As a layperson, time travel seems impossible to me. Prove me wrong!

They will if you get too close. For those of us watching, we will see you frozen in time as you fall in. Clocks run slowly in gravity fields. And in the field of a black hole at the event horizon, time will all but stop. So you will be frozen in a near eternal scream as you are ripped apart by the force of gravity.

So for you it is still December. Or it was really Feb in December.

 

A person will always have a concept of "now", regardless of where they are in time, right? Having a concept of "now" doesn't seem to me to indicate that no time travel took place - either into the future or into the past.

 

Why are you guessing? I explained how it works. Clocks run slowly in gravity fields. That is true on earth as it is in a black hole. The physics is correct whether we can actually go to a black hole or not. To equate this with concepts that are purely theoretical is incorrect. This comes from well-established physics. The difference between this other time machine models is that the physics well understood. The theory is well established and tested.

 

Yes. I was questioning whether one could go there, take advantage, and then come back alive.

 

Whatever it is, it is now.

 

True - it is your now.

But, it's not necessarily everybody's now, right?

I don't believe we can define a universal "now" that can be referred to by everybody.

 

But here's the thing. The only that that does exist is now.

What gives us the illusion of time are memories juxtaposed to 'now', which is forever in a fluid, changing, state.

In essence, time is an illusion.

This become extremely apparent to me one day after a car accident, and I was in amnesia for about 15 minutes.

It was 15 minutes of bliss. I had completely forgotten my entire life. I could remember how to speak, I could remember music and I knew I could still play my piano if one was available, but I couldn't remember a second that had passed, everything was disappearing before my eyes and I had this incredible realization, which dissipated as my capacity to remember gradually returned.

all the pain, baggage, etc. of your life are contained in your mind's memory banks. Without them, time ceases.

Time is a product of mind, it exists, therefore, in the abstract. This is why I say time travel, in the H.G. Wells sense, is impossible. Because it is based on the assumption that time exists. But it doesn't. Thing is, after years of meditation, sometimes I can revive the experience, at will, and the universe just becomes a sea of colors and shapes. Nothing has actually changed, but the meaning behind things disappears, and I become disoriented, but in a very pleasurable way. It's an ecstatic feeling. When it happens, life as I had known it, becomes moot. When it happens, something else emerges, and it doesn't' exist in time and cannot be imagined, nor explained, yet it is very real. There is a timeless state, and no machine can reach it. That is why I believe in the eternal soul. Consciousness is the soul's effort to capture itself, the soul's attempt to self-realize, which it is forever missing, because it doesn't realize the mind is the problem, and the soul 'thinks' that 'thought' is self, and the mind is forever taking pictures and filing them in memory banks. consciousness is kind of like how a dog tries to capture it's tail, but cannot. The self tries to self realize, but the mind (the dog's body, in this analogy) won't let it, and the chase is what gives birth to consciousness. It's happening at a subliminal level, you'll never see the process until what has happened to me happens to you. All I can say is trust me on that point. Consciousness, like time, is an illusion. There is a greater self, beyond time and beyond consciousness, one might call it 'superconsciousness'. However, the word betrays the actual experience, as all words do. But, the problem I'm describing is why no one can figure out what consciousness is. The only way you can figure out what consciousness is, is to have a transcendental experience, otherwise, it will forever be a mystery. This is why physicists, mathematicians, etc., cannot figure out what consciousness is, because they attempt to figure it out via contemplation. The mind cannot figure out what consciousness is, it is like a photograph trying to figure out what a camera is. It cannot be done. That is the opposite of what they need to do to figure it out. Forget contemplation, get more into meditation, silencing the mind. It takes decades, or it took me a number of decades, and an accident or two, nature giving you a little boost, might help ( it did me). It cannot be 'figured out'. It can only be experienced.

I"m kinda going out on a limb saying this, but, come to think of it, I don't give a ****.

 

So, you don't live in the now?

If not, where do you live? Have fun with that one.

 

I think you are talking about your perception of time.

 

I don't believe my own personal "now" is all that exists in this universe.

 

I've heard of other dimensions, but, do they exist in a place other than now?

 

There is no time. What you call time is merely memory and/or imagination, of which both exist in the abstract (meaning products of the mind)

Nothing to perceive beyond that.

IF there is, I'd love to see it. But where would it be other than happening right now?

 

Yes, some theoretical physicists postulate other dimensions as part of the models they create.

Each such idea would need to answer your question for itself. Also, we would need to recognize that those ideas are clearly not demonstrated by experiment or they wouldn't be limited to theoretical physics.

This is one of those questions that points out the importance of the line between what is testable and what remains in the realm of theoretical physics.

 

Well, nobody in physics that I have ever heard of agrees with that idea of yours.

I've given you a number of references concerning different models of time, including the mainline version that physicists accept.

I don't believe a discussion of this topic will lead anywhere.

 

My question wasn't whether they exist, it was, 'if they do exist, do they exist somewhere other than 'now'? "

 

Some physicists accept the idea of the illusion of time as a possibility. I posted a link to one a month or so, ago.

 

Well, I think I did answer that, just not in a way that's not particularly satisfactory.

Please note that I said that answer would depend on the model of multiple dimensions, or whatever, that the theoretical physicist might propose.

The accepted model of our universe has time as an inseparable part of our universe as demonstrated by Einstein. We live in space-time. I don't know how the way our time works could be connected to some other universe that has time.

Maybe some theoretical physicist is proposing that this universe has more dimensions than we actually experience.

 

Well, I don't remember the cite.

Maybe your idea had some real support.

Finding some theoretical physicists who don't say "no" is pretty much meaningless.

Even the entire range of experimental science is loathe to say "no" to just about any rational question.

 

A physicist named Carlos Rovelli posited time as illusion, the theory of which is probed in this article by Andrew Jaffe (Andrew Jaffe is a cosmologist and head of astrophysics at Imperial College London.)

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7

 

Thanks - I'm going to read more about that!

Just from the article it seems more like this physicist sees time as emergent.

There certainly are physicists who see time as emergent rather than fundamental.

 

We're all traveling through time right now.

 

If time was an illusion, then a baseball player would never be able to hit or catch a ball because that requires them to know where the ball is going to be in the future. If all there is, is now, then how can you make predictions about the future?

 

The baseball player relies on memory and prediction to function as a baseball player, granted, but that doesn't change the hypothesis that time is an illusion brought about the juxtaposition of memory and predictive imagination to the present moment.

The current moment is a flux, always changing, and memory of past moments juxtaposed to predictive imagination gives us the illusion of time, gives us the 'sense' of time.

I say time doesn't exist because the only thing that actually does exist is the current moment, Given that the past does not exist nor does the future, remove recall and predictive imagination and you no longer have the illusion of time. If time existed, it could be perceived without recall or prediction. Since without recall and prediction of to things that do not actually exist, thus time is an illusion. Recall and predictive imagination allow us to function in the current ever changing present, which is the only item of the three, past, present and future, that actually exists.

What I'm doing in this exercise, is looking at the universe as it actually is, sans the abstract, because past and future exist only in the abstract. Remove the abstract, and there is no time.

Now, I might be crazy in this exercise, but that is the reasoning behind my hypothesis.

To say 'there is no time' based on the above, all it really is is another way of looking at the universe.

Actually, the two statements, below, are true, and the reason they are true because both use different, but valid, approaches of looking at the universe.

1. Time is an illusion, it doesn't exist.

2. Time is real, it does exist.

Alas, we have a paradox.

Or, maybe we don't, but I've noted some physicists have posited that time is an illusion, so I don't think I'm living in la la land on this.

 

Sit in silence, quiet the mind, and the universe will disappear (for you, though it might take 20 years of meditation for it to happen). You are not actually traveling, but recall and prediction gives you the illusion that you are travelling.

 

You're still going, no matter what you tell yourself.