Speculation with portals
We need a new interesting and debatable portal scenario. Any ideas? Oh wait. Let's explain the "teleporting yourself inside yourself turns out inside out" scenario. 
Actually, yeah. I'm at work now, but I can bang out a pr?cis right quick.
But in a nutshell: I've been thinking that I owe you an apology, espen180. I shouted you down every time you tried to bring time or multiple dimensions of time into this discussion.
However, as long as we don't define time rigidly as "the FOURTH dimension" or any specific nth dimension, it could make a really interesting addition to our topological speculation.
In other words, supposing that all these higher-dimensional manifolds could exist, and that they could be deformed in various ways, is there any reason we could not suppose that dimensions of time might be manipulated in an analogous way? (note I didn't say "the same way")
What I've been thinking is: Our common-sense experience of time is "the Arrow of Time." That is, time travels in only one direction, straight forward, infinitely. (The topological analog of this is a ray, which is a line (a 1D manifold) with one border. It starts at an endpoint and extends infinitely in one direction.)
What if we could "bend" the arrow back to its starting point? Or make some other shape? If we folded time the right way, would formerly distinct events be duplicated at multiple points in time for a given universe/manifold/tempifold? (I just made up tempifold to mean a time space that is analogous to spatial manifolds.)
Discuss. 
Discuss.
In the words of Doctor Who...
Discuss.
How about, one blue portal, ten orange portals? ^_^
Well thats effectively a cloning machine.
put some money through it quick!
First of all, thank you, Paul.
To answer your question about bending time: (I need to use nth demensions here, sorry.)
In theory, you vcan travel back in time by folding the 5th dimension through the 6th.
Hrmmm. Can you help us visualize that?
What I'm thinking is, and I may be using some terms incorrectly, if we consider a single ray (timeline originating from one point) to be a first order tempifold, a second order tempifold would be all possible timelines originating from that point. For the sake of visualization we can imagine this as a plane with our point in the "middle". A third order tempifold would be all possible rays originating from all possible origins. We can visualize this as having all possible origins as forming a third axis, with each point along this axis representing a different possible origin.
What would happen if we took that axis and bent it into a circle?
http://www.tenthdimension.com/medialinks.php
watch this video. The dimensions are explained much better than I can, can gives a clear picture of folding dimensions.
To understand it better, one point in the "4th"(time) dimension is the entirety of space at one point in time.
watch this video. The dimensions are explained much better than I can, can gives a clear picture of folding dimensions.
To understand it better, one point in the "4th"(time) dimension is the entirety of space at one point in time.
I take back my apology. (Not really, but argh, dude.) I was proposing that we talk about this in a logical way, extending our understanding of spatial manifolds to incorporate time.
Referring back to "real" cosmology/physics stalls the discussion. We can't go anywhere with it.
This is what I mean! If I understand your analogy correctly, this has an interesting corollary. Which is: if we imagine all possible rays emerging from just one origin, we get a volumetric timespace (a 3-tempifold) of infinite volume (because rays never end). If we draw any line that starts on the origin in any direction, the path it traces in 3-time indicates the direction and speed of time in a single 3-space universe (which we can think of as "intersecting" our 3-tempifold at that line).
One ray might have time that runs at double speed, another that goes backwards, maybe one more that is parallel to an axis of the timespace (tempifold), and therefore is "static" with regard to time in that time dimension.
And if any line in the tempifold represents a whole 3-space universe, then each point on that line represents a single instant in the state of that universe as it goes down the timeline.
Now, there's no reason at all that we have to start drawing these rays at a certain point in the tempifold. It is infinite, after all.
So we can imagine two lines of different orientations that intersect at one point in the tempifold. What would that mean?
Well, my highly specultive answer is this: In an infinite timespace, there's no reason to think that multiple local timestates -- like the one at the point of intersection -- can't overlap and be identical, while belonging to completely separate 3-space universes with different properties of time.
In other words, there could be dozens of alternate-reality-universe yous sharing your body for an instant right now, intersecting you tangentially and then passing along another dimension of time which you can't perceive.
What do you guys think of that?
Heavy Editing for clarity.
