Is time linear?
What I mean is if you went back in time and killed your Grandfather before you were born, you would cease to exist = Linear time, time that only moves along in one line.

Or

Quantum time
Where you could go back in time and kill your grandfather before you were born and not cease to exist as all you did was alter another dimension and not the one you're from.

Or

Chaotic time
You couldn't kill your grandfather before you were born because even getting to the stage where it was possible to harm him was impossible because it would negate your own existence.

Just something to think about, there are hundreds of more theorys about the progression of time a but as we have no way to prove anything all theorys are sound so stick 'em up here and lets see how many we can get

have you read my thread I spun of of Sire's thought? those are all very good questions...I believe if you killed your grandfather, you would cease to exist...end of that gene pool!:p as for other dimensions and planes, I just don't know enough about such things...

I think I lean towards chaotic time...but I'm not sure...if you go back and kill your grandfather, you will never have existed. But then, since you don't exist, you couldn't be there to kill him. So he doesn't get killed. And you are born, and can go back to kill him. I think you'll end up in some sort of repetative time void...

Or there could be another sort of time. FATE time where in trevelling back to kill your grandfather things go wrong and you cause your own existance. just a thought

Chaotic time makes bad movies but is the most likely theory.

You could also have some kind of (fluidic?) time where you change the past by kiling your Grandfather and are now living out of the normal timeframe but still in the same world.

I lean towards what you describe as chaotic time. But a bit more towards cyclic.

sounds like ur restating a dime novel

psst....Guy, go back and change your post...it'll be like you went back in time

I'm a pulpist?

Since I aint good at explaining things I'll try to explain my theory as good as I can.

The way I see if I went to kill my grandfather, I wouldn't dissapear into nothingness or anything. Rather, my granddad would be dead. BUT I would still exist. With all my memories and everything. HOWEVER, time will go as according to his death. But then I would become some sort of being that exists outside of time. (Perhaps I would exist outside of time as soon as I transverse it?)

I dunno. But thats the way I see it, cause thats the way that won't create some sort of huge time/space loop or explosion.

Has anyone ever read "A Shadow Out of Time" by Lovecraft, or "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Adams?

I just said that only in a simpler fashion.

I`ve read Hitchhikers.

Hmm... Another way to think of this:
Time, alike height, length and width is but a 4th dimension. One we can percieve, but cannot control. More like a tree, who can only gain very limited control over the location in space it is placed in... It's roots, the base of it's existance, restrains it. So is it also with us, humans. We can percieve time, move forward in it. But our shell of flesh prevents us from stalling or accellerating within it... To do such would be to destroy the flesh...

'Till we can find a way to allow our conciousness to no longer percieve reality (which IMO is the 5th dimension... Percieved reality) from within these shells, we'll be stuck in the slow of the stream of time, as leaves on a river. Following the current, wherever it goes...

But to come to your earlier examples...
In this theory of mine you could go back and kill your grandfather... Or even yourself. However, since you meddle not with time, but with REALITY then, the changes for you are nonexistant. Simply another sequence of events is spawned, one other parallel world... One in which you'll never see the light. But that world would not be your world. Basically, as soon as you travel trough time, you'll travel into a different reality... That is if you consider your own conciousness not the ONLY valid reality to exist...

But enough ramblings... It is a possibility. I based this mostly on watching too much Star Trek and reading a little about probability mechanics... Don't take it too seriously -yet-

EOF

I think "chaotic" is a bad term for that theory. It should be called "logical time" or something. Because the truth is, when I watch one of Red's "bad movies" I never doubt the ending, because the truth is that if the person was going to fail in their time travel, they would have never started off in the first place.

Well, I'm putting this post here because I doubt if it really belongs in the subject sricken up in the time travel thread. But basically, according to the theory of relativity, mass bends timespace. So, the more you weigh, the more conicle the bend becomes. Objects of less density or otherwise lighter will gravitate towards you because you bend timespace in such a way that you are likely to tilt them towards you. Such is gravity.

Well, right along with that kind of Einsteinian thought is the fact that nothing canb ever travel faster than the speed of light squared. However, if you were to travel at some incredibel speed to another side of timespace, and then travelled back at a much faster speed, you could smack the curve before you left. The metaphysical shockwave caused by said smack, however, is what would cause matter, events, mass and so forth to shift. Conversely, since it all exists on several more dimensions than just three or four, there is really no way of telling what might happen.

The universal speed limit isnt the speed of light squared it is just the speed of light

He prolly meant E = MC2
C is the light speed constant.

Well, did the rest of what I said make sense?

According to physics, the fourth dimension is time space (where and when an object is) and the fifth is reality (as in whether an object is real or virtual or in plainer terms, whether it is matter or energy or a level of combination of both)
Just to calrify
And as I said at the outset, all theorys are in the technical sense"right" as nothing can be proven otherwise so keep 'em coming, I need as much as I can get if I'm going to get this time machine finished any time soon

Actually, the difference between real and virtual, is not whether it's matter or energy (both matter and energy can be both real or virtual) the question is whether it exists outside of the radiobackground long enough to be measured.