Want time travel? Keep dreaming.

[Battlehymn Republic]

Why the hate against Orion's Arm? And when was there time traveling in that universe?

[Lord Zentei]

Why the hate against Orion's Arm? And when was there time traveling in that universe?

As far as I can tell it was only SirNitram who dissed Orion's Arm. I haven't seen it, personally.

[wilfulton]

I thought we already had time travel. It's called "patience" and it allows us to go forward, and "memory" which allows us yo go back (even if we can't change what events really have transpired in the past).

[wolveraptor]

Dude, that joke is SO fucking over-used.

[Kuroneko]

Umm, no. Those were philosophical notions that were made to fit "common-sense" observations about the world made by ignorant primitives who had few tools at their disposal to observe and measure the world with, or were made up to satisfy man's deep-set egocentrism. Our understanding of the universe is reliant on objective mathematical expressions and equations, not the sophistry of the ancients.

The notion that mathematics is critical to the understanding of nature was not universally accepted, true, but it still over twenty-six centuries old. The reasons for the failure of the Pythagorean programme are clear to modern eyes: it was too ambitious. It is simply too incredible that a single mathematical system could account for all of Nature. (Why shouldn't the ancients attempt this? Theoretical generality is a great virtue even among modern scientists.) It is not at all surprising that Aristotle, for example, who was a zoologist and biologist foremost, would immediately see this as a problem, and dismiss the whole programme as faulty, seeking more general principles than the rigid mathematical ones instead. The modern solution is to have a multitude of systems tailored to deal with a variety of situations, each with their own context of applicability (e.g., how often do mechanical engineers get to use general relativity or quantum mechanics?), but that solution is not as obvious as one might think.

Even so, mathematics was never all that far away, not even for Aristotle. When an ancient Babylonian gives an algorithm for finding solutions of the sum of two unknown being some number and their product being another, a modern mathematician would immediately recognize that the Babylonians were doing quadratic equations, even if they did not think of them as such. Likewise, a modern reader may, at first glance, be put off by the Aristotelean laws of proportion between weight [mass], velocity, and effort, looking suspiciously like F = mv instead of F = ma, but a modern physicist would (should!) immediately recognize that Aristotle discovered the essence of Stokes' Law twenty-two centuries before Stokes. The entirety of Aristotelean physics is built upon this principle, with uniform motion as a balance of effort and resistance. Is it surprising that when he devised experiments to test his theory, Aristotle found, among terrestrial motions, confirmation to a rather striking degree? Ignorant? Yes. Lacking good observational tools? Assuredly. Sophistry? Absolutely not. It was science.

For others, nature was even more laden with mathematics, particularly the astronomers, whose world was nothing but pure geometry. Heliocentrism was quite a recurring theory in the history of science, starting with the aforementioned Pythagoreans (it's quite telling that Copernicus' argument bore no small resemblance to that of the Pythagoreans), and more famously Aristarchos, and each time it was discounted by the scholars. It is a mistake to think that this was because of some egocentrism. The truth is that all proposed heliocentric models were markedly inferior to geocentric ones. Both intertheoretically, because a heliocentric model required the dismissal of other theories which depended on geocentrism, and observationally, because the predictive power of heliocentric models was much worse than geocentric ones until the time of Kepler. Geocentrism was simply the most rational and scientific choice given the evidence at that time. Anyone who believes there is something intrinsically obvious or scientific about heliocentrism has quite frankly not given much thought to either this particular issue or the way science works.