Is time instant or if you created a light cone would you be able to beat time?

[Magnetar_Byte]

Disclaimer:

a light cone allows u to trace your space time history. Which is every possible locations of Past and Future of your life. U could then plot a line through this light cone. Which would in essence be your world line. Which means u exit this light cone which would allow u exit your future timeline and enter your past timeline.

 

So if that's the case, how do we know time isn't instant? Do we KNOW that we couldn't kill our past self? As we start to stab ourself in the past would the knife and anything we try to touch yourself with at the moment just disappear like there's a black hole bubble around yourself. Protecting the universe from casual breaking?

 

OR is it different. 

 

Where we could kill ourself but it would take some time before the universe catches up with us and we then fade away. Because rather then a paradox forming an infinite loop like we normally think. Time is slow and it takes time to catch up even if by one second would be enough. Because then it wouldn't be a loop it would be how u die. There would no difference in u dieing this way or a normal way. Even if the difference was a second for time to catch up.

 

 

[HarryNyquist]

18 minutes ago, Magnetar_Byte said:

Disclaimer:

a light cone allows u to trace your space time history. Which is every possible locations of Past and Future of your life. U could then plot a line through this light cone. Which would in essence be your world line. Which means u exit this light cone which would allow u exit your future timeline and enter your past timeline.

That's not how light cones work. Your past world line will always and forever be inside your past light cone.

 

The only exceptions are cases where space (and time) are warped very significantly to "tilt" the light cone closer to the source of the warping (e.g. a star or black hole) at which point it might be possible to have a cone tilted far enough to encompass a different position in space and/or time. By having a series of cones set up like this, you can create a "closed timelike curve" which would allow an object to travel back to its starting point in space & time (or any other place or time along the curve).

 

This is of course, highly theoretical, and there is little proof outside the mathematics (and even then scientists have doubts) to show that something like that exists.

 

39 minutes ago, Magnetar_Byte said:

So if that's the case, how do we know time isn't instant? Do we KNOW that we couldn't kill our past self? As we start to stab ourself in the past would the knife and anything we try to touch yourself with at the moment just disappear like there's a black hole bubble around yourself. Protecting the universe from casual breaking?

 

OR is it different. 

 

Where we could kill ourself but it would take some time before the universe catches up with us and we then fade away. Because rather then a paradox forming an infinite loop like we normally think. Time is slow and it takes time to catch up even if by one second would be enough. Because then it wouldn't be a loop it would be how u die. There would no difference in u dieing this way or a normal way. Even if the difference was a second for time to catch up.

That's all speculative since we don't even really know if time travel is possible to begin with. The grandfather paradox has been speculated on in fiction forever and even from a logical standpoint, has been used to show that time travel is impossible (If it is true that the past happened a certain way, then it is impossible to change no matter what a theoretical time traveler would do).

 

There's also the self-consistency principle that says if the past occurred in a certain way, then anything that could possibly lead to a paradox has a probability of zero (aka completely impossible) to the point of even saying that a time traveler would be unable to do anything to change the past, regardless of any attempts to do so.

 

OR, there's the multiple universe theories that say that IF you went back in time and killed yourself, the universe you came from ceases to exist, and a new one takes its place where the young version of you was murdered by older-you, and the universe continues without younger-you's contributions and older-you continues to exist in that new universe.

 

Again, all speculation. No one's gone back in time (as far as we know) so there's no telling what's true, false, or crazy babbling.