A Time experiment

[Skeptic believer]

Okay!
Here’s a thought experiment I dreamed up.

Let’s say that you have invented the first time machine (!) -
and you decide to go back in time to win last week’s lottery! - having first memorised the winning numbers.

Will the winning numbers be the same??
Will the slight effect of you going into the past, alter the past to such an extent that the numbers will be different and the journey a waste of time??

 

[Lamuella]

probably not. Most lotteries are done by the random drawing of numbered balls from a machine. Unless you accidentally landed on the machine, or somehow interacted with the machine, your presence would have a very limited impact on the numbers drawn.

Of course, it depends on both how far back you go and what changes you and your machine make.

 

[Skeptic believer]

Ii was thinking about what they say in 'chaos theory'
That a very slight change has exponential repurcussions -
so I wondered how much change would result from your mere presence in the past

 

[Roboramma]

Okay!
Here’s a thought experiment I dreamed up.

Let’s say that you have invented the first time machine (!) -
and you decide to go back in time to win last week’s lottery! - having first memorised the winning numbers.

Will the winning numbers be the same??
Will the slight effect of you going into the past, alter the past to such an extent that the numbers will be different and the journey a waste of time??

Let me put it this way: you should be able to rig it so that you won't mess up the numbers. Let's say there's a machine (see post#2) that determines the numbers. Let's say that you also arrive in the past 1 day before the numbers are drawn. Just make sure that you land in a place more than 26 billion kilometers away from the machine. Hopefully they've got a ticket booth somewhere nearby.

 

[Kid Eager]

Ii was thinking about what they say in 'chaos theory'
That a very slight change has exponential repurcussions -
so I wondered how much change would result from your mere presence in the past

my thoughts exactly. You go back in time and instead of sitting down to watch the lotto numbers, you are one of several mice being juggled in performance of a drunken dare...

 

[Verklagekasper]

There are two views on this.

1. You can change the past.
Then it is unlikely that you will get the same lottery numbers once you travelled back. For example, when you travelled back and want to go get a lottery ticket, you will encounter some people. By your presence, you will change their behavior at least slightly, like they wait 0.5 seconds to let you pass by, or they look at you for 0.1 seconds. Since they changed their behavior, the people encountering them will change their behavior in just the same way that you changed the behavoir of your first encounters, and so forth. You have caused a chain reaction of changes that first spreads at the speed of pedestrians, then at the speed of cars (as car drivers will be affected as well), and finally at the speed of planes. In the end, the person preparing the lottery machine will have been affected by this wave of changes as well, so the lottery machine will be prepared in a slightly different way, resulting in different numbers to be picked.

2. You cannot change the past.
Then you might be able to travel back in time, but you cannot change events since you have been part of those events all along. You could not assassinate a dictator, for instance. Something would always prevent you from doing that. It must be so because if you succeeded in killing the dictator, then the dictator would be dead, so you would not travel back to kill him, so he would stay alive - a contradiction. As for the lottery, the same numbers would be picked. But it would not be you to win the lottery but the same person who won the lottery in the first place. Something will keep you from winning the lottery, even when you know the numbers in advance. Whatever you try, you'll get arrested, or your time machine will crash, or you will just sleep late.

Either way, winning the lottery by travelling back in time is unlikely to work.

 

[AvalonXQ]

With #2, though, there's no reason you couldn't have won the lottery all along, and going back in time is just part of that.

 

[Skeptic believer]

There are two views on this.

1. You can change the past.
Then it is unlikely that you will get the same lottery numbers once you travelled back. For example, when you travelled back and want to go get a lottery ticket, you will encounter some people. By your presence, you will change their behavior at least slightly, like they wait 0.5 seconds to let you pass by, or they look at you for 0.1 seconds. Since they changed their behavior, the people encountering them will change their behavior in just the same way that you changed the behavoir of your first encounters, and so forth. You have caused a chain reaction of changes that first spreads at the speed of pedestrians, then at the speed of cars (as car drivers will be affected as well), and finally at the speed of planes. In the end, the person preparing the lottery machine will have been affected by this wave of changes as well, so the lottery machine will be prepared in a slightly different way, resulting in different numbers to be picked.

2. You cannot change the past.
Then you might be able to travel back in time, but you cannot change events since you have been part of those events all along. You could not assassinate a dictator, for instance. Something would always prevent you from doing that. It must be so because if you succeeded in killing the dictator, then the dictator would be dead, so you would not travel back to kill him, so he would stay alive - a contradiction. As for the lottery, the same numbers would be picked. But it would not be you to win the lottery but the same person who won the lottery in the first place. Something will keep you from winning the lottery, even when you know the numbers in advance. Whatever you try, you'll get arrested, or your time machine will crash, or you will just sleep late.

Either way, winning the lottery by travelling back in time is unlikely to work.

As I feared!!
I was thinking more of number 1 - as in Superman or Bewitched - just rolling back time, as (2) has too many paradoxes.

 

[JJM 777]

[I have been sharpening my claws in another thread about time and SR... here we go:]

Let’s say that you have invented the first time machine (!) -
and you decide to go back in time

Only the present moment exists, and future moments will soon exist. The past does not exist. Therefore going back in time is not possible, because where you want to go does not exist.

Reaching a forward point in time is possible, because it will soon exist. Time machines can potentially only function forward, delaying or otherwise altering your forward moving timeline compared to the forward moving timeline of the rest of universe, so you reach a different point in future than you normally would. But nevertheless, it is future where you end up, not the past.

And once you get to the future, you cannot come back either, because again any past moments of time would not exist any more.

 

[Aepervius]

There are two views on this.

1. You can change the past.
Then it is unlikely that you will get the same lottery numbers once you travelled back. For example, when you travelled back and want to go get a lottery ticket, you will encounter some people. By your presence, you will change their behavior at least slightly, like they wait 0.5 seconds to let you pass by, or they look at you for 0.1 seconds. Since they changed their behavior, the people encountering them will change their behavior in just the same way that you changed the behavoir of your first encounters, and so forth. You have caused a chain reaction of changes that first spreads at the speed of pedestrians, then at the speed of cars (as car drivers will be affected as well), and finally at the speed of planes. In the end, the person preparing the lottery machine will have been affected by this wave of changes as well, so the lottery machine will be prepared in a slightly different way, resulting in different numbers to be picked.

2. You cannot change the past.
Then you might be able to travel back in time, but you cannot change events since you have been part of those events all along. You could not assassinate a dictator, for instance. Something would always prevent you from doing that. It must be so because if you succeeded in killing the dictator, then the dictator would be dead, so you would not travel back to kill him, so he would stay alive - a contradiction. As for the lottery, the same numbers would be picked. But it would not be you to win the lottery but the same person who won the lottery in the first place. Something will keep you from winning the lottery, even when you know the numbers in advance. Whatever you try, you'll get arrested, or your time machine will crash, or you will just sleep late.

Either way, winning the lottery by travelling back in time is unlikely to work.

Problem with #1 is that so much stuff is d0one elctronically now. Even lottery in some country. So
1) put a PC with WIFI connected to your home in your garage, close the garage shortly before lottery to avoid time paradox
2) close the garage door 1 day before lottery open it 1 day after, time travel 2 day back with the number
3) you are in an ENCLOSED room your worst influence in the world will be consumming a bit of electricity, sending a few HTTPS packet to the lottery backend go back to your time
4) $$$$ profit.

You haven't in any way shape or form distrubed significantely the past.

 

[Aepervius]

[I have been sharpening my claws in another thread about time and SR... here we go:]


Only the present moment exists, and future moments will soon exist. The past does not exist. Therefore going back in time is not possible, because where you want to go does not exist.

Reaching a forward point in time is possible, because it will soon exist. Time machines can potentially only function forward, delaying or otherwise altering your forward moving timeline compared to the forward moving timeline of the rest of universe, so you reach a different point in future than you normally would. But nevertheless, it is future where you end up, not the past.

And once you get to the future, you cannot come back either, because again any past moments of time would not exist any more.

I would go one step further. You can travel NEITHER to the past NOR to the future. There is only the now and that's it.

 

[Skeptic believer]

Problem with #1 is that so much stuff is d0one elctronically now. Even lottery in some country. So
1) put a PC with WIFI connected to your home in your garage, close the garage shortly before lottery to avoid time paradox
2) close the garage door 1 day before lottery open it 1 day after, time travel 2 day back with the number
3) you are in an ENCLOSED room your worst influence in the world will be consumming a bit of electricity, sending a few HTTPS packet to the lottery backend go back to your time
4) $$$$ profit.

You haven't in any way shape or form distrubed significantely the past.

Ah! That sounds as if it has a chance of working

 

[Michael C]

There are two views on this.

1. You can change the past.[...]

2. You cannot change the past.[...]

There's an inherent problem with the idea of "changing the past". The very idea of "change" implies a time arrow, with "before" and "after". If we say we have "changed the past", we imply that there are two versions of a single past event, but one of them somehow happened "after" the other one. Who decides which one happened "after" the other? Here's a little story to illustrate the point:

At 10:00 Amy and Bob enter the secret lab where they have built a time machine. On the desk are two pieces of paper, which they placed there the evening before.

At 10:15 Amy gets into the time machine and goes back to 9:00 on the same day. She gets out of the machine, picks up one of the pieces of paper and puts it in her pocket. She puts the other piece of paper in the ashtray and sets it alight. She watches it burn to ashes. All this takes her about 5 minutes.

Having done that, she gets into the time machine and travels forwards to 10:30 on the same day. According to the usual narrative conventions, when she steps out of the machine she has one of the pieces of paper in her pocket, and the other piece of paper is just a pile of ashes in the ashtray. She has "changed the past".

So far, so good. But now let's look at Bob's view of things. His task is to stay in the lab and observe the pieces of paper, without disturbing anything. What does he see happening between 10:15 and 10:30?​

 

[Roboramma]

Ah! That sounds as if it has a chance of working

You didn't like my idea?

Just make sure that you land in a place more than 26 billion kilometers away from the machine.

It has the benefit of making it impossible that you could effect the outcome of the lottery.

ETA: And, as such, should get around some of the paradoxes you might worry about.

 

[Dan O.]

That's not how time machines work. You can transfer neither matter nor energy through time because the laws do not permit it. However, there is still a loophole where information can be transferred through time by hitching to the quantum entanglement.

The techniclal difficulty is that the time machine needs to be isolated to preserve the quantum state of the entanglement over a very long time scale. If you research the history of state lotteries, you will find that there was a time when the last sale and drawing were nearley simultaneous. If it wern't for the long drawn out process of drawing the numbers from the mechanical machines, the gap would be just about feasible. I wonder if there is still a statistical aberration of last minute sales matching the first three numbers more often than the last three.

Anyhow, back to answering the question in the op. if you build the time machine and turn it on, it's interaction with the environment is independent of the data that will eventually be fed into it. (assuming that you have properly isolated it so the environment doesn't change the data). You pull a set of numbers out of the machine (in the form of a preprinted card with the numberes filled in) and race to the nearest lottery terminal where you purchase the winning lottery ticket without ever seeing the numbers yourself. Back at home, you watch the drawing and feed the numbers into your time machine.

 

[gnome]

There's an inherent problem with the idea of "changing the past". The very idea of "change" implies a time arrow, with "before" and "after". If we say we have "changed the past", we imply that there are two versions of a single past event, but one of them somehow happened "after" the other one. Who decides which one happened "after" the other? Here's a little story to illustrate the point:

At 10:00 Amy and Bob enter the secret lab where they have built a time machine. On the desk are two pieces of paper, which they placed there the evening before.

At 10:15 Amy gets into the time machine and goes back to 9:00 on the same day. She gets out of the machine, picks up one of the pieces of paper and puts it in her pocket. She puts the other piece of paper in the ashtray and sets it alight. She watches it burn to ashes. All this takes her about 5 minutes.

Having done that, she gets into the time machine and travels forwards to 10:30 on the same day. According to the usual narrative conventions, when she steps out of the machine she has one of the pieces of paper in her pocket, and the other piece of paper is just a pile of ashes in the ashtray. She has "changed the past".

So far, so good. But now let's look at Bob's view of things. His task is to stay in the lab and observe the pieces of paper, without disturbing anything. What does he see happening between 10:15 and 10:30?​

The interpretation I favor is that two timelines are created. And thus two Bobs and two Amys.

Bob sees Amy get into the time machine and activate it. He never sees her again.

In the alternate timeline, Bob prime comes into the office with Amy prime at 10:00 to find one paper burnt and the other missing. At 10:30 Amy arrives in the time machine with the other piece of paper.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qbcv2Tf4Q...KbpIUtcBs/s1600/comic-relief-2011-promo-2.jpg

Amy then leaves with Amy prime and "gives her a driver's certificate".

Ok that part may be just in my head.

 

[AvalonXQ]

There's an inherent problem with the idea of "changing the past". The very idea of "change" implies a time arrow, with "before" and "after". If we say we have "changed the past", we imply that there are two versions of a single past event, but one of them somehow happened "after" the other one. Who decides which one happened "after" the other? Here's a little story to illustrate the point:

At 10:00 Amy and Bob enter the secret lab where they have built a time machine. On the desk are two pieces of paper, which they placed there the evening before.

At 10:15 Amy gets into the time machine and goes back to 9:00 on the same day. She gets out of the machine, picks up one of the pieces of paper and puts it in her pocket. She puts the other piece of paper in the ashtray and sets it alight. She watches it burn to ashes. All this takes her about 5 minutes.

Having done that, she gets into the time machine and travels forwards to 10:30 on the same day. According to the usual narrative conventions, when she steps out of the machine she has one of the pieces of paper in her pocket, and the other piece of paper is just a pile of ashes in the ashtray. She has "changed the past".

So far, so good. But now let's look at Bob's view of things. His task is to stay in the lab and observe the pieces of paper, without disturbing anything. What does he see happening between 10:15 and 10:30?​

Different time travel narratives deal with the situation differently.

1) Bob wonders why Amy didn't change anything, since the ash is still there and the other paper is still missing, just he remembers observing when they came in at 10:00. That's not what Amy remembers.

2) Bob is excited; right after Amy left in the time machine, both pieces of paper vanished and cold ash appeared in the ashtray. The past doesn't actually change, but the direct changes "catch up to" the future at the moment of the time travel (or possibly thereafter). Who keeps their memory, and to what extent, varies from story to story.

3) Your description of the initial lab event is incorrect; when they first come in, they see only the ash in the ashtray. This is equivalent to #2 above; all time travel into the past already happened and we are already dealing with its events.

There are more variations that just the above, but I personally accept (3) as the most plausible form in real life, although not necessarily the most interesting in fiction.

 

[Bob001]

....I wonder if there is still a statistical aberration of last minute sales matching the first three numbers more often than the last three....

Just a question. I don't know anything about time machines, except that I can't find one. But if the lottery number selection process is truly random, why would last-minute sales (or first-minute sales or any other time) be more likely to match any of the winning numbers?

 

[JJM 777]

There are two views on this.

1. You can change the past.
2. You cannot change the past.

How about:

3. The past does not exist any more, so you can neither go there nor change it.

I would go one step further. You can travel NEITHER to the past NOR to the future. There is only the now and that's it.

We all move towards the future, constantly moment by moment.

Disclaimer: I understand nothing of what I say below:

The idea that time travel (at least further into the future) should be possible comes from the Relativity Theory, and also from practical experiments (intended to check whether relativity theory is correct or not) where synchronized atom clocks lose the sync and show a different time compared to each other, when one of them travels a distance and comes back, while the other one stays immobile. Relativity theory claims, and the atom clock experiment seems to confirm, that time moves slower for the one who accelerates (= travels) compared to the one who stays immobile.

If we accept relativity theory and/or the results of the atom clock experiment, it means that it is possible to travel further into the future than your lifespan normally would reach, by entering a fast moving vehicle where time moves slower than elsewhere. This would mean that when you come out of the vehicle, you are in a moment of time which might be your 200th birthday according to normal calendar. Had you not been inside the vehicle where time moves slower for you, you would be long dead by then.

 

[AvalonXQ]

The idea that time travel (at least further into the future) should be possible comes from the Relativity Theory, and also from practical experiments (intended to check whether relativity theory is correct or not) where synchronized atom clocks lose the sync and show a different time compared to each other, when one of them travels a distance and comes back, while the other one stays immobile. Relativity theory claims, and the atom clock experiment seems to confirm, that time moves slower for the one who accelerates (= travels) compared to the one who stays immobile. If we accept relativity theory and/or the results of the atom clock experiment, it means that it is possible to travel further into the future than your lifespan normally would reach, by entering a fast moving vehicle where time moves slower than elsewhere. This would mean that when you come out of the vehicle, you are in a moment of time which might be your 200th birthday according to normal calendar. Had you not been inside the vehicle where time moves slower for you, you would be long dead by then.

I believe that you have described the consequences of time dilation correctly.