Is time travel really possible?

Question

How could it be done?

Answer 1

Well.... I cannot explain to you how it is done. Some secrets are best kept secret or something like that.

I just answered this question two days from now (in your future) and you gave me the best answer. Now, I have come back to thank you (in my past) for something that you have not yet done (your future). (Mind boggling isn't it?)

I should WARN YOU... that if you change my past (your future) it will cause a tear in the time-space continuum and doom as all to hell.

Answer 2

Some theories, most notably special and general relativity, suggest that suitable geometries of spacetime, or certain types of motion in space, may allow time travel into the past and future if these geometries or motions are possible. Concepts that aid such understanding include the closed timelike curve.

Many in the scientific community believe that time travel is highly unlikely. This belief is largely due to Occam's Razor. Any theory which would allow time travel would require that issues of causality be resolved. What if one were to go back in time and kill one's own grandfather? Also, in the absence of any experimental evidence that time travel exists, it is theoretically simpler to assume that it does not happen. Indeed, Stephen Hawking once suggested that the absence of tourists from the future constitutes a strong argument against the existence of time travel—a variant of the Fermi paradox, with time travelers instead of alien visitors. However, assuming that time travel cannot happen is also interesting to physicists because it opens up the question of why and what physical laws exist to prevent time travel from occurring.

Answer 3

There are lots of possible answers, and as you've read, until it happens (or doesn't) no one can answer with any certainty. However;
Fact--we cannot travel to the Future from now, as it has not happened.
IF time travel to the past is possible, you will not see evidence of it, as any visit to the past will alter the future of that past, and therefore, you and I will never know it was altered. It will have altered for the person traveling into the past, but that person will never come back to their current future, as they altered their own past, and therefore, anyone who knew them, will never know they left, and the person then would be stuck in the past as their future has not been created.

People have cited the fact that a person traveling faster than sound in a plane, have had a watch that when they left, matched the time of someone on the ground, but then had it read faster once they returned, but this only proves that time is relative, whihc is what Einstein's work proved. What happend to me didn't necessarily happen to you.

Answer 4

According to M-Theory, time does not exist but is only a term we use to describe more complex things. I do not believe time travel will be possible due to inherant logical inconsistencies and problems that would occur. Also, should time travel be invented in the future to return to the past, we would already be seeing people here right now from the future. It is simply incoherant to imagine time travel to the past ever becoming real. Now, in terms of time travel to the future, it wouldn't really be time travel so much as slowing the effects of time, certain dealings with relativity suggest that increasing to near light speeds slows the relativistic effect of time on the individual which would allow him or her to slow down to normal speeds and have skipped thousands of years, theoretically speaking of course.

Answer 5

The current theories we use to deal with space, i.e. General Relativity for one, do not imply that time travel is impossible.

Now how do we build a time machine, I don't know.

What seems certain is that to make one work, one would need to be able to generate, and concentrate, amounts of energy that are of the order of magnitude of more than mankind's total energy consumption for a few years. Pretty tough.

There would also be small practical limitations, i mean compared to where our science is today: for example the machine would need to be able to store exact information about the particles constituting your body, in order to be able to reconstruct you after the trip. Again that's way beyond the cumulative computing power of all computers on earth today.

Also, assuming you'd want to visit the earth in a distant future, or past, the time machine would need to be able to instantly compute where the planet will be / was (and remember, everything moves in the universe, so again there would be some pretty complex calculations, not to mention that you'd need the initial information about the position of billion of stars), and be able to take you there.

So, not impossible maybe. But way beyond mankind's current technological abilities, certainly.

Answer 6

The nearest star is 4.2 light years away,so if there was a planet in orbit around that star that would support life that we could visit and get there in 2.1 years we could watch ourselves at the midway point between earth and the new planet.Thus be in 2 places at the same time. Or look in the past and see what we did.Now if we could get back to earth in 2.1 years we would have made the whole round trip in 4.2 years .So by the time we got there we would be home again.To wierd.

Answer 7

Well, I don't remember precisely atm because my head is exploding, but a while ago someone was experimenting with making a machine in which you could travel as far back in time as the machine had been on, of course thinkin about it that sound like a load of hog manure but, and this is where my generic answer to any "is _________ possible?" question comes in handy, until you can prove it's not possible, it is.

Answer 8

i think time travel to the past is impossible, just like others mentioned, we would have seen people from the future visiting us.

but i think time travel to the future is still possible, guaranteed tha t we reach speeds higher than the speed of light. i know it's impossible now, but science develops, who knows? maybe we find things that travel faster than the speed of light.

if what i think is right, this leads to another question. if we can travel to the future, we should have the same ability to travel to the past, why wouldn't this be possible?? i don't know :)

Answer 9

I'm not sure how it can be done, but according to quantum physics there are layers of time. The ghosting affect where we see people from the past is where these layers touch from time to time. Plus there are more than one of everything. Wow hard to believe. There are actually parts of atoms that blink in an out of existence.

Answer 10

Being a student of history, I am fascinated by the idea of time travel. If I had three wishes, a time machine would be one of them. Have you ever heard of the Phiadelphia Experiment? Thats about as close as I think anybody ever came.