The Butterfly Effect and the Multiverse Theory

As a bit of a time buff, I feel like it's useless to consider the concept until we nail down a few more physical laws. We're still not sure how many dimensions there are, how they interact with each other, or what form they even exist in, so something like multiple timelines is truly a dead end right now.

 

This.

And if you went back in time and changed the past. Everybody would be changing everything, but it would only be known/visible to them as part of the multiverse theory. But something like that has most people confused, as they cannot perceive something of that scale. Amirite?

 

It's a fun subject to think about but I don't think many people have opinions as to whether they believe in time travel, the butterfly effect, parallel universes, and whatnot just because it doesn't have much basis besides various works of fiction like the time traveler's wife or the time machine or the butterfly effect... lol. Right now, it's more of an abstract.

As for me, it could be true and, like I said, it's fun to think about.

For instance, what if Lincoln hadn't been shot? Would I be a completely different person?

 

Ah, multiverse theory. I've done some dabbling here and there, it really is fascinating to think about. But there is a sort of proof, though, that multiple universes could exist. In 1928, Paul Dirac created a mathematical equation that suggested the existence of a universe exactly inverse of ours; an anti-verse. That equation eventually lead to the discovery and formation of antimatter.

That's just one other universe though. For multiple universes, that's where String Theory starts coming in. ****'s about to get Donnie Darko up in this *****. Robert Greene is a theoretical physicist, and author of several books regarding multiverse theory and parallelism of matter in general. The Butterfly Effect could potentially be accurate, but in a few different ways. We have the:

A) Linear, unalterable time theory. Basically, whatever you do in the past was meant to happen, and the future remains the same. Maybe you accidentally shot Lincoln in an attempt to kill Booth, who ****in knows. There could be a huge 'history within a history' that we don't know about due to time travelers. The same concept was explored in Harry Potter, if you remember The Prisoner of Azkaban.

or...

B) The Donnie Darko/String Theory/Schrodinger's Cat theory. Basically, if you were to travel back in the fabric of time and let's say, kill hitler, then an Alternate Universe would be created. In Donnie Darko, this would be a Tangent Universe. However, the rest of that lovely movie is more fiction than science, so I'll discontinue the obsessive references. According to many physicists that partake in String Theory and things of the like, there is an infinite number of universes, with each one having a difference. In some, the differences are as microscopic as a single atom, or even the position of a single atom. There's a universe where you make billions of dollars before you hit the age of 13. There's also one where you're forced to start selling your body before the age of 7. Scary world(s), right?

There's a whole lot of theories out there, theories about black holes and the plausibility that they may contain wormholes in time, theories of white holes, theories of twelve goddamn ****ing dimensions, or if you'd like to get really crazy, ten dimensions of time and space only.

As of yet, there aren't really any practical uses of these theories aside from general understanding of the universe, but we're getting there. Antimatter fuel is on the horizon, and faster-than-light travel was just broken recently, was it not? At least in a neutrino sense, it was. The point is, this is one of the most complex and expansive areas of science today, and it shouldn't be so quickly disregarded. Technological evolution happens at an exponential rate. We could be time travelling within our generation, who ****in knows.

 

My own personal belief is that time works on the principle of the multi-verse theory. And that going back in "time" is a construct that could only exist on a linear time scale. If one could "go back" in time then they would instantly have moved into a different universe where the "date" in question hadn't have happened yet. By changing the events that would have happened in your universe it has no effect on the universe you left from as that universe will keep on going without you, as far as people in that universe are concerned you would be MIA the moment you left that Universe.

This multi-verse theory essentially eliminates the possibility of a paradox happening which if time travel was possible would be the only way it could conceivably work. For it to work on the butter-fly effect would mean you could kill your dad and then you wouldn't be born which would mean you wouldn't be able to go back in time to kill your dad etc etc etc impossible loop etc. And that's just silly.

 

Watched that video and one thing about it I can't comprehend for a couple reasons is how is the 4th dimension is the "time line".

1.Why does that 4th dimension break the trend and get a magical invisible line and not a physical geometric line.
2.In a 2 dimensional universe 'flatlanders'(which doesn't have 3D) still have a time line(4D), A 3D universe needs 2D why doesn't a 4D universe need 3D?

 

Imma stick this dimension thanks. It has battlefield 3 n stuff.

 

Man, when Sarge finds this thread he's going to have a field day.

Regarding time travel though, my thoughts are it could most definitely exist already today, but only to varying degrees. You don't know what the government is working on, and there could be already some kind of device that is in prototype phases, albeit limited in the amount of time you could travel backwards. It may only be a few seconds, it could be days or a week, but obviously, if it was extremely advanced we'd all be saying "Adolf who? Osama got laiden, wtf?"

I've often thought of what would happen if I could go back in time and take alternate paths to what I already have, and sometimes I wish I could. I think we've all wanted to be Marty McFly at some point, but mainly for the chance to drive a DeLorean. I don't believe in fate, but my life has played out decently enough for me not to yearn for change too much.

Butterfly effect, on the other hand, is something I believe in, however. It's not as far-fetched as people believe, it's merely influence and effect. Think about it, something you do now could cause some kind of pivotal event somewhere down the line. May not be instant, but it's definitely more than plausible. Something as simple as buying a cheeseburger could cause someone to be killed in a robbery. Or dropping a piece of garbage may cause a massive pile-up on a highway.

Mix time travel with the butterfly effect though and you have a recipe for disaster. Just like it says in the Simpsons episode where Homer builds the time-travel-toaster, "if you ever travel back in time, don't step on anything, because even the tiniest change could alter the future in ways you can't imagine." As is proved by how Homer kills a mosquito, which results in Flanders becoming the overlord of the entire planet. Something that extreme may not actually happen, but if you traveled back to the time of the dinosaurs and had some kind of germ or parasite on you that was harmless to you, it could be deadly to the wildlife of that time and wipe them all out before they were meant to, resulting in no bird-life or reptilian life, and something as strange as octopus being the dominant species on the planet. Or the germs you carried back with you could evolve further over the course of millions of years and become a super-virus in the future.

To summarise, if you ever plan to go back and visit dinosaurs or prehistoric man, make sure you have a thorough shower and wear clean underwear before you leave.

 

I thought that if you could go back in time, getting back to the present you left would be nearly impossible
People say that you what you change in the past will have knock on effects and alter the future, this acknowledges that even though you have taken a short cut to the present/future, everything else has continued as normal. That means eveything has to re-happen anyway, even if you changed absolutely nothing. Even if you didn't change anything, just by letting the universe replay itself, something will change.

Say you flip a coin. You get heads or tails, 1/2. You flip it again, the chance of it being the same is now 1/4.
Actually, if you do flip the coin exactly the same (ie. start with the same side, same flipping strength applied to the same part of the coin in a completed controlled environment etc) then in theory you could expect the coin the do the same thing. So if the universe was well behaved and perfect, you could expect everything to play out exactly the same.

But thats just it, the universe is not 'perfect' (but we wouldn't have it any other way) and the things in it are not 'perfect' so if you tell it to just be itself, its unlikely that it'll do the exact same thing again (its not like it has any recollection of doing it before and knows what it should do, its doing everything for the first time... again).


So the present you return to will be different. Unless you want to start bringing in fate because then it'll be the same but you'll then go crazy because you've just proved to yourself that you're not responsible for any of your actions and everything's predetermined.

But that all assumes you can travel to the past (travelling to the future is easier, you just slow down you're own time. So to get to the past you'd do the opposite... speed up your own time to the point where everything else is relatively going backwards).

Soooo... don't do time travel unless you're prepared for some existential crisis.

 

Huh, I just stumbled across this print and thought I'd share..

Spoiler

 

I'm fairly certain that neutrino did not break light speed, and we will absolutely not see time-travel in our lifetimes. In fact, the only kind we're ever likely to see will be implausible to accomplish and one-directional in nature. You'll have to settle for the changes in time brought about by relativity, like what you see in long-distance space travel.

Multi-verse is fun for comics, at least.

 

You're going to have to word your questions a little bit better... but I think I get what you're saying. I by no means claim to be an expert in this field, but I've done a lot of research in it, so hopefully I can clarify some things with that specific theory:

For your first question, remember that a dimension is simply a variable. (x,y,z) This 'jump' you're referring to isn't as radical as it would seem to be, after all, as humans, we can comprehend the fourth dimension. There is no "Magical invisible line," you're think about this too literally. The best way to imagine a line in the fourth dimension is two points in time of an object, the line being every location it was in between those two points. (From the video, the 'long undulating snake')

As for your second question, you're again taking this too literally. The flatlander idea is just to help people understand the concept.

The butterfly effect is very paradoxically implausible. It's a sort of kindergarden-form of thinking when it comes to time travel, because it's the easiest to comprehend. It makes for great movies, but Pac put it in fairly good words; that's just silly. The idea that you could go into the past, kill your dad and never be born, infinite paradox, blah blah blah....

Yeah, not gonna work. If it DID work, we'd all be dead as a result of paradoxes in the universe causing it to collapse.

Actually, that goes into another great discussion. The natural selection of universes. There was probably a universe that had a set of physical laws allowing that form of time travel, but inevitably collapsed due to instability. Our universe hasn't collapsed for billions of years, which shows that it has a set of laws that work in unison. They're symmetrical, so to speak.

I think you need to read up on certain aspects of the Big Bang Theory. In modern science, explosive specialists can calculate the exact size of an atom bomb explosion, to the point where testing is now obsolete. Programs now have the ability to calculate exactly what the results of an explosion will be, so long as they know the variables. (Explosion force/type, chemicals involved, settings before the explosion, etc.) The big bang, in theory, is the same way. You could calculate everything beforehand, using math, if you knew all the initial conditions. So every decision you make could be mathematically calculated, and even if you knew this, your reaction to that new knowledge would also be able to be calculated.

You're also a bit caught up in the same idea that Xun's on, with the butterfly effect. It's just silly. You can't return to a present where you were never born, because you would never have been able to time travel in the first place. If you transport back in time a few years and meet a copy of yourself, the universe would collapse.

Also, to be nitpicky; if you flip a coin once, you have a 1/2 chance of getting heads/tails. If you flip it again, you have that same 1/2 chance. It doesn't suddenly become more difficult to flip a heads/tails just because of the results of your first flip. The odds simply multiply. 1/2*1/2=1/4 chance that all results will be the same.

You are, are you? The experiment has yet to be disputed, as far as I've heard, though it has not been tested extensively yet. And as for time travel, we're more advanced than some people would like to believe. Technology evolves exponentially, and latest of the latest is some pretty crazy ****. Especially with the innovations in propulsion theory, and with anti-matter fuel? It might just be possible, and possible soon.

 

Thanks kurbroda for backing what I said. Perhaps a little hard line take on it though.

But advances in fuel efficiency, higher levels of mach speed, and theoretical research is still far from things like time travel. If the neutrino experiment proves to be true and a particle can travel faster then the speed of light that is far from a practical purpose. Baby steps are always important though.

Don't quite get the easy dismissal of the multi-verse theory by chronotempest. On a pure theoretical basis lets assume our universe was created by the "big bang". To imply that the before the big bang all that ever existed was in one relatively small ball of mass and outside that mass was absolutely nothing is a hard concept to accept. Why couldn't there have been other "balls of hyper mass" that resulted in consecutive big bangs. As soon as there are more then 1 universe instantly you have a "multi-verse". One could argue that while multiple universes are plausible in that sense but implausible in the sense that those other universes would each hold different choices made in this universe because that implies this universe is the point of reference. But I digress, the point is don't be so dismissal of a theory that if true would explain a lot of things.

 

It's more than likely a measurement issue, Rorak. Similar results have shown up before, though with less hooplah due to the margin of error. The energy output of the neutrino didn't match up, either.
I have no doubt we will be able to travel space in ways befitting of our current science fiction, but even the most advanced technology will likely only find alternate ways of moving through space. Any sort of time-tampering is likely to remain in the realm of time dilation; that is, one-directional and within the confines of relativity.

Instead of a multiverse, it's much easier to believe that other dimensions are currently parallel to our own, we just can't see them. There are similarities, but to think of a multi-verse as most people do is just unfounded, especially in relation to time travel. The idea is attractive because it's easy to wrap your head around and avoids most of that nasty "paradox" business.

 

...it's because it avoids the "paradox" business that makes it as plausible a theory as any. You haven't really given much of a reason as to why multiple dimensions is a more plausible theory than multiple universes...and the two aren't mutually exclusive either in fact many theoretical physics discussions involve the two coinciding.

Also...none of this is "quite easy" to wrap one's head around. We're talking about all of this on a very superficial level. There are theoretical physics equations we could never fathom that attempt to mathematically explain these theories and to even be able to discuss these topics on a level we are able to do so has just come from experts extremely dumbing it down from Discovery or Science channel specials or infograms you read on the internet as I won't pretend to be an expert or know nearly a fraction of what they do about these kind of theories.

 

You're not understanding the concepts. We are beginning to understand other dimensions and how they might exist in our reality; however, time-related issues, which is what the multi-verse would be in the context of our discussion, are far beyond our scope. I only brought up dimensions because of the loose relation to multiple universes as something that happens to be "parallel".
As I stated in my first post, it's too early to do more than entertain our own imaginations in regard to time.

 

But not too early to accept other dimensions...a theory which has about as much factual support as time travel...

Also, let's not get presumptuous all of a sudden. I understand the concepts just fine, being overly dismissive of things you don't fully understand does not spur intelligent conversation (and if you claim you do understand them I'd love to see your phD in theoretical physics). I mean you're coming off a little snobbish as if we stupid kids and are crazy imaginations and your higher understanding of the universe.

 

I didn't say they've been accepted, but we're much closer to realizing what form they may take. These other dimensions are on the cusp of what we currently understand, and they even help explain things like gravity's strange behavior while fitting pretty well into popular ideas like string theory. I'm simply pointing out we're far closer to grasping additional dimensions than we are to dealing with additional universes.

You're allowed to infer whatever you want, it's not my problem.

 

From what i know on String Theory, there is no way we can witness or even conceive anything more than the 3 dimensions of x,y and z, and the space-time dimension of cause and effect. The energy levels needed to excite sub-atomic particles to break down the bonds at this level are in orders of magnitude so much larger than we are capable of, it would be in equivalent of harnessing a black hole. Any theory that goes beyond the quark to try and uncover new particles and dimensions exist only in mathematics.

The dimensions of string theory (26 for traditional, 10 for superstrings) are also purely mathematical convenience. They are invented to make the formulae work. They come to be through finding a relationship between the 3 most fundamental constants in the universe, C (speed of light), G (gravitational constant) and H (Hamiltonian/Uncertainty principle). Super strings uses much more complex mathematics to get the dimensions down to 10, but still, all of this theory only exists in mathematics.

And i don't think that experiment will be a break-through in faster-than-light particles. They are barely travelling faster than light. There have been plenty of experiments where massless or small non-zero mass particles like neutrinos and quarks have apparently broke light speed. It's more likely an anomaly caused by shifts in the Earths gravitational field, or some strange effect of quantum mechanics.

I'm suprised how little quantum mechanics has been brought up so far, because that is the founding field behind the study of extra dimensions and extra universes going back to the 60s. Evidence of strings or membranes will never happen in our lifetimes or even in an age of civilization that we could conceive, but there has been evidence of alternate fields, dimensions and universes within quantum mechanics for decades. The behaviour of gravity, vacuum energy and virtual particles all point to a whole bunch of things going on that we cant detect.


And any physicist would laugh you out of the room for trying to justify a dimension of time that goes backwards, a la time travel. Any space-time dilation caused by gravity or momentum is purely relative, and you can only go forward in time not back. If there was such a dimension, not only would all gravitational and particle physics be thrown out the window, but you would have a lifetime of trying to justify how such a universe came to be without cause and effect.