Time Travel - John Titor

[Moondance]

OK, buckle up SoWal Loungers... I mentioned this to Smiling JOe and decided I would post it (sorry in advance for its length).

I am interested to learn if anyone else has heard of John TIToR (TIme TRaveler). I listened to this mind- and time-bender radio interview on the "Coast to Coast AM with George Noory" show July 8, 2005 and finally tracked it down (BTW, there is a news item on Hurricane Dennis over Cuba that is a bit eerie).

The site for the radio show and streamlink of the full broadcast is:
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2005/07/08.html

However, the 30-day registration is $6.95. I am NOT hawking the show or the site or anything, it is simply a topic that is fascinating to me. You can check the Titor link below and get plenty enough of the flavor for free. The interview is great and has callers that are pretty wild...

(one said the time travel "police" intentionally caused a car accident with him, so that he wouldn't DIE in a car accident later that day, so they would, in turn, be able to catch the rogue John Titor, who had failed to return to 2036 as scheduled and was AWOL !!)

The radio guest was Oliver Williams, the proprieter of a web site that purports to have collected a large volume of online messages posted by a "John Titor," a self-described time traveler from the year 2036. Here is the radio tease:

"All that is known about Titor, Williams explained, has been compiled from posts on internet discussions boards dating back to November 2000. According to Williams, Titor claimed to have traveled to our present from the year 2036 -- a period scarred by the devastation of World War 3 -- to find a computer made in 1975 needed to fix something in his time. Through his internet postings, Titor gave detailed descriptions of his time machine, as well as warnings about an impending civil conflict in the United States, mad cow disease, and the cancellation of the Olympics, Williams said."

The free link to Oliver Williams' John Titor site is:
http://www.johntitor.com/

I was hesitant to post this but since I no longer have any reputation to protect (Thanks SJ, k, RO and GB ), I thought, what the hell?

Happy Travels!!

[Cil]

I've read about him. I enjoy science fiction and love time travel stuff.
However, while his story is interesting, to me it is a well-done fake, especially looking at the fact that he said a new (USA) Civil War will begin in 2004. (We may be divided, but I can't think of any states which have seceded.)


Wikipedia's John Titor

John Titor debunked

[Miss Kitty]

I keep expecting Rod Sterling and that crazy theme from the "Twilight Zone" !

[Cil]

hee
Yes. My husband likes to listen to Art Bell's Radio Show as well. He doesn't take it too seriously but it is quite entertaining, especially the people who call in.

[Moondance]

Awesome, Cil !! I can't wait to read the links. This is all I am looking for, an exchange of ideas. It has occurred to me certainly that it is fake, but on that point Oliver Williams notes that Titor's knowledge on a variety of complex subjects and disciplines is so broad and thorough that, if a hoax, it would seem to have been a team rather than an individual.

I would love for it to be debunked since the upshot, if you will, of the Titor story is mostly gloom and doom on a grand scale in our and our kids' lifetimes.

Btw, I thought about that after I made the post. Time Travel seemed innocuous enough of a topic, then you get into some of his "predictions" and say man, this is a supreme drag... Sorry to be a buzzkill in that respect, but my interest is in the "science" behind the ideas, definitely not in "the end of civilization as we know it."

Final thought, regarding 2004, there is a concept that Titor referred to as "temporal divergence" between his worldline (timeline) and ours, that might account for variations in time. "weedooweedooweedoo"

Thanks for the post. I hope we get more!

[Moondance]

hee
Yes. My husband likes to listen to Art Bell's Radio Show as well. He doesn't take it too seriously but it is quite entertaining, especially the people who call in.

Me too. The callers can be beyond bizzarre...

[Moondance]

See an "interactive" time travel link at: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2005/01/07.html

The kids (on this board) will love it!!
It looks like below and it really works (wow), no batteries needed.



"Albert Einstein theorized that time flowed at different rates. According to him, the faster one traveled, the slower time flowed. Einstein called this phenomenon time dilation, and invented the "Twin Paradox" to explain its effects. Click the above graphic (use the link above) to see an interactive example of the "Twin Paradox."

INSTRUCTIONS:
Click people (green) to set age
Click ship to set velocity
Click on a star to launch ship

After the ship returns, note the astronaut's age compared to the age of the person who stayed on Earth. Adjust the options and relaunch to see how things change."

[Cil]

Very cool, Moondance!
I sent the link to my niece and nephew.

[CastlesOfSand]

Didn't they make a movie about this......? Very interesting anyways.

[Moondance]

Didn't they make a movie about this......? Very interesting anyways.

If so, I'm not aware. Strangely, I generally dislike sci-fi, but I'd LOVE to see a Titor film that faithfully recreates (the fantasy or reality? of) John Titor, as reflected in his posts. Wild stuff!

[Moondance]

Very cool, Moondance!
I sent the link to my niece and nephew.

From a link on Art Bell's website (to Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel :
Time travel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Time travel is the concept of travelling forward and backward to different points in time, much as we do through space. It also includes the concept of traveling sideways between parallel realities or universes.

Unsolved problems in physics: Is time travel theoretically possible? Is it practically possible? If so, what are we to make of the time travel paradoxes, such as going back in time and killing one's own grandfather, etc.?

Humans are in fact always travelling in time — in a linear fashion, from the present to the immediate future, inexorably, until death. Some theories, most notably special and general relativity, suggest that suitable geometries of spacetime, or certain types of motion in space, may allow time travel into the past and future if these geometries or motions are possible. It has been confirmed that the effects of relativistic and gravitational time dilation can cause a traveller who starts at and returns to a point of origin that remains stationary, to arrive at a time farther in the future in that reference frame than their subjective elapsed time would indicate (a constrained form of time travel into the future) [see, time travel interactive link in previous post]

Often it is a plot device used in science fiction and many movies and television shows to set a character in a particular time not their own, and explore the character's interaction with the people and technology of that time—as a kind of culture shock. Other ramifications explored are change and reactions to it, parallel universes, and alternative history where some little event took place or did not take place, but causes large changes in the future.

Famous fictional time machines include the TARDIS from the long-running BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who and the titular time machine of H. G. Wells's novel. On film there were the modified Delorean of the Back to the Future trilogy, the telephone booth of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, the space-time portal of Army of Darkness and the first three Planet of the Apes movies.

Other books, films and series which feature time travel are A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Enterprise, the Terminator series, La Jetée, 12 Monkeys, Primer, Futurama, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Quantum Leap, Logan's Run and Sabrina The Teenage Witch.

Fictional time travel even exists in the medium of video games, such as Time Pilot, Chrono Trigger, The Journeyman Project, Blinx, Viewtiful Joe, Prince of Persia and Timesplitters.

In physics, the concept of time travel has been often used to examine the consequences of physical theories such as special relativity, general relativity and quantum mechanics. There is no experimental evidence of time travel, and it is not even well understood whether (let alone how) the current physical theories permit any kind of time travel. However, theories do exist about the possibility of folding time to hop from one point to another.

MD

Post-post: I might have to check out Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut. He's a trip to read!

[Moondance]

MORE:

:?: Einstein, special relativity (1905) and general relativity (1915)?!? It's clear I'm no Einstein...
General relativity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.



Two-dimensional visualization of space-time distortion. The presence of matter changes the geometry of spacetime, this (curved) geometry being interpreted as gravity.


General relativity (GR) or general relativity theory (GRT) is a geometrical theory of gravitation and cosmology published by Albert Einstein in 1915. In this theory;

• Spacetime is treated as a curved 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold,
• Spacetime is curved by the presence of mass, energy, and momentum (or stress-energy) within it.
• The relationship between curvature and spacetime is governed by the Einstein field equations, and
• Inertial motion occurs along timelike and null geodesics of spacetime.

In general relativity, gravitation[1] is not due to a force. Instead, phenomena that in classical mechanics are ascribed to the action of the force of gravity (such as freefall, orbital motion, and spacecraft trajectories) are taken in general relativity to represent inertial motion in a curved spacetime. So what people standing on the surface of the Earth perceive as the 'force of gravity' is a result of their undergoing a continuous physical acceleration caused by the mechanical resistance of the surface that they are standing on.
One of the defining features of general relativity is the idea that gravitational 'force' is replaced by geometry.