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I think some of you are misunderstanding this "monitor" concept. These are not monitors. They don't predict the future. They are the future. (Or the past, depending on which way you look through it.) They are literal portals through time. Take a painting, remove the picture frame, and hold...

Here are a few links that discuss wormhole time machines: Everything You Wanted to Know About Time Travel Nova Transcript Stanford University Paper On that last one, you'll need to skip to the section on General Relativity's allowance of time travel. The fiction at the beginning of...

Rats! I knew I shouldn't have used the word "monitor." Mark, these aren't like television monitors on which you see yourself as if you were being followed by a camera crew. They are actually two openings to the endpoints of a wormhole that are separated in time by five minutes. If the opening...

The “research” into time travel is primarily to determine whether the Universe absolutely prevents it, not whether we can actually build a time machine. Current thinking is that the Universe does indeed allow time travel, but it would require god-like expenditures of energy. But if we could...

Lew, I think I could have explained a few things a little better than I did. And I assure you, my concept of predestination has nothing to do with anything religious. I do think, however, that we are imposing our constrained view of time on the Universe in order to reach intuitive, but not...

Yeah, that was me. But I have to correct you on a spelling error, though. It's not spelled "astrophysics". It's spelled "armchair-physics". :) The notion of an unchangeable future (and past) comes from the results of a series of thought experiments involving time travel scenarios simple enough...

Jeff, you're messing with powers beyond your control. If the device answers "NO", then you'll be struck dead by a meteor or a heart attack before you can take the first bite of the donut. Don't mess with the device. I get dibs after Jeff bites the big one!

Thanks, Mark, but I'm not sure I did that good of a job explaining it. I've thought about it more, and I think I can summarize it in one sentence: Though time be of a nature that demands its entire history to be fully written before the first tick of its clock can begin, that does not preclude...

Who says that if we can't alter the future, we don't have free will? Neither can we change the past. It is written in stone, forever unchangeable. But did we not exercise our free will and make decisions of our own choosing in the past? Of course we did! Do we say that since we cannot change...

Ha! Good luck finding a cure for cancer using only yes-or-no questions. Question 1: Is the cure for cancer bigger than a breadbasket? :) That's a good question. Do you think you'll ever wish you hadn't asked it? It's possible, I suppose, that you could use your power to save the life of...

If I had a Magic 8 Ball that answered only "Yes" or "No" with unfailing accuracy, I would definitely use it judiciously and refrain from asking many questions. Gaining some knowledge would be difficult, however. Winning a chess game or ascertaining the identity of a murderer, for instance...