Is it true that for time machine to work, it must travel faster than light?

Answer 1

Both time travel and exceeding the speed of light are currently considered scientific impossibilities. Clumping them together is just one way of looking at the equations. Since times slows down the closer one gets to the speed of light, then perhaps going faster still would reverse the flow of time?
But equations are only a limited description of realitity, and what one makes of an equation outside of the limits of where it does apply is thus speculating without real scientific validity.

Answer 2

No.

Try not to get what you know about physics from superman movies or star trek!

Nothing can travel faster than light - no matter how 'super' it is.

Time machines, if possible would use relativity in fact - for example a worm hole where one end was moved at close to the speed of light - after a few centuries it would be a useful portal to a previous time - such time machines of course mean that it would be impossible to travel back further than when the time machine was first made. There's a possibilty we could use black holes but its all very speculative.

Read deutsch's the fabric of reality for a discussion of possibilities.

Answer 3

yes and no
depending on general relativity you must not be faster than the speed of light.
if You just move ... the faster, the higher the effect .. your time becomes different from the time of everything else.
Time runs slower for you, the faster you are. If you get in the range of the speed of light this effect becomes very intense.

But this is just one way to 'travel in time'

the other way, would say travel BACK in time.
astonishingly this seems to work for particles below the quantumn scale.
At this scale einsteins relativity does not seem to work the way it does in our macroscopic world.

a few people mentioned nothing can travel faster than light.
that is incorrect
light travels faster than C under specific circumstances.
for example does it propagate in Caesium >c

correct is: INFORMATION can not travel faster than c.. light can

Answer 4

in some cases sciencetist say that the speed of light is the universal speed limit for the universe(nothing can go faster)

so in this case no

Answer 5

it is currently impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. but i suppose you are thining of time travel as a thing where you hop in the machine and go faster than the speed of light for a few minutes then BAM>......you are a hundred years in the future. you will see flying cars.... walking robots....and all kinds of future technology. but that would be incorrect. that is only in the movies.....afterall anything is possible in the movies. if it were even possible to travel faster than the speed of light.....then the affects of traveling faster than the speed of light would only apply to the person who is traveling faster than the speed of light and not the whole world and all of the life cycles. water cycles or anything like that. it wouldn't speed up the science of the whole world. so if you could travel faster than the speed of light to try to travel to the future it wouldn't do it. you would stop the machine and be in the same time as when you left. the only amount of time travel you would have made is the diffrence in time from when you started to travel faster than the speed of light and when you stopped. that would be the diffrence in time on earth though. so if you started a stopwatch and left it in a room where the time will be the same and then you got in your machine and traveled faster then the speed of light and then you stopped the machine and got out and went to the room to look at the stopwatch and noticed it said 30 minutes. that 30 minutes will not even be considered time travel. it will just be the amount of time on earth that you were gone trying to travel to the future.

time travel is impossible. even if you could get something going faster than the speed of light. peoples bodies will not age any faster. the water cycle would not speed up. trees and flowers and plants would not grow faster. so technically all the things that happen over a given point of time will take the same amount of time to do wether you are going faster than the speed of light or not.

do you see where i am coming from. you cant jump in time to one hundred years in the future and just make 100 years in time pass in a matter of minutes and the things that happened over the course of that 100 years. to do that you would have to have a whole generation of people be born....age, live there whole lives and die.....in a matter of minutes...thats impossible. do you see my point. but why in general why you may be passing time the events that take place will still take the same length of time. trees wont grow faster. people wont age faster. all the cars on the earth that are driving will not drive faster to get those people to work. it goes against science.


what is time.......time is a measure from one point to another. i.e one sec, one min, one hour, ect. or the time it takes the earth to orbit around the sun. but there are things all through the universe that take place during this time. people being born. people running. people dying. trees growing. the water cycle. all the scieince there is. cars driving. time is an idea of humans. time is not real. it is made up. we can all make up our own unit of time. we all have an idea of what time is. we can count one mississippi 2 mississppi and we know that this is a second. we can make up our own unit of time though. like dropping a peice of metal from 10 ft in the air. from the moment it is dropped to the moment it hits the ground would be considered a unit of time. lets call this unit of time a metal drop. so now we are using this as a measure of time. "mom can you drive down to the store?". a boy asks.
sorry billy. i have to be at work in 50,000 metal drops. it takes 40,000 metal drops to get to work. and it will take 20,000 metal drops to take you to the store. so i would be late to work by 10,000 metal drops", the mom replies. you see. time is made up. time is a measure of how long it takes an event to do something. for earth time is measured by its location in orbit. but everything has its own unit of time. light has its own unit of time. each tree has its own unit of time. for light its unit of time is how fast it travels or what speed it travels at. what is speed. speed is distance over the time it takes to travel that distance. but lights speed is constant. a human body ages at a certain pace. you cannot speed up that pace by traveling faster then the speed of light. people can only run a certain speed. they cant go faster than that. unless if their muscles develop. it takes a tree a ceartain amount of time to grow. but it is possible to speed these things up. you can run faster by building up your leg muscles and endurance. you can make plants grow faster by engineering them to do so. but you cannot speed up a metal drop. so say a metal drop is a measure of time. the force of gravity is what pulls the metal to the ground. you cannot force gravity to the pull metal even faster to the ground. even if you could it would not speed up everything else. say you did get gravity to pull a peice of metal to the ground faster. it will still take a tree the same amount of time to grow. you cannot speed up everything by speeding up time. time is not something that can not be forced. do you see what i am trying to say. traveling on time by traveling faster than light will not make all the other times on earth go faster of fast foward. it will not take you a hundred years into the future or 10 minutes into the future for that matter.