Did Einstein ever say what he'd feel about traveling BACK in time?

Question

cuz someone told me he said something like it would be like that movie "butterfly effect" where no matter your intention, something worse would happen...

Answer 1

I do not recall seeing anything that Einstein ever said about time travel - forward or backward. He was totally immersed in his work for most of his life, and when he was asked to make some profound statement to a reporter, he usually either left him in the dust or said something sort of off-hand to placate him - for example, he was once asked about flying saucers - a topic totally unrelated to anything he had ever accomplished except in the imagination of the asker. His answer was:

"These people have seen something. What it is I do not know and I am not curious to know."

Although time travel is a very distant cousin to his work on relativity (i.e. the twin paradox) I doubt if he ever gave it a moment's thought. He was interested in things that he could understand and make sense of. He didn't like science fiction.


added comment: - He did say this: "For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Answer 2

Einstein's theory of special relativity was all about time travel, but only about traveling to the future at different rates. No laws of physics currently say anything about traveling backward in time.

Einstein was certainly a big thinker, but he was not one for idle speculation. His famous quote about the implications of quantum physics was that "God does not play dice with the universe."

Whether or not it will ever be possible, I don't think Einstein ever said anything about traveling backwards in time.

Answer 3

He did not say anything because physically time travel is not possible.

One should not confuse the time considerations in general and special relativity with the time we use in the usual sense.

One can simply state that, physically time does not exist, only does motion. You develop your sense of time or create a time unit showing a moving object or a repeating event as your reference. If nothing moved at all, none of us would develop a concept of time.

So time does not exist and thus time travel. None of actual Phd titled physicists claimed that time travel is possible.