Is there such thing as time travel?

Question

Scientists have said if they could make a powerful enough telescope they could see the beginning, the dawn of creation. So I guess it has to do with the ability of being able to surpass the speed of light, as time travels at the speed of light.

Example: The sun we look at is really the sun as it was 8 minutes ago because it is so far away....93,000,000 mi. It's light travels at 86,000 mi per sec.

Many of the stars we see at night don't even exist anymore. They burned up long ago. So we are actually looking at history. Does anyone get my point? If you don't, I'm sure it seems ridiculous. I'd like to see what you have to say.

Answer 1

Theoretically, time travel is possible. But current technology does not permit it. An interesting article appeared in Popular Science a while ago on time travel physics (see link). You're right about the stars - in that we're not looking at them in real time. In a similar vein, light from the earth reaches outward into space. An alien civilisation looking at us from far away through a telescope could theoretically view our past history. But light also weakens the further it gets away from its source, so to really look way back into our past, we'd need a really powerful instrument to detect such light patterns.

Answer 2

Light speed is actually 186,000 miles a second. But just because it's finite speed enables you to see into the past doesn't neccesarily mean time travel is real. There IS the phenomenon of "Time Dilation" that relativity predicted (and is now proven), where the closer an object gets to light speed, the slower it experiences the passage of time relative to a slower moving object...but while that can make one move "faster into the future", you could never travel backward in time that way.
As of yet, the most promising idea is that of synthetic wormholes in ther fabric of spacetime, creating a shortcut to other places in space and time...but we are a long way off from proving whether or not that can be done.

Answer 3

Interesting question in metaphysics----We can now see almost back to the big bang, however the big bang itself will be forever beyond our view. The reason is that in the big bang, EVERYTHING was created--------matter, energy, space, time.....
Your observation about the fact we are "looking back into the past" is not novel, but a lot of people aren't willing to follow the line of reasoning involved. Nudge,nudge, wink. It means we're smarter than they are.

Since light travels at, what else, the speed of light, and since light energy only diminishes as the square of the distance, this means we do look far into the past when we look out into space, and the further we look, we more "ago" we look. However, detecting light that is,say, 10 billion years old is not the same thing as decoding the information it carries. Observing the Sun tells us that it existed 8 minutes ago. Observing a galaxy at, say, 65,000,000 light years distance tells us that it existed when dinosaurs roamed. We cannot transport ourselves either to the sun of 8 minutes ago or to the galaxy of 65 million years ago. Time travel in that sense is, sadly , impossible.

Yet I submit that time travel IS POSSIBLE AND DOES EXIST TODAY!!! Right now, if you are like me, you've spent approx. 35 seconds reading my answer. You have traveled 35 seconds into the future, and you are no longer the same person you were when you began. Cells have died, cells have been born, atoms of radioactive elements in your body have broken down, and you can't go back to who you were before. So---------Time travel exists, and it's ONE WAY.

Answer 4

I read the first part of your question and decided to answer straight away; bear with me because I'll be with the latter part in just a second. What I am going to do for you at the moment, however, is clarify what you mean when you stated that man is able to "surpass the speed of light" in order to "travel back throughout time."

I suppose that if a particle were able to travel faster than the speed of light, that because the rate at which it travels is inversely proportional to the amount of time that relatively passes during its travel, it's safe to conclude that AT the speed of light, there is no passage of time (relative to an observer in an outside reference frame), and PAST the speed of light, one may go "backward" in time, that is, someone observing one traveling beyond the speed of light would record an actual backwards ticking of time, but you've got something fundamentally wrong here. By "looking into the past" using a telescope to see the origins of the universe, man is not overcoming the speed of light--rather, the speed of light is better inhibiting him to view what's actually there.

You should understand that the further one looks into the distance, the longer the light radiating through space from an object would take to reach the observer's eye, and thus, a yielding natural passage of time would still be in occurrence for said object all the while such that by the time the light does reach the observer's eye, at that SAME moment, the ACTUAL object in that SAME instant of time has changed its state of being. Its state is never truly known through direct observation because the speed at which light took to travel is what one sees, and the light which would tell us the IMMEDIATE state of the object is incapable of traveling instantaneously.

Now, for the second half: "Is there such thing as time travel?" In accordance with the laws of physics as we know them today, no, there is no possible way for one to travel "backwards" in time. It's so easy to understand on a fundamental level what's most conspicuously meant by "traveling back in time," but what would it REALLY mean in a world of concrete 4 dimensional boredom?

Traveling back in time directly corresponds to the notion that time is reverseable, that mathematically, the one dimensional concept of time may be thought of as a line rather than a vector (or a ray). To answer your question, the only thing one must do is solve to find whether the equation for time is either a ray or a line which travels in both directions, consisting of all the components any line has:

(1) an infinite number of points (which in this case could be broken into unites of time--seconds for instance),
(2) all of those points yielding the same distance from another line parallel to it.

One may think that the possibility of time travel is nonexistent, for during the Big Bang, there also lay the beginning of not only matter, but time itself---the fourth dimension--along with the other 3 of "up/down," "backward/forward," and "left/right."

Answer 5

I think you can see light that still exists but whose source no longer exists.

But no to your physical body travelling through time. (though if you travel away from the earth and back again you will be slightly younger. if you were able to travel at the speed of light away from the earth and back you would be a lot younger. you would technically have travelled to the future, but that is still not really possible).


And WHY is someone quoting the Bible in the SCIENCE section????

Answer 6

Theres one easy and definitive answer to this question, no. Simply because time is the one irreversible thing on this planet. We can not see into the future. The reason we see the stars that burned up is because then light takes so long to reach our planet. That is completely different from looking into the past.

Answer 7

We're only looking back in time when we look deep into the sky because of the finite speed of light. We're not traveling in time. If you were 10 feet from me, I would be seeing you the way you looked about 13 nanoseconds ago. It doesn't mean I've traveled into the past.

Answer 8

Kinda like my bathroom light. I turn on the switch and in a few seconds I have light.

Answer 9

Indeed! there is but we as human beings will never hv the ability to do that, cuz light doesn't hv a mass! bcuz of that light travels very fast! If, and only if you could travel or move faster than light, then time travel is possible! one thing for sure, we're living in a universe where the theory of relativity, infinity, and analogy counts.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Answer 10

There is no such thing as time travel. I don't believe there will ever be unless it is done by God.