If you could time travel what modern weapon would you take back to WW2 and what would you do with it? The end result of the war must be the same in terms of who won and no nuclear, biological or chemical weapons allowed. You can also take back whatever is required to operate the weapon indefinitely. My choice Harrier jump jet with extra large RAF markings and bomb the Kroll Opera House in Berlin on the day war was declared by Britain then hover till someone noticed and photographed, then disappear quick and see what the reaction was, second more devastating strike if they did not put their hands up there and then.
Londoner, I do not think that you will have much take up on this thread as "What if" questions are requested by the Moderators not to be asked. Regards Tom
I read this before posting "Off topic stuff. Rattle on about whatever you like here. Rants & raves, general strangeness & anything else you'd like to share. Pretty much a free for all. (Having said that, Modern Politics, & Religion, are now no longer welcome. Threads along those lines will be removed.)"
We've got a time travel thread somewhere. Hang on a mo. Merged into existing thread. And I'm sticking with the hat thing....
Lots of confusion hereThe one other problem is "Parallel universes" as expressed in both Schrodinger's paradox, and touched on in the Back to the Future series. Schrodinger's theorem held that personal decisions created parallel realities which "spit off from" each other and developed independently. Is the cat dead or alive, or both at the moment before you look in the box? (read the postulation) There is no 'Schrödinger's theorem', you mean I think Schrödinger's Equation. Schrödinger, in fact, thought that the conclusions of quantum mechanics were simply wrong; in this he fully agreed with Einstein, not Bohr. His cat paradox is fairly set out here Schrödinger's cat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia However, what is omitted and is invariably omitted in popular science books is Schrödinger's opening words in describing his cat paradox: "One can even construct quite burlesque cases. A cat is shut up in a box ... [etc]". In 1936 Schrödinger met Bohr in London, and reported to Einstein: "Recently in London spent a few hours with Niels Bohr, who in his kind, courteous way repeatedly said that he found it 'appalling', even found it 'high treason' that people like [Max] Laue and I, but in particular someone like you, should want to strike a blow against quantum mechanics with the known paradoxical situation, ... ". (source Schrödinger - Life and Thought, Walter Moore, p. 314). It never for a moment occurred to him that anyone would take the cat paradox seriously. To be fair, only a few commentators did, most notably Eugene Wagner and John Neumann and of course many popular science books. 'Parallel Universes' or the 'many-worlds'' interpretation of quantum mechanics is a notion proposed by the American physicist Hugh Everett in 1957; it has nothing to do with Schrödinger who almost certainly would have rejected it. In an infinite number of parallel universes you, I, and everyone of us are depraved serial killers in an infinite number of them. In an infinite number we are peerless saints, and in an infinite number Hitler is a democratic pacifist ... and so on ad infinitum. As Lawrence Krauss says 'Infinity is not a pleasant quantity'. I think time travel is ruled out by Occam's razor: to go back to a given past point in time you would have to turn back the entire universe to that point, trillions of galaxies each with billions of stars setting back events which themselves are in the process of travelling many millions of light years to us. The information from the past accessed by the time machine would have to exist for all time like some sort of gigantic 3-D film, ready at all times to be rerun. Supposing our time traveller and WW2 afficionado selects June 1944, there he or she would find me as a lad of 14. Is it really to be believed that there is an existing duplicate of me who might reverse decisions I made then? Suppose that I myself go back 30 times at a month's interval to the same time; there would then be 31 of me gathered at the same spot.
Sorry Peter but you have not been studying your Dr Who hard enough! There are no duplicates as our being is not the same now as it was even a nano second ago. You travel in time as an entity of the time when your first journey begins so the scenario where 31 of you gather in the same spot just could not happen. I know that I am not alone (but you may call me mad if want) in having twice travelled forward albeit momentarily and then back (and I do not mean déjà vu or similar). If you can travel forwards then back then I see no reason why you cannot do the reverse-backwards then forwards. As to infinity, I am of the camp that believes no man or woman living or dead has or can comprehend it.
I fully agree with you there, it just could not happen. However, either you have misunderstood what I was saying or I wasn't clear enough: my contention is that time travel to the past is impossible. If it were possible, of course, then you could meet any number of yourself by going back to a selected time and staying for a brief period, each time returning and repeating the trip. Are you seriously saying that if time travel was possible and you went back to, say, 2009 you wouldn't be there? Oddly enough, you can in fact travel forward in time, but only by leaving Earth and travelling at relativistic speeds (i.e., near the speed of light) for an appreciable time and returning. At lower speeds the effect is still there but is negligible. For example it has been calculated that the Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev who was in orbit for a total of 748 days during three space flights orbiting the earth 11,968 times, is now about 1/50 of a second younger; i.e., when he returned the earth was 1/50th of a second into the future. This is known as relativistic time dilation and was predicted by Einstein, but it's a one-way ticket and cannot be undone. It is a well known and perfectly understood effect; for a practical example, when atomic clocks are transported from one place to another for calibration or other purposes, the effect of time dilation caused by their motion must always be taken into account. As to your experience, if you believe that you have travelled forward in time without leaving this planet then, I am afraid, you are deluding yourself.
By my reasoning if it is dark when you go into warp drive then it will remain dark and you will not be able to see where you are going Regards Tom
If I could travel in time, I would want to check on all the many attempts to escape from POW camps in Germany and help these guys to be more successful. Stefan.
If ever you're time travelling and you meet yourself coming the other way - best to avoid eye contact.
