From: Jonathan Reeves (JonathanR@mail.iclshelpdesks.com)
Date: Wed Feb 17 1999 - 04:56:48 MST
I wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm sure someone will), but all the 'time
> travel' phenomena that I've heard about are to do with
> things(information) apparently moving faster than the speed of light.
> The interpretation that they are moving backwards in time is solely
due
> to a refusal to believe that something can travel at FTL speeds, as
this
> suggests the currently accepted view of relativity may not be entirely
> correct.
Anders Sandberg replied:
>> If something can move FTL, then relativity is obviously not correct
in
>> the first place. The reason FTL is dismissed in relativity (besides
>> the impossibility of accelerating beyond c)
FTL does not depend on _accelerating_ beyond c. A constant acceleration
of less than c would result in travel at faster than the speed of light
relative to your start point.
>> is that it would
>> completely mess up causality, which generally is/was regarded as a
bad
>> thing. If you buy Novikov's principle of self-consistency or
something
>> similar, then this might not be a serious problem after all -
>> causality gets weird and loopy, but not inconsistent.
>> However, "time travel" in various forms can be done without FTL. One
>> example would be wormholes, which are allowable solutions to general
>> relativity (even if their physical possibility remains unknown). With
>> wormholes you can move to a distant time and/or space without going
>> FTL in your local frame. The same problems with causality might
>> emerge, but again quantum effects such as the Visser build up of
>> virtual particle or Novikov's principle might keep physics sane.
Problems with causality/wormholes are due to the 'space/time continuum'
- an artifact of relativity theory.
Jon Reeves
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