Time travel is not seen as possible within currently known physics, it's a big thing for Sci-Fi writers, and an intriguing personal dream. I would like to visit Earth 80 million years ago, with adequate 'guns' because it was very frisky then. Many might also, I guess. But that seems selfish. Instead, think about moving great thinkers from the past thousand years or so forward to now. After fighting the thing done to them, they could assess newer science with their big brains and do some big brainy things.. Sci-Fi treatments of time travel have explored personalities being time displaced. I read Heinlein and PJ Farmer there. Moving great thinkers forward through time seems different and interesting.
I don't know whether you've done Season 3 of The Orville yet, but Episode 6 is interesting on this front. It's a good time-travel story, but it also addresses something I've always wondered about in Star Trek, The Orville and other shows: why isn't FTL travel causing discrepancies in time? This one addresses it quite clearly, which is cool. It's an interesting idea. But could they? In some cases, probably. But in others.... With our increased base knowledge from an early age, and with our better nutrition and easy access to information, would a genius from 1,000 years ago seem a bit dim in comparison to someone quite ordinary now?
That said, Bill and Ted brought some interesting personalities to the present. Napoleon was quite taken by water slides.
You could have been/are the father of humanity. Besides the animals that could eat you I think the other danger would be viruses and bacteria that our modern day bodies aren't equiped to guard against. Think of the Americans (the entire Western Hemisphere) when the Europeans first started coming over. Yes the Europeans were well armed but they carried desease that the Americans couldn't handle.
Einstein calculated time could slow down for space travelers going the speed of light (as unlikely as that is) but otherwise time is now. The past is gone and the future has not happened and whatever will happen is constantly changing by the present. Makes for good fiction in a few isolated cases.
funny you should mention that, i'm right in the middle of 'a connecticut yankee in king arthurs court'
My understanding is Twain invented the concept of time travel that so common in science fiction today. Bob Wilson
'That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun...' Ecclesiastes 1:9 notwithstanding, I'm not sure if Twain read it somewhere before or 'invented it' himself. I seen to recall something from Chuck Dickens.....that preceded it. Twain was an out of the box thinker and he certainly popularized busting the 299792458 metres per second universal speed limit imposed by Einstein.
Maxwell worked out how you could calculate that speed, knowing only the permittivity and permeability of free space, and that was in 1865, early in Twain's writing career. It wasn't until around 1907 that E. B. Rosa and N. E. Dorsey used that method to work out what the speed is. (There had been many earlier experiments to pin it down by direct measurement.) Einstein proposed it as a universal speed limit in 1905. (I'm not sure how long that idea took to catch on.) Twain died in 1910. If he wrote something popularizing faster-than-light travel, I wonder if it was back when the speed limit was just a good idea, and not the law.
Twain wasn’t interested in a time travel mechanism but rather how people from different ages might interact. Bob Wilson
I think HG Wells built on Twain a few years later with The Time Machine in 1895. That concept led to the modified DeLorean by 1985 when a time traveling Michael J Fox almost steals his young mother's attention from his not yet father. Fox's spot on Johnny B Goode rendition and duck walk was observed by the young Chuck Berry who steals it and goes on to Rock and Roll fame.
Saul Gone. Heisenberg should be back Monday night. Another form of time travel. Very little Uncertainty whether its Walter or Werner.
I read recently there’s a “unit” of time, a minimum, indivisible bit. after this thread started I found this: Addendum: right click the above, copy the link and paste in a fresh window, you can then view (on YouTube).
TL-DW for the moment. But from other discussions, standard quantum mechanics posits that the smallest possible unit of time is the Planck time, about 5.39×10^(−44) s. Also, the smallest possible distance is the Planck length, about 1.616×10^(−35) m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units#Planck_time Clocks also tick slower the deeper they are placed in a gravity well. For light emissions, this causes a gravitational redshift. About a decade ago, some folks were able to measure this clock slowdown in Earth's gravity field over an elevation difference of just over a single foot. Last year, this was pushed down to an elevation difference of a single millimeter (these may be pay-walled): https://www.sciencenews.org/article/atomic-clock-general-relativity-time-warp-millimeter-physics https://www.sciencenews.org/article/everything-really-relative
