Naked Science Forum

Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: tychobrahe on 22/07/2009 04:59:50

Title: Sending information backwards through time
Post by: tychobrahe on 22/07/2009 04:59:50
I posted this in the "Lighter: New Theories" section first because it seems closer to quackery than the other stuff, but it involves no new elementary particles or dimensions or perpetual motion machines and I want to hear what you have to think about it:

Ok this is a bit out there.  Deconstructing entropy as an arrow of time a bit, we consider the universe to be entropy increasing because that is the direction we are stuck in.  Our mitochondria, our cellular processes, our neurotransmitters, and thus our perception depend on the slow sequestering of molecules and an eventual diffusion to control that energy and then store it or use it as it best serves our needs.  It also allows us to store information in our brains, but only from a system with a lower entropy.  That's why we are moving 'forward' through time where entropy is increasing, because if you turn back the entropy you turn back our cellular processes and our learning, and if you stop the increase of entropy throughout our body, you stop any progress that the body is making and it can't comprehend the stoppage of time and entropy.

So that is why we are always going away from the big bang, not because it's the only way to go, but because our metabolism and information storage processes only work in systems going from lower entropy to higher entropy.  The rest of the physical laws are time reversible, from what i understand, and what I'm proposing is that there could be regions of the universe, or conditions created in a laboratory, where information can be stored going towards the big bang, entropy backwards.

This is all hypothetical (at this point, mwahahaha) but if instead of having molecular structures which would use increasing entropy of a system to its own advantage to create order and store information, you could have molecular structures that would use the increasing order of a system to its own advantage and create disorder and store information going towards the big bang in time.

Is this plausible?  Could there be was-ings to our beings?  Could we send information through the light cone going towards the big bang?  Let's also try to stay away from time travel paradoxes, for simplicity's sake.

Grab the pitchforks!  Light the torches!  Effigies should be as lifelike as possible (6'0", glasses, caucasian, curly hair)!  It's heresy hour!
Title: Sending information backwards through time
Post by: tychobrahe on 24/07/2009 20:52:31
Nothing?  Ok.  I'll assume that your silence is of the revered variety.  I win?
Title: Sending information backwards through time
Post by: lyner on 24/07/2009 21:59:22
OK.
I feel that it is quite possible that time is no more directional than any other of the dimensions we exist in. It could be just our way of looking at it - the way our brains / minds cope with the space time relationship - affecting our perception of things for convenience.

We can look at a graph showing the trajectory of a shell, for instance. We can see a description of the whole journey all in one go. When we 'experience it', however, we only see the progress instant by instant. Could that be merely a quirk of the structure of our brains? The Laws of Physics need be violated by this idea; afaik, they tend to be symmetrical in time.

There is no conflict with the concept of 'free will', necessarily, either. We can remember the history of a 'good' person and a 'bad' person and be happy to say that free will was at work in both their lives.
Title: Sending information backwards through time
Post by: LeeE on 25/07/2009 16:05:05
I think there are a few problems with treating time as equally bi-directional (I'm only considering two directions here as I've not heard any suggestions that time is two dimensional), one of the greatest being that time appears to have an origin but no end i.e. it appeared to start at the Big Bang but as the Big Crunch has been defenestrated, and with good reason too, there's nothing to suggest that it'll ever stop.  In that case then, it seems that while we can travel an infinite distance in to the future, we can only travel a finite distance in to the past, which indicates that time is not symmetrical.

It also depends upon whether you view time as a series of states or whether you view it as a direction.  The phenomenon of relativistic time-dilation suggests that we move along a temporal axis in a similar manner to the way we move along the spatial axis and that when the temporal and spatial axis are combined, as the rate of movement through one affects the rate of movement through the other, everything always seems to be moving through spacetime at the speed of light.

If this is so, then in order for us to change the direction in which we move along the time axis we would need to be 'reflected' by something in a similar manner to the way that light is reflected by a mirror.  Just as light doesn't seem to spontaneously change direction unless it is forced to do so by an external factor, it would seem that we'd need the temporal equivalent of a mirror to change our direction through time.

Such a temporal mirror doesn't seem to be precluded by theory, but as to likely candidates... well...