Is time travel in fact a real possibility?

Question

I've read about it and it sounds convincing enough that it could be accomplished, what does everyone think?

Answer 1

With certain breakthroughs in science, time travel is closer than you think. The ability to slow down a light particle, stop it in it's tracks, then let it go has already been done. Research being done in regards to time travel are facinating. The next few years are going to be interesting.

Answer 2

maybe..it would be possible..in the near future..?

Answer 3

Technically it can be accomplished...by traveling faster than the speed of light in its own frame of reference. As far as practicality goes, no comment. Of course, when you think about it, traveling faster than the speed of light would be wonderful anti-aging treatment as well.

Answer 4

Traveling to the past would require:

    * Space traveling faster than the speed of light

    * The use of cosmic strings and black holes

    * Wormholes and Alcubierre 'warp' drive

Time "travel into the future" is theoretically allowed using the following methods:

    * Using time dilation under the Theory of Special Relativity, for instance:

          o Traveling at almost the speed of light to a distant star, then slowing down, turning around, and traveling at almost the speed of light back to Earth[41] (see the Twin paradox)

    * Using time dilation under the Theory of General Relativity, for instance:

          o Residing inside of a hollow, high-mass object;

          o Residing just outside of the event horizon of a black hole, or on the surface of a larger-than-earth mass object.

Answer 5

Many people are relatively narrow-minded on this subject, including myself. Many people think of time traveling as actually going forward or backward in time. I think that you could (in a sense) time travel just by entering parallel dimension by breaking a vibration of a m-string.

Answer 6

Yes it is. The key is energy and a lot of energy.

Answer 7

On a practical level, we can all move one day into the future every 24 hours.  Also, we see into the distant past every time we look at the night sky; the light from distant stars that we see with the naked eye is decades, sometimes even centuries old (took that long to get here), and with our most powerful telescopes we can see literally billions of years into the past.  That's about it for time travel.

IF you found a way to safely accelerate to nearly the speed of light, you could jump farther into the future (time would pass more slowly for you than for the rest of us while you were at such high speed), but since the fastest any human has traveled - EVER - is about 18,000 miles per hour (5 miles per second), and the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, that's probably not going to happen.

At the extreme end of the scale, there is some evidence to suggest that we may one day find or create "wormholes" to other points in space/time, but that's deep into Star Trek territory and utterly beyond our capabilities, right along with teleportation and immortality.

Answer 8

If time travel were possible, and I don't think it is, one theory says you can only go back to the time when it was first discovered how.

One of the big factors no one seems to consider is if you were able to travel back into your own time-line, you can travel to any point in time, including 1 Planck time (10e-43 seconds). What would happen then? There would be 2 of you occupying the same space at the same time. Not a pretty site when your molecules and atoms become entangled.

For time travel to work would necessitate the instantaneous transfer of the eigenstates of all the quantum elements to the selected time-line To do otherwise, would cause one's matter be smeared out between time-lines.

Now, for alternative time lines:

Some physicists believe time-travel between alternative time-lines is theoretically possible in Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, but would require the energy of a star.

If you ascribe to the multiple-worlds interpretation, you would not travel back into your own past, but into the past of an alternate space-time continuum. How you would get back is any-body's guess.

In any case, there is one issue I don't see how you can avoid. Take the idea of using a wormhole. Say you stand at the threshold of the wormhole then advance 0.5 cm. Part of your body is in st1 (space-time region), and the rest in st2. Where are you, and when?

There are just to many variables to factor in to make it feasible. Of course, I could be wrong.

Answer 9

Honestly....I really really really don't think so!

Answer 10

think about this:  if you are, say, 30 years old now and you could time travel back to 20 years ago, what happened to 30 year old you?  did all that you've experienced cease to exist?  if you have a child and go back, does that child cease to exist?  i wish time travel were possible, but i don't think it is.