into the transmission room and report the precise time at which they received the signal.

In the transmitting room, you tell them to pick a random moment more today than ten minutes into the experiment to transmit a signal to the receiving room that will be received five minutes in the past.

Allow no other communication between the rooms.

If the signal is received, the senders will have no indication of it and thus no reason to not send it. Five minutes after they send it, the other scientists will bust in saying that they got he signal ten minutes ago - five minutes before it was sent.

With me so far?

Now, remove the wall. The receiving scientists receive a signal and immediately the transmitters know it will not be sent for another five minutes. One of two things will now happen: The transmitting scientists will be compelled to send that signal at a pre-ordained time, or they will be free to not send it.

Now it becomes a question, unfortunately, of philosophy - only because science doesn't yet know the answer: Is everything preordained, or does the Uncertainty Principal really grant us free will?

Personally, I go the free will route. So the transmitting scientists choose not to send it. But it came from somewhere. Where? Well, it came from a timeline that was obliterated the instant the signal was received. To the scientists, it's a message from nowhere. An acausal blip. And they have no possible way to determine the point of origin because it comes from a place that is now parallel to the universe they are in.

Is that a better/more acceptable explanation of what I'm trying to say?

w

Far more acceptable but provably wrong unless we are to throw out all that is known of physics.

What we know is that some of what you describe is standard physics. Right up to the point where it involves a message.

Let me restate your experiment.

In one room I have you and a microwave and inside the microwave is a frozen dinner. In another room I have someone else with a switch that turns on the microwave.

What are the chances of the food being cooked before the switch is thrown?

Let us hope it is not just small ... but zero.

Well, that's exactly what the experiment that this thread was started about is setting out to answer. If the switch can send a signal to the microwave to start seven minutes ago, then the dinner will be cooked by the time the switch is thrown. (Unless it's one of those big Marie Callendar's dinners that take 8-10 minutes, in which case it will be cooked but still cold in the middle. I hate that.)

Dan, I honestly know pretty much nothing about your credentials except to say that they are almost certainly more extensive than mine. However, unless I've missed something, John Cramer of the University of Washington - who is the one apparently in charge of performing the experiment - is more up on this stuff than ANY of us on this board. If he and his team are thinking that this might be possible, then I have a hard time understanding where you find the wherewithal to dismiss it out of hand without experimental evidence of your own.

w

DA, a question re:
"We know for a fact we can pack all of the stuff into the universe into a theoretical point (or if you prefer string). We do that in the lab all the time with Bose Einstein condensate. And it is quite likely that this is precisely the nature of a singularity inside the event horizon of a black hole (we just don't know)."

The difference, surely, is that a Bose-Einstein condensate occupies the space of an atom, whereas, by definition, a singularity occupies zero space. Isn't that correct?

Wayne Zeller wrote:
"John Cramer of the University of Washington - who is the one apparently in charge of performing the experiment"

I've spoken with Dr. Cramer a few times. Again we must separate the quantum world from the macroscopic world. I don't think anyone, at the level of microwave ovens, expects to see causality overturned.

redewenur wrote:
"The difference, surely, is that a Bose-Einstein condensate occupies the space of an atom, whereas, by definition, a singularity occupies zero space. Isn't that correct?"

Not necessarily. We really don't know what a singularity is but assuming we tried to pack all of the mass of the universe into a point ... even all of the mass of the earth for that matter ... the energy involved would be so great that atoms would cease to exist. Protons and neutrons, too, would break down to their constituent quarks. So what you would end up with, at worst, would be a collection of particles that are one-dimensional strings. Zero width, zero depth, and the length of, presumably, one Planck. Close enough to zero for me.

But we're talking about a signal. If the signal is received in a detector then people looking at that detector will react and say, "Hey, look! It worked! Woo hoo! I think I'll have some popcorn to celebrate." They then go to the microwave and toss in a bag of corn. By the time it's done popping, it's time to send the signal.

w

(Actually, they'd say, "Hey look! An acausal signal! It's going to work! Woo hoo! I think I'll have some popcorn.")

Wayne wrote:
"But we're talking about a signal. If the signal"

Not according to Einstein and relativity.

A signal is energy.
Energy has mass.

Hold a flashlight and aim it out into space. Sweep it from left to right as fast as you can. There is no question, one year in the future, that the sweep of that beam will traverse one light-year in less than a second. But no message will traverse that distance faster than the speed of light.

The speed of light is the law. It must be obeyed.

Dan,

So what form would this 'change events in the past' take - or is it just phrased that way to get media copy?

Blacknad.

Media copy.

These concepts are difficult for science reporters
More difficult for the lay public
And impossible for typical reporters more concerned about what drugs were in whatever-her-names body were