The reason Time Travel can't exist

While there are a lot of theories about the possibility of time travel and related phenomenon, I'd just like to drop my two cents in and hope it sparks the debate of more learned, scientifically-oriented people.

To the best of my reason, time travel is impossible simply because time, in essence, is a purely human perception: we base our experiences on how "long" the time between events is. The universe, however, as we know it, has no "memory" of time; it simply passes silently. To go back in time (going forward in time would require nothing more than some sort of prolonged hibernation) would require the complete reversal of all the particles in the universe to a previous state, such that one could truly "recreate" a certain period of time. This would require unthinkable powerful technology that, in my limited knowledge, simply wouldn't be possible, at least for non-energy based life forms.


[edit on 6-6-2004 by Don Armageddon]

I also don't believe in any literal form of time travel, for that very same reason. But I believe that because time is a human perception, that individuals in their own minds can subconsciously travel through time.

Ancient civilizations often seem to show evidence of people entering a subconsciouse state, and telling of traveling to different times or places, and I think there is something to this. The problem is that no new knowledge could be gained, as you could see only what your mind knows and can create.

Read about Robert Mallet.... I thoeries will have you passible rethinking your ideas about time travel.

Read about Robert Mallet.... I thoeries will have you passible rethinking your ideas about time travel.

I totally agree. Using the cliche time machines of movies where they enter the date they are at and then the date they want to go to, the Universe does not know BC or BCE. It does not know seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, or years. Time is infinite. Time did not begin when the Universe was created - Space, yes, Time, no. Becasue Time is infinite, you can't go to specific points - in order for points in time to exist, there has to be a zero to compare them to. Why is it assumed Time began at the Big Bang? The Big Bang was just an event in Time! The Calendar year 0 is just an event in Time also - maybe its (using Earth years) the 5 trillionth year in Time, or maybe its the 4 quadrillinth year in Time, we wont ever know. Basically, all events are points in Time. The events cant have numbers attached to them either, becasue that implies there would be a zero to count up to them from.

[Edited on 6/1/04 by xenophanes85]

I also don't believe in time travel.

It would take an incredible amount of energy to make time possible but time itself is just an illusion. There is no past, only our memory. There is no future, only our expectation of the future. Only the present exists.

However, you have to take in account the Philadelphia Experiment and research if it indeed happen.

Also, Einstein said if you slow down Gravity you will slow down time enough to go back in the past.


Also, take into account the religious aspect of Time.

In a sense... we've been traveling through time for a long time. Not really traveling, but seeing. We've seen into the past anytime we've observed stars or thought about things that happened the day before or watched a video tape of 9/11 or something. Also, when you watch something that has a repeating pattern, you know what is going to happen, so technically you can "see" into the future. I do not believe in the part about telling a machine to send you back to 1564 on Dec. 17 at 6:37 PM. There is no possible way nature and the machine would know when that exact date would be... I'm not sure you can rtavel ahead in time, since it hasn't happened yet, but I do believe you can go back, like hitting the rewind button on a remote. But then I believe you'll be stuck where you traveled, since you are part of the present there, and the future has not come.

Time does exist, the only thing that is human is the measurement of time. The Solar system has it cycles therefore something is becoming past as one becomes present and another soon to be the future. I mean where is your scientific proof of time travel not being plausible? I say anything is possible until proven IMPOSSIBLE. I mean who are we to say it's not possible, if hawkings believes there are parrallel universe, why couldn't time travel exist?

Maybe time just constantly repeats itself, we are just too minute to remember. Even the 3D world we see around is false, our Visual Cortex makes up information and takes out information, we see images as 2d fist and upside down. Nothing to do really with time travel but it's to make you think. hopefully.

Maybe time just constantly repeats itself, we are just too minute to remember.

Ah, now there's another theory. Let's assume that time really IS cyclical. There will be a constantly cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches. We could THEN extrapolate that, beginning from the same point (with all matter in the universe crammed in a tiny space) that after the next Big Bang, all matter in the universe could then take form in the exact same way as before, and therefore all of human history would be repeated, ad nauseum.

Therefore, if one could somehow preserve onesself to survive for trillions of years, up to a specific point in history in the NEXT cycle, you really could change the course of human history, albeit not your own history. This would also explain away the famous "grandfather paradox", where if you kill your own grandfather before your father is born, that you would never exist: since you're not really killing your actual grandfather, but rather your analog's gradfather, you could change history without creating a temporal paradox. Granted, this wouldn't really have any practical application, aside from a personal nature, since you'd be the only one from your time to witness the alternate history, but that's one way.

Of course, don't take my word for it; I'm a screenwriting major, not a man of science

But could you actually kill him? Would the fabric of time allow this? I mean I think it would counter itself, if you kill him, then you don't exist, meaning you were never born to return in time and kill him Can become mind boggling as we have no real resources to base any of this off of. Lets say there are trillions of Me, and that each one is in a constant state of experiencing a certain action, situation, and they are all tied to one, they appear to me, to the mes' as memories of actual events. Yet most never happen to the one that thinks it happened.

Yeah, I probably shouldnt smoke and post. lol

I still don't understand one thing. If you travel back in time (if it is possible) there would be two of yourself. Is that correct? Or is it that if you travel back in time, you will see the same people as the future, the same age and everything, but back 50 years or so. Or will you go back 50 years from when you turn back the clock.

How would it work?

Due to my popular hollywood mythology knowledge, if you went back 50 yrs it would be the ppl that were alive and doing whatever they were doing 50 yrs back imo. I not being 50 would not see another version of myself as far as I know. Maybe going back intime I could encounter another version of my self also time travelling?

Well obviously if you went back in time, people would either be younger or not even born yet, depending on age. But if you only went back a few years, you probably really could see yourself (like the greatest time-travel movie ever made, "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" taught us.)

Here's something else to chew on (let's assume I'm wrong and time travel is completely possible): What if you go back in time two minutes ago, and watch yourself go back in time? If you follow him back again, you would be in a past with two of your time-travelling selves, one two minutes older than the other. And of course, as one Dexter's Lab episode clearly showed, this could repeat ad nauseum until you replicated yourself thousands of times over, living in the same time. What then?

What was that movie with Jean Claude? Time Cop? I remember in it when a person touched his future/past self they'd merge together and die or something. Not that it's a very factual movie, but it does make me wonder.

Hawking spoke about parallel universes, which is also a popular belief among many. If parallel universes did exist, than if you killed your grandfather, there would be created another series of parallel universes. One parallel universe would involve you not killing your grandfather and you doing whatever it is you do. The next would involve you killing your grandfather, thus making it so you were never born in that parallel universe only. But you still do exist in that parallel universe because you were able to travel somehow between different universes. Time travel would be a mechanism that would work through the eternal connection of these parallel universes. All the parallel universes converge in this eternity of time. Thus, the fact you exist in a universe in which you were never born would be dependent on the eternality of your conscious...that is why you are the same person inside. The time travel machine would also need a mechanism to keep your physical form at the same specifications and the same vibrational frequency so that you would appear the same to the five senses in your new parallel universe.
As to the question of what would happen to your person in the universe you left from, it would be of the same mechanism as you dying. Then the problem would be how your time machine's mass/energy left that parallel universe if mass cannot be created or destroyed in any specific universe. Either that theory would be wrong or maybe the time machine would be of a conscious nature and both the machine and yourself would need the means to rematerialize as its five sense selves.
Maybe the more plausible idea is that we are time machines ourselves who can travel to an eternal plane where time and space do not exist and thus we can do whatever it is we fancy.
If this were true, what would be the point of creating a machine on this earth to travel in time, because when we die or when we travel consciously, we will be able to go wherever and whenever we want.

Matter cannot be created or destroyed would probably solve many of the problems you bring up, but that is not say time travel does not exist. I just don't think it can exist in the faculty we wish to use it in.

You have all brought up some good points but I have one that always comes to me when I think about time travel. How can two complete sets of the universe exist at once? If all of time exists on one plane and I could travel to MY past then how could that matter exist at once? If youre saying it exists separately where what you changed would be unaffected in your time is interdimensional travel and not so much time travel. But if time travel exists as popular culture thinks of it... how could any technology reverse the matter in the universe neglecting to reverse yours? I dont see how its possible though i wish it were.

Well, if you take time as a dimension, all time-travel is actually interdimensional. I read a book about how we perceive time, the analogy was of a place called flatland which is entirely composed of two dimensions. If a third dimension was introduced, to the inhabitants of flatland, only a snipet of the third dimension would be seen. Time works in a similar way in that we only see a snipet of another dimension (time) passing through our three-dimensional world. Time is only linear because we perceive it that way. Time is passing through this world, but another dimension exists, where all time exists. The other series of universes are much like our own in that time passes through them in a linear looking fashion. But the reason they would exist is because in the fifth or whatever number dimension where all time exists (just as all depth exists in our own), time extends in all directions so that all possibilities are manifest. Its hard to fathom what such a world would look like.

I'm not sure about seeing yourself, that would raise some interesting problems. The problems would depend on what you believe in. I guess if you believe in eternal souls, seeing yourself would involve seeing a duplicate internal soul, so that in the eternity there existed an infinte of real you's, an infinite of consciousnesses? The matter is merely something created according to our dna, the only thing that makes us unique is random chance. But random chance is probably not even random, it probably just follows rules we dont understand. Its highly possible to have two of the same forms, look at identical twins differing only by their eyes (random chance). Maybe humans are conscious in a way so as to access their higher selves when possible. So I guess when you met yourself, both of you would be decoders? (need a better word) for the same higher self.

Also, time is relative, so it is not the universe that changes but you that change. Technology would I guess have to alter your mind instead of altering the universe. The machine would have to alter itself as well. You would be viewing the universe as it was in the past or in the future, the universe wouldn't be viewing you in the respective future or past.

Knowing when to stop? If light is constant irrespective of a time frame (as Einstein has it), than light could be used a measurement to deduce how far in the future or past to stop based on your starting time frame.

Interesting thoughts.
If time is just human perception, then why do clocks "see" time as well?
You will say, humans made clocks.
That's correct but clocks also start to run "slower" as they approach the speed of light, just like not only our perception but our entire bodies are under effect of this slower timeflow as we approach the speed of light.

The faster you go, the slower time goes.
Speed is measured in distance per time.

The relativity theory is proven, thus it's possible to "travel into the future". (use a spaceship to orbit around earth with the speed of light for 7 days, and when you land a load more then 7 days will have passed on earth)
Travelling into the past however is not proven, and I personally think it's not possible either.

first of all, saying humans made clocks is why they see time would be a ridiculous thing to say with no relevance whatsoever, so if you were referring to me and trying to judge what i would say, i don't appreciate it. But clocks gauge time according to their relative time frame as you said, and if clocks are in the same frame we are, then they will perceive time accordingly.
The point I was getting at was that we see time according to a universal perception and that the time we experience is only a part of what time is.
A universal reference frame of time....I'd recommend reading some Hawking or something expounding on ideas from Einstein.
To a two-dimensional world, a third dimension would appear to them as only having two-dimensions as well. Time is the same for us....its hard to perceive time as being something that goes backward, forward, up, down...but I believe in another place it does.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that all experiments are affected by the observer. Our hypothesis supports our data (which is relative as well), rather than data our hypothesis. Just have to open your mind and believe sometimes.