I dunno if this will help at all, but I just made this very simplistic illustration of how radiation reflected from Earth can travel. Now, if an object can travel faster than the speed of light, it should be able to reach point B, C, D, E, and be able to look back and see the world in the past. But no matter how fast you go, you cannot travel forward in time, simply because the future hasn't happened yet (relative to us). But if I were in a spaceship travelling along at 0.6c, whizzing around the world, then it would seem that the rest of the world has travelling further through time than I have, but that's not travelling into the future, it's more that my time has slowed compared to yours.
Traveling back in time is highly improbably for the simple fact that it would imply that there is an alternate universe where everything is exactly as is right now, that is suspended at the exact moment in which you are traveling back to. Basically, if you are trying to travel back to when you were born, that moment would have to suspended at that EXACT moment within an alternate universe in order to give you a destination to travel back TO.
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So from what I've gathered here is the idea that if one could travel faster than light, he could "outrun" an occurrence by moving at a faster right of light's reflection from Earth. Thus, one couldn't necessarily "travel" to an event in the past versus peering into the past. Fair enough. However, would or could this be possible: we'll use the Shrek example. Someone murders Shrek. Then he or she gets in (or just sends) a fancy space shuttle to travel far enough from Earth that the events didn't happen. At this point, a signal is sent back to Earth (or maybe a fancy super laser) from a much further distance. The super laser would prevent the murder from occurring, which would be an alternate dimension based on events I suppose. Would it be possible or if you're already aware of certain events, does that make you stuck in the same dimension (so unless you physically travel on a fast space ship, one cannot "undo" an event)?
Cause entropy dun goofed up, and consequences will never be the same. You might see some light, then get ahead of it and look back and see it again but that just a semantic trick of saying you've gone to the past (plus you couldn't because of your mass). You can't go to the past, or the future because they don't exist. All that exists is an ever changing 'now'. The changes are happening everywhere, all the time.
From the New York Times: "Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a message faster than light, 'You could send a telegram to the past.'" So, if this is the case, why haven't we received any messages from the future? I'd like to know when the Rockets/Texans/Astros win their next championship. Or do I? Might be too depressing to find out...
Because it doesn't exist yet? If the universe is expanding at the almost the speed of light, aren't we already traveling at almost the speed of light (as compared to a distant galaxy)?
I don't know how or why, but Swoly's posts have gradually gotten funnier as DD ****s out dud after dud.
It's on our scientists for not proving that breaking the light speed barrier would improve oil production. Duh.
An object with mass can't go as fast as light. It's not physically or mathematically possible. Even if you could accelerate yourself to anywhere near that fast you would die from the forces on your body.
To accelerate an object of non-zero rest mass to c would require infinite time with any finite acceleration, or infinite acceleration for a finite amount of time. In either case, it would require infinite energy. Those are the rules as we know them, and this is why CERN is asking for other scientists to scrutinize their data. FWIW, fermilab got the same type of result a few years ago, but threw it out due to margin of error issues. It's possible CERN has a similar measurement problem, but they've repeated the results ~15,000 times. Can't wait to see how this plays out.
