So do you believe any of this stuff?
No. I don't, but I didn't just reject it out of hand. I've probably been thinking waaaay too hard about this, but it's the kind of thing that piques my interest.
I read all that there was on the website, and have spent the last few days pondering it, looking for a flaw. I found it. I couldn't tell you if there's one in the physics of the machine. There very well could be, I'm no Steven Hawking, not even an amateur physicist. I don't think I can even tell you any of Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics. (I'm not sure but I think one of them has something to do with turning apples to gold or something.) Besides that, it seems people much smarter than I am asked him all the physics questions and he was basically able to field them. And since all that shit is still largely theoretical, it wasn't difficult for him to agree or disagree as needed to suit his case.
The flaw that I found is in his logic. It hit me when I remembered the phrase, "With infinite monkeys using infinite typewriters, you will get Shakespeare."
Bear with me, this might get rough.
This "time traveler" often spoke about his time machine not being able to travel more than 60 years into the past, because the "time divergence" would be too great. That is, the further away from his own time he traveled, the more disparity there would be between the "worldline" he arrived in and the one he left. Or the greater the chance of him landing in a "worldline" different from his own. For the sake of this discussion, I'm going to use "dimension" instead of worldline because it's more familiar to me and makes the argument easier to understand, at least I think it does.
This basically is what he said on the subject. Every time you make a decision, (e.g. left or right at a stop sign) time branches, creating 2 separate dimensions. Since there are infinite decisions, and an infinite number of decisions that can sprout forth from the previous ones, there are infinite dimensions. Basically, his machine is only able to keep the percentage of divergence between his home dimension and the one in which he arrives low across short distances in time. Any further distances through time and the amount of possible different dimensions becomes so enormously infinite that he could arrive in a dimension where up is down and down is up. So far, so good . . . Now we get back to the monkeys.
If you have an infinite amount of monkeys randomly jamming keys on a typewriter, you would have one that produced, let's say "Hamlet". This is incorrect. You would not only have one monkey producing "Hamlet", you would have an infinite amount of monkeys producing "Hamlet". This is the "time traveler's" mistake. Because of the nature of infinity, not only is there infinite difference, there is also infinite sameness. His whole idea of dimension or worldline divergence just doesn't make sense, logically speaking.
Infinity is not a real number, it's imaginary. It is, therefore, impossible to assign any sort of real percentage to the probability of one single event happening. The only probablity that can be assigned is infinite( i.e. There is an infinite chance that a specific event will happen.) Because his time jumps are not infinite, however, we can sort of fudge the numbers a bit. Because there are infinite dimensions that are infinitely different and infinitely the same, for every one dimension that is different there is one that is the same. This means that, to put it coarsely, he has a 50/50 shot of landing in either his home dimension, or one exactly like it. Although that's not really true, he actually has infinite chances of getting home, it's a hell of a lot closer to the truth than his divergence bullshit.
I hope this makes sense. I swear it does to me.
<IMG SRC =http://www.blakjeezis.homestead.com/files/bloodjeez.gif>
If I were any better, I'd have to be twins!!
<marquee><font color=red>2%</font> White people are so scared of blakjeezis <font color=red>2%</font></marquee>