Is Time Travel Possible and What Are Its Implications?

[mlw]

Hello everyone,
I am new to this forum and would greatly appreciate your expertise in answering (or attempting to) a few questions for me. I don't care if you focus on one or all of them, but any answers are appreciated! These are about time travel, with a focus on traveling BACK in time...

1. Will time travel ever be possible?
2. If so, how soon? Also, how far back would we be able to travel?
3. Would our bodies be able to survive time travel?
4. Would time travellers be able to communicate with other humans, or would they be on a separate plane of time/dimension?
5. Is it possible that spaceship sitings are time travel machines from the future?

Also, if anyone can answer #4 (at least in theory), I'd be grateful.

 

[PhY]

Hello everyone,
I am new to this forum and would greatly appreciate your expertise in answering (or attempting to) a few questions for me. I don't care if you focus on one or all of them, but any answers are appreciated! These are about time travel, with a focus on traveling BACK in time...

1. Will time travel ever be possible?
2. If so, how soon? Also, how far back would we be able to travel?
3. Would our bodies be able to survive time travel?
4. Would time travellers be able to communicate with other humans, or would they be on a separate plane of time/dimension?
5. Is it possible that spaceship sitings are time travel machines from the future?

Also, if anyone can answer #4 (at least in theory), I'd be grateful.

1. Hopefully not (too much power corrupts). Imagine Neo-Nazi traveling back through time & warning Hitler not to attack Russia.
5. Spaceship Sightings are Fake and no, Humans tend the screw up and make mistakes and we would know about it.

 

[pervect]

1) It is currently unknown if time travel is theoretically possible within the framework of General Relativity. This is currently an active research topic.

2) and 3) can't be answered at all given that we don't have the theoretical issues fully resolved. (This is like asking someone who is trying to determine if something is even possible in principle "When is the product based on this idea going to ship to customers?).

4) cannot be given a definite answer, but it seems highly unlikely.

If the OP is primarily interested in 5), the best forum would be 'skepticism/debunking', and I'll move the thread there if the OP requests it. However, there will tend to be more information of UFO's and not so much information on time travel there, I think.

 

[mlw]

I was also wondering how certain most physicists are that wormholes do exist.

I'm assuming if time travel were ever possible, and someone did visit this century, we of course wouln't know about it. I would think by that time the human race would have evolved at least enough to know that that would have an effect on their own place in time. If they were to announce, "Hey, we're from the future!" it would only serve to endanger their own lives.

My main concern is the question as to whether time has already been altered (in other words, has any living creature already traveled back in time?). To me, the only way to be sure is to assume that time travel (no matter how far back) will one day (no matter how far in the future) be possible. Also, is it true that the future has already occurred? I assume this would mean that the past, present, and future are occurring simultaneously (correct me if I'm wrong)?

 

[mlw]

My main concern is whether time travelers would be on a separate plane or dimension of time if traveling back. Thanks!

 

[vsandel]

I'm not a physicist but I will add my two cents worth. Time is nothing but change. In a
static universe (without change) there would be no such thing as time. We measure time by comparing the rate of change of one process to another.

As for time travel, to go back in time every change would have to be reversed. Since changes in the positive direction follow the principles of thermodynamics, going from high energy to low energy and from order to disorder, where would the energy come from to reverse all the changes? To go back in time every change in the whole universe would have to be reversed. It would take an all powerful God could accomplish that. Time travel sounds pretty far fetched to me.

There are some theories of how the universe works that would allow time travel, the one which specifically comes to mind is the proposal that there is no change in the universe, motion is an illusion. The author (whose name I don't remember) states that the universe is controlled by a gigantic wave function that describes the position of every particle in the universe, and the "now" runs through this wave function taking the most probable course. In this view of the universe it is only the "now" that moves.

There would still be the problem of energy. The most probable course would still follow the laws of thermodynamics, so for the "now" to retreat from one spot in the wave function to an earlier state, it would still take energy to reduce the entropy to the earlier state.

 

[mlw]

If time is an illusion and is a function of distance, and is relative, why would everything in the universe need to be revsered for one time traveller?

 

[russ_watters]

Where do you get the idea that time is an illusion? It most certainly is not.

 

[Ricardo19]

If time is an illusion and is a function of distance, and is relative, why would everything in the universe need to be revsered for one time traveller?

time is not an illusion einstein said that gravity is described as the wraping of space and time near an object with mass the more gravity the more wraping of space and time
so you could say that that gravity and time are pretty much related

 

[peter0302]

Time, space, energy, velocity, mass, force, wave function, etc...

All these concepts are variables in equations. You can take one of several subsets of these and call them "independent" or "real" and the rest will be "dependent" on that subset, or "illusions." So which ones are "real" and which ones are "illusions?" Who's to say? Maybe none are real...

 

[russ_watters]

No. You are misusing those words. Just because something is variable or relative does not mean it is not real.

 

[Hernik]

My main concern is whether time travelers would be on a separate plane or dimension of time if traveling back. Thanks!

I don't understand what you mean... The concept of traveling back in time is to travel to a time that has already been in the timetravelers life (or before that). So why should it be another dimension of time (Whatever that is..) or a separate plane? Or are you asking whether one will be in the past "at the same time" as the dear beloved ones left i the "now" - like there being two sets of time or something?

If that's the case: The discriptions of time machines which I've read about are dealing with the same spacetime as the one we are in now - just different places at a different time.

These time travel machines were based on theories on black holes or tunnels between different parts of space/time. They needed so enormeous amounts of energy in order to create the right circumstances that it is unlikely it'll ever work and also unlikely anybody will be able to experiment with such a construction in our lifetime.

 

[peter0302]

No. You are misusing those words. Just because something is variable or relative does not mean it is not real.

Ok,so what's your definition, Morpheus? :)

 

[TomMac321]

Ok if you could go back in time I don’t think you could change anything think about it if you wanted to change something so bad that you went back in time to do then in the future it would be fixed and you wouldn’t have to go back in fix it there for ether not altering the future of undoing existence as we know it

 

[TomMac321]

time

Ok if you could go back in time I don’t think you could change anything think about it if you wanted to change something so bad that you went back in time to do then in the future it would be fixed and you wouldn’t have to go back in fix it there for ether not altering the future of undoing existence as we know it


and time is a Time is a diminution but also just a word

I have more info that is more scientific but may I ask why you want to know this

 

[Hernik]

Ok if you could go back in time I don’t think you could change anything think about it if you wanted to change something so bad that you went back in time to do then in the future it would be fixed and you wouldn’t have to go back in fix it there for ether not altering the future of undoing existence as we know it

I agree. If you come back to now from the future, anything you do now "was" part of the history in the future you left.

I find it very strange what the nature of time is. I never much believed the idea of time being a result of change. I think time must have to do with interaction between energies. Otherwise why would it pass differently depending on the field of gravity and the velocity.

 

[basePARTICLE]

E = m * c^2.

Did any of you read The future of time(2006). A good place to start. Many questions were approached realistically, by a number of the world's leading physicists!

Hawking gave a decent description of what would have been entailed to make time travel a realism. I think some Mathmatics was used, but I cannot remember exactly. Sorry if I am off topic, just thought that book containing relevant material might help.

 

[asymmetric]

you say that to be able to go back in time all changes must be reversed...if this could be done or if this actually happens naturally then, or rather, therefor they are also changes ...these new ''reversed'' changes are also processes with a rate of change one respect to another...so I'm sure this would not conclude in traveling backwards in time.
your idea of all movement , which is a change from one state to another and the time this change takes to become something else is i understand being studied here in spain...i saw this on a science programm a few months after i was working on this issue myself...
the idea being that ''time is unity or of value one'' always for the whole cosmos.
this means that all processes will always sum the same one for the whole cosmos.
its a bit dificult to explain...maybe somewhere i can get some more info...

I'm not a physicist but I will add my two cents worth. Time is nothing but change. In a
static universe (without change) there would be no such thing as time. We measure time by comparing the rate of change of one process to another.

As for time travel, to go back in time every change would have to be reversed. Since changes in the positive direction follow the principles of thermodynamics, going from high energy to low energy and from order to disorder, where would the energy come from to reverse all the changes? To go back in time every change in the whole universe would have to be reversed. It would take an all powerful God could accomplish that. Time travel sounds pretty far fetched to me.

There are some theories of how the universe works that would allow time travel, the one which specifically comes to mind is the proposal that there is no change in the universe, motion is an illusion. The author (whose name I don't remember) states that the universe is controlled by a gigantic wave function that describes the position of every particle in the universe, and the "now" runs through this wave function taking the most probable course. In this view of the universe it is only the "now" that moves.

There would still be the problem of energy. The most probable course would still follow the laws of thermodynamics, so for the "now" to retreat from one spot in the wave function to an earlier state, it would still take energy to reduce the entropy to the earlier state.

 

[quantify]

hypothesis that one where to somehow travel between two different planes of time/space. If all planes are relative to each other but not necessarily traveling at the same speed, then after making this transition and say waiting a week and then traveling back to the original plane you would enter at a time relative to the plane you just left. Unless both planes in this equation were traveling at the same precise speed then you would have gone back in time relative to both planes.

 

[vsandel]

Would every change need to be reversed?

If time is an illusion and is a function of distance, and is relative, why would everything in the universe need to be revsered for one time traveller?

I haven't been on the forum until now, but your question of why reversal of time requires every change to be reversed requires an answer.

If you assume that only certain changes would have to be reversed, who would decide which ones to be reversed? To truly go back in time, you would have to find everything as it was at the earlier date. If it were not, then how could one really say that they had gone back in time?

To go back in time the past must still exist. We cannot experience anything that doesn't exist except in our minds (memories?). Time travel necessarily assumes a theory of the universe (or infinite universes) that allows the past to exist. If it still exists, all changes would of necessity be reversed.

To travel to the future would require a deterministic view of all change. By that I mean any future state could be determined if the present state were known. While classical mechanics would allow this, quantum mechanics has eliminated the deterministic view of change.

 

[peter0302]

To travel to the future would require a deterministic view of all change. By that I mean any future state could be determined if the present state were known. While classical mechanics would allow this, quantum mechanics has eliminated the deterministic view of change.

No, to paraphrase Captain Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean, it's not getting to the future that's the problem. It's getting back.

What I mean is, you can "easily" travel to the future by traveling close to the speed of light for some time and then decelerating back to 0. You just can't go back.

Anyway, I like your pointing out that time travel assumes the "past" still "exists" in some form. I've also wondered about this.

 

[vsandel]

Whose Future?

No, to paraphrase Captain Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean, it's not getting to the future that's the problem. It's getting back.

What I mean is, you can "easily" travel to the future by traveling close to the speed of light for some time and then decelerating back to 0. You just can't go back.

Anyway, I like your pointing out that time travel assumes the "past" still "exists" in some form. I've also wondered about this.

Question is whose future would you return to? Your life would have been continuous, so there is no "break" in time which there would be if you had actual time travel.

Here is a question I have concerning the twin paradox, where one twin goes on a space ride near the speed of light, then comes back to Earth to find his brother much older than himself. Einstein derived the time dilation formula assuming the direction of travel is parallel to the beam of light in the positive x direction. To keep the speed of light constant the time has to slow down relative to time on earth. But on the return voyage you would be going in the -x direction. Measuring the speed of light of that same beam would make the voyagers time speed up by the same amount that it slowed in going away from earth. Therefore, when the traveling twin reached Earth he would be exactly as old as his brother. The term in the time dilation equation:

t-v(-x)/c exp 2​

becomes positive on the return trip. I can't believe that reputable phycists who have dealt with the twin paradox missed this, so where am I wrong?

 

[peter0302]

The Lorentz factor is always 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). So velocity is always squared, and whether it was positive or negative would be irrelevant.

The real issue is that the Earth's time appears to slow down for the traveller as well. This is reconciled when the traveller decelerates back to the Earth's reference frame, both on the "turn around" and the "landing". That's when the Earth twin appears to age from the traveller's persepctive.

 

[vsandel]

The Lorentz factor is always 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). So velocity is always squared, and whether it was positive or negative would be irrelevant.

The real issue is that the Earth's time appears to slow down for the traveller as well. This is reconciled when the traveller decelerates back to the Earth's reference frame, both on the "turn around" and the "landing". That's when the Earth twin appears to age from the traveller's persepctive.

You are neglecting a term in the numerator. Einstein gives the time dilation equation as:

t' = __t-vx/c^2____
sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)​

where t' is the traveler's time,t is Earth time, and x is the coorinate along which both the light beam and the spaceship is traveling. The x is positive on the way out from earth, but negative on the way back. Therefore t' will be slower than t on the way out, but faster than t by an equal amount on the way back. There is no term for accelleration or decelleration in the equation, only velocity. Thus the time dilation relative to Earth will change during the accelleration and decelleration because the velocity is changing, but that does not cancel out the time differences while traveling at constant velocity.

 

[peter0302]

The x is positive on the way out from earth, but negative on the way back.

Yes, and so is "v". The negatives therefore cancel out to a positive.

 

[JesseM]

You are neglecting a term in the numerator. Einstein gives the time dilation equation as:

t' = __t-vx/c^2____
sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)​

where t' is the traveler's time,t is Earth time, and x is the coorinate along which both the light beam and the spaceship is traveling.

That's not usually referred to as the "time dilation equation", rather it's the part of the Lorentz transformation that translates the time-coordinate of a single event in the unprimed frame to the time-coordinate of the same event in the primed frame. When people talk about the time dilation equation, they're usually referring to an equation that relates a time interval in one frame (like the time elapsed on a clock between two points on its journey) to the corresponding time interval in another. See the discussion on this thread.

 

[ZombieFrog]

New Here

I too am new here, and perhaps i am completely naive, but it seems to me that asking what energy could possibly reverse all the changes in the universe (aka go back in time) is very strange. perhaps as strange as asking what energy could possibly cause all the changes currently happening (aka go forward in time). again perhaps i am just naive.

as well it seem too me that time travel while possible (and i am indulging in speculation here) would be rather limited. Entering a time-space warp/vortex at one location and exiting at another location would result in a shift of time. This would be possible with large time-space warps, perhaps Black Holes, Wormholes, or even some human super-laser/light vortex, but in any case the forces being tampered with border on uncontrollability.

It also seems that any machine built would only be able to shift an object through time to the moment of the machines creation, and not further back, making it useless for traveling to the future, or far into the past (unless the machine has existed for a long time)

I am not a physicist but this is what i have gathered from my readings

 

[JesseM]

I too am new here, and perhaps i am completely naive, but it seems to me that asking what energy could possibly reverse all the changes in the universe (aka go back in time) is very strange. perhaps as strange as asking what energy could possibly cause all the changes currently happening (aka go forward in time). again perhaps i am just naive.

It isn't really "reversing all the changes in the universe". Here's an analogy I posted a long time ago on this thread:

That is not how time travel would work in general relativity. In both special and general relativity, you have to get rid of the idea of a single universal present, since these theories say that different observers have different views of whether two different events happened "at the same time" or not, and each observer's reference frame is equally valid. So instead you have to think of a single static 4-dimensional "spacetime" which contains the entire history of the universe; traveling back in time in this context means that an object's "worldline" curves back on itself and revisits a region of spacetime it already crossed through before.

Think of a block of solid ice with various 1-dimensional strings embedded in it--if you cross-section this block, you will see a collection of 0-dimensional points (the strings in cross-section) arranged in various positions on a 2-dimensional surface, and if you take pictures of successive cross-sections and arrange them into a movie, you will see the points moving around continuously relative to one another (in terms of this metaphor, the idea that there is no single universal present means you have a choice of what angle to slice the ice when you make your series of cross-sections). You shouldn't think of time travel as the points returning to precisely the same configuration they had been in at an earlier frame of the movie; instead, you should just imagine one of the strings curving around into a loop within the 3-dimensional block, what in general relativity is known as a "closed timelike curve".

 

[vsandel]

My assumption is that to visit the past, the past must still exist. If the object's "worldline" curves back on itself to revisit a region of spacetime it already crossed through before, would that space time not have the identical state and energy as when first crossed? If so, wouldn't the changes have to be reversed? It seems that you are assuming an infinite universes model of the cosmos in which the "now" travels from one universe to another. I have many questions about such a model. Occham's Razor suggests that this greatly complicated model of the cosmos is inferior to a model in which time is only change, and once a "now" is changed there is no going back without reversing that change.

One assumption made by people who consider time travel is that in going back in time a person would not change. I believe that if time travel were truly possible, a person going back in time would be the age he was at the earlier date, have the memories and knowledge that he had at the earlier date with no memories of his future life. Therefore his life in the past would play out exactly as it did the first time. He would not even know that he visited the past. This rules out the paradox of changing the past to make the future impossible.

 

[vsandel]

Yes, and so is "v". The negatives therefore cancel out to a positive.

Correct, Peter. I was looking at the situation of a person measuring the speed of light while traveling back to earth. His velocity would add to the speed of light if it were not for relativity. Therefore to keep c constant time would have to go faster for the traveler relative to Earth time. I am not proficient in the math of all of this, but is my reasoning not correct?