Is time travel actually feasible? Will it ever be possible?

Question

If it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light, could one actually go backwards in time?

Answer 1

Time travel into the future is feasible.  But it's likely you can't go back, at least not back in your "own" universe.

Answer 2

I don't think so.

Answer 3

Yes, I think it is. With all the other impossible things that have already been done. Whose to say it can't?

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Answer 4

As far as our modern day understanding of physics go's, no it is not possible.  According to Einstein, you cannot go faster than the speed of light.  But if you were in a subspace wormhole, or possibly entering a black hole then you may be able to achieve a speed faster than light.  Think of it as if you are on a conveyor belt.  Walking beside it you are slow.  Walking on it you are at a running speed yet you are only walking.  Same principle.

Answer 5

Apart from the Einstein idea of the "twins paradox" travelling at  the speed of light for an appreciable length of time there is absolutely no chance of going backwards or forwards in time now or ever - if it were then there would evidence of it around us now .

Answer 6

Whilst not forbidden mathematically (i.e. the equations work equally well if time were reversed), the requirements of cause and effect probably prevent it.  If they didn't, you would have the odd situation of being able to receive a message before it was sent, clearly a paradox.  All that applies to travel into the past.  As to travel into the future,  we all do it, all of the time, at the rate of 60 minutes per hour.

Answer 7

I would like to reference the mother/son conundrum that has plagued theorists for years on the topic of time travel.

If a son were able to travel back in time and kill his mother, then how would he have been born in the first place.  If he was not born, he would have not have been able to kill his mother.

You may find your own solution to this problem, maybe assuming there are alternate time-lines, or that time now is different from time then in some way.

But I propose that time is only a vast series of reactions in which we play a part.  Every part of the reaction can go either forwards or backwards (as in any reaction) and that given enough power the reaction may reverse to a more or less complex state.

The same problem again is that we ourselves are a part of that process and that to reverse all is to also reverse ourselves.

If there was any way to isolate ourselves, (let's say in space).

Then we become merely spectators and the earth the system in which to reverse.  If that is the case, then technically time travel in some way could be achievable.  At least it seems that way to me.

Answer 8

Don't tell anyone but I am from the year 7228 ------ here on vacation.

Answer 9

It seems doubtful that time travel will ever be possible in our own universe. If it were possible according to our laws of physics, we shouldn't exist in the first place.

If we could go faster than light, then yes the mathematics dictate that we would experience time going backwards. However, this would not be a good way to travel back in time because by the time you'd slowed back down to a stop, the time change would have been corrected for anyway. Besides, no one has yet found a way to move any information faster than the speed of light, so this method doesn't seem to be feasible in the first place. In the meantime, any feasible system of moving from place to place at an apparent speed faster than light would probably not be of such a nature that it would cause time to go backwards, but would instead utilize folding space, wormholes, quantum effects or other phenomena of that kind which probably wouldn't make time go in any abnormal direction.