Time Travel:  Is it possible?

[Dan, this is not a conspiracy!  What is it doing here?]

.......Uh, it is a machination, so I chose here.

Time Travel, not the type associated with travelling great velocities, or of going into some sort of hybernation, but genuine moving about through history, always caused me to wonder:

Since the Planet Earth orbits the sun at about 75,000 mph, and the sun itself orbits the center of our galaxy, and that galaxy is also busy travelling away from every other galaxy, if one was able to, say, ‘leap forward’ ten minutes, that would put him either in molten iron at the Earth’s core, or in the middle of the vaccuum of outer space, or someplace else unpredictable, like Michael Jackson’s master bedroom.

Time Travel would be pretty tricky!

Therefor, to heck with all the stuff about, ‘What if I travelled back in time, then killed my own grandfather?’  You’d never find the sucker!  He’d be billions of miles away!

Now, my answer to the grandfather paradox is that, were time travel possible, it would be as an undetectable observer, unable to inter-act with your surroundings in any way.  Moving your physical body through time would be pretty tough, compared to say, moving only your ability to observe, like a movie camera or something.

Of course, if one could go into the future just one year, and read the sports almanac, one could sure amass a fortune betting in Las Vegas, just like Biff in the Michael J. Fox trilogy.  Starting with just a twenty-dollar bet, doubling it every time, in just a few months, after 100 or so bets, whoopee!

But as Stephen Hawkins, the physicist, pointed out, if time travel is possible, how come no one from the future ever visits?

So there, Art Bell!

Dan the Timely Poster

Are we supposed to be aware of a time traveler visiting???? I would assume they would keep it a secrete…

We don’t see any because they keep popping into intersteller space since the Earth isn’t in the same location at each time-point.  Eventually, it’s hoped that either they’ll figure this small, but incredibly important, bit of information out.  Either that or they’ll kill themselves off trying.

But as Stephen Hawkins, the physicist, pointed out, if time travel is possible, how come no one from the future ever visits?

One physically possible time machine is a wormhole where one end has moved relativistically with repect to the other. If you create a wormhole, accelerate one end to close the speed of light and take it on a few trips round the nearest star, then return; one end of the wormhole might have aged several years (call this the old-end (OE)), the other several minutes (the young-end (YE)).

If you enter the OE, you will emerge from the YE in the future, if you jump in the YE you will emerge from the OE in the past.

Note, however, that it is not possible to travel into the past to a point before the wormhole was constructed (there would be no OE to emerge from) or to the future to a point after the wormhole collapses (similarly, no YE). Thus time-travel might be possible, but you would only be able to go back to sometime after time-machines had been invented, hence no modern-day time travellers.

Ironically for all this talk of time-travel, I have a strong feeling of deja-vu. I’m sure I’ve posted this hypothesis here before!

David B. - 06 June 2006 03:03 AM

Ironically for all this talk of time-travel, I have a strong feeling of deja-vu. I’m sure I’ve posted this hypothesis here before!

Ah yes, in “Man From the Future?”.