Time Lord Needs to Know

[bigshotprof]

So if I canot travel back in time, does that mean if I travel forward in time I am stuck there?

[dosbomber]

Exactly. There's a fast forward button, but no rewind. :rolleyes:

[suiken]

I had a teacher in high school who talked about relativity for a while, and he showed us this formula: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/2/9/1/291bfd8042576ef4c34fb191693e72c0.png
(I got this from a wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity))

W is the velocity of the observed object, V is the velocity of the frame of reference (C is of course, the speed of light).

So, due to that "1-", the only way to go back in time is to travel faster than light, but you'd have to pass a point where the formula divides by zero, suggesting that you'd go infinitely forward in time before you can go back.

At least, I believe that's how it works.

[bigshotprof]

I had a teacher in high school who talked about relativity for a while, and he showed us this formula: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/2/9/1/291bfd8042576ef4c34fb191693e72c0.png
(I got this from a wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity))

W is the velocity of the observed object, V is the velocity of the frame of reference (C is of course, the speed of light).

So, due to that "1-", the only way to go back in time is to travel faster than light, but you'd have to pass a point where the formula divides by zero, suggesting that you'd go infinitely forward in time before you can go back.

At least, I believe that's how it works.

That was my next question. According to Einstein, if you travel in a straight line for a nearly infinite amount of time, you would arrive back at your starting point. So if you travel forward in time, would you eventually recycle through the past up to the present?

My head hurts.

[jsatt]

I'm not sure about the starting over to get to the past part, but I know a lot of scientists believe that it could be done with quantum physics (which i believe Einstein hated because it was "spooky"). However the problem with using this method, as the girls almost touched on in the show, is that rather then traveling through time you're traveling to another dimension, which happens to be a past time on that parallel dimension. This then creates the issue of not really being your dimensions past, but the past of another dimension very similar to yours. Next, comes the issue of returning to the present, many believe that you would NEVER be able to return to the exact point from which you departed. You could return to one very similar, but never the same one.

I never took physics let alone quantum physics, so i don't quite understand it as much as I'd like, but check out some of the research that's been done around John Titor. He was the "time traveler" that showed up between 1998-2001 making a number of predictions that, eerily enough, many have come true. Some of the researchers hit on this theory and it's really interesting once you start to wrap your head around it.

[bigshotprof]

There was also the case of Emilio Lizardo in the 1980s

[masherscf]

That was my next question. According to Einstein, if you travel in a straight line for a nearly infinite amount of time, you would arrive back at your starting point. So if you travel forward in time, would you eventually recycle through the past up to the present?

My head hurts.

There is no such thing as "nearly infinite". Anything not infinite is merely finite. In any case, Einstein postulated that the Geometry of the universe was hyperbolic, not rectangular. Therefore, what you think of as a straight line might actually not be that straight.