On Charlie...

[DevilDan]

See, I never realized this was som sort of humor or joke contest. Had I known that, I would not have made a single joke. I mean, what more of a travesty of humor could there be?

[Furin_Mirado]

Not seriously funny though
And, no matter who's funny or not, I still am right...

Sorry to say, but anyone that tries to have a serious argument on the internet is inherently wrong.

[Ninjamuffin]

The problem with time travel is you have to leave the time-current (not a stream, but a small current in the ocean that is existence) to do so, thus causing yourself to lose time-coherency. Short trips, once or twice max, and time won't lose you impression, but any longer or more often and you risk being forgotten and having your place filled with an automaton that looks, acts, and thinks like you. (it actually is you, one that doesn't believe in time travel) Also, time refuses to let you back in, since it doesn't recognize you anymore. That is, of course, assuming you don't get gobbled up by any of the 'big fish' that live in the open water outside the current. There are one or two known 'reefs', safe havens outside of time, but they're difficult to find and not impervious to nasties of the 'whale' size. (we would be krill in this allegory)
So, really, most people who don't believe in time travel are actually people who figured it out and spent too long out of the current, getting themselves replaced with a doubting doppelganger.
Anyway, it's much easier to simply assume that Charlie is just crazy. Clever, but insane.

[DevilDan]

Insane? What exactly has Charlie done that would be characteristic of someone without a good grip on Erf-reality?

[Ninjamuffin]

Insane? What exactly has Charlie done that would be characteristic of someone without a good grip on Erf-reality?

Insanity has many levels and doesn't always mean a lack of grip on reality. Also, it's not always a bad thing.
Like, say, Deadpool, Charlie is eccentric by his universess standards to the point that it borders insanity. By our standards, he's pretty normal, maybe a little weird (Charlie that is, Deadpool is still kinda insane by our standards too), but, by Erf standards, he's so far out there in manner and speech and operation as to be considered insane. Heck, Wanda and co. have probably even thought Parson was insane at some point or another, and he's known to be from a different reality.

[Simanos]

Sorry to say, but anyone that tries to have a serious argument on the internet is inherently wrong.

I would say the opposite is more likely true

The problem with time travel (other than the arrow of time stuff) is that people keep imagining the universe as some sort of computer simulation/game and that what happens now is in the processor memory and what happened in the past (or future maybe) is stored in some "divine hard disk" that you can look up or even "load" again. Some even imagine that instead of 1 infinite "computer" there's infinite numbers of such infinite "computers". Occam's Razor anyone?

The facts so far show that you can imagine all you want, but that doesn't make it right. There's only 1 type of existence that we have discovered. The now, the present is what the universe is. Time is but a record of events. The past doesn't exist actually.

[DevilDan]

My favorite "theory of time" is that every single moment of existence, like frames from a movie, exists "simultaneously," as it were, sort of like "time slices." Note that this still precluded any form of time travel.

[Tubercular Ox]

My favorite "theory of time" is that every single moment of existence, like frames from a movie, exists "simultaneously," as it were, sort of like "time slices." Note that this still precluded any form of time travel.

I've heard that theory... and I can't remember where. Spill it!

[DevilDan]

I've heard that theory... and I can't remember where. Spill it!

I know next to nothing about physics, just what I read here and there. McTaggart wrote about the B-theory of time a century ago. It spread to poetry and was the subject of philosophical speculation and pop mysticism. Julian Barbour published a book on the "serious physics" side of it, The End of Time.

EDIT: This 2007 article talks about how people are still struggling with how the Wheeler-DeWitt equation gets to just ignore the idea of time.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun...&b_start:int=0

[ishnar]

Time travel to the past always is paradoxical. Always.

There are two holes in your argument. First, a multi-universe eliminates the paradox. If there are multiple universes, then you can go back in time and kill your great grandfather.

The worst part isn't that. It's that it's a cheap method to surprise the audience. The writer is called at some point to make an arbitrary choice that the audience has no logical reason to support either way. So the writer gets to play clever and boost his ego.

Second, you assume that time travel is only used to surprise the audience. I've read plenty of stories with time travel that time travel was only used to set up the background of the story, and everything proceeded from there. Actually, except in episodol TV crap, time travel is not played hot-and-loose.

A good example. Someone finds themselves back in time. So they are confronted by the conflicting time-travel theories. Which is simply resolved at the near the beginning with something like. Well, I was a historian and there was no mention of all these nuclear bombs going off at this time. So many-worlds it is. Or, the time-traveler finds themselves frustrated when everything they do somehow is balanced so the past events still happen.

What was suggested in this thread is not like that clearly. Charlie is supposed to be Parson, they talked to each other for...
I give this idea 2 thumbs down.

Still, if it were many worlds, then Charlie could still be Parson from a different universe and thus followed a different path. Maybe a reverse universe or something. Not that I support this idea. Mainly because Charlie's speech text is in the same font as everyone else's but Parson's in clearly different. So I don't really see Charlie=Future Parson.

[Kreistor]

There are two holes in your argument. First, a multi-universe eliminates the paradox. If there are multiple universes, then you can go back in time and kill your great grandfather.

I'm going to nitpick here. If this is the case, then you haven't time travelled at all. You've jumped to a copy of your universe at a previous instance of time. If you're trying to fix or change your universe, you fail, since the universe you leave continues on as it had been, albeit without you. Time travel is, then, useless.

On a side note, one of the more interesting time travel variants I've read is Thrice upon a Time by James Hogan (1982). A young scienteist creates a method of sending messages backward in time, howver it could only be received by the same unit that sent the message. A message, once received, did not need to be sent. He writes teh story two ways. Sometimes we get to see the failed path; that is, he writes a path which ends in disaster, we see the message sent to the past to prevent it, and then the story leaps back in time to the receipt of the message and we see the problem solved. Sometimes he writes the receipt of a message, and we never see the path that sent it, so it goes unexplained. What gets really chaotic for the scientist and his friends is when they start receiving messages from doubly dead paths. A message gets received with little reference, which makes no sense because they're on path C, the message was sent from path A expecting a reference point that explains things for a new path B, but path B sends a message back before this, putting everyone in different places and removing the context. Okay, let's explain that with an example. First run through, four people (1, 2, 3, 4) are playing a game to explain the machine. Person 4 is out of the room at the machine. Person 1 secretly picks a person, waits five minutes, then tells person 2 that person 3 is the selected person. Person 2 sends a message back 4 minutes earlier with person 3's name, which person 4 receives, walks into the room, and announces person 3's name. Wait 2 days. A disaster at a nearby fireworks plant. The scientist learns where the problem was, sends a message back 3 days to give them time to convince the factory to look into the problem, and the scientist and his friends go to work. The next day, they notice a message was received that was only "Person 3". On this third pass through this point in time, the game is not being played. They have no context for why they received a message saying someone's name. Is that person going to die?Have something bad go wrong? What?

Now once they get into multiple disaster events, things really start getting messy.

Note that in this version of time travel, the final world where all problems have been solved cannot determine if there were multiple copies of the universe, or only one. the only way to determine if there is only one universe is for a universe to send a message, and then see the world continue unchanged. In a reality where there are multiple copies of the universe, tehre is always one where time travel never exists. In that one universe where no message is received, because it is always the first univese to send, no proof of time travel ever occurs. No message is ever received, so no time travel is possible.

Anyway, just a mind frack for you. Time travel ain't simple.

[Simanos]

Ishnar read what Kreistor wrote...

[Ragamuffin]

{Scrubbed}

[Simanos]

{Scrubbed}

[Kreistor]

{Scrubbed}

[snipped by Kreistor]

Since Roland scrubbed everything to do with what I said, there's no point of reference for my post. I'm not going to leave something like that with no reference point. It looked, all by itself, antagonistic, with everything else gone.

[Simanos]

{Scrubbed}

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff of Moddingham: Please don't attack, insult, belittle, or abuse others.

[BillyJimBoBob]

On time travel and paradoxes...

[snippage]

It requires the assumption that time is not entirely linear (which, let's face it, if time travel is possible it cannot be wholly linear!), [...]

Actually, it can be linear and still have time travel be (theoretically) possible. That's one of the explanations for why time travel might be possible, because it is able to be described by using a certain number of dimensions, and if you can use more dimensions than needed to describe Time you can access it at any point.

Similar to this: A line is a one dimensional construct, it has only length. Draw a line on a sheet of paper, and you have a one dimensional construct on a two dimensional construct, one with length and breadth. We live in three dimensions, and are able to bend that paper so that any two points on that line are touching. The line is still one dimensional, and the paper is still two dimensional, they do not recognize that they have been bent. But we in three dimensions see that two points of the line now are touching.

So one theory of time travel I've read suggests that if we manage to learn to operate in more dimensions than Time requires to be modeled accurately, you can in a similar fashion make any two points of time touch. From there all you need to do is learn to cross over at the point of contact, either forward or backwards in time.

Of course, this is all nice on a theoretical level. But the being who can operate in more dimensions than Time requires to be modeled accurately is already so far removed from a three dimensional human as to be like unto a god.

[BillyJimBoBob]

I'm going to nitpick here. If this is the case, then you haven't time travelled at all. You've jumped to a copy of your universe at a previous instance of time. If you're trying to fix or change your universe, you fail, since the universe you leave continues on as it had been, albeit without you. Time travel is, then, useless.

Not at all useless! If I memorize the mega-ultra-lottery number which would have won today but no one chose those numbers, and "time travel" to an alternate universe which is really just an exact copy of my universe except that it runs a day behind mine and that there is no me but conveniently a woman who thinks she is married to me and a family who conveniently remember growing up with me, I'll gleefully accept that fact that my original universe continues on without me while I labor under the decisions of how to spend my mega-ultra-millions.