Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003)

It was a great movie. Slow for about the first half doing a lot of character development, then moving quick into all kinds of territory, and then mindbending finish. I didn't know it was adapted from Heinlein. Darnit. Scratch it off my list of "original" movies to put it on "risky but good."

Also, worth mentioning that the actor playing "John" had one of best presentations I've ever seen. Smart that they picked at "tomboy" for it as that fit most of the movie really well. Also, showed John's more straightforward acting took more talent than one would figure at first.

EDIT: "All You Zombies." Extra obvious now. Wish I read it sooner. :)

officialjunk• 10 years ago

A few links are broken in that article. Here's an archive which contains the pictures referenced: http://web.archive.org/web/20070202095050/http://www.anomali...

to3m• 10 years ago

I assume the war destroyed all the decent smartphones then, along with the vaping devices. Those photos look worse than ones taken on my Moto G.

zeven7• 10 years ago

The civil war in Titor's time line started in 2004, well before the first iPhone. I'd imagine the war altered his timeline enough that modern smart phones with nice cameras were not invented.

joe563323• 10 years ago

Could this have happened because some one altered the timeline?

stock_toaster• 10 years ago

El Psy Kongroo.

AznHisoka• 10 years ago

that anime is the only reason i know about John Titor

voltagex_3• 10 years ago

For anyone else wondering, this is a reference to a password used in an anime called "Steins:Gate". No idea how it relates to John Titor.

itchyjunk3• 10 years ago

I am curious as to why you were downvoted. I too am on the same boat and didn't know John Titor was based on `real` world events.

micaksica• 10 years ago

I happen to be watching this right now, only to find this on the HN front page. The Organization is watching me!

sgt101• 10 years ago

William Gibson's book "The Peripheral" is a fantastic take on this (and many other things).

spullara• 10 years ago

I stopped reading when he said that the clocks would tip over at 2^32 seconds after 1970 (136 years), but it is really 2^31 since it uses a signed 32-bit int (68 years).

idlewords2• 10 years ago

Fixed. You can finish reading.

flashman• 10 years ago

Only 4.155×10⁸ seconds late :)

lux• 10 years ago

Hahaha this is great! What I love about the John Titor story is how you kind of want to believe in it against your better judgement. The desire to be in on something larger than life, I suppose.

thinkloop3• 10 years ago

There is no such thing as time, or time travel. There are only positions of particles. To go back in time by 1 minute, all particles in the universe have to be moved/changed back to their previous position. This is not time travel, but universe manipulation except for one subject. If there were parallel universes with every possible outcome and you traveled to one, this would also not be time travel, but a moving to a place that looks like another place where particles were at a certain position. Time is just a way to label snapshots of particle positions in the universe.

austinjp• 10 years ago

this... would not be time travel, but... a different time.

Hmmmmm.

openfuture• 10 years ago

He probably should have said 'not time travel but a different world'

booleandilemma• 10 years ago

You make a good point. What if a civilization figured out how to do this on a local level? To finely manipulate particles within a small area? It would be like version control for reality.

sudhirj• 10 years ago

This idea is referenced quite a bit in an Asimov novel, but I can't remember the name. Something about earth in the far future, and called Eternity Circuits. Computers enforce physical arrangement at an atomic level, and redundancy circuits enforce the computer and each other, basically creating systems that last forever.

edpichler2• 10 years ago

Each particle has is own time. Each particle can go forward on time, independently.

That's why satellites clocks must be adjusted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

Mahn• 10 years ago

OTOH time is relative to the observer and certain universe phenomena, such as black holes, can distort how time passes in different points of the space dimension. The general idea that a point in time is how we define a particular snapshot of particles is probably right, but time as a dimension also appears to be a bit more complex than how we perceive it from Earth, which we should also not forget.

thinkloop3• 10 years ago

"Time", aka chemical and physical reactions, can happen faster or slower depending on the environment. But this is only slightly different than putting food in the fridge. The food will mold slower, but it's not time travel.

The closest we can get to faking time travel is by manipulating the speed of a subset of reactions (like our body's aging) by going the speed of light or freezing ourselves, etc. But it's still fake, "time" continues, you just managed to manipulate specific reactions in a peculiar way.

allemagne2• 10 years ago

Time travel is dubious, but in what useful sense is there no such thing as time? Define the phenomenon of time dilation or just the concept of motion without it. Particles go from position to position... but describing being at state X and then being at state Y seems to strongly imply the existence of what we understand as time.

adventured• 10 years ago

Time doesn't exist in the sense that it's just a measurement. I'm 6'2", that height does not exist as a tangible thing, it's a mathematical device.

Whether we're talking about 60 seconds, or 6 billion years, they're both measurements of distance traveled / motion. We measure one year by the earth's relationship to the sun.

Time travel cannot exist because the universe does not keep a record of where everything was at any given point in time, such that you can rewind (adjust) it all back to how it was at every or any given point in time. There is nobody recording that, there is nobody to rewind it, there isn't enough energy to attempt either the recording or the rewinding at an independent macro scale (eg could you properly rewind/adjust a solar system while the wider galaxy acts upon it? would you have to rewind the galaxy? and on it goes up).

SomeStupidPoint5• 10 years ago

Your position is inconsistent: the arrangement of particles changing is time, so your explanation of there not being time... asserts that time happens!

Putting the universe back as it was except for you is time travel. You've traveled your state to a different time (previous state) of the universe.

Your semantic game sounds very clever, but is actually just inconsistent and borderline ignorant of what people mean by those terms.

thinkloop3• 10 years ago

Putting the universe back as it was except for you is time travel. You've traveled your state to a different time (previous state) of the universe.
Your semantic game sounds very clever, but is actually just inconsistent and borderline ignorant of what people mean by those terms.

I don't think that's how most people think of time travel.

For example, say I proceeded to invoke reactions to get all particles back to exactly how they were on Jan.1 2000. Say this took me a year, and finally, in 2018, I execute the final reaction that places the last particle, so that the universe is exactly like it was Jan.1, 2000. Have I been time travelling for a year? Does making 2018 look like 2000 what people generally think of as time travel? What about that you yourself did not change, where are those particles coming from? What about the old you existing in that time as well, there aren't enough particles in the universe to have two you's. What about the time you travelled from remaining in existence while you're gone, and the changes you invoke in the "past" propagating there?

I get that it would provide a similar experience in many ways, but it doesn't involve travelling, nor time, just changes in particle positions - which is the nuance I am highlighting.

YCode3• 10 years ago

I think what he means is that time exists in the way that distance or speed exists. It's not a physical force like gravity or magnetism that acts upon the universe, it's just a method for us to understand and quantify what happens around us.

Traveling back in time subsequently doesn't make sense because the "past" is simply what we call previous configurations of matter.

You can't go back to those configurations (read: "go back in time") because they don't exist anymore.

Now, I'm not a physicist so I have no idea if he's correct, but semantically it makes sense and it's something I've wondered about for a while.

443633456• 10 years ago

"There are no particles, only waves."

cyphar3• 10 years ago

But waves are described by the wave equation, which is defined in terms of acceleration and curvature. Checkmate! Time is real. :P

Retra2• 10 years ago

There is no such thing as time [...] Time is [something that exists.]

Why even bother with this whole pointless facade? Just because you have a preferred model of time doesn't mean it doesn't exist. All things that are said to exist do so as models.

You're saying "time is fake, it's just labels" like somehow everything else in the universe isn't also just labels and just as real. Things are what they are. You find a useful way to talk about them. You don't spend your time laboring over meticulously irrelevant descriptions, ironically putting down 'mere labels' as though your whole argument here isn't just a grand exercise in label worship.

One could fairly trivially write a faithful version of your post on literally any subject. "Position doesn't exist, it's merely a manifestation of the relative relations between subsets of human experiences!" "Your HN post doesn't exist, it's merely electronic patterns in a transient configuration!"

cyphar3• 10 years ago

There is no such thing as time, or time travel. There are only positions of particles. To go back in time by 1 minute, all particles in the universe have to be moved/changed back to their previous position.

How do you explain acceleration? Or things like entropy that appear to indicate that the "arrow of time" does exist. Or general relativity / cosmology that clearly shows that your "snapshots of particles" appear different in different frames and there are physical effects that change how time progresses for them all.

Time is just a way to label snapshots of particle positions in the universe.

You're not saying anything new here, apart from saying that "time isn't real". Is any dimension real? Spacial dimensions are even weirder because they're unlabelled and you can pick and three vectors to define a basis.

edpichler2• 10 years ago

You are wrong. As far as I know, each particle has is own time. Each particle can go forward on time, independently.

That's why satellites clocks must be adjusted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

sakopov• 10 years ago

Does anybody know if the forum archives with John Titor's posts are still floating around somewhere? I remember reading some of his stuff a few years after he disappeared and it made for quite an entertaining read. This guy had his story figures out to the very bone. Everything down to the sci-fi tech. He had every nook and cranny covered.

pmiller2• 10 years ago

If you really want to be believed, just show up to Stephen Hawking's time traveler party he held in 2009[0].

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howabouttha...

sandworm101• 10 years ago

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/time_travel/johnti...

Interesting fiction. I'm not physicist, but anything pumping out enough gravity to bend a laser beam 45* over a couple feet (see pic in link) should also collapse that car into a sphere. I also laugh at seeing that while the laser seems bent, all the other light passing through the same area seems unperturbed.

zenithcobra• 10 years ago

the earth spins around the sun. the sun spins around the milky way. so if one where to time travel wouldn't they just pop into a space where we are now but where the earth hasn't reached yet?

matt_kantor• 10 years ago

Relativity tells us that there is no preferred reference frame. Earth is just as "special" as the center of the galaxy.

Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003)

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