It is possible when concepts of time are let go of. I have had experiences of going back in time, but it is likely to be a memory of past life, not an actual travelling back from this life. A vision of the future is not the same as going to the future, unless the concepts of time and space are broken down. What is time?
One theory I have is that someone travels back in time and prevents The First World War, by intervening in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, at Sarajevo, in August 1914, and preventing it from occurring. All of a sudden all the war memorials vanish, all the books, documentaries, war graves, museums, people's memories etc instantly disappear because The First World War suddenly didn't happen.
But if a war memorial is made of stone, stone cannot just vanish. So the vanishing of everything First World War related would be due to a change in perception, yet it could run parallel with a time line where The First World War did happen.
So maybe at the moment there is a parallel timeline which we can't see, where the war did not happen, because we are on the timeline where it did happen. But the problem would be in determining what actually did happen, if two or more alternative timelines run parallel to each other, one where things happened, the other where things 'unhappened'.
But the real question is how to actually go back or forward in time to investigate this.
Yes and no. In order from most plausible to least plausible:
1) Just sit and wait. 60 seconds from now, you will have traveled 60 seconds into the future! Wow! Okay, this isn't what people mean when they say time travel, but it's the easiest way to do it.
2) Build a spaceship that can accelerate very close to the speed of light. Make a round trip to, say, Alpha Centauri. Depending on how fast you accelerate, you'll arrive back on Earth to find that more time has passed for people on Earth than passed for you on the spaceship. In other words, you'll reach the future more quickly than the people who didn't take the trip. There are a few problems: for one, nobody knows how to build a spaceship that can accelerate close to the speed of light. Second, although less time passes for you than passes on Earth, it's not an instantaneous jump into the future; you still have to wait quite a while. Third, it's a one-way trip; you can effectively travel into the future, but you cannot come back.
3) Build a traversable wormhole. A wormhole is a hypothetical shortcut in the fabric of spacetime that would allow you to travel from A to B faster than light itself could travel between those two points. Once you've got that done, load one of the wormhole's mouths onto your super-fast spaceship and accelerate it off on a round-trip relativistic trip to Alpha Centauri. Just as in Method 2, the traveling wormhole mouth will age less than the mouth that stays behind, which means that the traveling mouth will exist in the past of the stationary mouth. When the traveling mouth returns to Earth, it will be a tunnel through time as well as space. Going through the wormhole in one direction will send you to the past; traveling in the other direction will send you to the future.
The problems here are even more formidable. First, nobody knows if a traversable wormhole is even possible, or how to build one if it is. Even if it *is* possible to build a wormhole, it would require a galaxy's worth of exotic energy to hold it open. Furthermore, you've got all the same problems you faced in Method 2. Also, you can only travel back in time as far as the wormhole's creation, so you couldn't go back to kill Hitler or to ride a T-rex, unless the wormhole had somehow existed since then. Bottom line: this method of time travel probably isn't possible.
So it looks like we're stuck with Method 1 for now. Sorry, it sucks, but that's all we've got. I hope that helps. Good luck!
I had a physics professor from Oxford who taught a class in time travel; he thought it was possible. Then you have esoteric gifts like precognition-- the ability to see the future, which leads to the question, what really is time? If you can't answer that, you can't say time travel is impossible.
But BTW, people forget that so many idiots have said that this, that, and the other thing was impossible (trains, bicycles, airplanes, rockets to the moon, "death rays," etc) then somebody who didn't listen to what everyone "knew" to be impossible, went and did it anyway. So maybe time travel is just a matter of time...
Yes in theory, also proven by a few photon experiments by people like Seth Lloyd. But as we still do not understand time yet it is difficult to say we can ever use it for travel forward or backwards. Some physicists say that time exists all a once past, future, and present all exist at the same time but in different space. The choice we make in one space are different to those made on another space by a person. The Multiverse ideas.
UPDATE: Please all research Seth Lloyd's grandfather Paradox Experiment using a single photon. Also research Ronald Mallett, 69, is a respected theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut, and the subject of a new documentary, ‘How To Build a Time Machine’.
Not to the past. The past no longer exists to travel to.
Strictly speaking you cannot travel to "the" future either. But what happens is that all the crap that makes up the universe moves about and changes state, and for the most part it is all random with a little order superimposed on it. We cannot predict "the" future as there is too many random processes involved. Hence we can never travel to "the" future, as it does not exist. However we can travel forward in time and when we do so we arrive at a state that is one of the many possible futures. We call the one we actually find "the" future.
There is a subtle difference between "the" future and "a" future. There is no such thing as "the" future until we get to it, however there certainly will be "a" future. It is worth knowing the difference if you want to make sense of "time travel".
I just has some personal experience ,is not like you can go to other times and travel at different locations ,is just a feeling like deja vu ,which you suddenly realize a momentum that you can remember even some detail of it .There are many magnetic flux leaking trough to the some places that can create that momentum like portal zone ,Which I thing it does do with electrical charges in the person body ,when person it pass trough to those zone the magnetic filed force the ion particles in the body to shift (attract or repel) to the magnetic charge of the place ,now what that does to the brain particles it's out of my knowledge and it create a momentum know as Deja Vu .Eyes it call that memory and we feel that we been in that moment before ,this is mostly an illusion result of the natural routine habits of the people that they are always at same time at same place .
Even a method of travel in time is discovered, unless it involves hypothetical wormholes the earth and the sun will not be where you are.
If you travel back or forward in time even one day the earth and the sun have moved in space by 17.28 million km (10.8 million miles). Since our spaceships cannot move at more than 40,000mph yoyo will never catch up.
You could try travelling backwards or forwards by 225 to 250 million years when the sun have returned to its current position
"Time Travel" as we think of it is a product of Science Fiction, originating with H.G. Wells' classic story The Time Machine. Wells invented an entire genre of Sci-Fi, and The Back to the Future trilogy is a great set of movies along this tradition.
Time Travel is an absolute unequivocal impossibility. But there are numerous physical realities which mimic time travel. Time dilation is one of them, and there are strange things which can theoretically occur, in particular around massive gravitational fields- but these are merely illusory.
Time Travel is a concept derived from the human imagination- we have our own memories, we have photographs and film, and we have a past, present and future. But reality does not allow us to actually travel through time, except as we normally do. It can slow down or speed up, but you can't traverse time as in the Sci-Fi concept.
Answers & Comments
It is possible when concepts of time are let go of. I have had experiences of going back in time, but it is likely to be a memory of past life, not an actual travelling back from this life. A vision of the future is not the same as going to the future, unless the concepts of time and space are broken down. What is time?
One theory I have is that someone travels back in time and prevents The First World War, by intervening in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, at Sarajevo, in August 1914, and preventing it from occurring. All of a sudden all the war memorials vanish, all the books, documentaries, war graves, museums, people's memories etc instantly disappear because The First World War suddenly didn't happen.
But if a war memorial is made of stone, stone cannot just vanish. So the vanishing of everything First World War related would be due to a change in perception, yet it could run parallel with a time line where The First World War did happen.
So maybe at the moment there is a parallel timeline which we can't see, where the war did not happen, because we are on the timeline where it did happen. But the problem would be in determining what actually did happen, if two or more alternative timelines run parallel to each other, one where things happened, the other where things 'unhappened'.
But the real question is how to actually go back or forward in time to investigate this.
Yes and no. In order from most plausible to least plausible:
1) Just sit and wait. 60 seconds from now, you will have traveled 60 seconds into the future! Wow! Okay, this isn't what people mean when they say time travel, but it's the easiest way to do it.
2) Build a spaceship that can accelerate very close to the speed of light. Make a round trip to, say, Alpha Centauri. Depending on how fast you accelerate, you'll arrive back on Earth to find that more time has passed for people on Earth than passed for you on the spaceship. In other words, you'll reach the future more quickly than the people who didn't take the trip. There are a few problems: for one, nobody knows how to build a spaceship that can accelerate close to the speed of light. Second, although less time passes for you than passes on Earth, it's not an instantaneous jump into the future; you still have to wait quite a while. Third, it's a one-way trip; you can effectively travel into the future, but you cannot come back.
3) Build a traversable wormhole. A wormhole is a hypothetical shortcut in the fabric of spacetime that would allow you to travel from A to B faster than light itself could travel between those two points. Once you've got that done, load one of the wormhole's mouths onto your super-fast spaceship and accelerate it off on a round-trip relativistic trip to Alpha Centauri. Just as in Method 2, the traveling wormhole mouth will age less than the mouth that stays behind, which means that the traveling mouth will exist in the past of the stationary mouth. When the traveling mouth returns to Earth, it will be a tunnel through time as well as space. Going through the wormhole in one direction will send you to the past; traveling in the other direction will send you to the future.
The problems here are even more formidable. First, nobody knows if a traversable wormhole is even possible, or how to build one if it is. Even if it *is* possible to build a wormhole, it would require a galaxy's worth of exotic energy to hold it open. Furthermore, you've got all the same problems you faced in Method 2. Also, you can only travel back in time as far as the wormhole's creation, so you couldn't go back to kill Hitler or to ride a T-rex, unless the wormhole had somehow existed since then. Bottom line: this method of time travel probably isn't possible.
So it looks like we're stuck with Method 1 for now. Sorry, it sucks, but that's all we've got. I hope that helps. Good luck!
I had a physics professor from Oxford who taught a class in time travel; he thought it was possible. Then you have esoteric gifts like precognition-- the ability to see the future, which leads to the question, what really is time? If you can't answer that, you can't say time travel is impossible.
But BTW, people forget that so many idiots have said that this, that, and the other thing was impossible (trains, bicycles, airplanes, rockets to the moon, "death rays," etc) then somebody who didn't listen to what everyone "knew" to be impossible, went and did it anyway. So maybe time travel is just a matter of time...
Strange business, time.
Yes in theory, also proven by a few photon experiments by people like Seth Lloyd. But as we still do not understand time yet it is difficult to say we can ever use it for travel forward or backwards. Some physicists say that time exists all a once past, future, and present all exist at the same time but in different space. The choice we make in one space are different to those made on another space by a person. The Multiverse ideas.
UPDATE: Please all research Seth Lloyd's grandfather Paradox Experiment using a single photon. Also research Ronald Mallett, 69, is a respected theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut, and the subject of a new documentary, ‘How To Build a Time Machine’.
No.
Not to the past. The past no longer exists to travel to.
Strictly speaking you cannot travel to "the" future either. But what happens is that all the crap that makes up the universe moves about and changes state, and for the most part it is all random with a little order superimposed on it. We cannot predict "the" future as there is too many random processes involved. Hence we can never travel to "the" future, as it does not exist. However we can travel forward in time and when we do so we arrive at a state that is one of the many possible futures. We call the one we actually find "the" future.
There is a subtle difference between "the" future and "a" future. There is no such thing as "the" future until we get to it, however there certainly will be "a" future. It is worth knowing the difference if you want to make sense of "time travel".
Cheers!
I just has some personal experience ,is not like you can go to other times and travel at different locations ,is just a feeling like deja vu ,which you suddenly realize a momentum that you can remember even some detail of it .There are many magnetic flux leaking trough to the some places that can create that momentum like portal zone ,Which I thing it does do with electrical charges in the person body ,when person it pass trough to those zone the magnetic filed force the ion particles in the body to shift (attract or repel) to the magnetic charge of the place ,now what that does to the brain particles it's out of my knowledge and it create a momentum know as Deja Vu .Eyes it call that memory and we feel that we been in that moment before ,this is mostly an illusion result of the natural routine habits of the people that they are always at same time at same place .
No ... If Time Travel was possible at any time in the future
then someone would have come back from it by now, unless,
of course, that's what UFO's are.
Time machines from the future .. that's why we never see them
coming on radar or follow them leaving again.
They just appear, have a look and disappear again.
time travel possible?
I have the same question?
that would be like living four different
time frames at the same time?
and being able to measure them?
or Knowing its a Monday and sleeping
and waking up on a Tuesday six months before
going to sleep waking up on Wednesday 5 months later
from the previous six but three days prior to the Monday and finding the
clues ALL OVER THE CITY.
then staying in the past cus time has been halted
and knowing the future and hoping it does not happen?
kind of like that?!
and not knowing what to do cus you do not
understand what is going on?
yes I have serious questions too
Even a method of travel in time is discovered, unless it involves hypothetical wormholes the earth and the sun will not be where you are.
If you travel back or forward in time even one day the earth and the sun have moved in space by 17.28 million km (10.8 million miles). Since our spaceships cannot move at more than 40,000mph yoyo will never catch up.
You could try travelling backwards or forwards by 225 to 250 million years when the sun have returned to its current position
"Time Travel" as we think of it is a product of Science Fiction, originating with H.G. Wells' classic story The Time Machine. Wells invented an entire genre of Sci-Fi, and The Back to the Future trilogy is a great set of movies along this tradition.
Time Travel is an absolute unequivocal impossibility. But there are numerous physical realities which mimic time travel. Time dilation is one of them, and there are strange things which can theoretically occur, in particular around massive gravitational fields- but these are merely illusory.
Time Travel is a concept derived from the human imagination- we have our own memories, we have photographs and film, and we have a past, present and future. But reality does not allow us to actually travel through time, except as we normally do. It can slow down or speed up, but you can't traverse time as in the Sci-Fi concept.