7:02 p.m. - 03.09.2004
Marty McFly - Where Are You When I Need You?
I fool around on this Friendster-ish site called Orkut where (like the super-cliquey Friendster High School) people align themselves with each other, but here they do it based on interests, or "communities".
For fun I joined this one on Time Travel cuz I wanted to pose some ideas.
Here's what one of the message boards reads:
Time Travel, or Parallel Universes? 2/26/2004 7:54 AM
Is Time Travel a real possibility or is every move in time a move into a Parallel universe that has that time as its present?
My opinion is probably the later. This also would account for the lack of Paradoxes. If the future doesn't exist, then you can't create a Paradox. This would also call for a conclusion that Time Travel doesn't exist. Only Multidimensional Universe Travel...??? (is that a term?)
Posted by: Some dude
2/28/2004 11:58 PM
Has anyone here checked out this web page? Extremely interesting reading on the subject. Should I ever write a time travel story/movie, I'm getting ahold of this guy to have him check out my premise first.
Actually, he has a section on this called "The Two Brothers:
Why Parallel Dimension Theory Is Not Time Travel." (http://www.mjyoung.net/time/brothers.html) He claims it's not time travel because if you end up in another dimension, you're not changing your own past/future
Posted by: Some chick
2/29/2004 3:42 PM
My theory is that in a Multidimensional Universe (a Multiverse) the only time travelling possible should be forward.
Any backward movement would just take us to another dimension where our "past" is its present. Thus moving again forward would only take us to that dimensions future, and not ours.
Trying to move back again, would just transport us to yet another dimension.
This of course causes a few problems, other than the normal technical and scientific (how to accomplish time travel).
An important one is what are these dimensions? Do they exist or are they created the moment we (we=time travelers) go back?
And if they are created would that mean they are an exact duplicate of our past?
Does this also mean that we can change our future only by changing a copy of our past?
Posted by: That first dude.
So then I popped in with my two cents. Rattle this one through the noggin' and tell me what you're thinking. (Remember, this requires a modicum of belief suspension and/or the poo-pooing of generally accepted scientific rules). *ahem*
"Okay, I don't know much about all this - but what if time travel is possible, but only going backwards.
What if time is both cyclical, and layered, like an onion. In essence, you don't have parallel universes - it's all the same universe - it just overlaps itself. That way, when people become "unstuck in time" a la Billy Pilgrim, maybe that's the phenom reported as "ghosts". For a brief second - a window opens between layers and we witness something that appears to be in the past, and even though it is the past, it's happening congruently with the present but only on a different layer. This can happen continuously without a pre-exisiting future. It's a growth cycle.
This way, what appears to be the ghost of a civil war soldier walking down a hallway actually is a civil war soldier walking down a hallway, only in his own time but we can witness it briefly.
I enter "ghosts" into the mix because of this story from when I lived in Gettysburg: Many buildings on the campus of Gettysburg College were used as military hospitals during the civil war. Some people once got on an elevator in one of these buildings and rode it to the basement, but when the doors opened, the laundry room was replaced by a bustling military hospital full of doctors and the wounded. Upon going back upstairs and returning - the laundry had returned. Ghost stories aside (since this community calls for the suspension of certain beliefs) it would be interesting to consider this reported occurrence as a time travel issue.
It's known that the location in question has a specific past, and that that past has (maybe?) been witnessed in the present. IF you believe such things - is it possible then that this means there really are no such things as ghosts - but really just glitches in time?
Posted by: amishboy
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