Confusing time travel question...

[ToysforGuns]

Hey guys,
I just thought of an unusual time travel question that none of my friends can answer, so I decided to post it in these forums. Lets say I made a program or something that generates a COMPLETELY random number whenever I click a certain button. If I clicked said button and say the number was... I don't know.. 2381. If I traveled back in time 3 seconds and clicked that button, would it be the same number? Let me know what you guys think. I personally think so, but it depends on how you think time travel would be accomplished. By the way, time travel is BS, time is a man made invention. (my lousy opinion)

 

[SpikeyGirl]

If you went back in time you'd probably see yourself press the button to get that number. Otherwise the timeline would probably explode as you're changing the past and creating an unstable time loop.
So, I doubt it, especially as what number you got would be the least of your problems.

 

[WolfThomas]

I've often pondered on similar scenarios, like if I time travelled would the lottery still be the same (I think probably not) and what about horse races?

 

[Batfred]

I've often pondered on similar scenarios, like if I time travelled would the lottery still be the same (I think probably not) and what about horse races?

Ha ha, I often try to remember really odd sporting scenarios like when did Berbatov get his 5 goals. The odds would be great. Or remembering the exact score of the the Ryder cup or the first 10 horses in last years Grand National. You need to go for some crazy event or some huge accumulator.

EDIT: OP: The number would be the same, but the implications would be catastrophic as poster number 2 (the edit screen doesn't show me the name - sorry) mentioned.

 

[Alien Mole]

I don't think RNGs aren't actually all that random (usually based on date/time), so I'm pretty sure that if you pressed the button at the exact same point in time it should come out the same. I'm sure that it doesn't quite work that way at a quantum level, but I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to know how they'd factor into it.

 

[Meestor Pickle]

I've often pondered on similar scenarios, like if I time travelled would the lottery still be the same (I think probably not) and what about horse races?

Well Im not sure how your area does lottery but the balls would still collide in the same way and no other factors have changed except you looking at it so unless you shoot lasers from your eyes it should stay the same, but time travel will melt your brain if you think about it too hard

 

[WolfThomas]

I've often pondered on similar scenarios, like if I time travelled would the lottery still be the same (I think probably not) and what about horse races?

Well Im not sure how your area does lottery but the balls would still collide in the same way and no other factors have changed except you looking at it so unless you shoot lasers from your eyes it should stay the same, but time travel will melt your brain if you think about it too hard

But I'm thinking extreme butterfly effect. I bump someone as I gape at the fact I'm back in time. A thousand tiny changes adds up to a subtle change in the timing or order the balls are place in the machine and released.

 

[b3nn3tt]

I've had the same thought when I listen to my iTunes, cos I have it on shuffle, and I've often wondered about this with regards to the next track

OT: I actually have no idea, but I imagine the number would be the same, because as soon as it happens the possibility of it being any other number collapses. But then if you went back in time the possibilities would all still be there. So maybe it would be different. But no, you've gone back, so it's already happened, so it would be the same

I am thoroughly confused, actually. I fear thinking about this any more would cause my head to hurt, so I'm going to say the number would be the same, and leave it at that

 

[Simon Pettersson]

Nothing changes when you go back in time, except you go back in time.
Wich means everything that has happened still happens unless you make people make different actions.

 

[Paulie92]

huh... was not expecting that... good question

I think the number would be the same, because you're not asking to generate a new number you're just watching it do what it already did if that makes sense. It's already generated a random number and the number it generated is still random but it's the same........ *headache*

 

[Fawful]

I think not. Since our concept of time is a straight line, i.e. liner, if you didn't do anything to effect the outcome then the outcome would be the same every time.

 

[Iconoclasm]

According to the eternalist model in the philosophy of time, yes.

Since it is a block, the events that decohere will do so, randomly at the time interval at which they occur, but are determined.

Any other way, and the notion of time travel as you've presupposed would be unable to occur, since you're returning to a point where you've "been" and everything else is the same, why, then, would the randomly generated number not be?

That was an easy one - a more difficult one would be something like this:

Assume you purchase an anthology full of the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche, including biographical information and the like. Now, you hop into your time machine and travel all the way back to 1864, as Nietzsche begins his studies and deliver the anthology to him, with the express directions to do precisely what the book says.

Now, take the further step and come "back" and let's assume Nietzsche did his part and published everything in accordance to information in the book - he thought those thoughts and rewrote them, so on and so forth.

Now, assuming that the whole "branching timeline" business is unavailable to us, who then is the proper author of the books? Who is responsible for the content of the anthology?

 

[darth.pixie]

Mostly depends on the question: is time a straight line or does it branch out depending on the possibilities? Is it a straight line or does it shift according to the things we do?

It also depends on "do I go back in time" as in my mentality goes back into the body that I had or do I see myself pushing the button? In my opinion the number could change mostly because I see the time line as constantly shifting.

Edit:

Assume you purchase an anthology full of the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche, including biographical information and the like. Now, you hop into your time machine and travel all the way back to 1864, as Nietzsche begins his studies and deliver the anthology to him, with the express directions to do precisely what the book says.

Now, take the further step and come "back" and let's assume Nietzsche did his part and published everything in accordance to information in the book - he thought those thoughts and rewrote them, so on and so forth.

Now, assuming that the whole "branching timeline" business is unavailable to us, who then is the proper author of the books? Who is responsible for the content of the anthology?

Time paradox. It would depend on finding the precise moment you started interfering with the time line which would be a 'chicken and egg' sort of question. For the first you and those who went back, it would be Nietzsche, but if Nietzsche was always inspired by you, it would be you.

 

[thahat]

Hey guys,
I just thought of an unusual time travel question that none of my friends can answer, so I decided to post it in these forums. Lets say I made a program or something that generates a COMPLETELY random number whenever I click a certain button. If I clicked said button and say the number was... I don't know.. 2381. If I traveled back in time 3 seconds and clicked that button, would it be the same number? Let me know what you guys think. I personally think so, but it depends on how you think time travel would be accomplished. By the way, time travel is BS, time is a man made invention. (my lousy opinion)

yes and no. ever -smallest amount of time- you generate an infinite amount of you-s
most of them WONT see it happen, but at least one of them WILL see you get your original number.

 

[Nimbus]

Computers are only able to generate pseudo-random numbers.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Hey guys,
I just thought of an unusual time travel question that none of my friends can answer, so I decided to post it in these forums. Lets say I made a program or something that generates a COMPLETELY random number whenever I click a certain button. If I clicked said button and say the number was... I don't know.. 2381. If I traveled back in time 3 seconds and clicked that button, would it be the same number? Let me know what you guys think. I personally think so, but it depends on how you think time travel would be accomplished. By the way, time travel is BS, time is a man made invention. (my lousy opinion)

The event has already occured, your just viewing it from a different angle.

 

[Randeris]

Avoiding the quantum mechanics and causality (butterfly effect) based ideas, mostly because i understand enough to read them and nod but not enough to really talk about them, I'd like to address computer randomness.

To the best of my somewhat sparse but wide spread knowledge, RNG's (Random Number Generators) are not actually random, as Alien Mole said it's pretty much based on the date/time you press the button. This comes down to the fact that RNG's and a good number of security coding systems (military ones too) use a Pseudo-Random pattern. That is essentially a set pattern that is totally random until it repeats... once every couple of thousand to million years, depending on how sophisticated they are.


The best example of this I can offer (from personal experience) is a frequency hopper, a device that changes the frequency your radio (receiver/transmitter) is set to, these things are great because people can't listen to them unless they have a hopper and the same hop-seed (a coded version of the pattern used) and the correct time set. If your time was off when using these then you couldn't talk to other people, because they use pseudo-random patterns to change the frequency.


So to answer the question, supposing you didn't affect anything serious, then you should see the same number. But that's just from a technical point of view of computer randomness.

As to time, in my opinion, it's not so much our invention as just the way we perceive things.

 

[Iconoclasm]

Mostly depends on the question: is time a straight line or does it branch out depending on the possibilities? Is it a straight line or does it shift according to the things we do?

It also depends on "do I go back in time" as in my mentality goes back into the body that I had or do I see myself pushing the button? In my opinion the number could change mostly because I see the time line as constantly shifting.

Edit:

Assume you purchase an anthology full of the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche, including biographical information and the like. Now, you hop into your time machine and travel all the way back to 1864, as Nietzsche begins his studies and deliver the anthology to him, with the express directions to do precisely what the book says.

Now, take the further step and come "back" and let's assume Nietzsche did his part and published everything in accordance to information in the book - he thought those thoughts and rewrote them, so on and so forth.

Now, assuming that the whole "branching timeline" business is unavailable to us, who then is the proper author of the books? Who is responsible for the content of the anthology?

Time paradox. It would depend on finding the precise moment you started interfering with the time line which would be a 'chicken and egg' sort of question. For the first you and those who went back, it would be Nietzsche, but if Nietzsche was always inspired by you, it would be you.

How could it be the time traveler? They weren't the authors of the anthology?

The proper answer is no one is responsible for the content.

Also, there are those who are still under the assumption that time isn't a dimension. An assumption one would do well to abandon. Tense and duration no more explain the entirety of time than up or down taken independently of space. If this is the case - and it most certainly is - then the past would be the same - assuming nothing else is tampered with (though I'm of the opinion that any tampering would already be done by the time the event in question occurred at all, thus negating any of those nagging paradoxes).

 

[TimDave]

First, because any discussion about time needs this disclaimer - "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." Tenth Doctor (David Tennant), "Blink"

Now, because I have pondered the various theories of time travel, there are multiple outcomes:

1)You travel back in time, watch yourself click and see the same number appear. This works on the theory that time is immutable, can not be changed and cannot be interfered with. (Btw, very good novel by Arthur C. Clarke/Stephen Baxter utilises this theory - The Light of Other Days)

2) You travel back in time, push your past self out of the way and click it as your future self, thus changing the timeline, most probably changing the number (as at least one of the elements feeding into the random algorithm has changed) This leads to two separate consequences:

i) You create a paradox, destroying all of time and space by ripping apart the space/time continuum.

ii) You create a parallel timeline in which two copies of you exist which would create a massive legal hassle due to sudden existence of someone with no records.

With regards to some of the other possibilities:

The Lottery; while the Chaos Butterfly might get a look in, the odds of you buying a ticket with the winning numbers causing any stream of cause and effect that changes the numbers are so minuscule as to be beyond counting. Possible but the Butterfly is going to have to be flapping pretty damn hard.

Ipod; If you travel back in time with your Ipod, future-Ipod will continue playing as it is not affected by time travel, it would continue playing as if it was still in the future. If you took past-Ipod from your past self, it is in the past and thus the randomising algorithm would, in all likelihood, bring up the same song. I base this idea from my own (non-Ipod) mp3 where the randomising algorithm takes my entire play-list and shuffles it into a random order. If someone more well versed in Ipod randomising mechanics can prove that the Ipod randomising algorithm selects a new song each and every time it reaches the end of a file, then we throw the conundrum out of Time's hands and into Fate's.

 

[Quaxar]

Meh. The real problem would be using the same mechanism for a particle. You measure the exact momentum, go back in time and measure the exact position.
Now you've broken a basic law of quantum physics, you know a particle's speed and a particles position at the same time with great accuracy.