-"YES" says Jeeves, "NO" says me!
All this started after me watching “12 Monkeys”, especially by the fact that the younger Bruce Willis sees the older one back from the future getting killed right in front of him. This was a mail chat that Libu and myself had regarding this.
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 8:05 AM
To: 'Libu Balakrishnan'
hey! i was thinking abt 12 monkeys today and i have this theory:
say, u are time travelling and go to the past, if some person living in the past sees you then you go down as a present event in the past time isnt it? then it means u are history for the future time from which u came! which would in turn mean that in the future from which u came there already exists a record of that past which means u didnt time travel any way! makes sense?
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 8:16 AM
To: Swethambari Seshadri
:)) Oh yes it does : ) ....me and johnson were talking about this for harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban, the time turner funda !!! Only think I cudnt put it in words as well as you did :D !! I tried writing about it, but it all turned out so drab that i left it.....
If you dont have such a record you couldnt go back in time, coz a footstep you put in time, will always trigger something which in turn will trigger something and in the future the chain reaction is ultimately bound to result in something big or miniscule (I believe in symmetry) ! So if theres a present then theres a present for it and a future....well if this mean that either time travel is not possible or that theres only the present and no past or future (dont think thats possible though!)
From: Swethambari Seshadri
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 8:26 AM
To: 'Libu Balakrishnan'
u know? this question about only the present and the absence of past and future, i've once read a story, dont remember the name or the author, think its arthur.c.clark though. anyway, in that story this airplane somehow breaks through the space time continuum and arrives at a point of voidness. there is nothing around, its just void! then they see that like a kids building block or something, the time is built around them, subsequently the past get erased. its like a stage where the props are dismantled and built again. so, this basically negates the theory of time traveling as there is no past that u can go to as it has already been destroyed and no future u can go to as it hasnt been built yet.
yes, we do have history of the past but as we do not have any history of a person of future time traveling we can either say that time traveling hasnt happened yet (stephen hawking's argument) or the traveler from future has indeed gone down in history only that as we say he has been recorded it is not time travel anymore, he became an existence at that time and hence seized being a stranger from the future.
From: Libu Balakrishnan
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 8:43 AM
To: Swethambari Seshadri
wow..i will try to get that book !! Yep it is certainly interesting...you know I havent read a brief history of time...sigh...yes !! earlier I used to have a sort of mania that any good book I know of, I will read it only once I buy it ;), but now since I have to pay for the books I buy, I sometime do get over this mania ;) !! Well brief history of time was one of those books...and later on i jsut got onto other things and missed it completely....I should get it some time soon and read through it....
Yep that does make sense and it works if the person is travelling into the future too : ) !! Well then it could also mean that we keep travelling back and forth between the past and future to make the present a function of time (which it is !!!) and whats more each recorded event in the past is a "present" !! Hmm.....that doesnt make sense because the present is dependent on the past and not a standalone instance....hmm...
lady you have just distracted me entirely from work !! Not that iam complaining :D !
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 8:51 AM
To: 'Libu Balakrishnan'
:O)) this has been eating my head since y'day (quite sometime infact but i could verbalize it only y'day) and i knew that without discussing this out loud i'll just be running around in circles!
each recorded event of the past is the "present" only if u travel back to that instance, otherwise it is just fact that may or may not have transpired .. but that branches over to truth and fiction!
but it isnt necessary to keep travelling back and forth in order to make present a function of time. it already is, immaterial of whether we choose to travel or not. time is a vector and so far as we know can only travel forward but then again at this instance in time it is constant. every second is a constant and we can only extrapolate about the next second or refer to facts about the previous second! does that make time constant and not a variable as we have only the present instance (or unit of time) to work on at any given point?
From: Libu Balakrishnan
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 9:46 AM
To: Swethambari Seshadri
Had a project discussion !
If present is a function of time and time can only move forward then there is no past, we keep recreating the past(which is present) with each moment and then in the next moment come back to the present. Then there is no concept of future or past :D !! We are just living in the present and what we believe should not be the present, we label as future and past depending on the various sensory signals that we get. Hazy coz, how do we "sense" what is the future and what is the past ? Especially as we have no concept of past or future only the present. Then that mean everything that happens is the present and that there is no thing called a future till we reach it ! I think Iam going around in circles :-/ !! Hmm......
From: Swethambari Seshadri
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 9:56 AM
To: 'Libu Balakrishnan'
that does make a lot of sense dude! if u say something happens, u immediately commit it to past! u realize that something is happening only after the moment has passed. say i am typing this mail, i realize that my spelling is wrong only after doing this. does this mean that our sense of understanding and realization is all based on the past and not on what is currently happening?
another example, real life event, say u r witnessing a game, by the time u realize what is going on its already past! u understand only after it has come to pass, does this mean there is no present or that time has no meaning in the present?
(i think i am contradicting myself!!)
From: Libu Balakrishnan
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 10:49 AM
To: Swethambari Seshadri
Yes, I believe it is so. I have read that our reactions are based on experience and logic. For logic you require experience. And for experience you need sensory perceptions, i.e sense.
Time certainly does have a meaning in the present, else our sensory perceptions wouldn't mean anything. Hmm....a sinless world it would be :). Since that is not the case, time should have meaning. And what is the effect of sensory perception ? The future or the present ? Hmm..should be the present. Well then we get away with everything according to how we perceive things. So that we can say that there is no future only the present !!??
From: Swethambari Seshadri
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 11:21 AM
To: 'Libu Balakrishnan'
see, even this sensory perception, whatever events are happening at the present unit of time as such do not have any meaning or cause or effect. only after it has come to pass do we understand what has really transpired. our sensory perceptions are also delayed reactions, be it by a nanosecond, but still its a nanosecond into the past!
the future, we dont know anything about that, so there is no way for our perceptions to act on the future, the present as explained does not give us any explanation to what is currently happening as we do not have the ability to gauge events as they happen,it should have completed for us to know what it meant. so only in the past time has any meaning at all!!??
From: Libu Balakrishnan
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 11:34 AM
To: Swethambari Seshadri
Well that basis is very relative because response times vary from person to person. and yes response is always a reaction so a delay does exist. But then we need to define what past is. Because, if time has meaning only in the past, then what happened a million years ago has a meaning. When I do not know what happened a million years ago, how can I say that Iam raising my hand(or whatever) because of what happend a million years ago and not because of something that happened a nanosecond before ??
From: Swethambari Seshadri
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 12:55 PM
To: 'Libu Balakrishnan'
that is exactly why whatever truth or history that u read u always take it with a pinch of doubt unless u were directly involved. even u being a spectator to some event does not convince u as much as it would have if you had been involved in that event.
if u are talking about evolution and such, that is still a hypothesis, nothing has been proved yet and the missing link is yet to be found. if u think just what ur life is, what u've been doing and what u know is concrete, then u'll have defined the past in ur perspective! and henceforth whatever u do is still adding on to "past" because it has already passed. the more i think of it the more i feel that time has no meaning in the present as there is no such thing as present, there is no way u can define present! the present is just another entity that is elusive as nothing that we do or feel can let us experience present! we are creatures of the past! however quick
From: Libu Balakrishnan
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 4:25 AM
To: Swethambari Seshadri
Iam not okay with that. Suppose you are going to smell a flower, and you suddenly wrinkle your nose in remembrance of another stinky involvment with another flower. Thats coming from the past. But when you inhale deeply because the flower has a nice fragrance, its the present. You say its the past, coz a nano second has passed. But I did rather think of present as an action-reaction pair. Else like you said, I agree it doesnt have a meaning.
Becuase even if you consider something that is past it does not have a meaning unless you associate a reaction to it. You smell a foul smelling flower, you wrinkle your nose. You cannot accept the past as only smelling the foul flower, but also the "wrinkling" of your nose.
From: Libu Balakrishnan
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 4:38 AM
To: Swethambari Seshadri
Hey one more thing, what I meant about defining the past was actually quatitative. I meant, fix a limit like, past is so much time before the present :D ! And use that for everyone irrespective of their instincts or reaction speed e.t.c. !! But yeah it didnt seem like a good answer, so the action-reaction pair..
From: Swethambari Seshadri
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 8:25 AM
To: 'Libu Balakrishnan'
when u say action and reaction u already commit the action to the past as u cannot have the action-reaction to occur simultaneously! so by the time u realize that the flower smells good the action of actual smelling has passed and the fact that u realize u've smelt the flower to know the fragrance becoomes past and ur reaction once u realize has become past too. but i guess if one gets into this mode of arguing that every reaction is delayed and that the realization abt the reaction itself is delayed one totally discredits the present!
(and i am fresh running out of anymore arguments as i think both of us have reached the situation when we keep talking abt the same thing over and over! change of topic u think?)
From: Libu Balakrishnan
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 8:51 AM
To: Swethambari Seshadri
yeah i guess...coz i cannot take it that the present does not make sense ;) !! Hmm...anyway will sit on it for some more days....
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