Do you think time-travel will be possible in the future? Do you think it should?

Question

I think its definitely possible, but at what expense? If a group of scientists in the future, decide to travel into the past, that could dramatically change our world. You could be sitting at your kitchen table one afternoon having lunch with your kids, then all the sudden, POOF!! They are gone and you're homeless in Delaware! Makes me sick to think about it. :(

Answer 1

fixasandwich wrote:
"Travelling forward in time is theoretically possible, time dialtion at high speed being one of the concepts introduced by Einstein in his theories of special relativity. An object moving at high speed relative to a watch will experience "time dilation", essentially one second is longer for the object than for the watch.
The time elapsed for the object (t') can be calculated using the formula
t' = t / (sqr(v^2/c^2)
where t is the time elapsed for the watch, v is the speed of the object relative to the watch, and c is the speed of light.
The result - the object ages less than the watch (often described using the twin paradox), essentially meaning the object has travelled forward in time.
Travelling backward in time is not possible because time always progresses forward. "


Theoretical and high speed particle physics has made startling discoveries since Einstein presented his special theory of relativity in 1905 that E=MC2 and his general theory of relativity in 1915 that dealt with space/time and time distortion. According to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity,1915, travel forward in time IS theoretically possible based on this time dilation effect but only relative to individuals who are stationary.

Many theoretical astrophysicists are divided as to whether travel backwards in time is possible or not, in part due to the time paradox of a man growing up to go backwards in time and kill his grandfather before he has a chance to meet his grandmother and have his father.

But, we know so little about the incredibly complex universe beyond what we see as the decoupling of matter and energy, or a few hundred thousand seconds after the instant that our universe as we know it began (roughly 14 billion years ago) that it is impossible to say what is possible in terms of space/time and time travel.

Super string theory predicts that our entire universe as we know it exists on a membrane that lies parallel to other membranes that we are unable to detect (similar to a slice of bread in a loaf of slices). The only thing in our universe that can leave our membrane (jump out of our universe and contact parallel universes) may be gravity waves or gravitons. This could be why black holes appear to disappear from our universe.

When I was in astronomy class in college, I remember my professor explaining how we are free to move in any of the familiar 3 dimentions of space (up/down, right/left, and back/forth) but can only move in one direction in time (past to future) as long as we are in normal space. But if we were somehow to cross the event horizon of a black hole (the distance from a singularity within which not even light can escape the pull of gravity from the singularity) we would now only be able to move in one direction in space (towards the singularity) but could, in fact, move in any direction in time.

What if a black hole is really a hole in the membrane of our universe that allows matter from our membrane to pass off of our brane onto another adjacent brane (parallel universe).

Time in our universe seems to travel in one direction only. From past to present. Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity, 1915, explained that space and time are actually one and the same. I remember one of my astronomy professors also saying "Our universe has always completely filled our universe." Until I better understood Einstein's general theory of relativity, I found this a bit cryptic. What he meant was that even at the moment that our universe was in its most infinitely dense state (immediately before the big bang) it completely filled all of space/time.

Suddenly, a cataclysmic burst of energy erupts and begins to expand and cool. This is 0:00:00 space/time and represents all space that is our universe at time zero. Now the time clock begins to run in one direction... zero to infinity or beginning to future and with it, space begins to expand. The two are inseperable by definition. Therefore, as time moves forward, everything in our universe (on our brane) expands outward from time zero. If space/time is expanding at exactly 299,792,458 meters per second which, coincidently matches the speed of light in a vacuum, then nothing in our universe could ever travel faster than this because there is no universe (brane) for it to travel into yet.

Another way to look at it, the present is for everyone, the edge of the expansion of our universe. The past is behind us in space/time and the future does not exist in space yet. This might expain why we look into the past every time we view a distant star or galaxy and why physics has proven (with cesium clocks) that time is relative to speed.

Consider a moving train. If you are standing along the tracks witnessing a train passing at 60 miles per hour, it seems to fly by. If, on the other hand, you are driving in a car parallel to the train at 55 miles per hour, it seems to be going rather slowly and if you speed up to 60 miles per hour, it seems to stop relative to you. If you speed up further to 80 miles per hour, the train would disappear relative to you until you stopped and allowed it to catch up. If space/time is now the train and our universe exists only up to the moment where the future becomes the present, then traveling faster and faster would bring the traveler closer to the front of the train and make time seem to slow down relative to your position. This would also seem to explain why travel beyond the speed of light is not possible within our universe.

This does not, however, eliminate the possibility that time travel is possible. In our current physical state we are not able to move off our physical membrane onto another plane of existence, but, according to E=MC2, all energy and mass in our universe can be converted back and forth between states of matter and energy. String theory allows for 11 possible dimensions and Super String theory allows for even more possibilities of dimensional space all existing right here where we are unaware of their existence.

If any of the String theories (including the M theory) are correct, the one puzzle that Albert Einstein was never able to solve - the Grand Unification of all forces Electromagnetism, Strong and Weak Nuclear Forces, and gravity will indeed be able to be expressed in one elegant formula representing all physics as we know it. This would then prove once and for all, that time travel in both directions is merely relative to the state of energy that the traveler exists in and the brane upon which the traveler is moving on.

Answer 2

int that we haven't had any visitors from the future is pretty good. Then again who in 1900 would have thought in just over half a century there would be people walking on the moon? The big question is whether it is possible; if it is possible then we can certainly find a way of doing it. It is POSSIBLE to send people out of the solar system to the nearest star - but at the moment it is highly impractical (i.e. it would take thousands of years); we need to find out a way to make it practical. There seems to be a lot of debate as to whether time travel is possible or not. One VERY interesting experiment is going on in Edinburgh. They have a little black box which generates 1s and 0s, and a computer draws a graph of the occurence. You'd think that it would be precisely 50% 0s a

Answer 3

One possibility worth consideration regarding time travel is that if it is possible, it might be impossible to go farther back in time than the invention of the first working time machine. I am saying that in part because there have been some semi-serious proposals that suggest that time travel might actually be possible under some rather strange conditions, like requiring a wormhole joining two parts of the universe, where the wormhole is stabilized by some form of exotic matter and where one end of the wormhole has been moved faster than light from one place to another, without explaining how this would be done.

Of course I didnt quite get far enough in General Relativity to confirm or refute this conjecture. But there have been write-ups on the subject, I think either by Kip Thorne and/or Robert Forward, etc. Hence I vaguely recall some suggestions that have been made regarding just how one would resolve paradoxes that might arise, i.e. if you could combine near the speed of light travel to some arbitrary point in the universe then you could spend billions of years getting there, but because of special relativity you would not age. Then a quick trip through a time machine before you arrive at your destination would effectively convert a long near light speed trip to an apparent faster than light trip.

The trick for converting faster than light travel into time travel, would of course be tricker, if it would even work at all, but there was another semi-serious proposal that came out in the mid 90's whereby a solution to General Relativity was discovered that does actually allow for apparent faster than light travel, i.e. the Alcubierre warp drive - which would also use some kind of "exotic matter" to compress and expand space.

Then again, if you could build an indestructable somewhat autonomous robot that could do anything that could be done, you could tell the robot to build you a time-machine and let you know when it is working. Now if it takes your robot a billion years (in robot time) to accomplish the task, and said robot has to take a conventional (not faster than light) trip circumnavigating half the black holes in the Milky Way, what do you care? Just so long as the robot makes it back before lunch with the closing stock quotes for the day.

Of course, if time travel farther back in time than the invention of the first time machine is not possible, your robot may well succeed at the task, but not be able to get back to the time of origin.

Answer 4

I do not think that time-travel Will be possible either now or in the future. If anyone wants to do any kind time travel they would have to have a vessel that would have to go at least the speed light which would be around 186,000 miles per second. By going at the speed of light time does slow down according to Einsteins theory of relativity but your vessel must have zero mass! A light particle, yea light is made of particles that have zero mass, which is also known as a photon can achieve this speed because it has no mass. So, if there was a spaceship that had no mass and was able to achieve the speed of light, then in theory time would stop. Keep in mind though, nothing, absolutely nothing can go faster than the speed of light since it is a constant regardless of which reference frame you are in.
For example, if you were riding on a spaceship traveling at the speed of light and had a laser shining a beam in the same direction as the spaceship is traveling, how fast would the laser beam be going? It would travel no more than 186,000 miles per second which is the same speed as the spaceship. With that in mind, you would have to have a spaceship that had a mass less than zero(negative) or as I would like to call it a imaginary mass in order to travel faster than the speed of light. Therefore, since nobody can create a negative mass, then time travel will be impossible.

Answer 5

General Relativity strongly suggests that it's possible to make a time machine (for instance, it has already been proven mathematically that an infinitely long very incredibly dense cylinder spinning on its axis incredibly fast acts as one - go round it one way to step forward in time, the other way to step back).

However, it's more like a time tunnel than the time machines you usually see in Science Fiction stories: the machine itself doesn't move in time, after the machine is built, you can enter it and come out at an earlier or later time, but you can't come out any earlier than when the machine was built or any later than when it breaks down. You can only travel up and down time during the period when the machine exists. Since no one has built anything like that yet (nor are they likely to), we won't bet getting any visitors from the future until we have. (I guess the only exception to that would be if some aliens had built one somewhere long ago and it was still working.)

Also, the machine has a limited capacity, like any other sort of doorway or tunnel: there's only a certain amount of people that can be stepping into or out of it at any one time (depending on how big the doorway is).

Answer 6

This is easy. Time travel is possible (but not in youre sense) and yes it has been done. Learn modern physics, it will show you! there are some simple equations you should learn called the lorenz transformation. f(v) = t/(1-(v/c)^2). C is a constant (the speed of ligh 3 E 8 m/s). And your V is your velocity. This is your time dialation equation. essentially as V approaches C, your time dialates to zero. In laymens terms, your time slows down and will stop when you travel at the speed of light. So you may ask yourself when has someone time traveld? Well according to the laws of physics, anytime you have a non-zero velocity your time dialates relative to someone with a zero velocity.

Your time dialation is also affected as a function of the gravitational field. So the time on your clock in the upstairs versus your downstairs will be off (this is over eons of time but still, mathematically they can never be in sinq with one another).

:)

And i dont really care whose hands its in because all it means is that you could travel into the future, and it is almost physically impossible to travel the kinds of velocities one would need. But if they did, so be it. You cant stop them. And someone said something about the government is covering UFO's up.. To him I say.... get laid.

Answer 7

I don't think so, but if it was possible, I don't think it would be a good idea. Say somone could do that and went back in time and changed things so that the world fit their ideals. Maybe the world would be a better place to some people, but no one should have the power to change that.

If you are interested in time travel, read the book Time and Again by Jack Finney. It's very good.

Answer 8

Travelling forward in time is theoretically possible, time dialtion at high speed being one of the concepts introduced by Einstein in his theories of special relativity. An object moving at high speed relative to a watch will experience "time dilation", essentially one second is longer for the object than for the watch.
The time elapsed for the object (t') can be calculated using the formula
t' = t / (sqr(v^2/c^2)
where t is the time elapsed for the watch, v is the speed of the object relative to the watch, and c is the speed of light.
The result - the object ages less than the watch (often described using the twin paradox), essentially meaning the object has travelled forward in time.
Travelling backward in time is not possible because time always progresses forward.

Answer 9

While it was already mentioned, I would like to expand on a very true and very logical comment said. If time travel were ever going to be possible at any time in the future, then we would have observed the time travlers some time in our past. O_o

Answer 10

I'm not a scientist, but I think it'll be a reality in another thousand years. And yes, it is quite scary to become a bum in a blink of an eye but I'm sure there will be laws to control it (ie. that movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme...Timecop I think it was called...)

Answer 11

If time travel becomes a reality it would be very scary if it falls into the wrong hands.