Hi,
I agree that the type on this thread is BS, but there is a point: Entertainment. I enjoy the BS ideas here. I think that in a fantasy game forum BS theories are fun and appropriate. Real theories based on the little information known about this topic are also interesting, but I don't think we need to limit the thread to them. Maybe future posters should clarify if they are talking about BS or real ideas.
Oh, I agree completely on the potential entertainment value of speculation. Sitting around the hostility (actually, hospitality) suite and BSing about that type of topic till sunrise was one of my favorite pastimes at cons. The point is that this thread was started with a post where some noodling on time travel was presented. It was almost, but not quite, science based. That took it out of the realm of fantasy. But the science was poorly understood or not understood at all. That took it out of the realm of science. And the speculations of how it would work were not really developed. That took it out of the realm of sf.
My post certainly was speculation, but not ignorance. It was meant to be a fun BS theory. Just something for entertainment's sake.
I presume you mean your reply to MEAT? There was nothing wrong with that post. You do not discuss the "how" of time travel, just the "what". Discussions of the form "if time travel (or FTL travel, or immortality, or a person was raised by Martians) was possible, then . . ." are fine. That is the basis of all good science fiction. It is a fun exercise in logic to present a hypothetical case and then see what the probable outcome of the hypothetical is. The only fault (and it hardly qualifies as a fault, really) I could find with your post is that that viewpoint has been expressed many, many times.
Basically, if time travel were possible then: either you could change the past or you can't. If you can't, then you have the "the universe will stop you" and the "what has happened *will* happen" camps. If you can, then you have the "the universe splits off into a new branch" and you have "everything in the 'future' changes" lines. In all the years that I've heard of these ideas, those are about the only ones that have come up. Sure, there are an infinite number of details that vary from person to person (or story to story), but they all pretty much fall into one of those four categories.
It's for that reason that, you'll notice, I don't respond to the "if time travel were possible then . . ." speculations. Been there. What I find much more interesting and enjoyable is the "how" of time travel. When I started reading about science in the early '60s, time travel wasn't even considered. The official dogma was that time flowed in one direction and that nothing could be done beyond what special and general relativity allowed, i.e., time dilation and contraction in one frame relative to another. The first scientific speculation that I'm aware of that this might not be absolute was the search for tachyons from that period. While most physicists didn't subscribe to the possibility (and apparently they were right), a few did point out that special relativity did *not* say that material objects could not travel faster than light, simply that they could not travel at the speed of light.
Even earlier than this, but later in my education, I ran into the concept that anti-particles could in some cases be the particle moving backwards in time. Of course, the anti-particle could also be a "hole" in a dense background sea of particles :)
So, there is indeed a sense of excitement in the various possibilities for time travel, for time travel and FTL travel are one and the same. And without FTL, we are destined to never venture much beyond the local neighborhood of the Sun. Perhaps a realistic fate, but a boring one ;)
And that is why I prefer good, informed discussion on the "how" ;)
--Pete
I agree that the type on this thread is BS, but there is a point: Entertainment. I enjoy the BS ideas here. I think that in a fantasy game forum BS theories are fun and appropriate. Real theories based on the little information known about this topic are also interesting, but I don't think we need to limit the thread to them. Maybe future posters should clarify if they are talking about BS or real ideas.
Oh, I agree completely on the potential entertainment value of speculation. Sitting around the hostility (actually, hospitality) suite and BSing about that type of topic till sunrise was one of my favorite pastimes at cons. The point is that this thread was started with a post where some noodling on time travel was presented. It was almost, but not quite, science based. That took it out of the realm of fantasy. But the science was poorly understood or not understood at all. That took it out of the realm of science. And the speculations of how it would work were not really developed. That took it out of the realm of sf.
My post certainly was speculation, but not ignorance. It was meant to be a fun BS theory. Just something for entertainment's sake.
I presume you mean your reply to MEAT? There was nothing wrong with that post. You do not discuss the "how" of time travel, just the "what". Discussions of the form "if time travel (or FTL travel, or immortality, or a person was raised by Martians) was possible, then . . ." are fine. That is the basis of all good science fiction. It is a fun exercise in logic to present a hypothetical case and then see what the probable outcome of the hypothetical is. The only fault (and it hardly qualifies as a fault, really) I could find with your post is that that viewpoint has been expressed many, many times.
Basically, if time travel were possible then: either you could change the past or you can't. If you can't, then you have the "the universe will stop you" and the "what has happened *will* happen" camps. If you can, then you have the "the universe splits off into a new branch" and you have "everything in the 'future' changes" lines. In all the years that I've heard of these ideas, those are about the only ones that have come up. Sure, there are an infinite number of details that vary from person to person (or story to story), but they all pretty much fall into one of those four categories.
It's for that reason that, you'll notice, I don't respond to the "if time travel were possible then . . ." speculations. Been there. What I find much more interesting and enjoyable is the "how" of time travel. When I started reading about science in the early '60s, time travel wasn't even considered. The official dogma was that time flowed in one direction and that nothing could be done beyond what special and general relativity allowed, i.e., time dilation and contraction in one frame relative to another. The first scientific speculation that I'm aware of that this might not be absolute was the search for tachyons from that period. While most physicists didn't subscribe to the possibility (and apparently they were right), a few did point out that special relativity did *not* say that material objects could not travel faster than light, simply that they could not travel at the speed of light.
Even earlier than this, but later in my education, I ran into the concept that anti-particles could in some cases be the particle moving backwards in time. Of course, the anti-particle could also be a "hole" in a dense background sea of particles :)
So, there is indeed a sense of excitement in the various possibilities for time travel, for time travel and FTL travel are one and the same. And without FTL, we are destined to never venture much beyond the local neighborhood of the Sun. Perhaps a realistic fate, but a boring one ;)
And that is why I prefer good, informed discussion on the "how" ;)
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?