If the human mind can think it, it can be done.

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We've already had this argument Fnord. Putting Spirit worlds and Time Travel in the same boat is dishonest. Retrograde time travel is a consequence of General Relativity - not exactly new or strange stuff anymore. Whether or not it is actually possible remains to be seen, but until then putting stuff which is part of scientific study into the same boat as New Age horses**t doesn't help the lay understand the difference between thinking critically/examining the universe and, well, whatever it is that New Agers do.

Godel showed that closed time loops were a consequence of General Relativity but arbitrary travel to the past is not. With the Godel solution one could do a closed time loop from the time the traveling device is activated into the future and back to the beginning of the journey. Rather like circumnavigating the earth. Arbitrary time travel to the past is not implied by General Relativity. For example one could not travel to a time prior to one's birth. If that were possible then the Grandfather Paradox could occur.

rueveyn

...unless the Novikov Self Consistency Principle is true.

I included those wooish subjects only because they have been mis-represented as scientific principles, when in fact, they are mere fantasy constructs (at worst) or purely hypothetical and unproven ideas (at best).

Yes, some people claim that the "Spirit World" concept is merely another consequence of the idea of parallel worlds.

As for Retrograde Time Travel - show me that it is real on the Real World scale (anything goes in the quantum world, it seems), and I'll believe. Otherwise, it's only another SciFi MacGuffin.

What are your thoughts on teleportation? Is it a load of crap as well? And what about bringing back extinct animals (e.g. mammoths, dinosaurs)?

Teleportation of quantum states may be possible. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

Transmission of information by an electromagnetic communication channel could be regarded as a kind of teleportation.

I have my doubts about moving extensive or massive objects by Star Trek kind of teleportation. To do so would require breaking up the object to obtain its pattern, transmitting the pattern, then reconstructing the object very closely at the other end. The Heisenberg Ideterminacy Principle would seem to militate against that. Dr. McCoy was completely correct for disliking the idea of "Rodenberry" type teleporation.

ruveyn

Think about it like this....

"I know that some things are smaller than others. I know that some thngs grow from small to large. Now, with the part of my brain that knows to double something, and that two of something is actually one of something, I will imagine a baby the size of infinity. "

So can a baby grow to the size of infinity? Could we make the technology to do that? Or is " infinity " just a concept to put in place what we cannot know, understand, or do? What I'm saying is that you have to really evaluate what the human mind can " think ". No body here, ever, anywhere, can in the most basic form of demonstration, properly illustrate the concept of infinity outside of using symbols and metaphors.

A counter argument could be that people had thought up things in the past which have come to be... but it's just like taking your infinity baby and imagining a REALLY fast spear and imagining what technically would be a bullet shootin infinity baby with infinity cuteness.

So with that... I think the statement is correct, bu tI also think it would be EASILY misrepresented. Currently the only concrete logical way for time travel to exist would be to somehow find the energy and accuracy to reverse what has taken place in a specific area of time... but to hit the " quantum reverse " on my dorm room and send all the things which have occured to me in the passed hour you would have to follow the pattern which affected, in a " fate " type sense, all the happenings of my area and surroundings. Problem with that = everything is related and connected by physical expressions of matter/atoms/protons/smaller(?) interactions which have occured either recently or long, long, long ago. So to change what has happened to my dorm room you either have to A: contain all the elements somehow in a perfect quantum seal... or reverse everything in the effect of time to go with it.

So yeah... good luck. And personally... I figure reversing time would be far more likely on an information level... iamgine a computer program that creates within it a living, breathing, interacting world in which you can reset and track every atomic interaction, chemical reaction, etc? It's contained, and seems doable with how confusing the interaction of information seems to me.

Quantum teleportation is for real.

See:
http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/

ruveyn

Let's see:

"Creating a four-sided triangle."
"Making 1+1 equal 37"
"Constructing a square sphere, which both exists and does not exist, which is simultaneously blue and not blue, has a radius of 30 km, 10 cm and 32 parsecs (all at once), is expanding and contracting simultaneously, and whose surface area is given by the formula A=72eR - 8k (in which k is the last prime number minus the penultimate prime number), is massless and has a mass of 10 kg, and is indestructible but can be destroyed by waving a dead fish in its general direction."

So, I have to say the statement is a little dubious.

You didn't think up anything new though. All you did was apply two symbols which represent a perception of your senses. Not to say that the concept of a triangle doesn't exist totally... but you can visualize and apply a triangle. However, you cannot take that imperfect unit of measure and then keep the angles the same so that it is a triangle with four sides.......because then it would be a square . Just like how you can say "-1 + -1 = -2 " ... but verbally that means a quantity of nothing plus another quantity of nothing equals even more nothing. So yeah... I guess the root of the problem is in the question equally.

In my opinion you have to define what " thinking " qualifies. And I do not view the combination of symbols like math or English a proper definition of what a human can " think ". In other words... I can think of infinity and what it is trying to represent. But something that never ends means nothing to me, as it can not be understood. So I can say " Turn off infinity ", and all you can do is imagine the concepts of turning something off, and the concepts of infinity. You can use math or language too, and you will never be able to understand what " Turn off infinity " is saying.

Last point ... it doesn't count if the symbol ( math or language based ) meant nothing before, but means something now. Some stoner from 1957 who worked at a lumber mill may have mumbled the words, " What if like... beyond the atomic level of stuff in chemistry and that crap ... there were like.... little dancing strings that were playing trippy music and making everything flow the way it does?", did not ' think it ' in a reasonable arguable way. His " string theory " was not our " string theory ".

Make any sense?

Big flaw in the theory:

I can think of myself with a loving, understanding cute and intelligent girl that love me for who i am. There, theory broken




That pages seems more like that they have been able to transport "matter entropy" and not the real matter itself i.e. it does not seem to move the original matter from A to B, so even if you could transport a big chunk of matter, i.e. a bar of metal or a piece of plastic it would probably only allow dead matter to be transported.

But i am not going to say that "startrek-type telportation will never happen" because people who say such things usually end up looking like idiots 300 years in the future.

I'm afraid these are not refutations, because they are contradictions in terms. As terms are human constructs (i.e., constructs of the human mind), we cannot think their contradiction; we may combine the symbols in a nonsensical way, we may write down "colorless green sentences", but we most certainly aren't thinking them in the way that the OP meant because it is not possible to think them because they lack meaning.

Damn... you said that a lot better than I did... and with about 300 fewer words.

Everything we believe can be done, is because according to our bases and former experience we know something like that might happen. People claimed people would fly one day, because they saw other animales flying and knowing that human technology always gets better. So when we think of things like "someday humans will populate the whole solar system" we know it could be possible, knowing the human nature to conquest and discover, and the latest advances in technology. We cant think of anything if it is not based on certain facts... therefore there is nothing the human mind can think that cant happen.

Our minds are not free from the physical laws of the cosmos. We can imagine things that can never be done because we are subject to those laws. We can discover those laws, but cannot change them.

Can we imagine a human mind free from hubris?

Actually, the human mind imagines it's done things it hasn't really done. It imagines that we are fully conscious, rational, reasonable creatures when we are none of those. We imagine what we are told to imagine, courtesy of the mass media. We can't even begin to imagine what we can't imagine.