Given the fact that data is an electric circuit of ones and zeros, flowing at the speed of light, could we technically send information across time?

  • Zippy@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Even wormholes break causality. Doesn’t matter the method, folding space, black holes, if you can arrive at a destination faster that light thru normal space can get there, you can know of things before they occurred.

    • Knusper@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      Hmm, but why do you think these things haven’t occurred yet?

      As far as I can tell, the speed of causality means things can have occurred in a certain location in the universe, but it takes time until the effects have permeated into the rest of the universe.

      So, it’s like a shockwave from an explosion. The explosion happens, but it takes a few seconds until you feel the shockwave.
      Well, with the difference that you can see an explosion before the shockwave. When we’re at the speed of causality, literally no evidence will have arrived in your position until it does.

      So, one could go meta-philosophical with basically “If a tree falls in a forest and no one has heard it yet, did it actually already happen?”, but yeah, I don’t think that’s terribly useful here.

      And well, if we treat it like a shockwave, let’s say you detonate some TNT and step through a wormhole to somewhere 20 km away. You would know that the shockwave will arrive soon, but does that matter? The shockwave will still just continue pushing on.

      And I guess, crucially, it did already happen, so you can’t do the usual time travel paradox of preventing that it would happen.

      • Zippy@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        If I understand you correct, it is not important that you know if it before it happened, because literally no evidence will have arrived until it does. Except that is not correct. Your knowledge is literally and entirely evidence so something did arrive. Effectively you are in a timeline that is behind the event’s timeline.

        But more to the point, you could take this knowledge, fold the universe again, and being that you are in a timeline prior to the event, you could arrive at the source event before it happened. And stop it. The paradox then. How did you know to do something that never happened?