Is it possible to travel backwards or forwards in time? if so how?

Question

or do you know of any research being done that will allow this in the near future?
thanks

Answer 1

It's very easy to travel forwards in time; without any effort, you are currently traveling forwards in time at the rate of exactly 1 second per second.

I know that's not what you meant, of course. Many scientists believe that time travel into the past is not possible, or that if it is possible it would require the use of relatively poorly understood principals. Time travel into the future, on the other hand, can be achieved by traveling near the speed of light, so that time dilation causes the traveler to experience less passage of time than the surrounding universe. Although it has never been done, this principal is very well understood by scientists.

Answer 2

You can travel forwards but never backwards. Check out the "Twin Paradox" all you need is a fast rocket ship. Take off at half the speed of light, travel for two years, stop, turn around and come back at half the speed of light. You will have aged four years but people on Earth will have aged many more. This is not an illusion or a trick, you will literally be many hundreds of years in the future. In fact there is no limit to how far you can travel into the future, all you need is a fast enough ship.

Answer 3

It's amazing to me that so many readers know so little about time. Time dilation due to high speed does not constitute a form of time travel, time slows only for the traveller, for everyone else they age at a normal rate and so doe's all around them, the traveler may be only a few years older while all others have aged hundred of years but he has not traveled into the future, when he returns to Earth it is still NOW. The future is not certain to form, we age as we always have and everything could end in two seconds. Steven Hawking has demonstrated that he knows nothing about the nature of time, he once stated that if the universe ceases to expand and begins to collapse in on itself time would reverse and we would all begin to get younger. Time is merely an interval between events, it is wedged tightly between the end of the last event and the beginning of the next, it is NOW.

Answer 4

Time travel to the past, although an entertaining concept in movies, is impossible, since history erases itself.

Nothing in the past is in existence exactly as it was. You can't go back to travel to the americas with Columbas, he is dead, the ships-gone, the crew- dead, etc.

The future , on the other hand, is an intriguing proposition, because of two factors: 1) it has not ccurred yet but,
2) by definition , it WILL occur

Depending how you define the future it is possible yes.
For example, travelling in space slows aging, conceivably people could live longer and thus, a man leaving earth at 25 years of age and returning in 100 years to find all his friends and loved ones dead , the 'world' he knew gone/changed unrecognizably and he is still alive due to a slowed aging process. You can't technicaly speed up time because time is in reality nothing more than the pace the earth makes a revolution around its axis, nothing more. So, 'time' as a contruct, ceases to exist, other than by measures its tied to.

In other words, sitting out in space, whether racing around the worlds atmosphere like superman, and standing still , has absolutely no impact on the RATE at which the earth turns.
If the earth's rotation was sped up, then that would alter the measure of time as well. Days would be shorter because sunrises and sunsets would happen quicker. The experience of time spent wouldn't change, just how we measure it.

There will never be a time machine which teleports you to the future instantaeously, because the future doesn't even exist yet.

So there is no place to go. If you want to travel 24 hours to the future ( as people on earth experience it). You will have to wait for the world to make one revolution , wheter you are on earth or in space, doesn't matter, the time elapsed waiting is the same...........

Answer 5

It is impossible to travel back in time, but it is possible to go to the future. If you travel the earths equator at the speed of light you will be in the future when you stop... in theory they actually tested that with super fast airplanes like Mach 1 or faster, and they had and atomic clock straped to one, and let it fly or a while at top speed then they had another of the same type of clock, and when the one plane landed they compared the two and there was a slight difference! Cool, no?

Answer 6

I believe it's possible, but you can only go back as far as the first point was created. Say you build a time machine today, June 24 2007, and a week from now you wanted to go back in the past. You would only be able to go back as far as June 24 2007 because you wouldn't have a time machine before that. There is a study going on, and a machine built but I haven't heard about any present work being done or about it in a while.

Answer 7

well it might not be possible in the physical aspect, but it might be possible in the mental aspect to travel through time, forwards or backwards, in either direction....it is generally believed that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light... but if anything could travel faster than the speed of light time travel might actually b possible...now, just for a second, try to visualise how the milky way galaxy looks like...how did u c it?? i m sure u wouldn't have gone in the universe to c it, but yet u did c it...this means u used ur brain waves for "seeing" it. the time u took in seeing it, was much lesser than the time it would hv taken light to travel this distance... the point is brain waves can travel faster than light....so if somehow we manage to find a way to convert objects into brain waves and then use these waves...who knows we might end up with a winner on our hands....

Answer 8

It is only possible to travel forward in time. And we all travel at the same rate unless we are moving at vastly different relative speeds. But even then, nobody gets to some point in the future before somebody else. It's just that their assessment of time would be different for them.
IOW, someone traveling at 1/3 the speed of light will age more slowly than someone left behind, but the one left behind won't see the future before the other one does.

Answer 9

Physically traveling backward and forward in time is possible by altering the velocity of light speed. At light speed (186,000 miles per second) time ceases, and goes neither forward or backward. Physical aging is not experienced at this speed. By increasing the speed above 186,000 miles per second, time begins to reverse itself--de aging the body (going backward) to the point of infinity and non-existence. Since earth and its beings do not move at the speed of light, we experience age, untill we die. Scientists at the present time have not an inkling as to how to increase our speed of existance to that enormous rate...and they will never stop searching to find a way, rest assured. Our earth rotates on its axis at about the speed of 30,000 miles per hour--this is how fast you are moving through space at this very moment! But it is a far cry from the speed of light, which is 186000 miles per second, so you can see our dilemma!

Answer 10

Stephen Hawking once suggested that the absence of tourists from the future constitutes an argument against the existence of time travel. I think that's true. You honestly think all future humans with this capability could restrain themselves? Of course that could be because we eradicated ourselves, so if time travel is possible we might be facing a bleak future.