time travel through a

Is Time Travel Possible?

We all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second.

We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.

However, when we think of the phrase "time travel," we are usually thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That kind of time travel sounds like something you'd only see in movies or science fiction books. Could it be real? Science says yes!

Image of galaxies, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxies that are very far away as they existed a very long time ago. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)

How do we know that time travel is possible?

More than 100 years ago, a famous scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He called it relativity. This theory says that time and space are linked together. Einstein also said our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Einstein's theory of relativity says that space and time are linked together. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What does this mean for time travel? Well, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true.

For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set to the exact same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane (going in the same direction Earth rotates).

After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. So, the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Can we use time travel in everyday life?

We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day.

For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. (Check out our video about how GPS satellites work .) NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town?

GPS satellites orbit around Earth very quickly at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second (similar to the airplane example above).

Illustration of GPS satellites orbiting around Earth

GPS satellites orbit around Earth at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. Credit: GPS.gov

However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 km) above the surface. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slighter larger fraction of a second.

Here's how: Einstein's theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth's gravity is much weaker. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground.

The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Luckily, scientists can use math to correct these differences in time.

Illustration of a hand holding a phone with a maps application active.

If scientists didn't correct the GPS clocks, there would be big problems. GPS satellites wouldn't be able to correctly calculate their position or yours. The errors would add up to a few miles each day, which is a big deal. GPS maps might think your home is nowhere near where it actually is!

In Summary:

Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.

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Is time travel possible? An astrophysicist explains

Time travel is one of the most intriguing topics in science.

Will it ever be possible for time travel to occur? – Alana C., age 12, Queens, New York

Have you ever dreamed of traveling through time, like characters do in science fiction movies? For centuries, the concept of time travel has captivated people’s imaginations. Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time, just like you move between different places. In movies, you might have seen characters using special machines, magical devices or even hopping into a futuristic car to travel backward or forward in time.

But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen?

The question of whether time is reversible remains one of the biggest unresolved questions in science. If the universe follows the laws of thermodynamics , it may not be possible. The second law of thermodynamics states that things in the universe can either remain the same or become more disordered over time.

It’s a bit like saying you can’t unscramble eggs once they’ve been cooked. According to this law, the universe can never go back exactly to how it was before. Time can only go forward, like a one-way street.

Time is relative

However, physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity suggests that time passes at different rates for different people. Someone speeding along on a spaceship moving close to the speed of light – 671 million miles per hour! – will experience time slower than a person on Earth.

Related: The speed of light, explained

People have yet to build spaceships that can move at speeds anywhere near as fast as light, but astronauts who visit the International Space Station orbit around the Earth at speeds close to 17,500 mph. Astronaut Scott Kelly has spent 520 days at the International Space Station, and as a result has aged a little more slowly than his twin brother – and fellow astronaut – Mark Kelly. Scott used to be 6 minutes younger than his twin brother. Now, because Scott was traveling so much faster than Mark and for so many days, he is 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds younger .

Some scientists are exploring other ideas that could theoretically allow time travel. One concept involves wormholes , or hypothetical tunnels in space that could create shortcuts for journeys across the universe. If someone could build a wormhole and then figure out a way to move one end at close to the speed of light – like the hypothetical spaceship mentioned above – the moving end would age more slowly than the stationary end. Someone who entered the moving end and exited the wormhole through the stationary end would come out in their past.

However, wormholes remain theoretical : Scientists have yet to spot one. It also looks like it would be incredibly challenging to send humans through a wormhole space tunnel.

Time travel paradoxes and failed dinner parties

There are also paradoxes associated with time travel. The famous “ grandfather paradox ” is a hypothetical problem that could arise if someone traveled back in time and accidentally prevented their grandparents from meeting. This would create a paradox where you were never born, which raises the question: How could you have traveled back in time in the first place? It’s a mind-boggling puzzle that adds to the mystery of time travel.

Famously, physicist Stephen Hawking tested the possibility of time travel by throwing a dinner party where invitations noting the date, time and coordinates were not sent out until after it had happened. His hope was that his invitation would be read by someone living in the future, who had capabilities to travel back in time. But no one showed up.

As he pointed out : “The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

Telescopes are time machines

Interestingly, astrophysicists armed with powerful telescopes possess a unique form of time travel. As they peer into the vast expanse of the cosmos, they gaze into the past universe. Light from all galaxies and stars takes time to travel, and these beams of light carry information from the distant past. When astrophysicists observe a star or a galaxy through a telescope, they are not seeing it as it is in the present, but as it existed when the light began its journey to Earth millions to billions of years ago.

NASA’s newest space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope , is peering at galaxies that were formed at the very beginning of the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

While we aren’t likely to have time machines like the ones in movies anytime soon, scientists are actively researching and exploring new ideas. But for now, we’ll have to enjoy the idea of time travel in our favorite books, movies and dreams.

This article first appeared on the Conversation. You can read the original here .

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Is time travel possible? Why one scientist says we 'cannot ignore the possibility.'

A common theme in science-fiction media , time travel is captivating. It’s defined by the late philosopher David Lewis in his essay “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” as “[involving] a discrepancy between time and space time. Any traveler departs and then arrives at his destination; the time elapsed from departure to arrival … is the duration of the journey.”

Time travel is usually understood by most as going back to a bygone era or jumping forward to a point far in the future . But how much of the idea is based in reality? Is it possible to travel through time?

Is time travel possible?

According to NASA, time travel is possible , just not in the way you might expect. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity says time and motion are relative to each other, and nothing can go faster than the speed of light , which is 186,000 miles per second. Time travel happens through what’s called “time dilation.”

Time dilation , according to Live Science, is how one’s perception of time is different to another's, depending on their motion or where they are. Hence, time being relative.

Learn more: Best travel insurance

Dr. Ana Alonso-Serrano, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, explained the possibility of time travel and how researchers test theories.

Space and time are not absolute values, Alonso-Serrano said. And what makes this all more complex is that you are able to carve space-time .

“In the moment that you carve the space-time, you can play with that curvature to make the time come in a circle and make a time machine,” Alonso-Serrano told USA TODAY.

She explained how, theoretically, time travel is possible. The mathematics behind creating curvature of space-time are solid, but trying to re-create the strict physical conditions needed to prove these theories can be challenging.

“The tricky point of that is if you can find a physical, realistic, way to do it,” she said.

Alonso-Serrano said wormholes and warp drives are tools that are used to create this curvature. The matter needed to achieve curving space-time via a wormhole is exotic matter , which hasn’t been done successfully. Researchers don’t even know if this type of matter exists, she said.

“It's something that we work on because it's theoretically possible, and because it's a very nice way to test our theory, to look for possible paradoxes,” Alonso-Serrano added.

“I could not say that nothing is possible, but I cannot ignore the possibility,” she said.

She also mentioned the anecdote of Stephen Hawking’s Champagne party for time travelers . Hawking had a GPS-specific location for the party. He didn’t send out invites until the party had already happened, so only people who could travel to the past would be able to attend. No one showed up, and Hawking referred to this event as "experimental evidence" that time travel wasn't possible.

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Time travel: Is it possible?

Science says time travel is possible, but probably not in the way you're thinking.

time travel graphic illustration of a tunnel with a clock face swirling through the tunnel.

Albert Einstein's theory

General relativity and GPS
Wormhole travel
Alternate theories

Science fiction

Is time travel possible? Short answer: Yes, and you're doing it right now — hurtling into the future at the impressive rate of one second per second.

You're pretty much always moving through time at the same speed, whether you're watching paint dry or wishing you had more hours to visit with a friend from out of town.

But this isn't the kind of time travel that's captivated countless science fiction writers, or spurred a genre so extensive that Wikipedia lists over 400 titles in the category "Movies about Time Travel." In franchises like " Doctor Who ," " Star Trek ," and "Back to the Future" characters climb into some wild vehicle to blast into the past or spin into the future. Once the characters have traveled through time, they grapple with what happens if you change the past or present based on information from the future (which is where time travel stories intersect with the idea of parallel universes or alternate timelines).

Related: The best sci-fi time machines ever

Although many people are fascinated by the idea of changing the past or seeing the future before it's due, no person has ever demonstrated the kind of back-and-forth time travel seen in science fiction or proposed a method of sending a person through significant periods of time that wouldn't destroy them on the way. And, as physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out in his book " Black Holes and Baby Universes" (Bantam, 1994), "The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."

Science does support some amount of time-bending, though. For example, physicist Albert Einstein 's theory of special relativity proposes that time is an illusion that moves relative to an observer. An observer traveling near the speed of light will experience time, with all its aftereffects (boredom, aging, etc.) much more slowly than an observer at rest. That's why astronaut Scott Kelly aged ever so slightly less over the course of a year in orbit than his twin brother who stayed here on Earth.

Related: Controversially, physicist argues that time is real

There are other scientific theories about time travel, including some weird physics that arise around wormholes , black holes and string theory . For the most part, though, time travel remains the domain of an ever-growing array of science fiction books, movies, television shows, comics, video games and more.

Scott and Mark Kelly sit side by side wearing a blue NASA jacket and jeans

Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905. Along with his later expansion, the theory of general relativity , it has become one of the foundational tenets of modern physics. Special relativity describes the relationship between space and time for objects moving at constant speeds in a straight line.

The short version of the theory is deceptively simple. First, all things are measured in relation to something else — that is to say, there is no "absolute" frame of reference. Second, the speed of light is constant. It stays the same no matter what, and no matter where it's measured from. And third, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

From those simple tenets unfolds actual, real-life time travel. An observer traveling at high velocity will experience time at a slower rate than an observer who isn't speeding through space.

While we don't accelerate humans to near-light-speed, we do send them swinging around the planet at 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h) aboard the International Space Station . Astronaut Scott Kelly was born after his twin brother, and fellow astronaut, Mark Kelly . Scott Kelly spent 520 days in orbit, while Mark logged 54 days in space. The difference in the speed at which they experienced time over the course of their lifetimes has actually widened the age gap between the two men.

"So, where[as] I used to be just 6 minutes older, now I am 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds older," Mark Kelly said in a panel discussion on July 12, 2020, Space.com previously reported . "Now I've got that over his head."

General relativity and GPS time travel

Graphic showing the path of GPS satellites around Earth at the center of the image.

The difference that low earth orbit makes in an astronaut's life span may be negligible — better suited for jokes among siblings than actual life extension or visiting the distant future — but the dilation in time between people on Earth and GPS satellites flying through space does make a difference.

Can wormholes take us back in time?

General relativity might also provide scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time, according to NASA . But the physical reality of those time-travel methods is no piece of cake.

Wormholes are theoretical "tunnels" through the fabric of space-time that could connect different moments or locations in reality to others. Also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges or white holes, as opposed to black holes, speculation about wormholes abounds. But despite taking up a lot of space (or space-time) in science fiction, no wormholes of any kind have been identified in real life.

Related: Best time travel movies

"The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point," Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, told Space.com sister site Live Science . "No one thinks we're going to find a wormhole anytime soon."

Primordial wormholes are predicted to be just 10^-34 inches (10^-33 centimeters) at the tunnel's "mouth". Previously, they were expected to be too unstable for anything to be able to travel through them. However, a study claims that this is not the case, Live Science reported .

The theory, which suggests that wormholes could work as viable space-time shortcuts, was described by physicist Pascal Koiran. As part of the study, Koiran used the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, as opposed to the Schwarzschild metric which has been used in the majority of previous analyses.

In the past, the path of a particle could not be traced through a hypothetical wormhole. However, using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, the physicist was able to achieve just that.

Koiran's paper was described in October 2021, in the preprint database arXiv , before being published in the Journal of Modern Physics D.

Alternate time travel theories

While Einstein's theories appear to make time travel difficult, some researchers have proposed other solutions that could allow jumps back and forth in time. These alternate theories share one major flaw: As far as scientists can tell, there's no way a person could survive the kind of gravitational pulling and pushing that each solution requires.

Infinite cylinder theory

Astronomer Frank Tipler proposed a mechanism (sometimes known as a Tipler Cylinder ) where one could take matter that is 10 times the sun's mass, then roll it into a very long, but very dense cylinder. The Anderson Institute , a time travel research organization, described the cylinder as "a black hole that has passed through a spaghetti factory."

After spinning this black hole spaghetti a few billion revolutions per minute, a spaceship nearby — following a very precise spiral around the cylinder — could travel backward in time on a "closed, time-like curve," according to the Anderson Institute.

The major problem is that in order for the Tipler Cylinder to become reality, the cylinder would need to be infinitely long or be made of some unknown kind of matter. At least for the foreseeable future, endless interstellar pasta is beyond our reach.

Time donuts

Theoretical physicist Amos Ori at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, proposed a model for a time machine made out of curved space-time — a donut-shaped vacuum surrounded by a sphere of normal matter.

"The machine is space-time itself," Ori told Live Science . "If we were to create an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves, it might enable future generations to return to visit our time."

Amos Ori is a theoretical physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. His research interests and publications span the fields of general relativity, black holes, gravitational waves and closed time lines.

There are a few caveats to Ori's time machine. First, visitors to the past wouldn't be able to travel to times earlier than the invention and construction of the time donut. Second, and more importantly, the invention and construction of this machine would depend on our ability to manipulate gravitational fields at will — a feat that may be theoretically possible but is certainly beyond our immediate reach.

Graphic illustration of the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space) traveling through space, surrounded by stars.

Time travel has long occupied a significant place in fiction. Since as early as the "Mahabharata," an ancient Sanskrit epic poem compiled around 400 B.C., humans have dreamed of warping time, Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told Live Science .

Every work of time-travel fiction creates its own version of space-time, glossing over one or more scientific hurdles and paradoxes to achieve its plot requirements.

Some make a nod to research and physics, like " Interstellar ," a 2014 film directed by Christopher Nolan. In the movie, a character played by Matthew McConaughey spends a few hours on a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, but because of time dilation, observers on Earth experience those hours as a matter of decades.

Others take a more whimsical approach, like the "Doctor Who" television series. The series features the Doctor, an extraterrestrial "Time Lord" who travels in a spaceship resembling a blue British police box. "People assume," the Doctor explained in the show, "that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff."

Long-standing franchises like the "Star Trek" movies and television series, as well as comic universes like DC and Marvel Comics, revisit the idea of time travel over and over.

Related: Marvel movies in order: chronological & release order

Here is an incomplete (and deeply subjective) list of some influential or notable works of time travel fiction:

Books about time travel:

A sketch from the Christmas Carol shows a cloaked figure on the left and a person kneeling and clutching their head with their hands.

Rip Van Winkle (Cornelius S. Van Winkle, 1819) by Washington Irving
A Christmas Carol (Chapman & Hall, 1843) by Charles Dickens
The Time Machine (William Heinemann, 1895) by H. G. Wells
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Charles L. Webster and Co., 1889) by Mark Twain
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Pan Books, 1980) by Douglas Adams
A Tale of Time City (Methuen, 1987) by Diana Wynn Jones
The Outlander series (Delacorte Press, 1991-present) by Diana Gabaldon
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury/Scholastic, 1999) by J. K. Rowling
Thief of Time (Doubleday, 2001) by Terry Pratchett
The Time Traveler's Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003) by Audrey Niffenegger
All You Need is Kill (Shueisha, 2004) by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Movies about time travel:

Planet of the Apes (1968)
Superman (1978)
Time Bandits (1981)
The Terminator (1984)
Back to the Future series (1985, 1989, 1990)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Galaxy Quest (1999)
The Butterfly Effect (2004)
13 Going on 30 (2004)
The Lake House (2006)
Meet the Robinsons (2007)
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
Midnight in Paris (2011)
Looper (2012)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Interstellar (2014)
Doctor Strange (2016)
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
The Last Sharknado: It's About Time (2018)
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Tenet (2020)
Palm Springs (2020)
Zach Snyder's Justice League (2021)
The Tomorrow War (2021)

Television about time travel:

Image of the Star Trek spaceship USS Enterprise

Doctor Who (1963-present)
The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) (multiple episodes)
Star Trek (multiple series, multiple episodes)
Samurai Jack (2001-2004)
Lost (2004-2010)
Phil of the Future (2004-2006)
Steins;Gate (2011)
Outlander (2014-2023)
Loki (2021-present)

Games about time travel:

Chrono Trigger (1995)
TimeSplitters (2000-2005)
Kingdom Hearts (2002-2019)
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003)
God of War II (2007)
Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time (2009)
Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (2013)
Dishonored 2 (2016)
Titanfall 2 (2016)
Outer Wilds (2019)

Additional resources

Explore physicist Peter Millington's thoughts about Stephen Hawking's time travel theories at The Conversation . Check out a kid-friendly explanation of real-world time travel from NASA's Space Place . For an overview of time travel in fiction and the collective consciousness, read " Time Travel: A History " (Pantheon, 2016) by James Gleik.

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Vicky Stein is a science writer based in California. She has a bachelor's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from Dartmouth College and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2018). Afterwards, she worked as a news assistant for PBS NewsHour, and now works as a freelancer covering anything from asteroids to zebras. Follow her most recent work (and most recent pictures of nudibranchs) on Twitter.

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Is time travel even possible? An astrophysicist explains the science behind the science fiction

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Adi Foord does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] .

Will it ever be possible for time travel to occur? – Alana C., age 12, Queens, New York

But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen?

Time is relative

However, wormholes remain theoretical: Scientists have yet to spot one. It also looks like it would be incredibly challenging to send humans through a wormhole space tunnel.

Paradoxes and failed dinner parties

As he pointed out : “The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

Telescopes are time machines

NASA’s newest space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope , is peering at galaxies that were formed at the very beginning of the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to [email protected] . Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

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Is time travel even possible? An astrophysicist explains the science behind the science fiction

Published: Nov 13, 2023

By: Magazine Editor

a swirling galaxy image overlaid with classic red alarm clocks with bells in a spiral pattern

Written by Adi Foord , assistant professor of physics , UMBC

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] .

Will it ever be possible for time travel to occur? – Alana C., age 12, Queens, New York

But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen?

Time is relative

However, wormholes remain theoretical: Scientists have yet to spot one. It also looks like it would be incredibly challenging to send humans through a wormhole space tunnel.

Paradoxes and failed dinner parties

As he pointed out : “The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

Telescopes are time machines

NASA’s newest space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope , is peering at galaxies that were formed at the very beginning of the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Tags: CNMS , Physics , The Conversation

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Time travel is possible, but it’s a one-way ticket

Chenoa van den Boogaard , Physics and Astronomy editor

The ability to travel through time, whether it is to fix a mistake in the past or gain insight into the future, has long been embraced by science fiction and debated by theoretical physicists. While the debate continues over whether travelling into the past is possible, physicists have determined that travelling to the future most certainly is. And you don’t need a wormhole or a DeLorean to do it.

Real-life time travel occurs through time dilation, a property of Einstein’s special relativity . Einstein was the first to realize that time is not constant, as previously believed, but instead slows down as you move faster through space.

As part of his theory, Einstein re-envisioned space itself. He coined the phrase “spacetime,” fusing the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single term. Instead of treating space as a flat and rigid place that holds all the objects in the universe, Einstein thought of it as curved and malleable, able to form gravitational dips around masses that pull other objects in, just as a bowling ball placed in the centre of a trampoline would cause any smaller object placed on the trampoline to slide towards the centre.

A computer-generated representation of Einstein’s curved spacetime. The Earth creates a gravitational dip in the fabric of spacetime which is deepest at its core. Courtesy and Â© of NASA

The closer an object gets to the centre of the dip, the faster it accelerates. The centre of the Earth’s gravitational dip is located at the Earth’s core, where gravitational acceleration is strongest. According to Einstein’s theory, because time moves more slowly as you move faster through space, the closer an object is to the centre of the Earth, the slower time moves for that object.

This effect can be seen in GPS satellites, which orbit 20,200 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. These satellites have highly precise clocks onboard that gain an average of 38 microseconds per day due to time dilation. While this time gain seems insignificant, GPS satellites rely on their onboard clocks to maintain precise global positioning. Running 38 microseconds fast would result in a positioning error of nearly 10 kilometres, an error that would increase daily if the time difference were not constantly corrected.

A more dramatic example of time dilation can be seen in the movie Interstellar when Matthew McConaughey and his crew land on a planet with an extreme gravitational field caused by a nearby black hole. Because of the black hole’s intense gravitational influence, time slows dramatically for the crew on the planet, making one hour on the surface equal to seven years on Earth. This is why, when the crew returns to Earth, Matthew McConaughey’s daughter is an old woman while he appears to be the same age as when he left.

So why hasn’t humanity succeeded in making such drastic leaps forward in time? The answer to this question comes down to velocity. In order for humanity to send a traveller years into the future, we would either have to take advantage of the intense gravitational acceleration caused by black holes or send the traveller rocketing into space at close to the speed of light (about 1 billion km/h). With our current technology , jumping a few microseconds into the future is all humans can manage.

But if technology one day allows us to send a human into the future by travelling close to the speed of light, would there be any way for the traveller to use time dilation to return to the past and report her findings? “Interstellar travel reaching close to the speed of light might be possible,” says Dr. Jaymie Matthews , professor of astrophysics at the University of British Columbia, “[but] this voyage is one way into the future, not back to the past.”

If we can’t use time dilation to return to the past, does this mean that the past is forever inaccessible? Perhaps not. Einstein proposed that time travel into the past could be achieved through an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a type of wormhole. Wormholes are theoretical areas of spacetime that are warped in a way that connects two distant points in space.

A visualization of a wormhole: The fabric of spacetime curves back upon itself, forming a bridge between two distant locations. Image by Panzi , CC-BY 3.0

Einstein’s equations suggested that this bridge in space could hypothetically connect two points in time instead if it were stable enough. “At the moment, even an Einstein-Rosen bridge cannot [be used to] go back in the past because it doesn’t live long enough – it is not stable,” Matthews explains.

“Even if it was stable, it [requires] other physics, which we don’t have. Hypothetical particles and states of matter that have “exotic” physical properties that would violate known laws of physics, such as a particle having a negative mass. That is why “wormholes” are only science fiction.”

While it would be fascinating to travel back in time to see the dinosaurs or to meet Albert Einstein and show him the reality of time travel, perhaps it is best if the past remains untouched. Travelling to the past invites the possibility of making an alteration that could destroy the future. For example, in Back to the Future , Marty McFly travels to the past and inadvertently prevents his parents from meeting each other, nearly preventing his own existence. But if he had undone his own existence, how could he have travelled back in time in the first place?

Marty’s adventures are a variation of the grandfather paradox: what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your father is conceived? If you are successful, how is it possible that you’re alive to kill your grandfather in the first place?

A recent study at the University of Queensland may have the answer to this baffling paradox. In this study, the researchers prove mathematically that paradox-free time travel is possible, showing that the universe will self-correct to avoid inconsistencies. If this is true, then even if we could travel back in time, we would never be able to alter events to create a different future.

While these new findings are enlightening, there appears to be more evidence that, although time dilation can allow us to glimpse the future, we will never be able to visit the past. As the late Stephen Hawking said in his book Black Holes and Baby Universes , “The best evidence we have that time travel [into the past] is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

Banner image by Alex Lehner, CC BY 2.0

240 thoughts on “ Time travel is possible, but it’s a one-way ticket ”

How do I go about time travel? what do I need how do I get those required things?

Very large ring magnets and some mathematics and will to see it in reality.

How about a sphere magnet ship…

hoe about 3d time and hemi synch or portals augmented reality,power of suggestion..drugs pcp binural tones frequency amplitude .virtual computing ie.

I’m a time traveling tourist, Stephen Hawking was wrong.

Time is simply a measurement of space under the amount given its mass and the amount of light and dark in which governs its mass in a 4dimensional reality step outside of the force in which permenates its flow one would reside there would be no past present or future there be a fixed permance of a constant here and now and so ok then what is to come.

Very well explained article !!

But I think if physics says time travel can be possible then it’s definitely possible. Considering not to go back to your childhood and fix things but rather can go to the past but as invisible person to them. So that,

No actions by you would impact your future.

Regards, Kirankumar DR

Tell me more

Yes.. I wish I can do this too 🙂

We will understand it better, by and by…

I have a theory for warp speed, but nasa would have to put it to the test…check my Facebook

I am reading for this drive , i am ready , without think my life safe or not

@Ravi chandila English translation please?

Please someone help me I just want to send a message to myself in my past.,to get the love of my life, he never revealed to me his feelings now my life is ruined by the decision of my elders Please help me, it’s question of my life and death. Nazneen

Is time travel machine is their, if the time travel machine is true can it move to the past . To bring back my lost life

That’s the problem you know.. it is not there that’s why we aren’t able to travel time..and yes it it will be built then you will be able to do so…..

damn my life is also lost and broken but still no one can give a time machine for free

DO NOT change the future. That’s why people like you couldn’t go. One wrong person to ruin it for the rest of us

On the point of time reversal, it is evidently impossible. The Uncertainty Principle prohibits spacetime reversal. The Universe is unable to remember its past (as a consequence of the Uncertainty Principle), therefore the Universe cannot reorganise itself.

Can I have to go on my past with another time travel it is a possible when just tell me about one thing that can I have to go in my past one year

we dont need magnets.we need a strong gravitational force to warp spacetime allowing us to travel through with speed of sound or speed of light or faster.we need to learn how to control such force carefully or it could be lethal.gravity slows down time.but it can theoratically work both ways.if we can reverse the gravity’s natural reaction we could speed up a spacecraft faster than light(its all relative(and theoratical))

I WAS ACTUALLY JUST THINKING THE SAME THINFG BEFORE READING YOUR PIECE. VERY WELL EXPLAINED, AND IT DOES MAKE ALOT OF SENSE. WELL DONE.

oh and I forgot to add it can be the key to look into the universe and also travelling time(theoratical).speed and gravity are the key to the universe(theory not proved)

All you really need is a crystal diode with 16 sides, a large pain of glass, and a frequency transmitter near a bathtub full of ice cold water….if you reach the right frequency you can travel through time forward and reverse…

Magnetized metal(VCR Reading Head), to read time out of the Magnetosphere all around earth. The Magnetosphere kills 2 birds with one stone- it protects earth and it records human time:

Mystery solved and I will explain, I was in a coma 3 months and I experienced things, I traveled time forward and backward, it is not a one way ticket. Movies and songs are recorded on magnetic tape in a VCR tape Cartridge or Cassette tape,Â Â Magnetic tape recording works by converting electrical signals into magnetic energy, which imprints a record of the signal onto a moving tape covered in magnetic particles.Â Â 3D life on earth(a movie), and the Magnetosphere all around earth coming from the core of earth(MAGNETIC ACTIVITY) without Atom Made Tape, is like a movie on magnetic Atom made tape in a VCR tape cartridge. Revolution and Rotation is the motor(VCR).

This is why people have those freaky Deji’vuÂ feelings like they have lived this before, BECAUSE YOU HAVE, and how people can be psychic, and how there is Prophecy in the Bible. When a person dies, their Spirit- MIND(Thoughts, Feelings, Urges(Physical and mental personality)) breaks out of human body- a stopped heart is what releases the spirit from the human body. Then the Soul(Life) with the memory of your existence in it breaks out of spirit and goes back to your birthday with a erased memory, meanwhile your spirit goes back in time to when you were a teenager starting the mental puberty, maturity from that adult spirit you died with in last life.In that old movie Star Wars or maybe it was the Empire Strikes Back, there is a scene where Princess LayaÂ plays like a 3D movie, that is EXACTLY how its of life on earth.

Mr Snow, I believe you as I have seen it too. As humans we have deep knowledge of things we cannot rationally explain but you have done a great job here.

I thought that Analogy would be a better and easier way to explain, or in a picture of the earth from far out in space with the atmosphere around it looks like a DVD disk and the earth being the center sticker but is in 3D.

Actually you are on to several things here. I have also had the infusion of knowledge that also had to do with comparing life to recorded movies and music. I know you were using it to explain your theory, but I do think there is something there, I always have. When you watch a movie you are seeing the past. Why canâ€™t you somehow use a recording as a base to go back into? I agree with everything you said here, and itâ€™s worth looking into.

Jeffrey, very interesting idea!! Could be something to that. As far as your coma experiences, I think there are things we just do not understand and are nearly impossible to explain. Perhaps time IS like a video tape, or a DVD? Magnetism is one of the forces of nature. I too have had some odd experiences that suggest that we are able to perceive things beyond our five known senses.

I think if you have had a near death experience, such as being in a coma, then you have experienced the powerful hallucinations provided by the chemical substance DMT which your body creates naturally in times of extreme trauma, but also found in most plants and used recreationally by some who are brave enough and into that kind of thing. Your theory is interesting, but completely unproven and as far as I know untested. If things were so simple, I’m sure many scientists would have already thought of such an idea and tested it.

How do I travel through time

Be alive and live life to the fullest is the best way to travel through time ! OR Befriend grey aliens../ They may hold the key to the sum of all knowledge in the universe..

Sounds good will it work

Really log vaps mil sakte hau h kya

Can you plz explain I didn’t get it

You dont first all you are not experienced in the field of the space time continum and you could you upset the already fragile and multitude of alternate realitys that have looping due irresponsible ones who somehow gotten the technology causing another altered time frame there are a disarray multiple reality which are looping in earths 4dimensonal time frame time traveling is not for a vacation or just to get a joy ride its a serious and complex reality not be joked about it is a real thing and certain individual have are upset the balance of earths original time zone note now the gaurdians of this region of milky way the galatic order of the light keepers Angelic gaurdians of the (names with held)are working over time ooh nice pun (over TIME) ha wow to restore Earth back to a original time continum

Who said I want a joy ride, my life is devastated even my kids are suffering, I want to commit suicide but can’t leave my kids back, Being captive for most of my life, if my life is changed nothing will be disturbed, only thing happens is 3 life’s will be saved. And more so over I don’t want to travel I just want to send a message to myself in my past plz on the date of 30th May 1996. My life is ruined plz help me, it was my dad,brother, sister who pushed me into the dungeon and my husband and his family took over the charge of torturing me. Nazneen

I want to go back in time and tell my 5 year old self to burn the creepy dolls that my mom bought cause there is demons in it at the same time I will kidnap and torture my dad right now go back in time and show the younger version of my dad show him what will happen to his future self if he donâ€™t get rid of those possessed objects and keeps letting my mom buy those antiques Iâ€™m 18 now Iâ€™m single no girlfriend no friend alone nothing very depressed too and I try to remember the positive things that happened in my life which there arenâ€™t many tho but the demons keep squeezing my memory brain and my mom keeps on making so much loud noise including her damn mouth I have attempted to burn the demonic dolls but I only burned them for a minute or two with gas cause I was worried I might accidentally set my whole neighborhood on fire but then my mom threw it all in the recycle instead of the trash so the demons just keep bothering me its driving me nuts he he.

Access to a Quantum Computer Network on the web would be a good start. A series of ChatBots and webhook sites strategically placed in not only space, but in time. A series of algorithms and I think information can be transferred backwards to ones self…

How do we know that there are no horde of tourists among ourselves?

How do we know we’re all not tourists?

We’re all time travelers. We all travel into the future daily. 1 second at a time. Lol…

Agreed! I had the same thought!

Excellent question

If is possible, I would like to go back to: January the 1st 1975 & relive the 70â€™s as I prefer that decade to the awful one I am facing now, Back then We had more police our streets & left our front doors open, Those days were far much more better .

https://3netra.co.in/61-2/

Please do comment on my blog post regarding time travel

how about you ask the flash to help you

I need the time travel so I’m fails so many times i love time travel i have to go fast and future so i have no idea im travel is a my dream so my dream solution plz say me i have time travel so please help me someone please…..

I think you are over reacting

When we look at the stars now it is what they looked like years ago so what if we go to the stars and look down?

You cant go to the stars. It will just take billions and billions of years to go even to the next nearest star than our Sun- proxima centuri. Sorry to say, but do you think that you will be alive all those years??

You can do that without going to the stars… our planet reflects light as well thus making it visible from other parts of the universe…. has the word â€œreflectionâ€ crossed your mind ? 😉

Contact me on my hangout I will help you [email protected]

bro just time travel its not that hard

Please help me to time travel, can I see myself when I go back in time like Harmaini sees herself in Harry potter?? Or can I send messages to myself I know the particular date when to send. It’s not the mistake I had done in my past but it was done by my father and brother who are safe, happy enjoying their lives,my life is totally ruined Please help me. Nazneen

I want to go back in time to save my wife .it was a bad mastake she died .that could be changed i need to go back and save her. Please help me.yours gordon sutcliffe

Would love to hear more how itâ€™s possible, as I am really so desperate to go back in time. I lost my wife 6mons back because of COVID and I will do the impossible things to make it happen.

DMT Experience

what is that?

Dmt experience. Time travel, out of body and sometimes superhuman capabilities.

Jump into a black hole

We have to lose something(the past) to gain something(the future) in time travel.Time cannot be played with.Am I correct.

you need to have d e t e r m i n a t i o n

Time machine is possible

speeder than light LOL

speeder than light cuz if the light break it limits it will move backward in time

Don’t Just don’t disturb the past

I want to go back in time and see my dad. I miss him.

mee too raina I lost my father the day before you posted the comment 18th may, crap it hurts me so much. I would rather die to bring those moments back….

Everything is connected . Time isn’t real .

It is universe we travel to and not a time line in one universe

Ask trump….Mandela effect…. dmt 5th dimension

u need an X-WING starfighter and a lightsaber to fight the knights at past and a R2-B2 to track

The fact that no one has time travelled to the past is the proof that time travelling will NEVER exist.

Others have. Portals open most of the time. Example: Miami Fl. Magnetic Material gets bombarded by the sun. Which fractures and formed portals within that area. Ley lines can lead to the portals of travel within miami for just to start. One can laugh or wonder if. In my experience jumping for the better the word of it (Movie Jumper) can be done. You can either Teleport or Time Travel. Our sun open these portals everyday. The best time when Sun spots start to emerge. All that electrons traveling at light speed is enough to rupture our magnetic fields on Earth. You will return of course. Like water on a lake or an ocean time will corrects itself. Your inner clock is your ticket back home. With a little math,fourth dimensional thinking,a magnetic meter, the right location,history research and luck. You may get to expirence it. First clue….cold spots…it may not be a ghost.

Plz can you help me please help me you can save my life

I wish I could help you, I can sense your sufferings.

You need a bag of hyperlink modules to start, then nuclear beepbeep gatangas, when you have that come back here and I will tell you what you need next.

You need high voltage beepbeep gatangas and a large broonasic magnet of about 450 Gauss, come back here when you have these and I will tell you the rest.

you need an old fashioned police box

If you rotate the center of the earth in the opposite direction, then the whole earth can be moved back in time, on the other hand, if you move the center of the earth and change its position by separating it from the part of the earth, then you will be able to time correctly. Let’s reach the other side.

How I could time travel any time travel machines inverted

give audition in the flash series..

I think that to go back in time you’d to travel faster than the speed of light since time stops at the speed of light but if you wanted to go back to say mlk’s assassination you would need to go at least 10 times the speed of light

You don’t want to, the moment you wrote that message is a historical point in time.

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It’s Close I can feel it

Yes it becomes a history but my life also in the past changes and the present also with it. The way I’m suffering from the pain and want to end my life I’m 100% sure at least sure no one around me is or was as hopeless and horrible as my hubby I’m devastated I really want to send a message to my past it may not start but it will definitely change. I was forced, not given any option, my father and brother gave me wrong information and had no concerns for me. It was just survival for me. I repent for not killing myself when I had time, but now if I have a chance why not. Now when I’m out of my marriage I come to know a guy then had feelings for me, was madly in love and wanted to ask for my hand, now I want to inform my self and change everything plz help me.

I too would like to go back in time. I just wish he lived a happy eternal life. I would just like to repeat to come back in 2020.

I heard from a guy in Idaho that time travel is possible. You’ll need to go online and purchase a pogo stick looking device and make sure not to forget the crystals.

I think u need a black-hole-proof spaceship, go to the centre, escape the black hole and viola! You are now in the past. If you can’t escape, then you’d travel to a time where that black hole didn’t exist.

Believe me you time travel! If not physically then you do mentally,like you through dreams.

Though they sale it online, it would not take the chance. It is as simple as beating the speed of light and having some system to send you to the time you want. Time however is not real, and were just traving universes. It will all be in the open in 2028 according to other travelers.

All you need base on how to travel to time is very simple but had to find firstly find a way to get to space through a space rocket secondly find a very perfect consifigration for traveling to tiTme then find a very fast rocket that could create a form of force reaction in space in order yo enable fast speed in space for the break through of non gravity in space and make sure that while doing all you activities is not far away from planet and not also to close to planet earth and make sure that you are with wristwatchs whose time is set disame then you can to the future

Man you can get all you need for too build a time machine in your local store man, man I sure wished Iâ€™d kept mine but it frightened the heck off me man, sometimes when I fart I find a grape in my pants

time travel is a fake, baseless and delusional idea. If you believe in that crap then tell us if we are living in the future or in the past. To travel backward the entire system has to return all along with nature and events, it won’t be for you alone except time travel only happens in the mind.

you would need to get about 1,000,000 pounds of silicon and then somehow conduct enough energy to make 500 cars run without an engine and then go to a nuqular power plant and somehow make a portal. but the whole world could go out of orbit if you do that so I wouldent sugest it.

Time machine is good and bad because,with the time machine you will know about your future which is not good.

Is time travel actually a real thing because if it is then I need it because I am trying to go back in time to fix all of my mistakes

So what if time travel is the reason that we now believe there are other realities in our own world.this could be that a Time traveler we could only go back and couldn’t come back, and on doing so if you do something to change the past in stead make a new reality.making other things are deferent and ours realty stays the same . sometimes reality gets mixed up make the mandela effect that we see today

Time in the future it is faster then now. The past is slower so you can travel . It is up to you. One way is to meditate. You can travel and see any body you want right now. You can fly faster then light. That is one way. You go to the future. To go to the past you sleep for a long time. Some time you go to the future or the past. Your heart well stop and your body gets cold. Sometimes you can control it sometimes you can’t.

but how do we know that is really true ? i mean i want to figure this out, i want to time travel, but how is it that simple ? so many people have been trying to figure this out for many years and its that simple ?

Yeah what if you get stuck in there what do you do than

You cant go there in the first place. Dont worry. With current technology, we will only end up messing some few microseconds. Highly doubtful, if we can end up getting the news of travelling hundreds of years in our lifetime.

wait what would happen if someone saw you while you where in past/future i’m curious

Time is an illusion based on perceived reality and is only relative to our limitations. Time isnâ€™t what it seems and all things canâ€™t be figured out

Im on a school computer looking this up and i found this article and scrolling trough it and ive not heard one statement here as good as yours bro

This is blowing my mind people, then I see the school boy on the post. Great stuff, whoever reads this is already capable of travelling through time. Think about all people who have posted on this thread, now think about who will read mine. Now think of those â‚¬opposite trolls $ who never ever bother posting on you tube thread etc. But ONE comment from one of the time travellers who wrote on this thread. So that opposite troll is me,I donâ€™t normally post.however because of previous comments Iâ€™m posting here. And I love the DMT shit I loved that and lived that one out in real life,,,,another day.

So my point is ifOne or two threads have made me write this….then what will my post make others write , think…..then I could travel back and not write this…. then what. Love the conception of time how can u travel something that doesnâ€™t YOU perceive to be time, like a train can only run on its train tracks, a car can only drive on a road etc Itâ€™s posibble I know it is. Sometimes when u have fun times moves swift but locked in jail it goes snail pace. U c me. I write letters to myself from past from future. Remember everything that happens in present becomes part the past. But the future is what you hold in your hands. Question is, now you know….what the f are u gonna do about it?.. 01/04 ==== 21

Hahahah only realised school boy is named BIG dick pissing myself laughing I gotta go pee. Respect certified

so not halal mode

True so were not traveling in time. It is just different universe (on what we call) different time, day, tears, etc.

You would be scared for life

you will desepear

Maybe it has happened before and we just don’t know that they’re from the future. If people in the future time traveled, the would know that it’s dangerous to mess with the past and would pretend to be part of the past.

I believe time travel is already possible, however we cannot fix past mistakes without altering future predicaments. Say we stop JFK’s assasination, that would completely change the future from that point forward to one none of us can know/guess or conclude the effects? Other time travel purposes go to the future I think that from now our world will die off before 2096 basdd on overpopulation, global warming & polution as such creating islands of plastic waste in our oceans. The best thing my opinion go back to the garden of Eden, kill that Serpent Satan before he tricks Eve into the forbidden fruit. Then let God raise, enlighten & teach us how to be humanly sustainable on his planet & I guarantee technology & smart phones? Ain’t no part of it!!

Time travel possible but one n only theory of Stephen hawking

How it is possible to jump in time …??

Many ways. The most used is creating a black hole which can be done in a few ways. 1) traveling forwards or backwords faster than the speed of light 2) been known during heavy lightning strikes. Each way is a fast movement that opens the black hole. It has been done by the Government since the 1980s though they claimed they never beet the speed of light until 2002. However, Time is a illusion and their for we are actually traveling different universe that are differnt than ours even if the difference is by 1 thing. Each universe may have (what we call) different time, days and years. And each time we change that time line we created a new one. It is belief as CERN has said they destroy 5 universe, that they can travel to them. Since 2012 it has seem we been shifting and is now belief they have possibly came together. The event is known as The Mandela Effect.

No one has the right theory in my thinking. Only a few things are wrong. It is universes with (what we call) different time, days and years we are traveling to and not time itself as it is a illusion. Their is no stop to how much we can do, or where we can go. No limit as such say.

There is no God. No magical serpent or Garden of Eden ever existed. Basing a scientific theory on archaic stories does no one any good.

You choose a hopeless eternity. I choose hope through the promise of salvation through Christ for those who believe. You see, I have child in heaven. Thankfully, have a hopeful reality that I can embrace. There is a God. Our known universe is only 14 or so billion years old… is it mathematically possible that random molecules out of the Big Bang mixed in just the right way from to form a complex cellular organism… with DNA… and result in humans and such diversity of life forms? Itâ€™s naive to accept this as a result of chance. Think about it. How is that remotely possible without a creator?

Hahaha. You make it seem as tho the big bang happened, and we just popped into existence? Naw it’s called evolution baby, we started out as microscopic organisms, seriously, when did you drop out of school? But that’s like saying a some guy writes a book to explain away natural phenomenons that they were to stupid (un-evolved) to grasp and the concept good and bad and the eternal damnation, And thus, the Bible, and boom, everyone now was made by God, hahaha. When you can prove he/she exists, and that the Bible was a autobiography, and not just some twisted piece of Fiction, that has no real basis in reality, and cannot be proved to be more that a work of Fiction. Rather than being used as the16th Century control tact, ‘be good or you’ll go to hell’. But I guess that’s what they mean when they say ignorance is bliss, (maybe if I was as ignorant as y’all believers I’d believe to). But I can’t see how a ‘GOD’ would ever ask one of its creations to kill another.. Genocide, Crusades, all the ethnic cleansing.. All In the name of God Almighty! Hahahahahhaaa. Aliens are more believable than this shit, and theirs no proof they exist either. Hahahahaha. Fug’n Bible thumpers. ‘Step out side your faith and see the world for what it really is, a complex organism, mad of gravity and dust, quite a unique specimen! And we, yes Bible bangers, this includes you, are destroying it like the bubonic plague.’. ‘The end is coming and it’s our fault’

Have you taken the time to read The Old Testament and the prophecies therein that came to be ?.

How do you explain that ?.

My last post should read GS not G

You have not had an encounter yet with God. Don’t be so certain on yuour theory of evolution. He came and shook my reality to it’s core. Made thing possibly that no one could ever explain.

What are you talking about? Ur so wrong and funny in every way.

BlissfullyInformed just told me his comment was all an April fools prank. He believes in Jesus and was just fooling.

Time travel is very much possible just as you decided to come existence in this century meaning one can decide to be in another time zone . life is all about numbers, you just have to work on numbers

I’m pretty sure ppl don’t decide to come into existence. If that were true I wouldn’t be replying to your comment.

Un like your other reply, I understand what you mean. Each timeline (or universe as some see it) can easily be traveled to at will. No different than traveling threw your time you want to visit.

Science has proven a few things from the Bible is true. God does exist. Christians are confused with time and what it says. For a example. God created the world, as science even belives it was God who created the big bang, yet the bang has happen itself creating the moon, planets and stars. Christians also fail to understand chapter 1 and 2 of gen. spoke of two different creations which can be why we see dinosaurs before humans as chapter 1 spoke of animals first and humans 2nd. Their also was different time than, as without the moon a full day is 6 hours. It would take 4 days back than to equal are 1 day. Time is lost and Christians are just confuse on that time. That does not proof their is no God. As they have already found the robes of Jesus and remains of Noah’s ark, it proves much did happen. The bible only has less than 50% of what was written.

Changing the past is impossible, because if we went back into the past, that means we were already there during the time you experienced it.

We all know how to get into time travel but how do we get out……..

You don’t need time travel – all you need is life. And what is life? Life is the evolution of the impossible into the inevitable over an infinite amount of time.

if it is shown that if something, such as a solution to a particular class of equations, were possible, then two mutually contradictory things would be true, such as a number being both even and odd. The contradiction implies that the original premise is impossible.

This is called proof by impossibility. Thus if some traveled back in time far enough to kill his grandfather, we have the contradiction and therefore it is impossible.

You could argue that he would be able to time travel, but not kill his grandfather. However almost anything a person does going back in time would cause the same contradiction, thererfore it is the traveling back in time that is impossible.

Actually, it probably is possible to travel back in time, however to do so, you would also have to travel so far in space that you cannot see anything that happened before your current time due to the speed of light, because this to could affect the future.

The reason I am here is that, i really want to go back the day when our matriculation exam was just finished. Everything around me is peaceful and happy. Currently, I am living in dire situation. People are dying outside on the streets. Smokes everywhere. Everything is in doom. Ah, yeah. I really miss my past. If you are reading this, you can judge me in anyways. I just want to live peacefully and happily.

You must live in Portland

I entirely know what you say and how you feel, Robin. I am totally convinced that future is no promise to offer a better place to live. World is becoming unnecessarily more complex and more horrible and more insecure. Therefore, travelling back in time to a point where things were still far away from such ordeals is what I aspire. But I think if it is possible to travel back in time without the possibility of carrying our lived experiences with us, it will be useless as we will be repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Now, this begs the questions “in what type of physique could we imagine ourselves back there if such time travel becomes possible? That is, becoming younger again in a physical regression (as I said this would be a torture without having learned from all these later years)? Or appearing at our desired times in our present physique and age? I believe the most ideal one would be if we appeared at our desired point in time at the same age that we were at that point of time with a good feeling of our later lived experiences.

Mam all u need to do is just run faster as much as u can or visit the black hole because in both condition time just slow it down ….

Time travel is simple. If you do happen to travel to the past you create a new time line not affecting the time line you left. In essence you going to the past is now your future. Even if you were able to return you may never know if you remained in your time-line or created a new one. So even if you changed something in your travels it would happen in the future not the past.

Sorry time traveling is not possible, there is no way you can go into the past or the future â€â™‚ï¸. You can only be in the time you are already in.

Incorrect. General relativity allows time travel into the future. You need a space ship that can travel extremely fast though, approaching the speed of light, or you need to get close to a supermassive black hole.

It is travel into the past that there is no known practical way to do, and is probably impossible.

So what happens when we Die? Where do we go? I want to go back in time so I can meet my childhood friends…

Simple question from a simple mind:

At what point, when a person says they are from the future, do we stop throwing them in the funny farm and actually start listening??

When they show actual proof. Not just some random prediction of the future.

I don’t believe that “glimpses into the future” could be possible. If it were so, we could glimpse blueprints of the future that we could bring back to the present and build before they were invented. My personal.beleif is in any time frame there is only one active time which is the present. The past no longer exists and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so there is no such thing as ‘time travel’ except for the frame we are in now.

First off time is not real we make time if you travel anywhere all you are doing is beating the Earth speed try this for a mathematical equation the Earth travels a thousand miles per hour you’re not beating human time that is your own equation the Earth travels a thousand miles per hour a space shuttle travel 17,000 mph you can beat time that you made so time is not real you are only beating the Earth speed if you go in a space shuttle and go around the earth 17,000 miles per hour the Earth only travels a thousand miles per hour plus it has all types of gravitational pull from the Moon Earth’s access on the til t you figure out the mathematical equation I cannot time travel is real if you can beat the Earth speed and we can it has nothing to do with its 12:00 it’s 1:00 that’s not real time is made up as a mathematical equation you can beat the Earth speed you can go back into the Earth’s time in a space shuttle but you’re not beating anything except the Earth’s speed think about that one time is not real at all all it is is a mathematical equation think about that one real long

What I’m trying to say is this a space shuttle travel 17,000 mph the Earth travels a thousand you beat it 16 times faster that’s all you did you’re not beating any time you’re not beating 1:00 you’re not beating 3:00 all you’re doing is beating the Earth’s time you can go in reverse around the Earth 17,000 mph okay you can go forward with the Earth’s centrifugal force 17,000 miles per hour you’re not beating anything you’re beating a mathematically equation that we we created astronauts been traveling time for instance for years and haven’t told us because of the space shuttle that does travel 17,000 mph it beats the Earth speed 16 times a boggles my mind you have the Earth access the moon gravitational pull but you can get in a space shuttle and travel 17,000 miles per hour and beat the Earth’s speed 17 times think about it

If any scientist or anybody can actually answer this question how do you set up this equation with the Earth spinning a thousand miles per hour you have the moon pulling gravity the Earth’s access on until I want to know tell me then wondering for a while this equation popped into my head about 2 years ago I’m not a math whiz or anything I just thought about it weird how the mind works I’m not into space or any space stuff at all I’m Samanthas boy friend John antos wrote this

I liked your post and the knowledge you given. I also written a post on Time Travel.

how would any of that stuff be true because e’*34+Em would stop all the forss of vissecs and how would we do it if you now what i mean??? also thanks for the scuff for my project

I would love it if I had a real life time machine here with me now which could take me to anytime I want, the past, present or future. If I had a time machine here with me now, I would go to the past in September 2004 when I was born and give myself to another family that is actually rich and not this horrible family that I have now.

that not nice

Close but not quite right scientists of the idiotic variety, yes, you don’t want people to travel back in time to mess with their own pasts, of course, but you say it’s impossible, but it’s not, and I’m always ignored with my crazed crackpot theories, so what’s the harm in telling the truth as I see it, while it could be possible to travel to the past, here in lies the problem with rewriting the future, while some believe it’s possible to travel back in time, but it’s very expensive and definitely a one-way trip to the future or to the past. Basically Doc Brown got the mechanism for time travel almost right but the energy out put needs to be quadrupled instead, allowing for the ‘physical item, being or vehicle’ to transport through time without killing the time traveler in question. Wormholes are unpredictable, until warp speed for spaceships are a thing, it is not possible for the space ships to achieve time travel, unless they want to enter a black hole, which I would not recommend. as you need warp speed to survive the emptiness of the black hole, without being ripped to shreds. Say for example, Back to the future 1, the timeline doesn’t erase it continues on without the ‘said time traveler’ in existence basically the Marty from Wimpy George’s timeline did time travel to the past and messed with his parent’s meeting so to speak, but never return to the same timeline therefore Marty A went known as a Missing Child in timeline A, while it continues on without him, however Marty A became Marty B/C, in the Successful George Timeline. So that is what I’m talking about. the timeline changes only for the time traveler themselves the ones who are left behind don’t experience a thing of timeline rewritten-ism, as it would never happen in the first place. The other thing is if you want to mess with your own childhood, to make a better life for the past self, the key thing to remember it’s not really you. It’s an alternative version of you, that you interfered with. creating a parallel timeline to it’s original, yet slightly different. Yes it would be awkward to raise yourself. but as long as you are staying in the past, nothing should happen until the age you traveled back in time, unless of course you touched your past self and suddenly de-aged and merged with your past self, is an option 1, option 2 the future self explodes spreading guts all over the place and therefore the past self, of you became a murderer of your future self, I am more inclined to believe option 1 as option 2 seems a little too out there. Basically you would have two memories one of the former timeline and one of the current different timeline. Still traveling through time is truly a one way trip and if you want to travel through time, you would need some time travel mechanism, the way you scientist talk is basically a dream version, or an OBE version (OUT-OF-BODY-EXPERIENCE) which is basically a vivid/lucid dream which is not true time travel, the true time travel is based on the BTTF Trilogy not the idiotic versions you preach about. I believe I’ve said enough.

Mystery solved and I will explain, I was in a coma 3 months and I experienced things, I traveled time forward and backward, it is not a one way ticket. Movies and songs are recorded on magnetic tape in a VCR tape Cartridge or Cassette tape, Magnetic tape recording works by converting electrical signals into magnetic energy, which imprints a record of the signal onto a moving tape covered in magnetic particles. 3D life on earth(a movie), and the Magnetosphere all around earth coming from the core of earth(MAGNETIC ACTIVITY) without Atom Made Tape, is like a movie on magnetic Atom made tape in a VCR tape cartridge. Revolution and Rotation is the motor(VCR).

This is why people have those freaky Dejiâ€™vu feelings like they have lived this before, BECAUSE YOU HAVE, and how people can be psychic, and how there is Prophecy in the Bible. When a person dies, their Spirit- MIND(Thoughts, Feelings, Urges(Physical and mental personality)) breaks out of human body- a stopped heart is what releases the spirit from the human body. Then the Soul(Life) with the memory of your existence in it breaks out of spirit and goes back to your birthday with a erased memory, meanwhile your spirit goes back in time to when you were a teenager starting the mental puberty, maturity from that adult spirit you died with in last life.In that old movie Star Wars or maybe it was the Empire Strikes Back, there is a scene where Princess Laya plays like a 3D movie, that is EXACTLY how its of life on earth.

If only wish I could undo everything what I’ve done wrong in the past, I’d be more happier

And that my friend is absolutely what you do not or would not know. Everyone focuses on what they don’t or haven’t had rather than what positives they do have around them. To change the ingredients of a past life only changes the flavour you have in this life, it does not make you happier.

No, travel to the future is not possible. Like, future is unpredictable and always have been so give up on that field

Already has been, and has been proven.

Time travel is not so possible for every one , but there are already time travelers on earth #@*

Who are these time travelers?

Depends if it is the Governments (they done it since the 80s), or if it was a Accidental travel, or a simple us creating our own machine. Either way, one can easily find storys, and other evidence with a good research. I have a website that shows the effects of change cause by time travel.

They are out their (done by the government since the 80s) but the future is open with time travel (told its open since 2028) so they travel back much.

Time travel 101-

Create a closed loop circuit around a full metal structure, hermetically seal it and bring O2, Use two tesla coils to create north and south poles. (Artificial Magneto sphere.) Make sure to pain the outside in lead to prevent any cosmic rays from penetrating the materials on the inside. (Radiation = bad). Connect a ball made of w/e with wires that alternate the current from the coils to w/e panel on the outside of the structure to make it move via inductive magnetic / electric Lorentzo (Lorentzo = ExMfield = Velocity. = Antigravity) Create Antigravity by using forces from the inside reactor. (Pressurized Mercury, and Tesla Turbine.) Then Move 10-100x faster than light depending on the charged field, Friction will be added to the electric field instead of the craft allowing the G-forces not to crush you inside. The field will take the pressures of outer space, The temperature of space will allow for super conductivity of the structure.

Eventually you will arrive in the future, if you stay in one place. but account for the movement of earth in your travel log. To see outside you will need a monitor / camera system, as any leaks through a viewing area will cause death by radiation from the cosmic rays from the field you have created.

The O2 can be used as a backup generator, through air pressure and the tesla turbine.

There are many different ways to make wormholes, but the curvature of space is really hard to calculate to send a machine far out to the end and create a link with the machine that wants to travel there. And leaving one behind to get back.

If you can imagine it, it can be done. You just need the knowledge of not dying to complete it.

U.S.S. Tourist, You’re a time traveler or just insanely smart.

You don’t need to go the speed of light. Human Time is recorded in the magnetospere as a movie is record, ed on magnet VCR Tape or a song on a record. A VCR or record does not have to go light speed to retrieve the recorded info. All of life is recorded in 3D by our Magnetosphere. My Analogy is imagine a VCR tape cartridge being the earth, imagine life on earth being the movie but in 3D with out adom made tape, imagine Rotation and Revolution of Earth being the VCR putting all in to motion- playing. That is how its done, the magnetosphere kills two birds with one stone, it protects earth and records time, human time is in a magnetic bubble that is why the Bible refers our time is different from gods time and this is how God the maker(PLANET OF UNITED SUPREME BEINGS) can flip through our time to know everything. By the way long before life on earth, he built the original 7 wonders of world(Pyramids) to Pump the Seven gasses into the atmosphere of this planet found in the goldilocks zone, so Life can live on it, and that life of all types is his technological cyborgs that grow and multiply on earth also he seeded it with plant, trees, sea creature and things that fly,. Anyway that above is how time is recorded.

Until recently, I thought my neighbor was a crackpot until he actually invented a time machine. He utilized an ordinary closet, and showed me the sophisticated (to me) instrumentation he had installed. I was very skeptical at first, until he offered a small demonstration and entered the time coordinates and energized his invention. To my amazement, when I opened the door, the clock on the wall was 30 minutes later than when we stepped into the machine. OMG!!! Destroy this thing before it destroys us!!!.

So happy to have my husband back after 6 months of separation. get any kind of relationship/marriage help you want from….Robinsonbuckler11 @gmail com………………………

I find it odd that people say time travel isn’t possible yet… If time travel is possible, it has always existed. Meaning, there is not past present it future, only our perception of time. What we know as past present and future have always been occurring simultaneously, so travel was invited the moment the universe wss formed. Dinosaurs are roaming the earth right now, and forever. A version of me is typing this and has always been typing this, within this perceived moment of “time” and time travel has always happened, whether or not we exist in that reality at the right “time” to observe time travel is the only question.

I find it odd that people say time travel isn’t possible yet… If time travel is possible, it has always existed. Meaning, there is no past present or future, only our perception of time. What we know as past present and future have always been occurring simultaneously, so travel was invited the moment the universe was formed. Dinosaurs are roaming the earth right now, and forever. A version of me is typing this has always been typing this, within this perceived moment of “time” and time travel has always happened, whether or not we exist in that reality at the right “time” to observe time travel is the only question.

Their had to be one point however, when it was created and started, and for that, there was nothing but the current time. Once it was created, than we had a pass, present and future to which we can go back to millions of years to see Adam and Eve with the dinosaurs or go millions of years in the future. However, given the events that changes, each time a new time line has been created. We also have destroyed the planet and repopulated many times in the last million years. Each event changed, or something we do different (without traveling) enters a new universe where some things may be different or the same. Today are universe are shifting a lot.

To be fair, even if it is a one way trip into the past, that doesn’t stop machines going back. We could send a machine back and order it to do anything we want and then tell it to meet us at a certain time in the future. We send it back, then go straight to the meeting point we agreed and then we’ll be able to prove if it worked or not.

I’m a girl who has read a book about seeing future through a box. So is it actually possible?

Time travel has been done on purpose by the Government since the late 1980s. From research, the mostly use kids, or future Presidents. Their are some cases where people have been struck by lightning or came across some tragically event that cause them to leave their timeline either forward or behind in time. The Mandela Effect is the current cause of how things go wrong when time travel is not done right. Click on my name to see the website.

Even as traveling to a location as a future or pass date is possible as what people here mean. However, as you said, it is numbers. Time is a illusion and we do not travel threw time, just universe that are different than ours. What we call time dates and months is what changes each universe. We are all from different universes today as they came together. The mandela effect is a fine example.

thx to eleon wont we soon be able to digitize our conscious being, then accelerate that data pass the speed of light some how then download it into some android or something…..i dunno…..just a thought

I want to go to my elementary school again. Someone help me out, I know its Idiotic but stil.. I am not good at science. As far I understood, 1) we can trace through time if we travel fast than speed of light.. I think memory os the only thing that is faster than light, Yeah I can go to Paris within 1 sec in my memory but yeah its illustion, i want in real 2) Through Blackhole – I think its Bermuda triangle

if you travel back in time you will still be your age now. That is how it worked with others. No one gets younger otherwise traveling to far back would kill you. No school would let you return to school as a adult so not possible.

Plz help me I just want to send a message to myself in my past and save my self from a beast plz help Nazneen

Would love to experience many moments in life again for the first time again!

I think that time traveling should be left alone, for the sake of humanity. There are some things we’re not ready for yet.

Well stephen hawking may be wrong. I mean, the study proved that the universe self corrects itself to prevent inaccuracies. So maybe tourists from past do visit us but we don’t remember them as the universe alters our memory. If you guys have read about Butterfly Effect, a simple mistake today may grow through years to become a giant disaster in future so if you think of it, oncoming tourists from future may cause giant inaccuracies. Imagine this, You have travelled to past. You brought two cakes for yourself, so you pay the shopkeeper 20$. The shopkeeper invests the 20$ in stocks, strikes gold there and becomes a rich businessman.His daughter goes to Cambridge and marries someone else than the person she was supposed to marry according to time. Can you imagine the magnitude of inaccuracy after 100 years? Therefore, whatever the tourists from future do, is corrected by the universe and we don’t remember it. Creepy, but food for thought.It also adds a special meaning to the word ‘Fate’.

How much wacky terbacky (i.e. weed) you be smokin’ JOE JOE?

Hmmmm…. As brilliant of a mind as Stephen Hawkins was, how is he so sure that he would even recognize hordes of tourists from the future? Almost everyone is aware of the warning of the Butterfly Effect. So I’m sure any future visitors Intelligent enough for Past-Time travel would be amply attuned to this.

Most future people coming to the pass (our time) seems careless and not intelligent. Most are taking FBI lie detector test and telling us what is happening in the future. That is a bad idea, because if you tell us (example) who is the next President, and the Government does not like the person they than can change that event to let someone else in (as seen in 2020) One should never acknowledge who he or she is or why they are their. Most traveling is to get knowing of the pass or to pick up certain things. Since are pass is changing, events are changing and are timelines are messed up, someone made a mistake. The Mandela Effect is a fine example.

Wow that’s great plz help me go to my past plz,I can’t do it by my own at least help me send a msg to myself in my past Nazneen

I think it is possible, but time traveling is really just changing universe created by different time lines. Our whole solar system is in a whole different place now and Earth is much smaller in this universe from the one I grew up end. Someone has already changed the timeline.

Roads? Where we’re going, you don’t need roads!

Youre wrong about your measurement of speed for traveling, in order for time to slow down, with inside an object compared to outside. Scientists proved that time with inside an object at an excelorated speed actually appeared to have slown down during the duration of time for the test. The speed was far less then the terminal speed of a rocket for NASA at 256,000 kms p/h.

In to the volicity of space. Generating a vacuum of space, could be no different the the actual transport of matter over frequency where in fact matter can be carried by sound. It is believed that an alien civilization harnessed this energy in the form of bolisks that where believed to carry the same properities and in consideration of harmonic resinance, the simularities could be used in order to carry large weight. In accordance with a documentry on theoretical science.

However the properties, present the fact that a working property controdicts your counter intuative theory of gravitational deceloration of matter to colide within itself to absorb all things into non existance as to the transfer of matter into energy, rather then your idiolisms of transfer between dimentional space to another destination that is not linked or the transfer between time that isnt, either.

However to reproduce the fabric of time within space in a practical measurement as I have mentioned, would put an end to all the lunacy of an unmeasureable field, which people fail to identify. Like running into a glass window. Only to not know what forcefield is present.

Time travel into the past can be achieved simply going faster than the speed of light.

The closer you get to the speed of light the slower time goes

If you reach the speed of light time stops

If you go faster than the speed of light it starts to reverse

Why does no one seem to know this?

Christopher Reeves did this in Superman 3 brah.

Any time travel, pass and future, is by going faster than the speed of light. It is said by reversing that that you can go back in time. However, I assume since the Government has done this since the 80s they have better ways (maybe tying in a date) and not having to go to a unknown date.

I want to send a message to myself in the past on a particular date plz can you help me, this means a lot lot lot to me,plz help me Nazneen

Why don’t we drop the declaratory statements that it “is or isn’t possible!” Until someone actually does so. Just say “maybe”.

People have and their are records both to the pass and future. The Government has done it since the 80s as part of the “star wars project” and are much better at it today. This explains the black holes in the sky of 2019, and the CERN destroying 5 parallel universes in 2013. We also see changes because of time travel events changing time. The Mandela Effect is a find example.

I want to send a msg to myself and my family in the past ,is it possible plz help me my life will be saved one who helps me saves me and my kids from a pack of beasts,

The worst idea ever. We all want to do this and where does it stop. A lottery win does not sound bad if you knew the actual location, time and place. After a while though, would you not want to write that hit song, become the author of the Harry Potter books, stop 9/11? The idea of giving your pass self (a time time travel was not proven) information of the future could change things in a major way. This would cause one small thing to change creating many others to change. This has already happen in simple ways of the The Berenstein Bears changing to The Berenstain Bears. This is a small event but this event “The Mandela Effect” now has over 3,000 changes.

What if you decided to give your pass self information about a lottery ticket that would be a winner, bought late at night and he was hit by a car on the way to get it. Changes the whole future. However, If detailed right, done right, with no large changes, it may not effect much, but to know your being given info from yourself in a future time (when that was not known much or provrn back than) You would either assume it is a joke or you gone crazy.

I don’t want to win a lottery, my decision about my career and studying was right but my family and their cruelty has put me into this worst condition I just want to go back complete my studies and live a life like a human not like a animal or slave,help me plz Nazneen

Can someone take me to 2013? i can pay later to all of you in bitcoins so its a win win and you dont need to do anything, just wait

LOL but still complicating on my side

You travel in your dreams where time and space colloids ..That’s y sometimes the dream which you dreamt might be a 10 mins reel time but you felt dreaming whole time like 6 to 8hrs .. Probably even traveling to parallel universe

I agree. Dreams as we know it is not a simple sleep. The part of the brain we do not use while awake, we use at night. This is the phenomenon part of the brain that can do thing we feel a human can not do. We of course use less than 30% of our brain. By the use of 100% of the brain we would use both sides and be able to do common things such as read thoughts, move things without touching them etc. The idea of using this side of the brain, would be the theory we can leave our bodies and visit different universe, see what could of happen shall we done something different, and even see future events. This may be why we notice different memories to some things as we could of held some from another reality.

It would be very weird, however, if we were trapped in that universe, or another body and fail to return to ours. Is that how people die in their sleep?

i just fell like going to late 70’s, where i can see majority of family.. i am willing to trade life for it…..

Time travel to the pass is just as common as the future. However, as both has been done it is NOT travel threw time. Time is a illusion we created. We are actually traveling threw different universe with (what we call) different time, dates, years, etc. The Mandela Effect is a find example how traveling threw different reality’s change the time lines.

As a add on to the above, Time travel is not a theory, has been proven, and has been done by the Government since the 1980s. Their is many residue in our history to even show some time travel storys to be real.

Where can one get a reverse watch, is it really possible to go back in past with its help, is it sooo easy ,plz help me ??????? Nazneen

US20060073976A1- search this patent number,this describes the process for time travelling,I really don’t think magnetic energy will work,maybe heat focused on a specific point could expand the fabric of space and make a hole in it.even then I will the hole take you to another time.it would be one thing to time travel but selecting a point in time would be impossible.you could only travel to the time you device was built?

Is there a watch which back travels in time or reverse time watch? Is it true? How to get one? But with that how can I send a message to myself in my past, plz help Nazneen

I don’t believe such a watch exist and their are plenty of smart minds with huge funds trying to travel.right now there are only theories.

Thank you very much for your response. I just want to send a message to myself in my past. Nothing much will be changed but 3 literally dying devastating lives will be saved. We are suffering for the mistakes and egoistic arrogance of others so if possible plz help me

Traveling back in time isn’t just a when problem, it’s a *where* problem. Where was the place you’re standing right now a thousand years ago, or a thousandth of a second ago? There is no useful answer to those questions, so there’s nowhere to travel back in time to.

Traveling forward in time? You’re doing it now.

when you step through a door is time lost when you come back through? lets say you return days Later how much time did you loose. what exactly is Time,.? is dialation a safe way to return ,. a Blackhole will assist you in in travel, the question is will you arrive safe,.

Traveling back in time is impossible. 2 reasons why that are never taken into account.

A) The stuff you are made of ( subatomic material) is being used by something else. It I not like you are a facsimile of the already existing material. What you are made of is exactly the same existing material. The problem is exact stuff can not exist in 2 different places in the same point in time. You will either : Decompile or fall out of phase with the universe. Both bad outcomes for the time traveler.

B) Lets look at it from logical commonsense. You have a bar of gold . You intend to send the bar back 1 second in time. Now you have 2 bars of gold . You send those 2 bars back one second . You have 4 bars …… do that 50 times . You have over 900 trillion bars of gold. All made of the exact subatomic particles. The more the bars back the more the existing mass of the universe increase. What are the consequences of changing the mass of the universe . Hence the paradox . Information can not be destroyed., It also can not be created.

At least this is the way my brain perceives going back in time.

Time is a function of change. None of the 4 forces The strong force , The weak force , Electromagnetism and Gravity can not work without time.

I will figure out time travel one day but only for the past.

I wish I could travel back to 18th of June to save my mom.

Is time travel really a one way ticket? Theoretically, if you can go one way, you should be able to go back.

Time is not one way. It’s consequences are however irreparable given certain circumstances and is not something that should be taken lightly or thought of in a manner of disregard. I’ve only very recently decided to take to your social platforms regarding space and time.

You can try finding me on Instagram. I’m not familiar with these platforms to better direct you there. My Instagram name is johnrvh

On Twitter it seems to be @_JohnRvH

If I go forward I will have to pay extra bills and taxes. I donâ€™t think I can afford it.

You’re the first person I’ve come across in this timeline that has a sense of humor. Thankfully, going forward is not possible if that future hasn’t been created yet.

timetraval is no joke if its created the whole universe could go out of orbit.

Cauchy problem converging to non minimal terraces as t â†’ +âˆž

Stephen Hawking may he rest in peace a genius but not all knowing. As far as he knows we haven’t been flocked by tourists, in the same maybe these UFO sightings are actually time travelers from the future coming to the past to view how we really lived why things really happened the way they did, etc. To limit the imagination of possible and impossible is wrong then you create fantasy. And we have learned from history that there is truth in fantasy. I.e. the different mythos of the different ancient cultures from around the world including those of the Norse. Improbable and probable should be more appropriate. It’s possible because it can be imagined improbable die to the right math or this or that not existing or matching up. I also believe that if time travel to the past were possible that the changing of something in the past would create a new timeline running current with your timeline at which will inevitably collide and will cause the collapse of the universe at which point a new universe will be born.

so i think the speed of light is only relative to deciding a point of destination -initially- as specific gravity of destination needs to be ascertained to calculate the frequency needed to run an alcubierre-white engine to bend space correctly to cross space ‘quickly’, the point of reference may well be jupiter in our solar system for the fact of the moons that orbit it, i surmise that by using a ‘dead end ‘ equation that usually puts notable mathematicians into the outer regions by trying to solve it may actually be the key as calculations end in a loop of 4-2-1 ie 3N+1; this process of calculation creates a sine wave over time/distance relative to specific gravity of chosen destination – as time is determined by gravity therefore if the speed of light to a destination can be used to ascertain the specific gravity of a ‘body’ to visit ie a star or sun due to receivable resonant frequencies emitted by the body, then the constrictions of the speed of light do not exist other than to give a constant, by using the 3N+1 method of calculation ,once the speed of light and returning resonant frequencies of a destination are determined the calculation can be extrapolated to match the distance giving the end point -in doing this the sine wave required can be ascertained and be condensed to create a wormhole and allow the alcubierre-white engine to ‘bend or distort space enough so that the bubble you are in matches the required specific gravity of the destination – the frequency of the body nearest to the destination point should be used and resonated inside the bubble to create synchronicity of frequency and cause attraction i also believe that travelling through space require the ability to see things from different perspectives and it requires the ability to navigate through a series of what may be described as “Aims Windows” where your point of view needs to change inherently with a given position at a given point in the galaxy

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Time travel: five ways that we could do it

Cathal O’Connell

Cathal O'Connell is a science writer based in Melbourne.

In 2009 the British physicist Stephen Hawking held a party for time travellers – the twist was he sent out the invites a year later (No guests showed up). Time travel is probably impossible. Even if it were possible, Hawking and others have argued that you could never travel back before the moment your time machine was built.

But travel to the future? That’s a different story.

Of course, we are all time travellers as we are swept along in the current of time, from past to future, at a rate of one hour per hour.

But, as with a river, the current flows at different speeds in different places. Science as we know it allows for several methods to take the fast-track into the future. Here’s a rundown.

1. Time travel via speed

This is the easiest and most practical way to time travel into the far future – go really fast.

According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, when you travel at speeds approaching the speed of light, time slows down for you relative to the outside world.

This is not a just a conjecture or thought experiment – it’s been measured. Using twin atomic clocks (one flown in a jet aircraft, the other stationary on Earth) physicists have shown that a flying clock ticks slower, because of its speed.

In the case of the aircraft, the effect is minuscule. But If you were in a spaceship travelling at 90% of the speed of light, you’d experience time passing about 2.6 times slower than it was back on Earth.

And the closer you get to the speed of light, the more extreme the time-travel.

Computer solves a major time travel problem

The highest speeds achieved through any human technology are probably the protons whizzing around the Large Hadron Collider at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Using special relativity we can calculate one second for the proton is equivalent to 27,777,778 seconds, or about 11 months , for us.

Amazingly, particle physicists have to take this time dilation into account when they are dealing with particles that decay. In the lab, muon particles typically decay in 2.2 microseconds. But fast moving muons, such as those created when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere, take 10 times longer to disintegrate.

2. Time travel via gravity

The next method of time travel is also inspired by Einstein. According to his theory of general relativity, the stronger the gravity you feel, the slower time moves.

As you get closer to the centre of the Earth, for example, the strength of gravity increases. Time runs slower for your feet than your head.

Again, this effect has been measured. In 2010, physicists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) placed two atomic clocks on shelves, one 33 centimetres above the other, and measured the difference in their rate of ticking. The lower one ticked slower because it feels a slightly stronger gravity.

To travel to the far future, all we need is a region of extremely strong gravity, such as a black hole. The closer you get to the event horizon, the slower time moves – but it’s risky business, cross the boundary and you can never escape.

And anyway, the effect is not that strong so it’s probably not worth the trip.

Assuming you had the technology to travel the vast distances to reach a black hole (the nearest is about 3,000 light years away), the time dilation through travelling would be far greater than any time dilation through orbiting the black hole itself.

(The situation described in the movie Interstellar , where one hour on a planet near a black hole is the equivalent of seven years back on Earth, is so extreme as to be impossible in our Universe, according to Kip Thorne, the movie’s scientific advisor.)

The most mindblowing thing, perhaps, is that GPS systems have to account for time dilation effects (due to both the speed of the satellites and gravity they feel) in order to work. Without these corrections, your phones GPS capability wouldn’t be able to pinpoint your location on Earth to within even a few kilometres.

3. Time travel via suspended animation

Another way to time travel to the future may be to slow your perception of time by slowing down, or stopping, your bodily processes and then restarting them later.

Bacterial spores can live for millions of years in a state of suspended animation, until the right conditions of temperature, moisture, food kick start their metabolisms again. Some mammals, such as bears and squirrels, can slow down their metabolism during hibernation, dramatically reducing their cells’ requirement for food and oxygen.

Could humans ever do the same?

Though completely stopping your metabolism is probably far beyond our current technology, some scientists are working towards achieving inducing a short-term hibernation state lasting at least a few hours. This might be just enough time to get a person through a medical emergency, such as a cardiac arrest, before they can reach the hospital.

In 2005, American scientists demonstrated a way to slow the metabolism of mice (which do not hibernate) by exposing them to minute doses of hydrogen sulphide, which binds to the same cell receptors as oxygen. The core body temperature of the mice dropped to 13 °C and metabolism decreased 10-fold. After six hours the mice could be reanimated without ill effects.

Unfortunately, similar experiments on sheep and pigs were not successful, suggesting the method might not work for larger animals.

Another method, which induces a hypothermic hibernation by replacing the blood with a cold saline solution, has worked on pigs and is currently undergoing human clinical trials in Pittsburgh.

4. Time travel via wormholes

General relativity also allows for the possibility for shortcuts through spacetime, known as wormholes, which might be able to bridge distances of a billion light years or more, or different points in time.

Many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, believe wormholes are constantly popping in and out of existence at the quantum scale, far smaller than atoms. The trick would be to capture one, and inflate it to human scales – a feat that would require a huge amount of energy, but which might just be possible, in theory.

Attempts to prove this either way have failed, ultimately because of the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

5. Time travel using light

Another time travel idea, put forward by the American physicist Ron Mallet, is to use a rotating cylinder of light to twist spacetime. Anything dropped inside the swirling cylinder could theoretically be dragged around in space and in time, in a similar way to how a bubble runs around on top your coffee after you swirl it with a spoon.

According to Mallet, the right geometry could lead to time travel into either the past and the future.

Since publishing his theory in 2000, Mallet has been trying to raise the funds to pay for a proof of concept experiment, which involves dropping neutrons through a circular arrangement of spinning lasers.

His ideas have not grabbed the rest of the physics community however, with others arguing that one of the assumptions of his basic model is plagued by a singularity, which is physics-speak for “it’s impossible”.

The Royal Institution of Australia has an Education resource based on this article. You can access it here .

Related Reading: Computer solves a major time travel problem

Originally published by Cosmos as Time travel: five ways that we could do it

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Do you believe in time travel? I’m a skeptic myself — but if these people’s stories about time travel are to be believed, then I am apparently wrong. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll have to eat my words. In all honesty, that might not be so bad — because the tradeoff for being wrong in that case would be that time travel is real . That would be pretty rad if it were true.

Technically speaking time travel does exist right now — just not in the sci fi kind of way you’re probably thinking. According to a TED-Ed video by Colin Stuart, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev actually traveled 0.02 seconds into his own future due to time dilation during the time he spent on the International Space Station. For the curious, Krikalev has spent a total of 803 days, nine hours, and 39 minutes in space over the course of his career.

That said, though, many are convinced that time dilation isn’t the only kind of time travel that’s possible; some folks do also believe in time travel as depicted by everything from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine to Back to the Future . It’s difficult to find stories online that are actual accounts from real people — many of them are either urban legends ( hi there, Philadelphia Experiment ) or stories that center around people that I’ve been unable to verify actually exist — but if you dig hard enough, sincere accounts can be found.

Are the stories true? Are they false? Are they examples of people who believe with all their heart that they’re true, even if they might not actually be? You be the judge. These seven tales are all excellent yarns, at any rate.

The Moberly–Jourdain Incident

Paris, France- April 10, 2010: Paris is the center of French economy, politics and cultures and the ...

In 1901, two Englishwomen, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain , took a vacation to France. While they were there, they visited the Palace of Versailles (because, y’know, that’s what one does when one visits France ). And while they were at Versailles, they visited what’s known as the Petit Trianon — a little chateau on the palace grounds that Louis XVI gave to Marie Antoinette as a private space for her to hang out and do whatever it was that a teenaged queen did when she was relaxing back then.

But while they were there, they claimed, they saw some… odd occurrences. They said they spotted people wearing anachronistic clothing, heard mysterious voices, and saw buildings and other structures that were no longer present — and, indeed, hadn’t existed since the late 1700s. Finally, they said, they caught sight of Marie Antoinette herself , drawing in a sketchbook.

They claimed to have fallen into a “time slip” and been briefly transported back more than 100 years before being jolted back to the present by a tour guide.

Did they really travel back in time? Probably not; various explanations include everything from a folie a deux (basically a joint delusion) to a simple misinterpretation of what they actually saw. But for what it’s worth, in 1911 — roughly 10 years after what they said they had experienced occurred — the two women published a book about the whole thing under the names Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont simply called An Adventure. These days, it’s available as The Ghosts of Trianon ; check it out, if you like.

The Mystery Of John Titor

John Titor is perhaps the most famous person who claims he’s time traveled; trouble is, no one has heard from him for almost 17 years. Also, he claimed he came from the future.

The story is long and involved, but the short version is this: In a thread begun in the fall of 2000 about time travel paradoxes on the online forum the Time Travel Institute — now known as Curious Cosmos — a user responded to a comment about how a time machine could theoretically be built with the following message:

“Wow! Paul is right on the money. I was just about to give up hope on anyone knowing who Tipler or Kerr was on this worldline.

“By the way, #2 is the correct answer and the basics for time travel start at CERN in about a year and end in 2034 with the first ‘time machine’ built by GE. Too bad we can’t post pictures or I’d show it to you.”

The implication, of course, was that the user, who was going by the name TimeTravel_0, came from a point in the future during which such a machine had already been invented.

Over the course of many messages spanning from that first thread all the way through the early spring of 2001, the user, who became known as John Titor, told his story. He said that he had been sent back to 1975 in order to bring an IBM 5100 computer to his own time; he was just stopping in 2000 for a brief rest on his way back home. The computer, he said, was needed to debug “various legacy computer programs in 2036” in order to combat a known problem similar to Y2K called the Year 2038 Problem . (John didn’t refer to it as such, but he said that UNIX was going to have an issue in 2038 — which is what we thought was going to happen back when the calendar ticked over from 1999 to 2000.)

Opinions are divided on whether John Titor was real ; some folks think he was the only real example of time travel we’ve ever seen, while others think it’s one of the most enduring hoaxes we’ve ever seen. I fall on the side of hoax, but that’s just me.

Project Pegasus And The Chrononauts

Close up of golden pocket watch lean on pile of book.

In 2011, Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings stepped forward, claiming that they were former “chrononauts” who had worked with an alleged DARPA program called Project Pegasus. Project Pegasus, they said, had been developed in the 1970s; in 1980, they were taking a “Mars training class” at a community college in California (the college presumably functioning as a cover for the alleged program) when they were picked to go to Mars. The mode of transport? Teleportation.

It gets better, too. Basiago and Stillings also said that the then- 19-year-old Barack Obama , whom they claimed was going by the name “Barry Soetero” at the time, was also one of the students chosen to go to Mars. They said the teleportation occurred via something called a “jump room.”

The White House has denied that Obama has ever been to Mars . “Only if you count watching Marvin the Martian,” Tommy Vietor, then the spokesman for the National Security Council, told Wired’s Danger Room in 2012.

Victor Goddard’s Airfield Time Slip

World War II P-51 Mustang Fighter Airplane

Like Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, senior Royal Air Force commander Sir Robert Victor Goddard — widely known as Victor Goddard — claimed to have experienced a time slip.

In 1935, Goddard flew over what had been the RAF station Drem in Scotland on his way from Edinburgh to Andover, England. The Drem station was no longer in use; after demobilization efforts following WWI, it had mostly been left to its own devices. And, indeed, that’s what Goddard said he saw as he flew over it: A largely abandoned airfield.

On his return trip, though, things got… weird. He followed the same route he had on the way there, but during the flight, he got waylaid by a storm. As he struggled to regain control of his plane, however, he spotted the Drem airfield through a break in the clouds — and when he got closer to it, the bad weather suddenly dissipated. But the airfield… wasn’t abandoned this time. It was busy, with several planes on the runway and mechanics scurrying about.

Within seconds, though, the storm reappeared, and Goddard had to fight to keep his plane aloft again. He made it home just fine, and went on to live another 50 years — but the incident stuck with him; indeed, in 1975, he wrote a book called Flight Towards Reality which included discussion of the whole thing.

Here’s the really weird bit: In 1939, the Drem airfield was brought back to life. Did Goddard see a peek into the airfield's future via a time slip back in 1935? Who knows.

Space Barbie

I’ll be honest: I’m not totally sure what to do with thisone — but I’ll present it to you here, and then you can decide for yourself what you think about it. Here it is:

Valeria Lukyanova has made a name for herself as a “human Barbie doll” (who also has kind of scary opinions about some things ) — but a 2012 short documentary for Vice’s My Life Online series also posits that she believes she’s a time traveling space alien whose purpose on Earth is to aid us in moving “from the role of the ‘human consumer’ to the role of ‘human demi-god.’”

What I can’t quite figure out is whether this whole time traveling space alien thing is, like a piece of performance art created specifically for this Vice doc, or whether it’s what she actually thinks. I don’t believe she’s referenced it in many (or maybe even any) other interviews she’s given; the items I’ve found discussing Lukyanova and time travel specifically all point back to this video.

But, well… do with it all as you will. That’s the documentary up there; give it a watch and see what you think.

The Hipster Time Traveler

In the early 2010s, a photograph depicting the 1941 reopening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia in Canada went viral for seemingly depicting a man that looked… just a bit too modern to have been photographed in 1941. He looks, in fact, like a time traveling hipster : Graphic t-shirt, textured sweater, sunglasses, the works. The photo hadn’t been manipulated; the original can be seen here . So what the heck was going on?

Well, Snopes has plenty of reasonable explanations for the man’s appearance; each item he’s wearing, for example, could very easily have been acquired in 1941. Others have also backed up those facts. But the bottom line is that it’s never been definitively debunked, so the idea that this photograph could depict a man from our time who had traveled back to 1941 persists. What do you think?

Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor

According to two at least two books — Catholic priest Father Francois Brune’s 2002 book Le nouveau mystère du Vatican (in English, The Vatican’s New Mystery ) and Peter Krassa’s 2000 book Father Ernetti's Chronovisor : The Creation and Disappearance of the World's First Time Machine — Father Pellegrino Ernetti, who was a Catholic priest like Brune, invented a machine called a “chronovisor” that allowed him to view the past. Ernetti was real; however, the existence of the machine, or even whether he actually claimed to have invented it, has never been proven. Alas, he died in 1994, so we can’t ask him, either. I mean, if we were ever able to find his chronovisor, maybe we could… but at that point, wouldn’t we already have the information we need?

(I’m extremely skeptical of this story, by the way, but both Brune’s and Krassa’s books swear up, down, left, and right that it’s true, so…you be the judge.)

Although I'm fairly certain that these accounts and stories are either misinterpreted information or straight-up falsehoods, they're still entertaining to read about; after all, if you had access to a time machine, wouldn't you at least want to take it for a spin? Here's hoping that one day, science takes the idea from theory to reality. It's a big ol' universe out there.

December 1, 2015

12 min read

Can Time Travelers Reach the Past via Wormholes?

Astronauts already skip ahead in time, but the laws of physics seem to forbid going backward—or do they?

By Tim Folger

The famous writer H. G. Wells published his first novel, The Time Machine , in 1895, just a few years before Queen Victoria's six-decade reign over the U.K. ended. An even more durable dynasty was also drawing to a close: the 200-year-old Newtonian era of physics. In 1905 Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which upset Isaac Newton's applecart and, presumably to Wells's delight, allowed something that had been impossible under Newton's laws: time travel into the future. In Newton's universe, time was steady everywhere and everywhen. It never sped up. It never slowed down. But for Einstein, time was relative.

Time travel is not merely possible—it has already happened, though not exactly as Wells imagined. The biggest journey through time so far, according to J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, was taken by Sergei K. Krikalev. Over the course of his long career, which began in 1985, the Russian cosmonaut spent 803 days in space. As Einstein proved, time passes more slowly for objects in motion than for those at rest, so as Krikalev hurtled along at 17,885 miles an hour onboard the Mir space station, time did not flow at the same rate for him as it did on Earth. While in orbit, Krikalev aged 1/48 of a second less than his fellow earthlings. Put another way, he traveled 1/48 of a second into the future.

The time-travel effect becomes easier to see as distances stretch longer and speeds creep higher. If Krikalev left Earth in 2015 and made a round-trip to Betelgeuse—a star that is about 650 light-years from Earth—at 99.995 percent the speed of light, then by the time he returned to Earth he would be only 10 years older. Sadly, everyone he knew would be long dead because 1,000 years would have passed on Earth; it would be the year 3015. “Time travel to the future, we know we can do,” Gott says. “It's just a matter of money and engineering!”

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Jumping a few nanoseconds—or even a few centuries—into the future is relatively straightforward, practical challenges aside. But going backward in time is harder. Einstein's special theory of relativity forbade it. After another decade of work, Einstein unveiled his general theory of relativity, which finally lifted that restriction. How someone would actually travel back in time, however, is a vexing problem because the equations of general relativity have many solutions. Different solutions assign different qualities to the universe—and only some of the solutions create conditions that permit time travel into the past.

Whether any of those solutions describes our own universe is an open question, which raises even more profound puzzles: Just how much tweaking of fundamental physics would it take to allow backward time travel? Does the universe itself somehow prevent such journeys even if Einstein's equations do not rule them out? Physicists continue to speculate, not because they imagine time travel to the past will ever be practical but because thinking about the possibility has led to some surprising insights about the nature of the universe we live in—including, perhaps, how it came to be in the first place.

A new way of looking at time With his special theory of relativity, Einstein made time malleable in a way that must have pleased Wells, who presciently believed that we inhabit a universe in which three-dimensional space and time are knit together into a four-dimensional whole. Einstein arrived at his revolutionary results by exploring the implications of two fundamental ideas. First, he argued that even though all motion is relative, the laws of physics must look the same for everyone anywhere in the universe. Second, he realized that the speed of light must be similarly unchanging from all perspectives: if everyone sees the same laws of physics operating, they must also arrive at the same result when measuring the speed of light.

To make light a universal speed limit, Einstein had to jettison two commonsense notions: that all observers would agree on the measurement of a given length and that they would also agree on the duration of time's passage. He showed that a clock in motion, whizzing past someone at rest, would tick more slowly than a stationary clock at the person's side. And the length of a ruler moving swiftly by would shorten. Yet for anyone who was traveling at the same speed as the clock and ruler, the passage of time and the length of the ruler would appear normal.

At ordinary speeds, the time-and-space-distorting effects of special relativity are negligible. But for anything moving at a hefty fraction of the speed of light (relative to the observer), they are very real. For example, many experiments have confirmed that the decay rate of unstable particles called muons slows by an order of magnitude when they are traveling at close to the speed of light. The speeding muons, in effect, are minuscule time travelers—subatomic Krikalevs—hopping a few nanoseconds into the future.

Gödel's strange universe Those speedy clocks and rulers and muons are all racing forward in time. Can they be thrown into reverse? The first person to use general relativity to describe a universe that permits time travel into the past was Kurt Gödel, the famed creator of the incompleteness theorems, which set limits on the scope of what mathematics can and cannot prove. He was one of the towering mathematicians of the 20th century—and one of the oddest. His many foibles included a diet of baby food and laxatives.

Gödel presented this model universe as a gift to Einstein on his 70th birthday. The universe Gödel described to his skeptical friend had two unique properties. It rotated, which provided centrifugal force that prevented gravity from crunching together all the matter in the cosmos, and thus created the stability Einstein demanded of any cosmic model. But it also allowed for time travel into the past, which made Einstein deeply uneasy. In Gödel's cosmos, space travelers could set out and eventually reach a point in their own past, as if the travelers had completed a circuit around the surface of a giant cylinder. Physicists call these trajectories in spacetime “closed timelike curves.”

A closed timelike curve is any path through spacetime that loops back on itself. In Gödel's rotating cosmos, such a curve would circle around the entire universe, like a latitude line on Earth's surface. Physicists have concocted a number of different types of closed timelike curves, all of which allow travel to the past, at least in theory. A journey along any of them would be disappointingly ordinary, however. Through the portholes of your spaceship, you would see stars and planets—all the usual sights of deep space. More important, time—as measured by your own clocks—would tick forward in the usual way; the hands of a clock would not start spinning backward even though you would be traveling to a location in spacetime that existed in your past.

“Einstein was already aware of the possibility of closed timelike curves back in 1914,” says Julian Barbour, an independent theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, England. As Barbour recalls, Einstein said, “My intuition strives most vehemently against this.” The curves' existence would create all kinds of problems with causality—how can the past be changed if it has already happened? And then there is the hoary grandfather paradox: What happens to a time traveler who kills Granddad before Granddad meets Grandma? Would the demented, now parentless traveler ever be born?

Fortunately for fans of causality, astronomers have found no evidence that the universe is rotating. Gödel himself apparently pored over catalogs of galaxies, looking for clues that his theory might be true. Gödel might not have devised a realistic model of the universe, but he did prove that closed timelike curves are completely consistent with the equations of general relativity. The laws of physics do not rule out traveling to the past.

An annoying possibility Over the past few decades cosmologists have used Einstein's equations to construct a variety of closed timelike curves. Gödel conjured an entire universe that allowed them, but more recent enthusiasts have warped spacetime only within parts of our universe.

In general relativity, planets, stars, galaxies and other massive bodies warp spacetime. Warped spacetime, in turn, guides the motions of those massive bodies. As the late physicist John Wheeler put it, “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.” In extreme cases, spacetime might bend enough to create a path from the present back to the past.

Physicists have proposed some exotic mechanisms to create such paths. In a 1991 paper, Gott showed how cosmic strings—infinitely long structures thinner than an atom that may have formed in the early universe—would allow closed timelike curves where two strings intersected. In 1983 Kip S. Thorne, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, began to explore the possibility that a type of closed timelike curve called a wormhole—a kind of tunnel joining two different locations in spacetime—might allow for time travel into the past. “In general relativity, if you connect two different regions of space, you're also connecting two different regions of time,” says Sean M. Carroll, a colleague of Thorne's at Caltech.

The entrance into a wormhole would be spherical—a three-dimensional entrance into a four-dimensional tunnel in spacetime. As is the case with all closed timelike curves, a trip through a wormhole would be “like any other journey,” Carroll says. “It's not that you disappear and are reassembled at some other moment of time. There is no respectable theory where that kind of science-fiction time travel is possible.” For all travelers, he adds, “no matter what they do, time flows forward at one second per second. It's just that your local version of ‘forward’ might be globally out of sync with the rest of the universe.”

Although physicists can write equations that describe wormholes and other closed timelike curves, all the models have serious problems. “Just to get a wormhole in the first place, you need negative energy,” Carroll says. Negative energy is when the energy in a volume of space spontaneously fluctuates to less than zero. Without negative energy, a wormhole's spherical entrance and four-dimensional tunnel would instantaneously implode. But a wormhole held open by negative energy “seems to be hard, probably impossible,” Carroll says. “Negative energies seem to be a bad thing in physics.”

Even if negative energy kept a wormhole open, just when you would be on the verge of turning that into a time machine, “particles would be moving through the wormhole, and every particle would loop back around an infinite number of times,” Carroll says. “That leads to an infinite amount of energy.” Because energy deforms spacetime, the entire thing would collapse into a black hole—an infinitely dense point in spacetime. “We're not 100 percent sure that that happens,” Carroll says. “But it seems to be a reasonable possibility that the universe is actually preventing you from making a time machine by making a black hole instead.”

Unlike black holes, which are a natural consequence of general relativity, wormholes and closed timelike curves in general are completely artificial constructs—a way of testing the bounds of the theory. “Black holes are hard to avoid,” Carroll says. “Closed timelike curves are very hard to make.”

Even if wormholes are physically implausible, it is significant that they fit in with the general theory of relativity. “It's very curious that we can come so close to ruling out the possibility of time travel, yet we just can't do it. I also think that it's annoying,” Carroll says, exasperated that Einstein's beautiful theory might allow for something so seemingly implausible. But by contemplating that annoying possibility, physicists may gain a better understanding of the kind of universe we live in. And it may be that if the universe did not permit backward time travel, it never would have come into existence.

Did the universe create itself? General relativity describes the universe on the largest scales. But quantum mechanics provides the operating manual for the atomic scale, and it offers another possible venue for closed timelike curves—one that gets at the origin of the universe.

“On a very small scale (10−30 centimeter) you might expect the topology of spacetime to fluctuate, and random fluctuations might give you closed timelike curves if nothing fundamental prevents them,” says John Friedman, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Could those quantum fluctuations somehow be magnified and harnessed as time machines? “There's certainly no formal proof that you can't have macroscopic closed timelike curves,” Friedman says. “But the community of people who have looked at these general questions would bet pretty heavily against it.”

There is no doubt that the creation of a loop in spacetime on either a quantum scale or a cosmic one would require some very extreme physics. And the most likely place to expect extreme physics, Gott says, is at the very beginning of the universe.

In 1998 Gott and Li-Xin Li, an astrophysicist now at Peking University in China, published a paper in which they argued that closed timelike curves were not merely possible but essential to explain the origin of the universe. “We investigated the possibility of whether the universe could be its own mother—whether a time loop at the beginning of the universe would allow the universe to create itself,” Gott says.

Just as in standard big bang cosmology, Gott and Li's universe “starts” with a bout of inflation, where an all-pervasive energy field drove the universe's initial expansion. Many cosmologists now believe that inflation gave rise to countless other universes besides our own. “Inflation is very hard to stop once it gets started,” Gott says. “It makes an infinitely branching tree. We're one of the branches. But you have to ask yourself, Where did the trunk come from? Li-Xin Li and I said it could be that one of the branches just loops around and grows up to be the trunk.”

A simple two-dimensional sketch of Gott and Li's self-starting universe looks like the number “6,” with the spacetime loop at the bottom and our present-era universe as the top stem. A burst of inflation, Gott and Li theorized, allowed the universe to escape from the time loop and expand into the cosmos we inhabit today.

It is difficult to contemplate the model, but its main appeal, Gott says, is that it eliminates the need for creating a universe out of nothing. Yet Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University, Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge and James Hartle of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have proposed models in which the universe does indeed arise out of nothing. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, empty space is not really empty but is filled with “virtual” particles that spontaneously pop into and out of existence. Hawking and his colleagues theorized that the universe burst into being from the same quantum-vacuum stew. But in Gott's view, the universe is not made out of nothing; it is made out of something—itself.

A cosmic chess game For now, there is no way to test whether any of those theories might actually explain the origin of the universe. The famed physicist Richard Feynman compared the universe to a great chess game being played by the gods. Scientists, he said, are trying to understand the game without knowing the rules. We watch as the gods move a pawn one space forward, and we learn a rule: pawns always move one space forward. But what if we never saw the opening of a game, when a pawn can move two spaces forward? We might also assume, mistakenly, that pawns always remain pawns—that they never change their identity—until we see a pawn transformed into a queen.

“You would say that's against the rules,” Gott says. “You can't change your pawn into a queen. Well, yes, you can! You just never saw a game that extreme before. Time-travel research is like that. We're testing the laws of physics by looking at extreme conditions. There's nothing logically impossible about time travel to the past; it's just not the universe we're used to.” Turning a pawn into a queen could be part of the rules of relativity.

Such wildly speculative ideas may be closer to philosophy than to physics. But for now, quantum mechanics and general relativity—powerful, counterintuitive theories—are all we have to figure out the universe. “As soon as people start trying to bring quantum theory and general relativity into this, the first thing to say is that they really have no idea what they're doing,” says Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of science at New York University. “It's not really rigorous mathematics. It's one piece of mathematics that sort of looks like general relativity and another little piece of mathematics that sort of looks like quantum theory, mixed together in some not entirely coherent way. But this is what people have to do because they honestly don't know how to go forward in a way that makes sense.”

Will some future theory eliminate the possibility of time travel into the past? Or will the universe again turn out to be far stranger than we imagine? Physics has advanced tremendously since Einstein redefined our understanding of time. Time travel, which existed only in the realm of fiction for Wells, is now a proved reality, at least in one direction. Is it too hard to believe that some kind of symmetry exists in the universe, allowing us to travel backward in time? When I put the question to Gott, he replies with an anecdote:

“There's a story where Einstein was talking to a guy. The guy pulled a notebook out and scribbled something down. Einstein says, ‘What's that?’ The guy says, ‘A notebook. Whenever I have a good idea, I write it down.’ Einstein says, ‘I've never had any need for a notebook; I've only had three good ideas.’”

Gott concludes: “I think we're waiting for a new good idea.”

Tim Folger is a freelance journalist who writes for National Geographic , Discover , and other national publications.

Where Does the Concept of Time Travel Come From?

Time; he's waiting in the wings.

Wormholes have been proposed as one possible means of traveling through time.

The dream of traveling through time is both ancient and universal. But where did humanity's fascination with time travel begin, and why is the idea so appealing?

The concept of time travel — moving through time the way we move through three-dimensional space — may in fact be hardwired into our perception of time . Linguists have recognized that we are essentially incapable of talking about temporal matters without referencing spatial ones. "In language — any language — no two domains are more intimately linked than space and time," wrote Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher in his 2005 book "The Unfolding of Language." "Even if we are not always aware of it, we invariably speak of time in terms of space, and this reflects the fact that we think of time in terms of space."

Deutscher reminds us that when we plan to meet a friend "around" lunchtime, we are using a metaphor, since lunchtime doesn't have any physical sides. He similarly points out that time can not literally be "long" or "short" like a stick, nor "pass" like a train, or even go "forward" or "backward" any more than it goes sideways, diagonal or down.

Related: Why Does Time Fly When You're Having Fun?

Perhaps because of this connection between space and time, the possibility that time can be experienced in different ways and traveled through has surprisingly early roots. One of the first known examples of time travel appears in the Mahabharata, an ancient Sanskrit epic poem compiled around 400 B.C., Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told Live Science

In the Mahabharata is a story about King Kakudmi, who lived millions of years ago and sought a suitable husband for his beautiful and accomplished daughter, Revati. The two travel to the home of the creator god Brahma to ask for advice. But while in Brahma's plane of existence, they must wait as the god listens to a 20-minute song, after which Brahma explains that time moves differently in the heavens than on Earth. It turned out that "27 chatur-yugas" had passed, or more than 116 million years, according to an online summary , and so everyone Kakudmi and Revati had ever known, including family members and potential suitors, was dead. After this shock, the story closes on a somewhat happy ending in that Revati is betrothed to Balarama, twin brother of the deity Krishna.

Time is fleeting

To Yaszek, the tale provides an example of what we now call time dilation , in which different observers measure different lengths of time based on their relative frames of reference, a part of Einstein's theory of relativity.

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Such time-slip stories are widespread throughout the world, Yaszek said, citing a Middle Eastern tale from the first century BCE about a Jewish miracle worker who sleeps beneath a newly-planted carob tree and wakes up 70 years later to find it has now matured and borne fruit (carob trees are notorious for how long they take to produce their first harvest). Another instance can be found in an eighth-century Japanese fable about a fisherman named Urashima Tarō who travels to an undersea palace and falls in love with a princess. Tarō finds that, when he returns home, 100 years have passed, according to a translation of the tale published online by the University of South Florida .

In the early-modern era of the 1700 and 1800s, the sleep-story version of time travel grew more popular, Yaszek said. Examples include the classic tale of Rip Van Winkle, as well as books like Edward Belamy's utopian 1888 novel "Looking Backwards," in which a man wakes up in the year 2000, and the H.G. Wells 1899 novel "The Sleeper Awakes," about a man who slumbers for centuries and wakes to a completely transformed London.

Related: Science Fiction or Fact: Is Time Travel Possible ?

In other stories from this period, people also start to be able to move backward in time. In Mark Twain’s 1889 satire "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," a blow to the head propels an engineer back to the reign of the legendary British monarch. Objects that can send someone through time begin to appear as well, mainly clocks, such as in Edward Page Mitchell's 1881 story "The Clock that Went Backwards" or Lewis Carrol's 1889 children's fantasy "Sylvie and Bruno," where the characters possess a watch that is a type of time machine .

The explosion of such stories during this era might come from the fact that people were "beginning to standardize time, and orient themselves to clocks more frequently," Yaszek said.

Time after time

Wells provided one of the most enduring time-travel plots in his 1895 novella "The Time Machine," which included the innovation of a craft that can move forward and backward through long spans of time. "This is when we’re getting steam engines and trains and the first automobiles," Yaszek said. "I think it’s no surprise that Wells suddenly thinks: 'Hey, maybe we can use a vehicle to travel through time.'"

Because it is such a rich visual icon, many beloved time-travel stories written after this have included a striking time machine, Yaszek said, referencing The Doctor's blue police box — the TARDIS — in the long-running BBC series "Doctor Who," and "Back to the Future"'s silver luxury speedster, the DeLorean .

More recently, time travel has been used to examine our relationship with the past, Yaszek said, in particular in pieces written by women and people of color. Octavia Butler's 1979 novel "Kindred" about a modern woman who visits her pre-Civil-War ancestors is "a marvelous story that really asks us to rethink black and white relations through history," she said. And a contemporary web series called " Send Me " involves an African-American psychic who can guide people back to antebellum times and witness slavery.

"I'm really excited about stories like that," Yaszek said. "They help us re-see history from new perspectives."

Time travel has found a home in a wide variety of genres and media, including comedies such as "Groundhog Day" and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" as well as video games like Nintendo's "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" and the indie game "Braid."

Yaszek suggested that this malleability and ubiquity speaks to time travel tales' ability to offer an escape from our normal reality. "They let us imagine that we can break free from the grip of linear time," she said. "And somehow get a new perspective on the human experience, either our own or humanity as a whole, and I think that feels so exciting to us."

That modern people are often drawn to time-machine stories in particular might reflect the fact that we live in a technological world, she added. Yet time travel's appeal certainly has deeper roots, interwoven into the very fabric of our language and appearing in some of our earliest imaginings.

"I think it's a way to make sense of the otherwise intangible and inexplicable, because it's hard to grasp time," Yaszek said. "But this is one of the final frontiers, the frontier of time, of life and death. And we're all moving forward, we're all traveling through time."

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Originally published on Live Science .

Adam Mann is a freelance journalist with over a decade of experience, specializing in astronomy and physics stories. He has a bachelor's degree in astrophysics from UC Berkeley. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Nature, Science, and many other places. He lives in Oakland, California, where he enjoys riding his bike.

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Time travel is theoretically possible, calculations show. But that doesn't mean you could change the past.

Time travel is possible based on the laws of physics, according to researchers.
But time-travelers wouldn't be able to alter the past in a measurable way, they say.
And the future would essentially stay the same, according to the reseachers.

Imagine you could hop into a time machine, press a button, and journey back to 2019, before the novel coronavirus made the leap from animals to humans.

What if you could find and isolate patient zero? Theoretically, the COVID-19 pandemic wouldn't happen, right?

Not quite, because then future-you wouldn't have decided to time travel in the first place.

For decades, physicists have been studying and debating versions of this paradox: If we could travel back in time and change the past, what would happen to the future?

A 2020 study offered a potential answer: Nothing.

"Events readjust around anything that could cause a paradox, so the paradox does not happen," Germain Tobar, the study's author previously told IFLScience .

Tobar's work, published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity in September 2020, suggests that according to the rules of theoretical physics, anything you tried to change in the past would be corrected by subsequent events.

The grandfather paradox

Physicists have considered time travel to be theoretically possible since Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity. Einstein's calculations suggest it's possible for an object in our universe to travel through space and time in a circular direction, eventually ending up at a point on its journey where it's been before – a path called a closed time-like curve.

Still, physicists continue to struggle with scenarios like the coronavirus example above, in which time-travelers alter events that already happened. The most famous example is known as the grandfather paradox: Say a time-traveler goes back to the past and kills a younger version of his or her grandfather. The grandfather then wouldn't have any children, erasing the time-traveler's parents and, of course, the time-traveler, too. But then who would kill Grandpa?

A take on this paradox appears in the movie "Back to the Future," when Marty McFly almost stops his parents from meeting in the past – potentially causing himself to disappear.

To address the paradox, Tobar and his supervisor, Dr. Fabio Costa, used the "billiard-ball model," which imagines cause and effect as a series of colliding billiard balls, and a circular pool table as a closed time-like curve.

Imagine a bunch of billiard balls laid out across that circular table. If you push one ball from position X, it bangs around the table, hitting others in a particular pattern.

The researchers calculated that even if you mess with the ball's pattern at some point in its journey, future interactions with other balls can correct its path, leading it to come back to the same position and speed that it would have had you not interfered.

"Regardless of the choice, the ball will fall into the same place," Dr Yasunori Nomura, a theoretical physicist at UC Berkeley, previously told Insider.

Tobar's model, in other words, says you could travel back in time, but you couldn't change how events unfolded significantly enough to alter the future, Nomura said. Applied to the grandfather paradox, then, this would mean that something would always get in the way of your attempt to kill your grandfather. Or at least by the time he did die, your grandmother would already be pregnant with your mother.

Back to the coronavirus example. Let's say you were to travel back to 2019 and intervene in patient zero's life. According to Tobar's line of thinking, the pandemic would still happen somehow.

"You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would," Tobar said, according to Australia's University of Queensland , where Tobar graduated from.

Nomura said that although the model is too simple to represent the full range of cause and effect in our universe, it's a good starting point for future physicists.

Watch: There are 2 types of time travel and physicists agree that one of them is possible

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Time Traveling Through London With an Impressionist Painter

A writer used Camille Pissarro’s paintings of suburban London and a ‘lost’ railway as a lens for exploring the city’s history — and settling an arcane mystery.

The Crystal Palace railway station is named for the large glass structure that was moved to Southeast London after the 1851 Great Exhibition. The structure later burned down. Credit... Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times

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By Mike Ives

June 28, 2024

In the early 1870s, an émigré painter watched from a railway footbridge as a steam engine left a station on London’s suburban fringe. His name was Camille Pissarro and he was developing a style of plein-air painting that would soon be called “Impressionism.”

Pissarro and a fellow émigré, Claude Monet, only stayed in London for a few months. By April 1874 they were among the painters holding the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, the subject of a retrospective that runs until July 14 at the Musée d’Orsay and opens on Sept. 8 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

But London was one of their early muses. Monet painted the River Thames and the Palace of Westminster, among other central landmarks, while Pissarro captured scenes in suburbs where houses and train tracks were replacing forests and farmland.

I have a special interest in Pissarro’s train painting because it shows the neighborhood where my wife grew up — in a Victorian home rendered as a “smudge” on the Impressionist’s canvas, as my father-in-law says.

Pissarro captured a city where houses and train tracks were replacing forests and farmland. One of these houses is now owned by the writer’s in-laws.

The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)

The railway, shuttered in the 1950s, is now a nature path where our kids forage for blackberries during visits to their grandparents.

A yellow brick house with a sharply pointed roof is shown from the vantage point of its backyard, with trees and shrubs framing the photograph.

On our last visit, I decided to find out what Pissarro saw in that train, and what his early London paintings tell us about Britain’s Victorian past. I learned that his brushstrokes captured a moment of dramatic urban transformation whose impacts on the city’s layout are still visible today.

My Pissarro project entailed long winter walks, trips to museums, a ride on a vintage locomotive and a dash of investigative reporting around an arcane mystery. My main guide was my father-in-law, a former “ trainspotter ” with a white-hot interest in railroad history.

‘Fog, snow and springtime’

A 1990 history of my in-laws’ area describes the old railway as “lost.” But, like other locations that Pissarro painted in Southeast London, the site where the tracks once ran wasn’t hard to find. I could see it through a bedroom window, just beyond the camellia and winter jasmine.

Pissarro, a Danish citizen fleeing a Paris suburb during the Franco-Prussian War, was used to being an outsider. He had been born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to Jewish parents of French descent, and moved to Paris in 1855 after a few years in Caracas.

But he wasn’t completely isolated when he arrived in London with his partner, Julie Vellay, and their two young children in December 1870. They stayed with relatives in the southeastern suburb of Norwood, and he socialized with Monet and other émigré artists at a central cafe run by a French wine merchant.

Pissarro, 40, was frustrated by his lack of commercial success, and his family was homesick. Vellay described the English language as a “succession of curious noises.”

London wasn’t all bad for them, though. It’s where Pissarro and Vellay married; where he met Paul Durand-Ruel, an art dealer who would sell his work for decades; and where he painted several canvases in his formative Impressionist style.

“Monet and I were very enthusiastic over the London landscapes,” he later wrote. “Monet worked in the parks, whilst I, living at Lower Norwood, at that time a charming suburb, studied the effects of fog, snow and springtime.”

Time travel

Pissarro lived near the Crystal Palace, a glass-domed exhibition space that epitomized Victorian Britain’s sense of modernity and had been moved to Southeast London from Hyde Park in the 1850s. But the painter, who worked outdoors in wooden clogs, was more interested in suburban scenes unfolding around the corner.

One of Pissarro’s early London paintings, “ Fox Hill, Upper Norwood ,” shows figures walking on a snow-dusted residential street. When my father-in-law, Alec, drove me there on a blustery December morning, we noticed that many of the same homes were still there.

The winter sky was the same mottled gray that Pissarro liked to paint (and which Cat, my long-expatriated wife, loves to hate). I was struck by how well his muted canvas still captured the area’s rolling hills and refracted sunlight.

Then we noticed two people wandering down the street holding a print of the same painting. What were the odds of that? It turned out they were also Pissarro groupies, searching the present for clues to the past.

“It’s just like time travel,” one of them, Libby Watson, told me. “It’s about the nearest thing you can get to it — isn’t it? — to look at the old buildings and imagine you were there.”

A ‘higgledy piggledy’ city

When Pissarro arrived in London, the city was still expanding in tandem with new railways. The train line he painted in 1871 had opened in 1865 to serve new suburban commuters, as well as tourists traveling to the Crystal Palace from Victoria Station, near Buckingham Palace.

In 1866 or 1867, my in-laws’ house was built beside the line on a street that had been a foot path through fields near the village of Dulwich, whose name derived from an Old English term for “the meadow where dill grows.” The street was in Forest Hill, a newish suburb that, like Norwood, took its name from the Great North Wood , an ancient forest that was mostly cut down as London barreled south in the 19th century.

Not everyone liked the pace of change. The Victorian art critic and social philosopher John Ruskin , who lived in the Dulwich area, complained that fields near his home had been dug up for building sites or cut by the “wild crossings and concurrencies” of railroads.

“No existing terms of language known to me are enough to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin,” wrote Ruskin, who left London in 1872 for England’s Lake District.

London’s 19th-century expansion was not well-organized but “higgledy piggledy,” as my father-in-law says, and fueled by railway rivalries. The line Pissarro painted was run by a company that battled a neighboring one for passengers. Both were run by “belligerent characters” who built unnecessary tracks for the sake of competing, according to the railway historian Christian Wolmar.

The competition “resulted in a complex and underinvested network that still causes distress to commuters today,” Mr. Wolmar wrote in “Fire and Steam,” his 2007 history of British railways. And as any Southeast Londoner will tell you, train service in the area remains notoriously patchy.

But for a visiting 19th-century Impressionist, it must have been fascinating to watch a giant city devour countryside in real time.

On the tracks

“ Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich ,” Pissarro’s 1871 train painting, shows a black engine belching smoke as it approaches the viewer on tracks that run through empty fields. A railroad signal — a metal or wooden contraption whose placement indicated whether a train driver should stop or go — hovers overhead in a horizontal position.

Today the scene is almost unrecognizable. The train line closed in 1954, nearly 18 years after the Crystal Palace burned down . Lordship Lane Station was later demolished, and a local bus route was extended to cover the former railway route.

Housing now sits on what was once open land, and the railway bridge Pissarro painted from lies in a nature reserve (and is temporarily closed for renovation).

The sliver of land where tracks once ran past my in-laws’ place has been turned into a nature path .

As for the canvas, it now hangs in central London’s Courtauld Gallery. When we visited in December, I was so busy trying to keep our toddlers from destroying priceless artworks that I didn’t get much of a chance to study it.

But we did get a flavor of Britain’s railway heritage at other points on our trip. One day we took our locomotive-obsessed boys on a steam train ride along the Bluebell Railway , a heritage line outside London. Those tracks were once owned by a railroad company that funded moving the Crystal Palace to Southeast London after the Great Exhibition of 1851 .

The kids also played on trains at the London Transport Museum, where a display informed us that “unstructured” 19th-century growth had transformed the city.

“Lordship Lane” highlights the drama of that transition because Pissarro’s train tracks divide a patch of still-rural land from a newly suburbanized one, Karen Serres, the senior curator of paintings at the Courtauld, told me when I called for a chat.

And unlike many of Pissarro’s other works, “Lordship Lane” doesn’t show any people. When the Courtauld’s staff X-rayed the canvas in 2007, they discovered that a human figure had been painted in a corner of an early version, then painted over.

The train, then, is the main subject. And you can’t avoid it because it’s heading right for you.

The signal in question

“Lordship Lane” is often compared to “Rain, Steam and Speed,” an 1844 landscape painting by J.M.W. Turner . Pissarro and other French Impressionists openly admired English artists, whose work they saw in London’s museums. Art historians have long debated the extent to which the Impressionists were influenced by British painters.

I don’t have a strong opinion about that. But in London, I was very interested in settling another, even more arcane, historical debate.

Specifically, I had been told that “Lordship Lane” is the painting about which the Courtauld receives the most complaints. Among other things, critics apparently argue that Pissarro’s Victorian train signal should have been vertical for “go,” not horizontal for “stop.”

Some critics argue that Pissarro’s Victorian train signal should be in its vertical position for “go,” not horizontal for “stop.”

Dr. Serres told me what I’d heard was correct. Over the years, she had changed the museum’s description of the painting after railway enthusiasts flagged mistakes, including its original title of “Penge Station, Upper Norwood.”

But she had never known what to think about suggestions that the signal should be vertical for “go” because the train appears to be idling at the station. Her own impression was that the train was “lightly beyond” the platform and had already been given the signal to proceed. Then again, other details in the painting, including the station and the train smoke, did not look especially accurate.

“It’s very difficult to know how completely accurate these things are, and indeed that wasn’t his point,” she said. “It was to make a beautiful composition.”

My father-in-law said that he tended to think the signal was correct because the train seemed to have already passed the station. But he wasn’t totally sure.

A railway expert said the signal is correct because the train has already passed the station.

So I called Mr. Wolmar, the author of “Fire and Steam,” who later emailed me to say that he agreed.

“The train is well past the signal so it will have reverted to default which is horizontal,” he wrote.

Mystery solved.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world. More about Mike Ives

New study finds evidence of possible alien travel through space 'warp drives'

A new study has found a theory that 'warp drives' could be possible - this method of fast space travel will be known to many sci-fi and Star Trek fans.

These super powered space engines can manipulate space time as it compresses what's in front of it and expands it behind.

It creates what's called a 'warp bubble' which is how these spacecrafts in the sci-fi world can travel so quickly, some faster than the speed of light.

This has been looked into because scientists have hinted 'warp drives' may well have been used by aliens as they have left trails through space.

A previous study published in 1994 suggested this could be possible with a substance that may or may not exist but a new study suggests a way to do it without this.

Lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said: "This study changes the conversation about 'warp drives'. By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we've shown that 'warp drives' might not be relegated to science fiction."

According to a statement, the new model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a 'warp bubble' that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics".

However the proposal says travel faster than the speed of light could not be achieved.

Fuchs and his research team admit this is a single study and even if others could prove the maths behind it, actually building a 'warp drive' is a long, long way off.

"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement.

"We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age."

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'Warp drives' could mathematically be possible, according to the new study / (coffeekai, iStock)

New travel deals for Amazon Prime members on cruises, rental cars, flights and more

These savings on travel come in time for any last-minute summer vacations.

Amazon Prime Day is fast approaching, and beyond viral beauty products or hot new kitchenware, the e-commerce giant is introducing savings on travel just in time for any last-minute summer vacations.

Amazon partnered with various travel companies, including Southwest Airlines, Viator, Turo, Carnival, and others, to give Prime members early access to price cuts on travel packages, car rentals, and cruises.

PHOTO: In this undated stock photo, two friends dive into the sea from a cliff.

In a similar move last summer fellow retail competitor Walmart partnered with Expedia to give Walmart+ members the ability to earn Walmart Cash by booking vacations.

"These travel deals are sort of an extra that they can offer their members," RetailMeNot editor Kristin McGrath told ABC News. "There are plenty of ways you can save and get discounts. These membership programs can just make it a little bit easier."

Amazon Prime travel deals and discounts for Prime Day

PHOTO: A Southwest commercial airliner takes off from Las Vegas International Airport, Feb. 8, 2024, in Las Vegas.

Save 10% on Viator travel experiences Save up to 30% off Avis car rentals and earn 10% back Up to 15% Sixt car rentals Book a Carnival Cruise for to 40% off Southwest Airlines get 50% off Rapids Rewards points

PHOTO: In this June 20, 2019 file photo, the headquarters of Turo is seen in San Francisco.

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Walmart+ travel deals.

The company offers discounts on fuel and travel, plus up to 20% back in Walmart Cash for booking through their portal during Walmart+ week.

PHOTO: The Carnival Radiance cruise ship is seen at Avalon harbor, May 19, 2023, in Avalon, Calif.

Costco travel discounts and deals

The warehouse retailer's travel arm offers everyday savings on top-quality, brand-name vacations, hotels, cruises, and rental cars, exclusively for Costco members.

Teresita Nino has used Costco to book vacation packages and told ABC News how she saved on international deals.

"My last trip that we booked was to Saint Lucia and we ended up booking the airfare and the hotel -- I ended up saving about $700," Nino said of her experience using Costco. "Nine out of ten times is Costco Travel is always giving me a better deal overall than other travel companies."

Access to Costco's travel deals require a paid membership as an extra perk for customers.

"The travel savings are the cherry on top -- but it's not necessarily the most lucrative benefit," McGrath said. "In these membership programs, you have to take the value of membership as a whole rather than just joining to save on travel."

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June 27, 2024

Highway 23 detour Bock to Ogilvie remains in place through mid-July

Recent heavy rains delay project schedule.

ST. CLOUD, Minn. – Due to recent heavy rains, Highway 23 will remain closed east of Bock to Ogilvie with the detour in place through mid-July, reports the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

The $6.5 million project to resurface and improve 12 miles of Highway 23 between Mille Lacs County Road 2 in east Milaca and the Groundhouse River east of Ogilvie, Kanabec County, began in mid-May. Crews are completing work in two segments—first, east of Bock to Ogilvie; then, east of Bock to Milaca.

Here’s the adjusted plan for Highway 23 Milaca to Ogilvie:

East of Bock to Ogilvie

Detour through mid-July: Highway 23 will remain closed and detoured between Mille Lacs County Road 24 and north junction Highway 47 in Ogilvie. The detour goes north of Highway 23 via Mille Lacs County Road 24 east of Bock, Kanabec County Road 26 to Highway 47 back to Ogilvie.
Local traffic: Expect segments of lane closures, alternate one-way traffic, flaggers and pilot car from sunrise to sunset on good weather days. Follow signs and enter/exit the work zone nearest to your destination to avoid delays.

East of Milaca to Bock

Detour mid-July to mid-September: Work on the second segment will begin and Highway 23 will close between Mille Lacs County Road 2 in Milaca and Mille Lacs County Road 24 east of Bock. Motorists will be detoured along Mille Lacs County Road 2, County Road 4 and County Road 1.
Lane closures Mid-September to early October: Travelers to encounter alternate one-way traffic with flaggers and pilot car.
Local traffic: Highway 23 will remain open to those who live, work or visit those along the work zone; however, expect changes and use of alternate accesses. Hard closures will occur to replace box bridges. Follow signs and enter/exit the nearest to your destination to avoid delays.

All traffic impacts are tentative and weather dependent.

For more information, to view detour maps, sign up for email updates or contact MnDOT, visit the Highway 23 project web page .

For your safety and ours— please stay out of barricaded areas, be prepared for delay, add time to your commute or seek alternative routes; expect slow moving trucks entering/exiting work areas in the work zone.

When all lanes open in early October, motorists will benefit from a smoother road surface, updated drainage, and improved access and safety along 12 miles of Highway 23.

For current road conditions in central Minnesota, visit 511mn.org .

ComArtSci Alumna Empowers Women Through Travel

Story adapted from an article originally published in Spartan Magazine , Spring 2024.

Megan Grant is on a lifelong mission to see the world…and to change it at the same time.

The 2016 communication alumna is the owner of Cherish Tours LLC, a woman-centric travel agency aimed at creating experiences to empower women.

Grant grew up taking vacations to exotic destinations. A formative solo overseas trip in her teens planted the seeds of her future career. After graduation, Grant worked in the business hospitality industry, where she honed her skills as an event and conference planner. While the experience sharpened her organizational abilities, it failed to satisfy her ingrained love of travel.

“Conferences are in-and-out and you don’t really appreciate the places that you’re in,” Grant said. “You go to a conference center, you stay in the hotel and you don’t get anything about the culture,” she said. “Travel in that world was not the enjoyable kind. It was work travel. I was burning out on it.” 

Grant leaned into the skill sets and confidence she gained at MSU to launch her own business. Cherish LLC hosted its first tour in 2021. Her clients have traveled to overseas locations including Costa Rica, Panama, Iceland, Denmark, Tanzania and Turkey. Grant has also organized domestic tours in Utah and Alaska.

At the core of each trip are women seeking growth and self-fulfillment.

“There’s something powerful about bringing women from different walks of life, different ages, different communities, all of these people together in a space where they can be their most authentic self,” Grant said. 

Grant coordinates her tour packages with women-owned businesses in each destination. She’s seen the economic benefits of women supporting women…and that’s how she intends to expand her business model.

“There are studies that prove when you give a woman a dollar, the effect it spreads in her community is much greater than when you give it to a man,” Grant said. “I believe in the ripple effect of that. The empowerment of not only one person, but many. Supporting women and their dreams creates positive things in the world.” 

By: Kevin Lavery

TSA checkpoints at Newark Liberty International Airport now equipped with new state-of-the-art 3-D checkpoint scanners to improve explosives detection in time for summer travel season

NEWARK, N.J. – The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is prepared for the highest passenger volumes the agency has seen at airport security checkpoints nationwide during this summer’s travel season, which runs through Labor Day, and that includes individuals who are planning to fly out of Newark Liberty International Airport.

Since mid-May, TSA has seen multiple days break into the top 10 busiest days in the agency’s 22-year history. Typically, TSA had been screening approximately 2.5 million people per day nationwide, however since last month, the number of people screened has increased by several hundred thousand per day, with TSA officers screening more than 3 million individuals at checkpoints for the very first time.

“Here at Newark we already have seen a notable increase in checkpoint volume,” said Thomas Carter, TSA’s Federal Security Director for New Jersey. “We have been in close coordination with our airport, airline and travel partners, and we are more than ready to handle this summer’s increased travel volumes as we head into the July 4th holiday travel period,” he said.

“Knowing that travel volume will be high is why it is vital to give yourself plenty of time to park or return a rental car, check in with your airline to check bags and prepare for the security checkpoint. If you find yourself in a checkpoint line, travelers can save time by removing items from their pockets and placing them in a carry-on bag, instead of putting items directly into bins at the conveyor belt. My advice is to get into the airport two hours prior to your scheduled departure time.”

TSA is has installed eleven new computed tomography (CT) scanners in Terminal B in time for the summer travel season. These new state-of-the-art advanced CT scanners provide 3-D imaging that provide for TSA officers to enhance explosives detection capabilities for screening carry-on items.

“TSA is committed to getting the best technology to enhance security and improve the screening experience,” Carter said. “Our officers’ use of CT technology substantially improves our threat detection capability at the checkpoint. The CT technology applies advanced algorithms for the detection of explosives, including liquid explosives and other threat items.”

The system applies sophisticated algorithms for the detection of explosives by creating a 3-D image that can be viewed and rotated 360 degrees on three axes for thorough visual image analysis by a transportation security officer. This new technology creates such a clear image of a bag’s contents that the system can automatically detect explosives, including liquids, by shooting hundreds of images with an X-ray camera spinning around the conveyor belt to provide TSA officers with the three-dimensional views of the contents of a carry-on bag.

It takes a few extra seconds for the TSA officer to view the image and rotate it to get a better understanding of its contents, however in most instances, rotating the image allows the TSA officer to identify an item inside the bag and clear it without a need to open it for inspection. Checkpoint CT technology results in fewer bag checks. However, if a bag requires further screening, a TSA officer will inspect it to ensure that a threat item is not contained inside.

As an added passenger convenience, with the use of these new CT units, travelers may now leave their laptops and other electronic devices in their carry-on bags along with their small 3-1-1 liquids .

Since traveler volume will be high this summer, it is even more important for travelers to come to the airport prepared to go through the security screening process. Passengers need to make sure that there are no prohibited items among their carry-on items. Prohibited items will result in a need for TSA officers to open and inspect a bag to determine what triggered the alarm. This process takes a few minutes and will slow down someone’s trip through the checkpoint.

When packing, it is recommended to start to pack with an empty bag, so that travelers are well aware of the contents of their bags. Prior to packing that empty bag, individuals can check TSA’s “What Can I Bring?” tool to know what is prohibited. Individuals who are heading to the beach, may wonder how to pack their sunscreen. Any liquids, sunscreen containers and alcohol over 3.4 ounces must be packed in a checked bag. Liquids, aerosols, gels, creams and pastes are allowed in carry-on bags as long as each item is 3.4 ounces or less and placed in one quart-sized bag . Each passenger is limited to one quart-size bag of liquids, aerosols, gels, creams and pastes.

It is important for individuals who own firearms to remember that they are prohibited to pass through security checkpoints, even if a passenger has a concealed carry permit or is in a constitutional carry jurisdiction. Passengers may travel with a firearm, but it must be secured in the passenger’s checked baggage; packed unloaded; locked in a hard-sided case; and declared to the airline when checking in at the airline ticket counter. If a passenger brings a firearm to the security checkpoint on their person or in their carry-on luggage, TSA will contact local law enforcement to safely unload and take possession of the firearm. Law enforcement may also arrest or cite the passenger, depending on local law. TSA may impose a civil penalty up to $15,000 when weapons are intercepted, and passengers will lose TSA PreCheck® eligibility.

TSA PreCheck® members should make sure that their known traveler number (KTN) is in their airline reservation. It is essential that airline reservations have the passenger’s correct KTN, full name and date of birth so they can receive the program’s benefits. Those who fly with multiple airlines should ensure their KTN is updated in each of their airline profiles every time they travel. TSA PreCheck passengers are low-risk travelers who do not need to remove shoes, belts, 3-1-1 liquids, food, laptops and light jackets at the TSA checkpoint. TSA’s wait time standards for TSA PreCheck lanes are under 10 minutes and less than 30 minutes for standard lanes. Travelers may visit https://www.tsa.gov/precheck for more information about enrolling or renewing in TSA PreCheck and to find enrollment locations and pricing information for all TSA PreCheck enrollment providers.

“It is also important to remember that our TSA officers are working throughout the summer, including the upcoming July 4th holiday, so respect TSA and other frontline airport and airline employees,” Carter said. “Our officers along with all frontline airport and airline employees and local law enforcement, are working together to ensure safe and secure travel. Consider offering them a kind word of thanks.”

TSA also reminds travelers that starting on May 7, 2025, if you plan to use your state-issued ID or driver’s license to fly within the U.S., make sure you have a REAL ID or another acceptable form of ID. If you are not sure if you have a REAL ID, check with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission . For questions on acceptable IDs, visit TSA’s web site. “Put REAL ID on your summer to do list,” Carter recommended.

Travelers can contact TSA with questions may contact TSA by sending a text directly to 275-872 (“AskTSA”) on any mobile device or over social media by sending a message to @AskTSA on X or Facebook Messenger. An automated virtual assistant is available 24/7 to answer commonly asked questions, and AskTSA staff are available 365 days a year from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET for more complicated questions. Travelers may also reach the TSA Contact Center at 866-289-9673. An automated service is available 24/7.

TSA encourages all passengers to remain vigilant. If You See Something. Say Something®.

IMAGES

Why Future Time Travel Is More Likely Than Going to the Past
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A Beginner’s Guide To Time Travel
Artwork of time travel through a wormhole
How to Time Travel to the Future
Time Travel: Explained in a nutshell

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EINSTEIN’S TIME TRAVEL: From CLOCKS to UNIVERSE
TIME TRAVEL THROUGH TOWN
Time Travel Through History
TIME TRAVEL THROUGH TOWN

COMMENTS

Is Time Travel Possible?
In Summary: Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.
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Time traveling to the near future is easy: you're doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change. According to Einstein's special theory of ...
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Physicist Discovers 'Paradox-Free' Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible. Physics 17 December 2023. By David Nield. (andrey_l/Shutterstock) No one has yet managed to travel through time - at least to our knowledge - but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. As movies ...
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Physicists Just Figured Out How Wormholes Could Enable Time Travel. Physics 16 July 2023. By Mike McRae. (gremlin/Getty Images) Theoretical physicists have a lot in common with lawyers. Both spend a lot of time looking for loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that might be exploited somehow. Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov from the ...
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Scientists are trying to figure out if time travel is even theoretically possible. If it is, it looks like it would take a whole lot more knowledge and resources than humans have now to do it.
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Wild New Physics Theory Explains Why Time Travel Is Impossible. Physics 26 October 2023. By Mike McRae. An artistic depiction of a wave encountering an exponentially curved spacetime. (Matias Koivurova) Sliding care-free through the complete emptiness of space, light covers a constant 299,792,458 meters every second. No more, no less.
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Time isn't the same everywhere. Some scientists are exploring other ideas that could theoretically allow time travel. One concept involves wormholes, or hypothetical tunnels in space that could create shortcuts for journeys across the universe.If someone could build a wormhole and then figure out a way to move one end at close to the speed of light - like the hypothetical spaceship ...
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Real-life time travel occurs through time dilation, a property of Einstein's special relativity. Einstein was the first to realize that time is not constant, as previously believed, but instead slows down as you move faster through space. As part of his theory, Einstein re-envisioned space itself. He coined the phrase "spacetime," fusing ...
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Until recently, most studies on time travel have been based upon classical general relativity.A theory of time travel based upon quantum mechanics requires physicists to solve the time evolution equations for density states in the presence of closed timelike curves (CTC).. Igor Novikov conjectured in the mid-1980s that once quantum mechanics is taken into account, self-consistent solutions ...
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Time Traveling Through London With an Impressionist Painter. A writer used Camille Pissarro's paintings of suburban London and a 'lost' railway as a lens for exploring the city's history ...
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SIOUX CITY, Iowa - June 22, 2024 - If you are planning a trip in northwest Iowa this weekend you need to be aware of several road closures that may slow down your trip. Between the evening of June 20 and morning of June 22, portions of northwest Iowa received significant rain, resulting in flooding along various primary highways. There are currently widespread flash flooding and river ...
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A Physicist Has Worked Out The Math That Makes 'Paradox-Free' Time Travel Plausible. No one has yet managed to travel through time - at least to our knowledge - but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future ...
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