taog

Ok, this is my cup of coffee.

I'm an astronomy nerd, and stuff like this used to interest me a hell of a lot. Theoretical physics is one of my interests, and I have done much research on the subject, especially related to space and time.

When you think of time, do not think of time as a clock, though clocks are used in experiments all over the place to prove theories. Think of time as a dimension related to space. Really what we are talking about is the expansion of space when we speak of time. If space didn't move, we would only have three dimensions, that we can comprehend. We would have length, width and height. Now, you take the expansion factor, and you have time.

Time is simply the difference between two events.

Now lets take a look at Einstein's relativity.

It HAS been proven that the faster you go, the slower time goes. You were right about the jet being flown around the globe with a clock in it, correct to the nano second with another clock stationary on the ground. The clock on the ground and the clock on the plain were then compared after the jet flew around the glob at high speeds, and the result proved Einstein to be correct about his theory. The clocks times did not match, and they should have if you take all types of error into consideration, including our magnetic feild. It proved that the faster you go, the moretime slows down.

That theory is called time dilation.

Time dilation also states that you cannot exceed the speed of light, due to a theory in relativity called mass increase. The faster you go, the more your mass increases. As you approach the speed of light, your mass approaches infinity, and the energy it takes to get there would be infinite as well. Just look at the famous E = mc^2. Mass increases as you more faster, and if you were to look at the formula to get your mass, it would show that you cannot go faster than the speed of light, or your mass will be infinite.

Another small, and not so interesting theory in relativity is length contraction. The faster you go, the smaller your length is, in the direction that you are moving. You get squished in other words. It makes sense if you think about acceleration and the fact that you are going faster near the front than you are near the back.

Now, if you take all of these into consideration, you will see why time travel, in terms of back to the future or something like that, is impossible.

YOU CAN SLOW TIME DOWN, but you cannot travel across time. If you were able to go faster than light, which no object with a mass can do, you can possibally switch your direction of time, which could possibally be looked at as time travel, but i think it's more complicated than that. The problem is, you can't go faster than light.

So, you can slow your own time down in reference to everyone elses, but time itself is constant, universally.


And, though this was mentioned, the best way to disprove time travel is to simply say, why haven't we been visited by anyone from the future?

Now, I know that Hawking didn't say that first, because I'm reading a book, written by Hawking, about Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Einstein, and one of those dudes had written something similar in one of their papers.


Anyway, that's our problem when thinking about time travel. Time isn't defined the way we think about it. It's more complicated than we can comprehend with general knowledge about the subject. Time is a dimension, not something that can be changed or reversed. You can change the length of something, but you can't give it a negative length. It's the same as time. You can change the rate of time, for yourself, in reference to everything else, but you cannot change the direction of time.


I believe that time is actually slowing down. When the universe began, I believe that it was going as fast as it possibally could be going, and since then, it's been slowing down. There was a distant supernovea that was closer than it's redshift had shown, which could be explained through the speed of light slowing down, which would mean that the universe's overall rate of time is slowing down, as we expand. Eventually it will come to a halt, and time will reverse.

Now, i mean time moving at rate 0, not time 0. I believe time 0 was just befor ethe big bang.

My above theory about time slowing down is likely wrong, since I haven't found any evidence of any scientists thinking the same thing. I also don't have the means to test it to prove it wrong, but it's just a thought.

Anyway, time travel is impossible, but if either were, it would be more likely for us to be able to go into the past, rather than the future. We would have to slow ourselves down to a speed less than 0 to be able to start going into the future. It seems more possible to speed ourselves up to a speed faster than light.