xkamelx
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Post by xkamelx on Apr 8, 2004 20:04:20 GMT -5
In Superman, the motion picture, after Lois Lane dies, Superman forced Earth to rotate backwards, and as a result, the events that took place were put in 'rewind', basically causing time to flow backwards. Since then I have heard many references to reversing time through that method. So I ask, is that an actual theory, or just something the writers of Superman made up? And if it is an actaul theory, how is it supposed to work? I dont see how Earth rotating in another direction would alter time.
Another one is, in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, Kirk and crew sling shot around the sun, to travel back to the 20th century. Another time traveling act I don't understand.
The did a similar thing on StarGate SG1, when they traveled through the stargate at the exact same time of a solar flare, to travel through time.
~Myke
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Speed
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I'm not even supposed to be here today!
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Post by Speed on Apr 9, 2004 2:09:31 GMT -5
Being the resident Superman FREAK!!!! I must say that putting the Earth in a reverse rotation would do nothing but screw up our planet's weather systems and ultimately make weather move backwards from what we're normally used to.
The slingshot around the sun theory does have some scientific merit, though. I forget the exact theory, but it has to do with extreme acceleration around an extreme gravitational mass resulting in an incredible burst of speed upon breaking away from the gravitational mass, thus resulting in a speed way beyond warp, to give the effect of "timewarp."
I know this was a little vague, so in short, "Superman Time Travel = CRAP. Star Trek Time Travel = A plausible Theory."
Hope this helped a little!
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xkamelx
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Post by xkamelx on Apr 9, 2004 2:24:55 GMT -5
It does help. I've heard a few theories about using gravity to travel through time, perhaps an artifical gravity well, so I figured the slingshot around the sun was somewhat related. Thanks Speed! ~Myke
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Post by valderra on Apr 9, 2004 10:54:12 GMT -5
In Superman, the motion picture, after Lois Lane dies, Superman forced Earth to rotate backwards, and as a result, the events that took place were put in 'rewind', basically causing time to flow backwards. Since then I have heard many references to reversing time through that method. So I ask, is that an actual theory, or just something the writers of Superman made up? And if it is an actaul theory, how is it supposed to work? I dont see how Earth rotating in another direction would alter time. Another one is, in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, Kirk and crew sling shot around the sun, to travel back to the 20th century. Another time traveling act I don't understand. The did a similar thing on StarGate SG1, when they traveled through the stargate at the exact same time of a solar flare, to travel through time. ~Myke Well, it was a nice effect when I first saw that Superman film but in practise it would never work, of course. First of all, we don´t have a Superman who could just spin Earth around the other way, so who or what would do it? And secondly, like Speed said, it would screw everything up. In fact, I believe that if that was possible, it would probably throw Earth out of it´s orbit and hurdle it into deep space or towards the sun, who knows... Anyway... I have found the following clip from a discussion site who talk about the possibilities of time travel and talk about the movies time travel occurred. Have a look at this little extract and see what they have to say about Kirk & Co travelling back to our present: "Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies unravels Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home Continuing from Star Trek III, the skeleton crew of the Enterprise is returning home in a stolen Klingon Bird of Prey, having blown up the original Enterprise NCC-1701 to get it. They are departing from Vulcan to stand trial for their unlawful and irresponsible actions in the rescue of Spock's body in direct violation of Star Fleet orders. However, Star Fleet has its hands full at the moment: some huge alien device has attacked the earth, vaporizing the oceans, and threatening to destroy all life on the surface in the process. Becoming aware of the problem, Mr. Spock determines that the device is trying to get a response from the long-extinct humpback whale. Kirk determines that the best hope for the world is for his tiny crew to take their ship back to the twentieth century, steal a couple of whales, and bring them back to the present to reply to the device, which they decide to refer to as a probe. There is an absurdity in the premise which for some reason is never asked. Given that the probe has traveled from light-years away (beyond anywhere to which the Federation's fleet of faster-than-light exploratory starships has been) because it no longer hears whale song, and given that whale song is an audio frequency signal, traveling roughly a thousand feet per second (much slower than the 186,000 miles per second of light) and incapable of traveling through a vacuum, how did the aliens who sent the probe receive the sounds of whale song in the first place? But the movie does not attempt to offer an explanation, so we have no way of evaluating it. There is another problem at this point. The team is going to use the technique of sling-shotting around the sun to go back in time. Forgive my confusion. Although this technique is used in the Star Trek television series, and elsewhere, it makes no sense. It is a fallacious extension of the notion in relativity that as velocity approaches light speed time for that object slows, and that time for that object ceases at light speed. Thus we are given to imagine that if we exceeded light speed, we would go backward in time. (The TV comedy It's About Time began with that premise.) But relativity also makes it clear that anything which traveled at that speed would have infinite mass and absolute density, and would be reduced to a singularity. The complications of accelerating an object of infinite mass, absolute density, zero dimension, and static time are--in short, well beyond the capabilities of anything so insignificant as a small yellow star in the outer arm of the galaxy. But somehow they want us to believe that moving somewhere in excess of warp nine (which I am told is not nine times the speed of light, but exponentially faster) will cause you to move backward in time. They also want us to imagine that this small increase in gravity will propel the ship at such a velocity even though their warp engines, which permit them to travel between stars in a matter of hours, will not--and that at these speeds we won't fly right past the sun so fast that it will be light years behind us before we achieve the necessary velocity! But just so we all understand the absurdity of the notion, they suggest at the end of the film that the process can be reversed by using the same method, but flying around the sun in the opposite direction! I'm sorry to burst the Star Trek bubble, but if you can fly faster than light to reach other stars, you can't also use it to go back in time, and you certainly can't use it to come forward in time again: it is the velocity which causes the temporal reversal, not the direction. (I should also mention that the concept of relative time does not mean that the object moves through our time at a different rate, but that it experiences time itself at a different rate. The astronauts who travel to another star at 90% of the speed of light return to us in the same number of years we would expect--about 11 years to go 10 light years--but they would only have aged slightly. Following this logic, to exceed the speed of light would result in the craft continuing to be perceived in our own time, but the persons aboard getting younger.)... " to be continued in a link... There is much more to it and it talks about more problems involved in this theory. But since this would be a much too large post, I will just post the link to the site here so you all can read it in your own time. BTW, the problem with the sling-shot theory is in the third paragraph. It´s also a great site for any other movie-related time travelling theory. www.mjyoung.net/time/stvoyage.html
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xkamelx
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Post by xkamelx on Apr 9, 2004 14:35:10 GMT -5
It's a cool link. I myself, have never understood the slingshot theory from Star Trek, I always found it ironic that Spock and Kirk knew how to travel hrough time, yet the Federation had no time travel technology.
As for the whale sounds, that does, in a sence make sence, as sound as we know it is impossable in space. It's one of those times where we have to guess the 'hows' I think. To make something up fast, perhaps the whale sounds travel on a special sub space level, although I doubt they were powerful enought to break the atmosphere to begin with. Or perhaps, given the extreme advanced technology of 'the probe' it has unhead of censor capabilities, that could reach 50,000 lightyears to pick up the Whale language. Who knows, but remember this was filmed in the 80's and the 80's are notorious for movie plots that would probably not be used today.
~Myke
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