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No. Remembering isn't anywhere near to being able to go back to that remembered time. Events of the past have left their imprint on everything, the solar system included, but that isn't going to make it any easier to get back to the time when such events occured.

If anything, relativistic effects will be a benefit to future space explorers, because they'll be able to travel to distant stars in far less (apparent) time than it would otherwise take them. No. If light is going to exist inside gravity wells at all, it's going to have to conform to the shape of space, and since stars create pretty large gravitational dents, it would be surprising if there was any light at all. The space only seems curved if you look at it in 4-dimensions, and light in a 3-dimensional universe is not going to be able to travel in 4 dimensions. You talk about the laws of physics like they're ethical trends. People aren't trying to force what goes on to fit current physical models, you know. As has been said before, the laws of physics are based on what we currently know about physics, so it's ridiculous to talk about "finding a way" to break them. (Edited to add stuff, and because I kept misunderstanding the question. )

If wormholes are possible and there are no universal laws of chronological protection, then you could travel a little way back in time. You have to remember, though, that a universe in which time travel was possible would potentially be in constant temporal flux until it reached a state in which time travel wasn't possible. So if you ask me, time travel probably isn't and will never be possible, at least not while we're stuck in one universe. It doesn't bother me, though. Acausal universes are messy.

Oh, this just reminded me of something - if gravity travels at light speed, does anyone know if that would rule out the theorised possibilities for various forms of warp drive? I would think it would, since the idea seems to focus around riding a gravity wave at superluminal velocities, which presumably isn't possible if gravity propagates at the speed of light, but I could be wrong.

If Creationism is defined as denial of evolution, then it is in opposition to science. If this is what you meant, then I agree, it is sad.

If you went through a wormhole at close to the speed of light you'd still experience some slowing of time, but you wouldn't need to go through at anywhere near relativistic speeds - so yeah, people on both sides would be pretty much in sync, and if it could be done you could build quite an extensive network of wormholes, I assume, which would pretty neatly avoid the temporal distortions associated with "conventional" (if there was such a thing at the moment) interstellar travel. (spelling edited)

1) More complex systems are more disordered. 2) The Earth isn't a closed system.

Oh, if you're talking about wormholes, then yeah, you'd be able to travel instantaneously from one point to another within the confines of Relativity. It wouldn't strictly be faster than light travel, though, since you'd be travelling through a warped region of space at subluminal speeds, but the effect would be the same. If you wanted to preserve causality, though, you'd have to be careful about wormhole placement, and you'd still need to take one end of the wormhole to it's destination at slower than light speeds. Of course, this is all entirely theoretical.

That we won't be able to send signals faster than light to other places in space or time using gravity if gravity travels at the same speed as light. I assumed this was what you were saying we should try to do.

Not if gravity travels at the speed of light.

Yeah, but I used the term loosely. It was just simpler to refer to the collection of books that is today recognised as "The Bible" as "a book", rather than "the books of The Bible". Good point, though, I'll edit the post.

Travelling at significant fractions of the speed of light does cause time dilation, but this isn't useful in the way you imagine it to be because time only seems to travel more slowly for you, so, for example, it would seem to you that you'd only been gone a few days whereas to everyone back on Earth you would have been gone for decades.

Did you even read the article? It's using an analogy between gravity and evolution to highlight the idiocy of Creationists, since most people would accept that challenging the idea of gravity is foolish, and it remains unchallenged because it has no imagined theological implications as of yet. All science is theoretical. Everything could change tomorrow. Gravity is no different. That said, it makes no more sense to postulate endlessly with no evidence to back things up.

Yeah, from the perspective of our 3 dimensions we are in space, but if we reduced those dimensions to 2 for the sake of analogy, we would appear to adhere to it. Even in completely flat space you wouldn't just pop out of the universe. Yeah, gravity does distort (slow down) time, but it's only near gravitational extremes (black holes) that such effects become especially noticable.

flamingoflie, I'm interested in how you'd respond to my earlier point, and how, in light of this, you can consider Creationism science: Oh, and remember that this isn't the same as looking at natural occurences and coming up with hypotheses to explain them, based on what you can see. The bible did not occur naturally and the story contained within it is not abundant throughout the natural world, as is the case with that on which the hypotheses of science are based. No, so called proofs of Creationism would not count as extensions of the bible even if they were valid, since you still have to refer back to the bible to make them so, which is, itself, something that has come into being as an original only once, and is not abundant throughout nature. (Edited in case of misinterpretations over language used.)

OK, fine, remove the extra gravity, and turn the quicksand into a hole in solid ground. If the runner is adhering to the ground (as objects do to space), and he's running in a straight line, if the curvature of the surface becomes too great he will still reach a point where he can never escape the hole as long as he's running in a straight line.

Using the well known Rubber Sheet analogy, imagine the sun is a sphere on a stretched rubber sheet. It creates an indentation, which the Earth and the other planets roll around in orbit. If you suddenly whip the sun off the rubber sheet, the trampoline will not instantly return to utter flatness. If you recorded and slowed it down (although, really, you can tell it isn't instant just by looking at it) you could watch the indentation created by the sun rise gradually upwards, and, assuming it was slowed down enough, it would be clear that the sphere of the Earth did not instantly react to the change in the curvature of the sheet (this would be more obvious the bigger the rubber sheet). It's not like scientists are actively "worrying" about breaking the laws of physics, you know. Scientists would like just as much as the rest of us some method of travelling faster than light, I'm sure. It's just that, well, an inconvenience of these laws is that they can't be broken. How would you like scientists to go about finding ways to break the laws of physics? You might as well tell someone you pass on the street to sprout wings and fly. No, because there's never going to be a material which something can move through faster than vaccuum. On the black hole issue - I don't see why you see a problem here. It's the same sort of thing as a marathon runner being stuck in quicksand. In this case, the quicksand definitely flows slower than the marathon runner can run, but, nonetheless, the marathon runner cannot get free. Speed isn't everything. The speed of gravity could be half the speed of light and black holes would still be possible, because the speed of the propagation of gravity is irrelevant to it's strength in any case. Gravity wells of (relatively) stationary objects are, roughly speaking, like holes in the ground. There's no speed to take into account here, because they're static distortions, and it doesn't matter whether something can move faster than the hole could form - they could still fall in.

Theoretically, I don't see why not. With today's technology we could probably do it even faster than they did. Practically, it would probably take quite a while to properly plan it out before the actual building work started since (as far as I know) there aren't any remaining instructions on exactly how the Egyptians went about building a pyramid, and if you wanted to do it without today's technology you might have some trouble getting enough people to put enough effort in, since we wouldn't have the benefit of slaves anymore.

Hahahaha, I just noticed this bit. Is that how you think evolution works?

Creationism is not considered a theory in science. It's considered nonsense, and rightfully, because it's not science because its based, ultimately, in faith. Starting from a hypothesis isn't the same thing as starting from a conclusion. Evolution started from a hypothesis based on observation, which was then refined in light of the proof. Creationism doesn't begin from a hypothesis (no, the Bible doesn't count) but a conclusion, so whatever "proof" is gathered is looked at with the aim of using it to conclude that the Bible is an accurate historical document, and things that don't lead to such a conclusion are deemed wrong or ignored. Essentially, there's no-one who, after going through a rational scientific education, examined the evidence and decided, "Wait, this seems to suggest that the world was created in 6 days by a god who then created a man called Adam and a women from one of his ribs and then went on to give man 10 commandments and a variety of other ethical laws the specifics of which I should be able to go on to extrapolate from this evidence!" It always works the other way round. Someone reads the Bible, decides it's true, and goes on to try to prove it's true scientifically, no matter how much they'll have to disregard and misinterpret the mountains of evidence pointing to another conclusion. Then you were wrong. There are places to engage in such ridiculous debates as this one, but this thread wasn't one of them, although, unfortunately, it seems to have become one anyway.

All of science is a theory.

The atom doesn't remember anything. If a photon hits a nucleus it will be deflected or absorbed, and if this happens a lot I assume the light will be scattered and dispersed. Just remember that atoms are mostly empty space though, so there's plenty of room for the photons to move in without hitting anything.

Ah, thanks. So, if life had evolved around a triple helix, would it externally be much the same as double helix life? Or is there no way to tell what differences there might be?

Haha, I understood almost none of that. Any chance of a simplification? Is it saying that creatures can't be built entirely from triple helix DNA?

And what effects does it have?