Time Travel Possible?

Time Travel Possible? |  Closer To Truth | Is a PBS television series (as well as multiple books and a website). Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a neurologist, is the host.

On all of the Big Questions surrounding a triptych of broad topics - Cosmos, Consciousness, and God - he's been featured in one-on-one interviews and panel discussions with the crème of today's cosmologists, physicists, philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and others.

The trilogy covered a wide range of topics, including reality, space and time, mind and consciousness, aliens, theology, and so on. Here are some of my thoughts on one of the main themes discussed: Is time travel possible?

# Can you go through time? Actually, I am not certain that time exists. Change exists, and the rate of change we measure is time. Time, in my opinion, is merely a concept. Time is a mental construct that aids in the acceptance of change.

Some cosmologists claim that time was created at the Big Bang, as if time had substance and structure, but I dare them to construct time in front of their peers or perhaps a television audience, or at the very least produce a theoretical equation or two that would generate time. Meanwhile, consider the following three things.

Time Travel Possible?

To begin with, time travel is one of those fascinating aspects of physics. Playing the "what if" game, whether true or not, is interesting. At the very least, the concept prompts or requires one to consider the nature of reality.

Second, Einstein and others have proposed that time travel is a theoretical possibility, and I'm not in a position to refute their theories. I'll defer to those who are well-versed in the field.

But, most significantly, you can never truly be in the future or past; you can only be there in comparison to where and when you are now. In other words, you live in the where-ever and whenever in that where-ever or anywhere NOW, or in other words in the present, no matter how you slice and dice things.

Because you can only experience the NOW, which is the now, you cannot literally be in any future or past. Even if you travelled back an hour, you would still feel as if you were at the present moment. If you sleep for an hour and then get up, you are in the future in comparison to when you went to bed, yet you are still in the NOW.

# Can you go through time? Yes and no are the answers.

Yes, we can travel into the future at one second per second; whether we like it or not, we do it anyhow. Yes, we can travel into the future more quickly by sleeping or otherwise incapacitating our sense of consciousness, our awareness of rate of change (which is what time actually is or measures).

You get drunk and pass out, and then you wake up 12 hours later. Yes, humans can go into the future, as illustrated by Einstein's twin 'paradox,' in which one twin travels outward bound at a very fast velocity, pauses, and returns to home base, while the other twin stays at home.

Time Travel Possible?

The travelling twin discovers that their remain at home sibling is much older upon their reunion, indicating that the travelling twin has travelled further into the future than would otherwise be the case.

Yes, according to the apparent theoretical features that wormholes or black holes can have, you can travel back in time. Because of all those awful paradoxes, you can't travel back in time.

I like the variant on the grandfather paradox in which you travel back in time one hour and kill yourself. That's an interesting way to commit suicide! Another paradox I enjoy is going back in time to having Shakespeare sign your copy of "Hamlet." Shakespeare isn't at home, but the maid says that when he returns, he'll sign your book.

Unfortunately, your timing is off, and Shakespeare hasn't yet written "Hamlet," so when he receives your copy from his maid to autograph, he reads it, and when you return to Shakespeare's home and receive your now autographed copy, you return home to your own time, Shakespeare writes "Hamlet."

The conundrum is where did "Hamlet" originate from, given that Shakespeare only penned it after seeing your manuscript. No, you can't travel back in time because if you could, you'd have hordes of time-travelling tourists who travelled back in time to see some significant historical event.

Custer's Last Stand, the Battle of the Alamo, the sinking of the RMS Titanic, or any of thousands of other historical events have never been chronicled by crowds of photo-taking visitors.

Yes, time travel is possible, but only in a parallel reality. There is no paradox if you shoot yourself but it is another you in another universe.

You travel back in time to have Shakespeare sign your copy of "Hamlet," but in that parallel reality, Shakespeare may now compose "Hamlet" based on your copy, and there is no paradox. However, one topic that interests me is if you are truly in the future or the past whether you end yourself in the future or the past.

No, the only moment you can exist in is the present, which is right now. It may be a different era from what you are used to, yet you only exist in the NOW wherever and whenever you are.

# Can you go through time? It's possible that time travel has already been documented at the quantum level, albeit this is up to interpretation. Before I get into the details, I should point out that time is invariant when it comes to physics' rules, principles, and relationships.

Physics operations are invariant in time, whether time is flowing forward or backward as we ordinarily experience it (future to past). In an universe where time ran backwards, gravity, for example, would behave normally.

Time Travel Possible?

There are several operations that could be filmed that would be undetectable if played backwards. The coming together, collision, rebounding, or separation of two billiard balls spring to mind, as do tree branches waving in the wind.

Now that we've proven that physics doesn't care which way time flows, there will be no breaches in the laws, principles, and relationships of physics from the future to the past, we can go on to the delayed double slit experiment.

In a standard double slit experiment, an electron gun shoots one electron particle at a time at two side-by-side slits, allowing one electron to complete its journey before the next one is fired. When one of the slits is open, electrons travel through it one at a time to a detection screen behind the slits.

After each electron particle passes through the single open slit, the detector screen is hit in approximately the same area every time. That's all there is to it. If both slits are open, the electron morphs back into a particle, passes through both slits (as only a wave can), and strikes the detection screen.

The distinction is that when enough electrons have been discharged and passed or waved through the double slits, the hits on the detector screen are not concentrated in one or two areas, but rather are dispersed throughout the detector screen in a characteristic wave interference pattern. That's the standard experiment.

The delayed double slit experiment is a variation on the topic. With both slits wide open, electrons are blasted one at a time. After enough electrons have been fired, an all-over-the-place classic wave interference pattern should emerge on the standard detector screen.

However, in addition to the conventional detection screen, there are two additional detectors positioned behind it, each in an exact line of sight with one of the two slits. The electron has been launched. It transforms into a wave that passes through both slits before reverting to a particle.

However, before the electron can strike the detector screen, which has already gone through both slits, the detector screen is removed, revealing the other two line-of-sight detectors behind it. Now, it's apparently too late to change the electron's mind about where it'll hit once it's passed through the two slits.

The two line-of-sight detectors aligned with the two slits should detect only a few. Unfortunately, one of the line-of-sight detectors will detect each and every particle.

It appears that the electron can alter its mind after passing through both slits and appear to have passed through only one of them. One theory is that after passing through both slits, the electron realised the gig was up, went back in time, retraced its steps, and passed through one or the other.

Time Travel Possible?

The double slit experiment, as highlighted by the late Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, goes to the heart of quantum weirdness. This is significant since it was Richard Feynman who proposed that a positron (an anti-electron) was simply an ordinary electron travelling backwards in time.

# Can you go through time? I'd like to make a few more remarks about the concept of time travel.

First, there's Stephen Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture, which claims that there's some yet-to-be-discovered physical law that forbids time travel to the past, making the universe a secure haven for historians to flaunt their wares.

Second, it is believed that you can only travel back in time to the date your time travel 'device,' whether it is a wormhole or some other gizmo, was built. So even if a genius invents a time-travelling 'technology' in 2014, he won't be able to travel back in time.

However, he can travel back to 2014 in 2015, and to any point between 2114 and 2014 in 2114. The comparison is that you cannot travel through a tunnel before it was constructed. As a result, we have yet to see human time travellers because no human time travel 'technology' has been built.

The issue is that it does not prevent ET from visiting someone who may have built a time-travelling 'technology' millions of years ago. Remember those pesky UFOs? They don't tend to cluster around key terrestrial historical events, so perhaps ET isn't interested in our past and is simply passing by on their way to their future.

Finally, your time-travelling 'gadget' is most likely stuck at celestial coordinates. Because everything in the cosmos is in motion, when you re-emerge into it after going on a time travel voyage, the rest of the cosmos will have migrated to different celestial coordinates.

Time Travel Possible?

You won't wind up in London if you start in London and travel down or up the time travel route. Finally, the concept of you, the future, the past, or your past is solely relative to any fixed point you choose.

If you choose your date of birth as that fixed point, you are clearly in the future in relation to that date. You are neither in the future nor in the past relative to the NOW if you choose the concept of an ever-continuing NOW, the present, as a fixed point.

That isn't to say you can't remember what happened before your NOW (albeit the past is more abstract in general) or make plans for the future after your NOW (Although you have no control over the future in general).

# Can you go through time? Another way to travel through time, or at least the illusion of time travel, is to go to the movies. There are numerous films and television episodes about time travel, many of which are legendary.

But that's not the media I'm interested in here. Time travel can be programmed into a computer simulation.

You can create a video game in which the protagonists move backwards (or forwards) through time, or a software programme that loops back to the start. Now the question is: Could we be virtual beings or characters in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe? If this is the case, the software programmes that operate our virtual show may allow for time travel, although virtual time travel that appears to us to be extremely real. Where does our sensation of déjà vu come from, exactly?

# Can you go through time? There is one more type of fictitious 'time travel' to the future that can be disproven. Staying alive is perhaps the only way to know what the future holds without the advantage of any mythical 'technology' that can take you there faster than one second each second. That's it once you've kicked the bucket. Your second-by-second voyage into the future has come to an end.

It's a shame if the useless stock you own skyrockets to spectacular levels within a week of your death, or that you'd really like to know if ET exists, but the revelation comes a few days too late for you.

Of course, some argue that an afterlife will allow you to keep up with future events from a heavenly vantage point high in the sky, but there are also people who claim to have lived previous lives or to have been in previous incarnations.

As a result, you can continue your journey to discover what the future holds by reincarnating into another body (and again and again). However, there is one major issue with remembering' claimed prior lives. Your mother's egg cell is unable to recall your previous life. Your father's sperm cell is incapable of remembering your previous life.

As a result, those born at conception are incapable of remembering previous incarnations. So, where did you get your memories of previous lives? Could I argue that it was internally formed out of wishful thinking, that believing you lived in the past will lead to believing you will exist again in the future, as a fictitious afterlife and fictitious 'time travel' that brings you comfort?

Regardless, that concept is a far-fetched 'time travel' methodology that may be rejected, despite the fact that many people claim to have 'time travelled' to their infinite future using this method.

Is Time Travel Possible, According to Theory?

Is time travel a reality? The 'Time Travel paradox,' which goes somewhat like this, is the issue with time travel. Let's say someone travels back in time before birth and breaks a link in the time chain that led to their birth.

"What if you killed your own grandmother before her first child was born?" has been used to explore this issue. (I'm not sure why the time travel paradox is never addressed in terms of killing one's own mother, but it isn't.)

You would not be born if you killed your grandmother. You couldn't travel into the past if you hadn't been born, so you wouldn't kill your grandma. You would be born if you did not travel back in time to kill your grandmother, forcing you to journey back in time to kill your grandmother again...with me so far?

Time travel appears to be possible according to the principles of physics. Many scientists feel that some type of constraint would be required to make time travel impossible. Time travel, according to Albert Einstein, was a distinct possibility.

His theory was that when we get closer to travelling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), time appears to slow down for us in comparison to someone who was not moving. He coined the term "time dilation" to describe the slowing of time caused by motion.

The "twin paradox" was an example Einstein came up with to demonstrate the implications of time dilation. There are two twins, according to the contradiction. One twin travels at the speed of light to a distant destination, while the other twin remains on Earth.

Time slowed for the twin who travelled, while time remained constant for the twin who remained on Earth. The twins were no longer the same age when they returned. The time dilation and twin paradox really strengthen the hypothesis of future time travel.

Time Travel Possible?

In 1971, the twin paradox idea was confirmed in an experiment. Two atomic clocks were utilised in this time experiment, both of which started at the same moment. One atomic clock was mounted on a plane that flew around the world at 600 mph, while the other remained stationary. The clock that had gone around the world was a few billionths of a second behind when the jet landed.

So, what about travelling back in time? The fundamental properties of quantum theory really allow for time travel into the past, and the paradoxes generated by Einstein's theory of relativity's equations never come into play.

According to the idea, quantum objects break their existence into several component waves, each of which travels through space-time in its own way. Nothing in quantum theory prevents waves from travelling backwards in time, hence time travel is possible.

If you used quantum mechanics to travel back in time, you would only see events that were consistent with the world you left behind.

To say the least, time travel is an intriguing theory. This is my final thought on time travel. If someone knocks on your home one day and claims to be a distant cousin, you might want to think twice about closing the door.