ME3210 History of Heroism--Assignment 2

[Erika]

In comics, the past, present and future can all be subject to change. Discuss some of the difficulties that time travel present in a comic world.

This is a short answer assignment.

[rypperd0c]

We can start with the grandfather paradox. If a time traveler went back in time and kept his grandfather from ever having children, then the time traveler could never have been born, so he could never travel back in time to disrupt his grandfather's life.

The Grandfather Paradox is negated in the divergent universes theory. This theory says that once the time traveler went back in time, if he changed anything, he would not be able to return to his own time, but would instead be in a new universe. One that is very like his own, but different in whatever way he caused it to change with his actions. He would return to his home time, where he never existed, and nobody would know who he was, or have any knowledge of him. Meanwhile, in his home universe, he simply stopped existing, presumably killed when his time machine disappeared.

What would follow would be a never ending mission for the time traveler to find out how to cause the right changes in history to find a version of the universe that matched what he wanted to achieve by time traveling in the first place.

Grade: 2 loving grandmothers

[Twitch]

>:DRED ALERT! DIATRIBE LAUNCHING!

While many wonderful stories and series center around time-travel and it's paradox, IT'S SLOPPY SCIENCE! The problem is the laws of matter and energy.
Energy and matter can not be created or destroyed. Only converted back and forth.

• Backwards time travel assuming sending something (matter) backwards in time. However, there's no place for it to go. The matter that makes up my body was in use five minutes ago. Sending my 'present' back to my 'past' would increase the amount of matter in the system (universe/timeline).
• Forward time travel does happen natural. I move from present to present with my matter and energy changing. However, 'skipping ahead' is just as impossible as moving back. Where is my body during the 'skipped present?' There is now less matter in the system.

The only story I've read that half way addresses this problem is the Dark Tower, an unfinished novel by C. S. Lewis. The Time Machine, Doc Who, Time Bandits, Samurai Jack, NONE OF THEM FIX THIS!!!

While I love all the stories I've listed, I really dislike time travel. Science aside, author's often use it to 'undo' another writer's work in the comic-book industry. Even if I disliked the arc, as a writer, I think its offensive to the creator to just shove something under the rug because it's unpopular. Time-travel is over-done. 

Note to Dean: Please, pretty please don't make any assignments about parallel universes. It will give me agita. 

Grade: Don't hold back. Tell us how you REALLY feel

[rypperd0c]

Twitch,
I respectfully disagree with your position on time travel vs conservation of mass/energy.

Most people view reality as three dimensional ( up/down, front/back, side/side) or if you prefer the axis of X, Y, Z. But this ignores the 4th dimension that is time. Just like we can travel up and down in ways nobody would ave believed possible a few hundred years ago, someday we will be able to travel back and forth along the 4th axis as well. Distance keeps everything from being in the same place at the same time. Time keeps everything from happening all at once in the same place.

And all if this is without getting into trans-dimensional theory

[Twitch]

Aug 8, 2014 9:13:42 GMT -5 rypperd0c said:

But this ignores the 4th dimension that is time.

Woah, that was my 'joke' answer. I didn't expect someone to call me out on it.  Guess, I'll be pontificating a bit more.

If the 4th dimension has matter and energy to exchange with the other dimensions, time travel is possible without breaking the laws of conversation.

However, I still think time-travel is impossible. It boils down to my assumptions about the nature of time.
My theory it that time is not a dimensional plane; its a construct of memory. Humans keep time by remembering changes -position of the sun, heartbeats, distance traveled by wavelengths of Cesium radiation. However, its always the 'present.' 

One of my many hobbies is astronomy (not to be confused with astrology.) There have been studies of the effects of gravity on time. Surprisingly, it 'slows it down.'

A simple experiment with clocks at different altitudes, and later one in orbit, showed that a SI second in a high gravity field is not in sink with a SI second in a low gravity field. This is why clocks coming back down from space are often head. However, when both clocks are compared in the same gravity field, there is no difference in the 'running' speed. This is why in the book Ender's Game the old general was living in space. By putting him in low gravity, his 'time' lasted long enough for Ender to grow up to meet him. The general was still aging like a normal man, but from his view the Buggers War wasn't a century ago - just a few decades.

Now, back to the clocks and gravity. Gravity isn't deforming the present. For someone observing the high and low gravity zones at the same time, it's still the 'now' for her/him. So length of time is relative to the observer. The reason we can travel in the xyz axis is because the distances are absolute. Until we have a way to find treat time the same way, we can't travel in it, but are anchored to the 'universal present.' The past is memory and future is speculation.

Now, my argument hinges on a few assumptions. One: Conversation of mass and energy. There is same same amount of 'stuff' in the universe. Two: time is relative, unlike distances.

If you have data or insights I've overlooked, please share them! Like, I said, my argument has several assumptions and if just one is wrong. I need to redo a lot of thinking. 

[rypperd0c]

SO what you are saying is that Gravity, the same force that makes activities. like lifting something up, or moving side to side or front to back, require more force/energy to perform also slows down an objects movement through time.

In addition to this, the closer something approaches the speed of light, the slower its passage through time becomes.

In both cases, we have energy manipulating time travel in the normal forward direction. This implies that if someone had enough energy, and knew how to use it, they could reverse directions and travel back in time.

[Twitch]

Aug 25, 2014 23:35:31 GMT -5 rypperd0c said:

SO what you are saying is that Gravity, the same force that makes activities. like lifting something up, or moving side to side or front to back, require more force/energy to perform also slows down an objects movement through time.

In addition to this, the closer something approaches the speed of light, the slower its passage through time becomes.

In both cases, we have energy manipulating time travel in the normal forward direction. This implies that if someone had enough energy, and knew how to use it, they could reverse directions and travel back in time.

Well, that's one way of looking at it, if you take assumption that the time is a plain - which I didn't.

Tachyon particles, a hypothetical particle used by Gerald Feinberg, are supposed to travel faster than light and move backwards in time. However, Mr. Feinberg's faster-than-light particles depend on the premise than the speed of light can be surpassed. Lab experiments to detect faster-than-light particles or accelerate anything up to the speed of light have failed.

With humanity's current knowledge and models, we can't find anything moving backward in a 'plain of time.' Personally, I can't make time-travel work not matter the view of time I take. However, in the words of the immortal bard, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The scientific method is limited by what I can observe and replicate. It's quiet possible there is some data out there that would make everything 'click' into place.
However, as I'm not omnipotent, I have to build my hypothesis and models with what I have. To accept time travel, I need lots, lots more data.


To summarize I view time-travel as highly improbable. However, given that my understanding of time/quantum physics/gravity/nature-of-the-universe is incomplete, I will admit time-travel may not be completely impossible.

[Kashiro]

There are three different kinds of time travel, I believe:
1. Time is fixed, everything that occurs or will happen is fixed, and there is no way to alter the course of either history or the future. This is a time loop.
2. Time is ambiguous, and can be best described as a timey wimey ball.
3. Rather than travelling through time, you are merely travelling to another universe (as part of the "multiple universes" theory) and any divergence caused by your actions will not occur to what you know as your own, but as a copy that diverges at the point of your interference.

There are no problems with 1, ever. It just ends up with situations like by attempting to prevent something, you set up a chain of events that causes the exact event you travelled through time to prevent. With 2, everything can happen and this is the most confusing and incomprehensible possible account of events. This may involve a retcon or not, and is rather...difficult to understand at any rate. Examples of 2 would be the timeline of Doctor Who, Looper, etc. Now, with 3, there's the best and worst parts of both 1 and 2. We have a fixed timeline that cannot change, and a second timeline that is constantly changing.

Now, the problem with time-travel and comics is that time-travel is usually either self-referential or goes to the future. Comics have a long and varied history, and for some of the long-runners, such as the Marvel and DC universes, there are over 50 years of comics that have accrued up too many events that comic historians will probably be employed at some point in the future. Hell, DC had to simplify and re-launch all their titles in 2012 in the New 52. Now the 52 does not stand for the number of different comics, rather, the number of alternate universes in the continuity. Think about that again. 52 UNIVERSES! This is AFTER they simplified down the series'. AFTER. I mean, come on! It's actually impossible to truly understand and know even a fraction of all of the comics that have piled up over the years, and given the multiple number of artists, writers and, sometimes, even companies that produce these comics, it is inevitable that te timeline can be screwed up. Now, normally this isn't a big problem because they can just keep going and going. But if there's time travel, then at some point a call-back will happen and this will mean an absolute logistical nightmare.

That is only in regards to time-travelling to the past. If one travels to the future (Unless it's as many generations down the line as with SG), then at some point in the future fans will expect the plot to catch up and the time travellers will be observed from the perspectives of those that never moved faster than 1 second per second. Unfortunately, given how this is almost always years into the production's future, the comic will evolve and shift and the world imagined by the time travel will not accurately reflect the world the comic had become. That is, assuming the time travel incident isn't forgotten about completely.