Is it possible?

Question

Is time travel possible?

Answer 1

How can I say that anything is impossible? If we are in the region of our fantasies and dreams, all is possible. Our dreams and fantasies are powerful stuff, and we know that they can come true - yes, it is possible!

But It would also like to consider the physical world that you and me live in, for this is the world from where our dreams are born. We live in the constraints of the physical, and therefore we dreams to travel in time. It is wonderfully fascinating. We observe that as time passes and things change around us we wish to go back or forward in time to see how things were long time ago, or how things will be in the future.

But is it all that is there for us to know? If we ask – what is time something we like to travel in? We see that it is in fact the way things change in the physical world. We know time has passed when, for example, hands on a clock-face move forward. We know that time has lapsed when the Earth moves round relatively fixed position of the Sun, or when the Moon changes its position round the Earth we knon some time has passed. And each atom of the matter, and inside each atom each electron, is in a continuous state of motion. This is the reason things change their physical appearance, and we notice this as ‘time’. Things change, they grow, they rust. If nothing in the world would move then the sense of time simply would not have been there – or one may say nothing would have existed.

To me time is not something that flow through things in physical world to change them, and it is not something through which all things of the world move as if they are things adrift in a mighty river. Time is the very quality of all things physical – their quality to change. And this is important to understand! Thinking of time without things of the physicl world is like thinking of having apples without an apple tree.

If you want to travel by train, for exapmle, you need to know what a train is? Similarly if you what to travel by time you need to understand first - what time is? A painting is said to be a timeless piece because it things in it do not change – their quality to show time has been altered by the use of specific chemicals. A picture on a sandy beach, on the other hand, is more likely to show time as its constituents change.

Then we can ask why things change at all? This question is not scientific question; it is a philosophical thought leading to further questions like – what is real? Are our dreams real? Do they become physical realities, or are they physical realities somewhere in the universe?

The problem is that if we want apples we need an apple tree, and if we use apples to grow a tree of different type then it would not be possible. If we are to consider possibilities of time travel in a physical world, then we will need to know what time is, and what things are? And more importantly – why every things is in motion, the motion that we know as time? If travelling through time is possible then it is also possible to find the answers to these all-important questions.

Answer 2

Theoretically time travel into the future is possible. This is based on einstiens special theory of relativitiy, one of the consequences of which is that moving clocks run more slowly than clocks at rest. So if you were in a space ship moving near the speed of light, the clocks on board would move much more slowly than the clocks on earth. So when you return to earth altough only a matter of months may have elapsed on your spaceship years may have passed on earth. In this way you can time travel into the future.
Time travelling into the past is a more complicated affair and is fraught with many paradoxes the most well-known of which is the grandfather paradox. However, einsitiens general theory of relativity opens up the possibility of using wormholes as gateways to the past. The mouth of one end of the wormhole is carried away on our space ship where the clocks are moving more slowly. Both ends of our wormhole then become out of "sync", and so when the two mouths are brought back together it may be possible to step through one mouth and travel backwards in time and emerge through the other mouth. Einstiens therory of GR offers other exotic prospects for backwards in time travel - but it is impossible to go back before the time machine was contructed. No visting dinosours! So in summary: forward time travel def possible. Backwards time travel a little more difficult! Regards Paul.

Answer 3

It is indeed possible , Albert Einstein spoke on this subject at length. Also it is true during Apollo moon missions when traveling away from the earth at 25,000 miles per hour they did indeed time travel but for just a few milliseconds.

Answer 4

We do it all the time, only forwards.

Some philosophies argue that time itself is an illusion, our own perceptions of change being given a form which we can handle.

If all time is is a human perception of change, then no, it would not be possible to either undo what changes have been wrought and return to an era where your present is as yet unwritten, or to skip ahead to a time where the natural development of changes in your present have not been enacted yet.

At least, according to my personal philosophy. But there are others, including Feynman's hypothesis that anti matter is the same as regular matter, only projected backwards in time.

Answer 5

Going forward in time is both possible and fairly simple. Either move through space faster or find a high gravity source. Going back in time is a lot more difficult and limited, if not impossible.

Answer 6

In the spectral sense anything must be possible otherwise we'd not be here to conjecture about it yet how that melds with the temporal side is the head of all scratchers.

Time itself is the compression of so many dimensions of essence that it is, and must be, by the very nature of itself, linked to the passage of itself in a form we have yet to encounter.

Or maybe we already have and just do not comprehend its enormity as yet. The problem with our understanding of those higher dimensions is that each of us starts off anew and must learn all that came before us before we can grasp or gain insight into that which is, or comes after.

You cannot imagine a nuclear powered device being available in our distant past and yet all the elements were there waiting to be assembled.

It took a passage of time and one of those blinding insights which seems to be the trademark of humanity to bring something like that into existance, these are unarguable facts that touch upon some form of an unlocking evolutive will.

It could be the case that spectrally we do come back, obviously this is one of those purer conjectures but following the thought through is enlightening, if one did return would it not make sense to have that clean sheet again as the technological advancement would be self evident in a future frame of reference as our past still is today.

You can argue semantics and universes in a nutshell until you are red in the face but put simply, we do not know.

As all our endeavours are geared toward that search in the multitude of forms it takes, it makes a comparitive sense to myself to continue to attempt to understand it and even if I fail spectacularly I'll still have the knowledge that I learned.

Its curious to note that as a certain assemblage of physicalities arise which enrich our lives so the same can be said for a certain way of putting our words together which give form to those ideas, for without that particulate its impossible to even imagine.

Now who would dare to imagine that there is something unseen, of which we all know and feel, that remains to be shown.

Not I said Shadoelight to his trusty sidekick CloppentoPhEleR as he glopped off into the night muttering nonsensicalities of immutable origins whilst raising his ars of the saddle to phart the waves of his newfangled streamlined form.

Answer 7

i thought somebody said about 4th dimension. true. if you define 4th dimension is time dimension, where you can only travel one way, at the same velocity as everybody else.

i think even if we can, we can only travel forward, as travelling back in time will cause "history breakdown" i guess. loops in time or something like that. i mean like, we are made of history, like if you messed even a very small incidence it can affect you very own existance. what happened to you in the future, who tried to change the past? he didn't even exist. (erm... what am i talking about?)

Answer 8

"of course, we do it every day...in the forward direction and at the normal speed (actually at the speed of light in space-time)"

Unless you're moving wrt another frame of reference in which case your 'speed' through time as measured by an observer in that frame is reduced by a factor corresponding to your speed in the spacial dimensions, and so is normally varying constantly.

Your 'velocity' in the 4 dimensional space-time is a vector with constant magnitude of the speed of light, which may have components in each dimension, but never zero in time - unless you're a photon !

Answer 9

possibly. I think we would have to travel to the 4th dimension.

Answer 10

Yes in theory - and if the true story portrayed by the film The Philadelphia Experiment is to be believed - they have already done it !