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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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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.

Courtesy and © of NASA

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 © 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.

Image by Panzi, CC-BY 3.0

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,   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 Deji’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.

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 can’t you somehow use a recording as a base to go back into? I agree with everything you said here, and it’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 don’t get rid of those possessed objects and keeps letting my mom buy those antiques I’m 18 now I’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 aren’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 70’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 “reflection” 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 it’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.

When time travel is possible, you should d̵͔̮͉̣̯̳͌i̩͒̍̆͟ͅs͎̲̖͙̺ͬ̽̊͆͢r̖̹͆͂̚͘ê̛̫̪̱͇̘̩ͬg̖͉̤͚ͭͣ̊̌͜a̯̗͚̬͍̱̦͑͂͒͡ṟ̝ͦ͗͘d͋҉̪̖̥͔̟̟͚̻ ͎̬ͧ̔́i̧͚̫̻̇ͮͫ̆t̩̻͉̩̘̰̠̫̓̂̕ ̦̻̳̦̉͆̊̇̀i̴̗͍̞͙͇ͣ̈́mͦ̑ͦ̚͏͚̜̬̹̘̟̭m̱͕̻͇̮̠̰̼ͫ̌͆͡e̢͈̜̱ͩd̵̦͙͔̭̹̃̿̈̚ͅi̛̖̬͓͚̩̝̗ͯa̦͎̭̣̭̘͔͙̅̏́ṯ̴̟ͥ̀͗e̵͎̭͓̟͗ͨ̂͒l̼͕͕ͦͦ͜y̸͙̯̺̘͉ͣ,͈̻͙̭̺̘̞̑ͫ͜ ͔̗̣͒͜d̶͇͚͉̦̞̗͛̍o̞̮̻̲̜̠̒ͩ̈́̀ͅ ̲̙̦̮̺̉́͂̏̀ṋ̞͖̌͠o̬͕̯̩͓̮̫̝͛ͩ̐͛͜t̼̙̿͊͆̕ ̲͚̲̬̦̗̐̀m̢̹̜̭̠̬͗̆ͣą̲̺̻͈̹͎̈́̇̉͛ǩ̜̪̱̀e̜̳͔͉̣͓̓͗͘ ̉҉̲̞̘͈ͅc̴̦̣̝͇͈̙̋ͥ́o̫͇͇̘̻̠̹͎ͯ̀n̺̹̣̦̔̇̾͢t͚̹͚̙̞̪̗̺̄͂͜a̞̗̖̻̩͉̋͛̆͘c͙̙̎͘t̻̠̣͉̹̠̣̲̐ͧͩ̈́̕ ̶͕̗̬̿w͓̞͍̹̰͖͉ͦ͐͡i͎̞̾ͦ̃̈́̕t̜̺̖̭̍ͦ͞h͙̰̬̖͎̰͛̇ͮͫ͡ ͣͯ͏͕̻͚̹̺ā̱̙̝̦̤̼̥͡n̶͔̜ͥ͆̌̋y̷͓̻̺̺͉͇̻ͨọ̱͙̜̈́̉ͣ̔͟ņ̦̟͔̜̫̗̒ͬe̡͕̮̓͂̚ ̡͓̘͚̭̹͔̉͐͋̽t̖͍͚̝̬͈̝͌͋͘ͅẖ̗̖͚̼͔͕͆̓̾͜a͈̣͍͕͍̋ͦͩͭ͢t̖̪̤̳͎̱̏͡ ̛̻̠̼̬̓ͫl̶̞̤̣͔̗͔̂ͅö̹̞̦̖͚̫̜̱́ͯ͠o̧̯̱̪̓ͮ̋k͉͎̝̻̓ͧ̕s̤͈̪̍͟ ̤̞̳͔̝̪̟̹̔̂ͨ͜h̛̝̲̰̻͗̅̏̃u̜̙͐̇̈͝m̧̞̮̟̦̳̟̊a̸͓̺̲̼̜͊͛̐n̶̳̮̒.͇̻͚͓̳̺̜̱͋ͬ͗ͩ͢

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 I’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 isn’t what it seems and all things can’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 €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 don’t normally post.however because of previous comments I’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 doesn’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 It’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? It’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 ‍♂️. 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 Deji’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 don’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 → +∞

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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Carlo Rovelli.

Carlo Rovelli: ‘Time travel is just what we do every day…’

What do you ask the man who knows everything? The theoretical physicist and bestselling author answers questions from famous fans and Observer readers

T heoretical physicists and mathematicians are fond of describing their theories and equations as beautiful but very few writers are able to bring this elegance to life for the general public. The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli has proved himself to be one of those rare figures. His first attempt at writing a book for a mainstream audience, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014), outsold Fifty Shades of Grey in his home country, has been translated into 41 languages and sold more than 1m copies. His second, The Order of Time , is an appreciation and lucid deconstruction of a quality we take for granted – “We inhabit time as fish live in water,” he writes.

Like other popular scientists such as Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Brian Cox, Rovelli feeds our fascination with the fundamental forces that make our universe tick. Here, famous fans and Observer readers question him further.

Questions from famous fans

Can you imagine a future in which relativity and quantum mechanics could be so well and generally understood that time, as mediated by relative motion and the strength of the local gravitational field, becomes part of our immediate and common sense appreciation of the world? Could we experience in the every day space and time obviously and sensuously inseparable? Or are we bound by our very nature and our evolutionary past, and living between the very large and very small, to remain within the sensory limits we experience now? I think that we will learn, and slowly counterintuitive ideas will become intuitive. It has happened with the fact that the Earth is a sphere (clarified two millennia ago) and the fact that it spins (clarified a few centuries ago). At first these were extremely counterintuitive ideas; nowadays we accept them as comprehensible. But it takes time. I think, for instance, that the day when we will have spaceships travelling very fast, and we experience directly things like meeting our children older than us on our return home… when we experience this, the elasticity of time will become obvious to us. Of course, all this is assuming our civilisation survives long enough and we do not destroy ourselves with conflicts and stupidity, which is something we humans seem to be very good at and not ready to move away from.

Artist and designer known for her kinetic stage sculptures

Es Devlin with her installation The Singing Tree at the V and A in 2017.

The course of events often feels cyclical; in architecture, design and fashion, styles and tendencies seem to echo and recur . Could there be folds in the fabric of time that wrap around and touch one another, causing imprints and echoes? Oh, Es! If your extraordinarily creative artist’s mind can make something out of these folds, wraps, imprints and echoes, I am the last one willing to tune this idea down! The fabric of time is multilayered, stratified; this is precisely the main idea of my last book. At some level, my answer would probably be negative, but at another level – the one woven by the memories and expectations of our brain – the answer is certainly yes; this is the level we actually mean, when we concretely think about what time is for us.

How, if at all, has music helped you on your path of knowledge and understanding about the way things work? I do not know. Like most people, I listen to a lot of music and in writing my book on time I have thought much about the relation between music and our sense of time flow. The fact that so much meaning is conveyed in such an apparently meaningless structure as a sequence of sounds has always mystified me.

Comedian and co-host of The Infinite Monkey Cage

Does dealing with the reality of atomic and subatomic behaviour help take your mind off the surrealism of human political behaviour in these strange times? I do not think that these times are particularly strange. Humans have massacred one another and had a hard time collaborating for ever. What changes is who the [short-term] winners are. As for me, no, dealing with physics does not help in taking my mind off humans’ continuous self-inflicted pain.

James Lovelock

Scientist best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis

What is the best way to view time? What we call time, and usually view as a very simple elementary notion, is actually a complex experience grounded on different levels. There is a basic physical level of “things happening”, but this is very far from our common notion of time, because it lacks all the rich features of what we call time. Then there are approximations due to our specific scale. There is the effect of the large number (myriads) of microscopic degrees of freedom we interact with. There is the very peculiar manner in which our brains interact with the world, based on memory and tentative anticipation of the future.

Finally, there is a thick emotional layer, which is what gives us the sense of the “flow” of time. The problem of understanding time is the problem of disentangling this complex tangle of structures and effects. Your wonderful realisation of the notion of Gaia was based on viewing unity beyond apparent complexity. Understanding time is the opposite: viewing the complexity beyond apparent unity.

‘The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones,’ Rovelli argues in The Order of Time.

Nick Hornby

I loved The Order of Time . It made my head spin, while your writing is clear and beautiful. However, I have decided to ignore you and I am going to think about time the old-fashioned way for the rest of my life – in a line, with a now, a yesterday and a next year. To think of it in terms of kisses and crowds of Italians jostling is too disorienting. What am I missing out on? If you prefer to keep thinking about time in the old-fashioned way, what you are missing out on is a lot of fun and an opportunity to learn more in depth about how the universe really works. Not much more than this. I think one can happily keep living thinking that the Earth is flat or is at the centre of the universe; in daily life, it does not matter much, if at all. And of course I understand that crowds of Italians jostling is disorienting; but still, do you really feel that a world made of stone is more hospitable than a world made of kisses?

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Artistic director of the Serpentine Galler ies , London

I am curious to know more about your unrealised projects. We know a lot about architects’ unrealised projects as they publish them, but we don’t know much about those of artists and scientists , which is why I’m mapping them. What is your dream? I think most scientists have unrealised projects. My drawers are full of unfinished works. My dream project is between physics and biology. There is a common idea that a living organism is a sort of fight against entropy: it keeps entropy locally low. I think that this common idea is wrong and misleading. Rather, a living organism is a place where entropy grows particularly fast, like a burning fire. Life is a channel for entropy to grow, not a way to keep it low. My dream is to be able to articulate this properly and quantitatively. I do not know if I will ever be able to. I have to study.

Monica Grady

Space scientist

In The Order of Time , you write: “ The characteristic features of time have proved to be approximations, mistakes determined by our perspective…” How does this affect your ability to read a bus timetable and get to an appointment on time? Not at all, of course. Does knowing that in Sydney people live upside down make it harder for you to distinguish the floor from the ceiling? Realising that we use approximate concepts, and that it is a mistake to assume that they have universal validity, does not prevent us from using them. If anything, we understand them better, because we now know the limits of their validity.

The Milky Way over Athabasca Pass, Alberta, Canada.

Michael Pollan

Author and activist

I have three questions: do you think that quantum mechanics has any relevance for our understanding of consciousness? Do the quantum effects observed at the level of particles scale up to our experience of the world or do the effects wash out as you move up? Finally, y ou have said that your youthful experience of psychedelics opened you up to the non intuitive ideas of theoretical physics. What specifically happened during those trips to change your mind? I do not think that quantum theory plays any major role in our understanding of consciousness. However, I suspect that perhaps better understanding quantum theory could free us from some prejudices about the structure of reality, prejudices that obstruct us in [our] understanding of what consciousness is, whatever that word means. Quantum theory indicates that reality is more interdependent than it is in the picture classical physics paints.

The reason I think that quantum effects are more or less irrelevant for consciousness is precisely because they do not scale up to our experience of the world; they wash out as we move up in dimension. This is why the world looks so “non-quantum” to us, well described by classical mechanics.

Your question about my experience of psychedelics and its relation to the nonintuitive ideas of theoretical physics is delicate. Let me put it this way: I got so confused about the basic structure of reality that when, 10 years later, I had to dive into fundamental theoretical physics, I wasn’t scared of losing my bearings. You ask what specifically happened during those trips. The psychedelic experience is notoriously very strong and at the same time very hard to talk about. A drastic loss of the usual personal, emotional and intellectual coordinates. Overwhelming emotions, a sudden sense of seeing everything profoundly differently. The colourful visual theatre is nice and fun, but less important, at the end. In the days after my first experience, I wrote frenetically in a notebook about it. I filled an entire notebook. A few months later, my mother found the notebook and burned it.

Albert Einstein at work in his study.

Neil G aiman

‘ ‘ I’m haunted by the idea of Einstein telling a colleague that his dead wife was still alive and it is merely a failure in our perception to see all of time as existing at once. (I may have completely misunderstood what you and/or he were saying.) So are we flatlanders, failing to perceive a much richer universe around us, deluded by the idea of sequential time? You haven’t misunderstood. We are flatlanders, failing to perceive a much richer universe around us, deluded by the idea of sequential time. But perhaps not in the simple-minded sense of our loved ones still being alive… The reason for the failure of our perception to see all of time as existing at once is deeply grounded in the physics of our environment and ourselves, but we still have the intelligence and imagination to allow us to see beyond those limits. And to imagine plural worlds, as you know well, I would say…

Helen Czerski

Physicist, broadcaster and writer

Time and gravity are grand concepts that can seem very remote from the practicalities of being human. What are the small things in life that bring you joy and what are your favourite ways to spend time with friends and family? Do you separate the small joys and the grand thoughts or are they all woven together? I think that they are pretty much woven together, because I have difficulty compartmentalising my life. The small things that bring me joy are things like waking up in the morning and going out to watch the sea (I live near the sea) or just doing nothing with my companion. I like a lot hiking and travelling. I have a small, very old boat and as soon as I can, I just go out to sea, maybe even to eat bread and cheese while the sun sets.

Jim Al-Khalili

Theoretical physicist and host of Radio 4’s The Life Scientific

Despite all its success as a beautiful theory of the building blocks of the universe, quantum mechanics still leaves even those of us physicists who work with it daily both frustrated and bemused. Would you agree that maybe Einstein was right after all and that quantum mechanics is not yet complete? Yes, I agree that maybe quantum theory is incomplete. Because how could we ever be sure that anything is “complete”? But only “maybe”, because I do not see compelling reasons to conclude that quantum theory can only be viewed as an incomplete theory. The reason is that any possible “completion” of quantum theory demands that we accept strangenesses that are even less plausible than those implied by quantum theory as it is. With the difference that the strangenesses of quantum theory as it is are empirically confirmed, while the strangenesses of its completion are arbitrary guesses. I think that quantum theory can make sense as it is: we just have to give up some cherished metaphysical prejudices and accept the deep relational aspect of nature that the success of the theory has revealed.

carlo rovelli as a young man

Questions from readers

I read recently that you take enormous pleasure in washing up piles of dishes. Why is this? And any tips for removing stubborn stains from pans? What other household chores do you enjoy? Jane via email

I have no special tips. In fact, I do not think I am particularly good or effective at washing dishes. I just like doing it. The reason is that it is one of those (rare) human activities where you start with a disgusting mess, you immerse yourself in an easy task that relaxes your mind and you end up with everything nice and clean and shining and neat. Wouldn’t it be great if life was all like that? Usually, it is the opposite: you start with something so-so, you struggle and get nervous and at the end it is all a mess. My habit of cleaning dishes comes from my youth when I used to live with messy friends. Nobody ever wanted to do the dishes and cohabitation tended to raise tensions. I discovered that if I did the dishes for everybody then everybody loved me and living together became a pleasure. So I got a lot for a cheap price. In fact, in exchange, my room-mates routinely did the groceries and cooked wonderfully for me. Definitely worthwhile.

Do you believe in free will? Celso Antonio via Twitter

Free will is an ambiguous expression. In the commonsense meaning of “being free to decide”, of course there is free will: we decide. If, instead, by free will you mean that in deciding we violate known laws of physics and their standard causal relations, then no, there is no free will in this sense; the evidence is now overwhelming. What happens in a “decision” is a very complex network of microevents in the brain, which is too complicated to predict. As clarified by Spinoza, free will is real: it is the name we give to our own inner complexity, which is too rich for us to disentangle or predict.

erwin schrodinger lectures at a blackboard in about 1950

Is [Schrödinger’s] goddamn cat dead or not? Afristotle via Twitter

I think the cat is never “dead and also alive”, as quantum theory is sometimes said to claim. The cat is either dead or alive. The subtle point, in my opinion, is that all contingent aspects of reality are relative to other physical systems and are realised in interactions. Therefore in principle a cat could be neither dead nor alive as long as it was not interacting with anything. But a macroscopic entity such as a cat is constantly interacting heavily with the rest of the world – therefore it is effectively always either alive or dead. Cats behave. The discussion on the interpretation of quantum theory is wide open, however. I think that different perspectives are possible. It may be a mistake to pretend to choose one. Maybe the different readings of quantum theory that are discussed are all interesting and the future will tell us better.

Is there a layman’s way of explaining how gravity alters time, please? Sea -level and up -a -mountain kind of gravity … HarvestingKarma via comment

The straight way of thinking is the opposite: it is not gravity that alters time, rather, it is the alteration of time that is responsible for gravity. The point is that a large mass like the Earth slows down time in its vicinity (please do not ask why, because I can only answer one question at a time). And the effect of this slowing down of time in the vicinity of the Earth is that things fall. A bit like when you run into the sea and your feet are slowed down by the water and your body is pulled downwards…

the large hadron collider at cern in switzerland

Is a new, more powerful linear [circular] collider than the LHC really worth it at the moment, given that the glory years of discovering new elementary particles appear to have ground to a halt ? bilyou via comment

This is a large and serious discussion, going on currently in the scientific community. There are good arguments on both sides. It is never easy to decide where best to allocate resources. Part of the scientific community is digesting the disappointment of not having found at LHC what they were convinced had to be there. For others, such a non-discovery has actually been a confirmation of expectations. It is good to stop and think sometimes.

How seriously should we be taking the recently mooted idea that the universe is a form of hologram? What difference would it make to doing science? To living life? palfreyman via comment

I have never been convinced by this vague idea. If there is something to it, I have not yet seen it realised in a convincing way as a theory of our world. On the other hand, I have seen a lot of very free speculations in this direction, which I do not find very plausible. I might be wrong, of course. Others disagree.

Can time be said to exist if no observer/participant is there to experience it? How would one know? Could this not make consciousness a fundamental quality of the universe? Gary W Kelly, Salinas, California

I definitely don’t think consciousness is a fundamental quality of the universe. Our subjective conscious experience is the product of the complexity of our brain: it is something very specific. The universe is not going to change whether we experience it or not. It is out there and it does what it does. This is what we learn when we are three years old and it’s true. What depends on our consciousness is the way we ourselves perceive time – our experiential time. Discovering that something we perceive depends on the way we are does not imply that the universe depends on us.

richard feynman  receives word that he is two share the nobel prize for physics in 1965

Do you think that Richard Feynman ’s dictum “Shut up and calculate” has done a great disservice to physics? Isn’t physics about trying to understand the root causes behind physical phenomena, not just treating them as “black boxes” we can never hope to comprehend? David Mitchell via comment

I think the dictum “Shut up and calculate” is misattributed to Feynman. Feynman was a deep thinker, asking subtle and fundamental questions and offering visual interpretation of his calculations: quite the opposite of “Shut up and calculate”. The expression “Shut up and calculate” has been used to characterise a certain excessive pragmatism in the physics of the 1950s. I believe we have moved out of it. Of course science is about understanding, not about predicting.

Is time travel a possibility? If so, is it limited in the direction one could travel, forward or back? And would it require a powerful engineered device or exist in nature? Sagarmatha1953 via comment

Time travel is just what we do every day, isn’t it? Every single day we travel one day ahead in time… But this is not what you are asking… You are asking whether we can fast-jump into the future and whether we can go to the past. The answer to the first question is: certainly yes, it is just a question of money. The answer to the second is that it is improbable in a very technical sense. Let me explain: if you want to travel to the next millennium, it is sufficient to build a fast starship, travel fast enough back and forth, and in a few days (of yours) you can definitely be back here on Earth a millennium in the future. The science of this is completely uncontroversial and clear. The only problem is finding the money for such a starship. If instead you want to travel to a millennium ago, things are more complicated. The reason is that you have to beat the entropic arrow of time. This is not impossible, because the arrow of time is statistical, therefore it is just a matter of probability and improbability. But the improbability is overwhelming. So in a very technical sense, I think that going to the past is very improbable.

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Time travel could be possible, but only with parallel timelines

time travel in daily life

Assistant Professor, Physics, Brock University

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Barak Shoshany 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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Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could undo? Correcting past mistakes is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often portrayed in science fiction, with a time machine, nothing is permanent anymore — you can always go back and change it. But is time travel really possible in our universe , or is it just science fiction?

Read more: Curious Kids: is time travel possible for humans?

Our modern understanding of time and causality comes from general relativity . Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s theory combines space and time into a single entity — “spacetime” — and provides a remarkably intricate explanation of how they both work, at a level unmatched by any other established theory. This theory has existed for more than 100 years, and has been experimentally verified to extremely high precision, so physicists are fairly certain it provides an accurate description of the causal structure of our universe.

For decades, physicists have been trying to use general relativity to figure out if time travel is possible . It turns out that you can write down equations that describe time travel and are fully compatible and consistent with relativity. But physics is not mathematics, and equations are meaningless if they do not correspond to anything in reality.

Arguments against time travel

There are two main issues which make us think these equations may be unrealistic. The first issue is a practical one: building a time machine seems to require exotic matter , which is matter with negative energy. All the matter we see in our daily lives has positive energy — matter with negative energy is not something you can just find lying around. From quantum mechanics, we know that such matter can theoretically be created, but in too small quantities and for too short times .

However, there is no proof that it is impossible to create exotic matter in sufficient quantities. Furthermore, other equations may be discovered that allow time travel without requiring exotic matter. Therefore, this issue may just be a limitation of our current technology or understanding of quantum mechanics.

an illustration of a person standing in a barren landscape underneath a clock

The other main issue is less practical, but more significant: it is the observation that time travel seems to contradict logic, in the form of time travel paradoxes . There are several types of such paradoxes, but the most problematic are consistency paradoxes .

A popular trope in science fiction, consistency paradoxes happen whenever there is a certain event that leads to changing the past, but the change itself prevents this event from happening in the first place.

For example, consider a scenario where I enter my time machine, use it to go back in time five minutes, and destroy the machine as soon as I get to the past. Now that I destroyed the time machine, it would be impossible for me to use it five minutes later.

But if I cannot use the time machine, then I cannot go back in time and destroy it. Therefore, it is not destroyed, so I can go back in time and destroy it. In other words, the time machine is destroyed if and only if it is not destroyed. Since it cannot be both destroyed and not destroyed simultaneously, this scenario is inconsistent and paradoxical.

Eliminating the paradoxes

There’s a common misconception in science fiction that paradoxes can be “created.” Time travellers are usually warned not to make significant changes to the past and to avoid meeting their past selves for this exact reason. Examples of this may be found in many time travel movies, such as the Back to the Future trilogy.

But in physics, a paradox is not an event that can actually happen — it is a purely theoretical concept that points towards an inconsistency in the theory itself. In other words, consistency paradoxes don’t merely imply time travel is a dangerous endeavour, they imply it simply cannot be possible.

This was one of the motivations for theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking to formulate his chronology protection conjecture , which states that time travel should be impossible. However, this conjecture so far remains unproven. Furthermore, the universe would be a much more interesting place if instead of eliminating time travel due to paradoxes, we could just eliminate the paradoxes themselves.

One attempt at resolving time travel paradoxes is theoretical physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov’s self-consistency conjecture , which essentially states that you can travel to the past, but you cannot change it.

According to Novikov, if I tried to destroy my time machine five minutes in the past, I would find that it is impossible to do so. The laws of physics would somehow conspire to preserve consistency.

Introducing multiple histories

But what’s the point of going back in time if you cannot change the past? My recent work, together with my students Jacob Hauser and Jared Wogan, shows that there are time travel paradoxes that Novikov’s conjecture cannot resolve. This takes us back to square one, since if even just one paradox cannot be eliminated, time travel remains logically impossible.

So, is this the final nail in the coffin of time travel? Not quite. We showed that allowing for multiple histories (or in more familiar terms, parallel timelines) can resolve the paradoxes that Novikov’s conjecture cannot. In fact, it can resolve any paradox you throw at it.

The idea is very simple. When I exit the time machine, I exit into a different timeline. In that timeline, I can do whatever I want, including destroying the time machine, without changing anything in the original timeline I came from. Since I cannot destroy the time machine in the original timeline, which is the one I actually used to travel back in time, there is no paradox.

After working on time travel paradoxes for the last three years , I have become increasingly convinced that time travel could be possible, but only if our universe can allow multiple histories to coexist. So, can it?

Quantum mechanics certainly seems to imply so, at least if you subscribe to Everett’s “many-worlds” interpretation , where one history can “split” into multiple histories, one for each possible measurement outcome – for example, whether Schrödinger’s cat is alive or dead, or whether or not I arrived in the past.

But these are just speculations. My students and I are currently working on finding a concrete theory of time travel with multiple histories that is fully compatible with general relativity. Of course, even if we manage to find such a theory, this would not be sufficient to prove that time travel is possible, but it would at least mean that time travel is not ruled out by consistency paradoxes.

Time travel and parallel timelines almost always go hand-in-hand in science fiction, but now we have proof that they must go hand-in-hand in real science as well. General relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that time travel might be possible, but if it is, then multiple histories must also be possible.

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April 26, 2023

Is Time Travel Possible?

The laws of physics allow time travel. So why haven’t people become chronological hoppers?

By Sarah Scoles

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In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation .

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

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 relativity, time’s flow depends on how fast you’re moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity , gravity also affects clocks: the more forceful the gravity nearby, the slower time goes.

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“Near massive bodies—near the surface of neutron stars or even at the surface of the Earth, although it’s a tiny effect—time runs slower than it does far away,” says Dave Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University.

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole , where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read [about closed timelike curves] and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

Just as importantly, though, they investigated the problems with time travel. What if, for instance, you tossed a billiard ball into a time machine, and it traveled to the past and then collided with its past self in a way that meant its present self could never enter the time machine? “That looks like a paradox,” Costa says.

Since the 1990s, he says, there’s been on-and-off interest in the topic yet no big breakthrough. The field isn’t very active today, in part because every proposed model of a time machine has problems. “It has some attractive features, possibly some potential, but then when one starts to sort of unravel the details, there ends up being some kind of a roadblock,” says Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island.

For instance, most time travel models require negative mass —and hence negative energy because, as Albert Einstein revealed when he discovered E = mc 2 , mass and energy are one and the same. In theory, at least, just as an electric charge can be positive or negative, so can mass—though no one’s ever found an example of negative mass. Why does time travel depend on such exotic matter? In many cases, it is needed to hold open a wormhole—a tunnel in spacetime predicted by general relativity that connects one point in the cosmos to another.

Without negative mass, gravity would cause this tunnel to collapse. “You can think of it as counteracting the positive mass or energy that wants to traverse the wormhole,” Goldberg says.

Khanna and Goldberg concur that it’s unlikely matter with negative mass even exists, although Khanna notes that some quantum phenomena show promise, for instance, for negative energy on very small scales. But that would be “nowhere close to the scale that would be needed” for a realistic time machine, he says.

These challenges explain why Khanna initially discouraged Caroline Mallary, then his graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from doing a time travel project. Mallary and Khanna went forward anyway and came up with a theoretical time machine that didn’t require negative mass. In its simplistic form, Mallary’s idea involves two parallel cars, each made of regular matter. If you leave one parked and zoom the other with extreme acceleration, a closed timelike curve will form between them.

Easy, right? But while Mallary’s model gets rid of the need for negative matter, it adds another hurdle: it requires infinite density inside the cars for them to affect spacetime in a way that would be useful for time travel. Infinite density can be found inside a black hole, where gravity is so intense that it squishes matter into a mind-bogglingly small space called a singularity. In the model, each of the cars needs to contain such a singularity. “One of the reasons that there's not a lot of active research on this sort of thing is because of these constraints,” Mallary says.

Other researchers have created models of time travel that involve a wormhole, or a tunnel in spacetime from one point in the cosmos to another. “It's sort of a shortcut through the universe,” Goldberg says. Imagine accelerating one end of the wormhole to near the speed of light and then sending it back to where it came from. “Those two sides are no longer synced,” he says. “One is in the past; one is in the future.” Walk between them, and you’re time traveling.

You could accomplish something similar by moving one end of the wormhole near a big gravitational field—such as a black hole—while keeping the other end near a smaller gravitational force. In that way, time would slow down on the big gravity side, essentially allowing a particle or some other chunk of mass to reside in the past relative to the other side of the wormhole.

Making a wormhole requires pesky negative mass and energy, however. A wormhole created from normal mass would collapse because of gravity. “Most designs tend to have some similar sorts of issues,” Goldberg says. They’re theoretically possible, but there’s currently no feasible way to make them, kind of like a good-tasting pizza with no calories.

And maybe the problem is not just that we don’t know how to make time travel machines but also that it’s not possible to do so except on microscopic scales—a belief held by the late physicist Stephen Hawking. He proposed the chronology protection conjecture: The universe doesn’t allow time travel because it doesn’t allow alterations to the past. “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians,” Hawking wrote in a 1992 paper in Physical Review D .

Part of his reasoning involved the paradoxes time travel would create such as the aforementioned situation with a billiard ball and its more famous counterpart, the grandfather paradox : If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has children, you can’t be born, and therefore you can’t time travel, and therefore you couldn’t have killed your grandfather. And yet there you are.

Those complications are what interests Massachusetts Institute of Technology philosopher Agustin Rayo, however, because the paradoxes don’t just call causality and chronology into question. They also make free will seem suspect. If physics says you can go back in time, then why can’t you kill your grandfather? “What stops you?” he says. Are you not free?

Rayo suspects that time travel is consistent with free will, though. “What’s past is past,” he says. “So if, in fact, my grandfather survived long enough to have children, traveling back in time isn’t going to change that. Why will I fail if I try? I don’t know because I don’t have enough information about the past. What I do know is that I’ll fail somehow.”

If you went to kill your grandfather, in other words, you’d perhaps slip on a banana en route or miss the bus. “It's not like you would find some special force compelling you not to do it,” Costa says. “You would fail to do it for perfectly mundane reasons.”

In 2020 Costa worked with Germain Tobar, then his undergraduate student at the University of Queensland in Australia, on the math that would underlie a similar idea: that time travel is possible without paradoxes and with freedom of choice.

Goldberg agrees with them in a way. “I definitely fall into the category of [thinking that] if there is time travel, it will be constructed in such a way that it produces one self-consistent view of history,” he says. “Because that seems to be the way that all the rest of our physical laws are constructed.”

No one knows what the future of time travel to the past will hold. And so far, no time travelers have come to tell us about it.

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Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say

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Matthew S. Schwartz

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A dog dressed as Marty McFly from Back to the Future attends the Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in 2015. New research says time travel might be possible without the problems McFly encountered. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A dog dressed as Marty McFly from Back to the Future attends the Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in 2015. New research says time travel might be possible without the problems McFly encountered.

"The past is obdurate," Stephen King wrote in his book about a man who goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. "It doesn't want to be changed."

Turns out, King might have been on to something.

Countless science fiction tales have explored the paradox of what would happen if you went back in time and did something in the past that endangered the future. Perhaps one of the most famous pop culture examples is in Back to the Future , when Marty McFly goes back in time and accidentally stops his parents from meeting, putting his own existence in jeopardy.

But maybe McFly wasn't in much danger after all. According a new paper from researchers at the University of Queensland, even if time travel were possible, the paradox couldn't actually exist.

Researchers ran the numbers and determined that even if you made a change in the past, the timeline would essentially self-correct, ensuring that whatever happened to send you back in time would still happen.

"Say you traveled in time in an attempt to stop COVID-19's patient zero from being exposed to the virus," University of Queensland scientist Fabio Costa told the university's news service .

"However, if you stopped that individual from becoming infected, that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place," said Costa, who co-authored the paper with honors undergraduate student Germain Tobar.

"This is a paradox — an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe."

A variation is known as the "grandfather paradox" — in which a time traveler kills their own grandfather, in the process preventing the time traveler's birth.

The logical paradox has given researchers a headache, in part because according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, "closed timelike curves" are possible, theoretically allowing an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self — potentially endangering their own existence.

But these researchers say that such a paradox wouldn't necessarily exist, because events would adjust themselves.

Take the coronavirus patient zero example. "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 told the university's news service.

In other words, a time traveler could make changes, but the original outcome would still find a way to happen — maybe not the same way it happened in the first timeline but close enough so that the time traveler would still exist and would still be motivated to go back in time.

"No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you," Tobar said.

The paper, "Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice," was published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity . The findings seem consistent with another time travel study published this summer in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters. That study found that changes made in the past won't drastically alter the future.

Bestselling science fiction author Blake Crouch, who has written extensively about time travel, said the new study seems to support what certain time travel tropes have posited all along.

"The universe is deterministic and attempts to alter Past Event X are destined to be the forces which bring Past Event X into being," Crouch told NPR via email. "So the future can affect the past. Or maybe time is just an illusion. But I guess it's cool that the math checks out."

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Exploring the Reality of Time Travel: Science Fact vs. Science Fiction

By Adi Foord, University of Maryland, Baltimore County November 16, 2023

Time Travel Machine Art Concept

Time travel, a longstanding fascination in science fiction, remains a complex and unresolved concept in science. The second law of thermodynamics suggests time can only move forward, while Einstein’s theory of relativity shows time’s relativity to speed. Theoretical ideas like wormholes offer potential methods, but practical challenges and paradoxes, such as the “grandfather paradox,” complicate the feasibility of actual time travel.

Will it ever be possible for time travel to occur?

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 Science Behind Time Travel

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.

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 .

Theoretical Possibilities and Challenges

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.

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.”

James Webb Space Telescope Artist Conception

Artist’s rendering of the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: Northrop Grumman

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.

Written by Adi Foord, Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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8 comments on "exploring the reality of time travel: science fact vs. science fiction".

time travel in daily life

Until the problem of the second law of thermodynamics(entropy) is solved, the concept of time travel will remain the subject of science fiction. Since this is a basic law of our universe, there is no conceivable way that we know of to do this. The great thing about our knowledge of the universe is that it continues to grow and with that our view of what is possible continues to change. After all, at one time it was believed we could never leave earth!

time travel in daily life

The 7 planets are soul pollen in the space @ life has been the world has been prepared @ The pollen of the universe is hidden @ Around the axis of the galaxy, the universe is hidden@@ The pollen of the galaxies is a hidden cluster Itis made that we thought about what wisdom is in God’s work and how it is arranged in the form of words.The verse that is made is as follows @@ John, you are in time @ worlds, planets around the axis of the branches of galaxies @@ 8 Prophets, divine prophets, God-aware witnesses @ God’s words of revelation, they are aware @@ 48 What the words of revelation that every prophet has about @ sometimes Sometimes the message of God has become a verbal cliché in the head @@ 62 The message of God was given to every prophet @ The message was made around the power of God @@ 46 The truth of the religions of the cradle of time is said in the world @ Prophets always came for justice in time @@ 62 A warrior became brave in time @ Delaver Ghahrmani Boud Taarani@@ 43 Omar Noah never died, who knows!@ Imransan Is there an unseen world, immortality!?@@ 49 Men’s rights in the sign @ Human rights, the observance of world justice @@ 40 We have God’s love @ A love that is not patched, separation!!!: @@ 39 Take one word from the end of the first and second stanzas to the bottom of these eight verbal verses, and this sentence is made @@ God-aware, the world is born, you know the sign of God @ Agah,the beginning of time, the world, eternity, the world of separation @@ The meaning of this sentence is That God, who before us humans lived on the earth, formed the earth’s crusts with full knowledge, and we humans know the sign of God, which is on the earth, on the continents and countries, and some names have been shown by God for our knowledge since the end of time.In a later video, if I have a lifetime left, I will explain exactly about these poems, God willing @@ The word of the Prophet 17 is the 17th and Muhammad (PBUH) said that the Bedouin Arabs should pray 17 rakats so that theyperform ablution and be clean and not kill and loot.From the caravans, these were all God’s will, and he is good everywhere, in every nation, God does not like evildoers, sinners, and oppressors.Muhammad (PBUH) was God’s last messenger to the Arab people, he was God’s best prophet, and the third verse is because they do not accept Muhammad (PBUH).Some Iranians who were in contact with me, that’s why in the third verse of this surah, he said that his message was given to every prophet, the message is based on divine power, and the word truth, the first two letters of which istruth, is truth, and truth is the 43rd and forty-third word, and the word is time.It is exactly 46, and this song of the Prophets was revealed at the age of 46 ببخشید اگر قبلآ مطالبی فرستادم که به مذاهب مذاهم ارتباط داد شاید به درد شما نمیخورد من در کامنت های بعدی سعی میکنم از نجوم و حیات زمین سخن بگویم این چند بیت را به خارجی انگلیسی که تبدیل کردم معنی آن حیرت انگیز تعغیر کرد گفتم برای شما بفرستم و بداند که این کلام من نبوده کلام خداوند بوده شما نظرتان در مورد خداوند چیست من میگویم خداوند که پدر ومادر انسان بودند قادر به ساختن ما بودند اما آیا آنها قادر به ساختن ستاره ها هم بودند

time travel in daily life

Your comment has validity to God. But it surely has no place here, it is only fare if the hole comment were in english and has less of a convincing push in a belief a person either believes or not.

It’s too bad physics can’t come to a complete consensus about time, I would like to add some thought about discoveries it has been proven that time travels in only one direction forward, the experiment dealt with light thru glass and how it reacts in the middle and what change happens after light exits the other side, a simple explanation of this experiment. Brings me to theorize and start that time existed before the big bang and is outside of our universes influence, when time is acted on by gravity the ( Form ) of time is changed until the influence no longer has effect, this could go hand in hand with light photons the photon has a influence in the Form that time has. This can not be a observed difference unless we were to see beyond the speed of light. We do agree that physics changes at a subatomic state and also does some strange changing once the speed of light has been exceeded.

The experiment I referred to was posted on IFL in October 2023 headlined ( Solution to complex light problem shows that time can only go Forward ).

time travel in daily life

One of the problem with travel time is the one people keep forever. And, that is that the earth is always move through space. Matter of fact, the earth is not in the same place that it was 50 years ago. So you will have to move through space as well as time.

Ironically, the only science fiction that seems to handle this is the original story “The Time Machine”.

time travel in daily life

Time travel is happening now. It has been done since the 1950s. The method satisfies all the requirements. Traveler can’t change the past, but only observe. You can’t go farther back than when the machine was first invented (1950s). There’s one more limitation, you can only observe what the machine was directed. The time machine, the common video camera, and video tape recorder. Now it’s the camera, and file capture computer. Yes, viewing a video tape is effectively going back in time. It’s more than the video, it’s the sound too. There are working versions of smell, and touch which can be recorded too. If you record, and replicate all the senses, you have effectively complete time travel. The most primitive form is the picture. This technology has been around for thousands of years, and is manually intensive. Later many pictures were strung together to make a film. Using a camera to record film was the first example of complete visual time travel (back to when the film was made). Later sound was added, and we have the movies. A way of going back in time that included sight, and sound. Now we have video systems (YouTub) that can play back past events selected by you. Yes, video systems are virtual time travel machines we have now.

How Stellar Cannibalism Illuminates Cosmic Evolution

جزایر فیلیپین دایناسوری که توسط انسان خلق شده در بیش ده ها میلیون سال و بخاطر ریخته شدن دوهزار متر خاک غرق شده بخاطر بالا آمدن آب اقیانوس اما جزایر فیلیپین شبیه دایناسوریست

The address of the above comment on the site about a thief who was trained by a dinosaur bird who was trained by humans tens of millions of years ago and who arrested murderers and robbers.The police were arrested by big birds.don’t the scientists of the world think about this?They were buried in the bed of important cities, they were buried with all the tools and machines, the traces of humans tens of millions of years ago, they had a civilization and a history of hundreds of thousands of years, they built a base underthe earth, from the meteorites that explode from the planets when they hit the sun, and they knew that several thousand meters of soil is poured on the surface of the seas and islands, and they knew that the shapes they made of the islands in thecountry of Papua may go under the ocean, of course, the Philippine islands.The picture is of a baby dinosaur that went under the ocean, but the northern island of Australia, which is Papua, is quite clear.It is a big dinosaur whose tail is towards the east and its mouth is open towards the west.There is the Philippines, but it was more difficult to take the soil to the Philippine islands to create a dinosaur than the island of Papua, that is why the height of the soil in the Philippines is lower, and when the meteorites fell a few kilometerson the surface of the ocean, the image created by humans under the ocean in the shape of a dinosaur is hidden in the American continent The picture is of a bird in the shape of a dinosaur that is flying, and this bird was made to flyby the Indians of the tribe, that bird was talking to people, but its spirit might have heard something from the police because a thief while in the bird’s mouth He was handcuffed by the police and the weapon, which is a machine gun, is fromthe east of the American continent on the coast

The country of Florida is a machine gun.When you continue to New York City, you will reach the mouth of the dinosaur, where a thief is trapped in the mouth of a bird, and the little finger of the police handcuffed the thief’s hand, and a small colt is in the hand ofthe thief, who the police caught in the mouth of the dinosaur.put in the mouth of the bird dinosaur, you can clearly see that the thief fell on the ground and was shot in the head, and it is clear that his forehead was pierced, the bird’s mouth is open in flight, the head of the birdis from the east of the American continent, and a fish is placed in the bird’s mouth in the water of the ocean.The stretched glove of the police, which is in the form of a fist, with a handcuff attached to the left hand of the thief who fell on the ground in the sea and the mouth of the bird, the head of the thief and the killer, is located towards the southwest and west coast of America.All these images were created from the American continent and islands by Humans were created, but they didn’t have enough fuel and time to create more accurate images and meteorites ruined the beauty of the images, but it is clear that all these changes were createdby humans, but you have to consider that two thousand meters of soil from meteorites are fish.And they buried the whales under the beaches, and after a very long time, the bodies of the whales turned into oil under the two thousand meters of soil on the beaches, and on the other hand, the presence of two thousand meters of soil onthe surface of the seas and droughts could not make the created images disappear.

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Life's Little Mysteries

Science Fiction or Fact: Is Time Travel Possible?

delorean time machine

In this weekly series, Life's Little Mysteries rates the plausibility of popular science fiction concepts.

In the first "Back to the Future" movie, all it took to travel through time was 1.21 gigawatts and a flux capacitor (packed into a DeLorean sports car for style points). Despite centuries of dreams and decades of bona fide research, flux capacitors remain beyond our grasp, as do any other time travel-enabling devices.

From a pure physics point of view, travel into the future is not at all impossible and in fact happens all the . . . time. With all due respect to Doc Brown, however, backward time travel stacks up as a much tougher proposition.

"We can travel at different rates to the future," said Seth Lloyd, a professor of quantum mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "To go into the past and mess around with it, that's more controversial."

My watch or yours?

For a real, everyday example of time travel, consider the satellites of the Global Positioning System . Were it not for built-in calibrations, the GPS atomic clocks would gain 38 microseconds over terrestrial timepieces every day, throwing off their location accuracy by several miles. "Clocks on Earth tick a tiny bit slower than satellites out in space," said Lloyd.

The reason: time dilation, as described by Einstein's two theories of relativity. According to the special theory, the faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower it experiences time. For GPS satellites zooming around Earth at nearly 9,000 mph (14,000 kph), this effect cuts seven microseconds off their clocks daily (relative to clocks on Earth).

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The second effect, explained by the general theory of relativity, involves gravity. Clocks closer to the center of a gravitational mass, such as Earth, tick more slowly than those farther away. GPS satellites orbit 12,500 miles (20,100 km) above the ground, and as a result have 45 microseconds tacked onto their clocks per day. The net result of the two relativistic phenomena is 38 microseconds, which engineers have accounted for with GPS technology.

Future, here we come

Both of these time dilation pathways — motion through space or a strong gravity well — permit time travel into the future.

A popular imagining of the first scenario involves astronauts cruising aboard a rocket ship at extremely high speed to a distant star. Upon their return, the ship's occupants will have aged mere years while centuries have passed on Earth. (An unintended version of this situation befalls Charlton Heston and his crew in the original 1968 movie " Planet of the Apes .")

Pulling off such a feat is really only a matter of investment, technology and will. "Doing 'century hopping' via relativity will require some engineering solutions to things like building rocket engines with enough fuel supplies for very prolonged trips," said Jeff Tollaksen, a professor of physics at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. [ 7 Everyday Things That Happen Strangely in Space ]

Going to a distant star and back would not even be necessary — all that is required is motion. The time-traveling effect would be achieved by simply getting whirled in a giant centrifuge at near-light speeds, Tollaksen said (though it would kill whoever attempted it).

The second, gravity-based scenario poses similar lethality, at least for someone wanting an appreciable difference in his relative time frame. If you stood on a neutron star for a few years, a decade would elapse on Earth. Of course, you would not survive the supermassive star's crushing, rending gravity, making this approach truly a "Rip" van Winkle method.

Yesteryears

What of diving into the past? According to general relativity, a rotating black hole can warp space-time, forming paths to previous moments. "You have these so-called timelike curves that you could follow that would take you back to your past," said Lloyd. [ What Would It Be Like to Travel Faster than the Speed of Light? ]

Quantum mechanics has opened up strange avenues as well. Experiments have shown that measuring a particle property at an initial and end stage can modify its middle value, but only if the last measurement takes place. Such clues toward a possible "backwards causality" continue to be investigated.

A major showstopper for traveling back in time, however, is common sense. A classic example is the grandfather paradox , in which a time traveler goes into the past and murders his grandfather, thus preventing the time traveler from ever being born.

Yet there might be ways around this mind-bender. Lloyd has conducted quantum mechanical experiments in the last few years that suggest timelines remain self-consistent. The tests served as "the moral equivalent of sending a photon a few billionths of a second backwards in time and having it try to kill its former self," Lloyd said.

In Lloyd's experiment, as photons got ever closer to interfering with themselves, the probability of the experiment succeeding grew ever lower. "Our theory has an automatic censorship of things which are completely inconsistent," said Lloyd. "When you go back [in time], no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the thing you try to change."

In theory, then, Grandpa lives, no matter what.

Space-time busters?

A couple of other domains offer hope for would-be time travelers. Moving faster than light — the universal reference point — would do the trick, hence the excitement over last year's finding in Europe of superluminal neutrinos , a seemingly impossible finding that has been widely faulted.

Wormholes — theoretical "tunnels" through space-time — also could burrow into the past or future just as they might connect different regions in the cosmos.

Neither of these alternatives seems particularly likely. As much as many of us might hate to admit it, the past, with all of its mistakes, could remain sealed off from our efforts to redo it.

"Even if the laws of physics allowed visiting the past," Lloyd said, "it is not clear how it might actually happen in our universe."

Plausibility score: A one-way ticket to the future requires a hefty budget and a heck of a lot of engineering know-how. Voyaging into the past, however, looks to be near impossible, so we give time travel two out of four Rocketboys.

time travel in daily life

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries , a sister site to LiveScience.

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time travel in daily life

time travel in daily life

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How Time Travel Works

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time travel in daily life

From millennium-skipping Victorians to phone booth-hopping time traveler teenagers, the term time travel often summons our most fantastic visions of what it means to move through the fourth dimension. But of course you don't need a time machine or a fancy wormhole to jaunt through the years.

As you've probably noticed, we're all constantly engaged in the act of time travel. At its most basic level, time is the rate of change in the universe -- and like it or not, we are constantly undergoing change. We age, the planets move around the sun, and things fall apart.

We measure the passage of time in seconds, minutes, hours and years, but this doesn't mean time flows at a constant rate. In fact Einstein's theory of relativity determines that time is not universal. Just as the water in a river rushes or slows depending on the size of the channel, time flows at different rates in different places. In other words, time is relative.

But what causes this fluctuation along our one-way trek from the cradle to the grave? It all comes down to the relationship between time and space. Human beings frolic about in the three spatial dimensions of length, width and depth. Time joins the party as that most crucial fourth dimension . Time can't exist without space, and space can't exist without time. The two exist as one: the space time continuum . Any event that occurs in the universe has to involve both space and time.

In this article, we'll look at the real-life, everyday methods of time travel in our universe, as well as some of the more far-fetched methods of dancing through the fourth dimension.

Did you know your GPS devices rely on time-travel calculations to help you navigate around town? It's true! GPS satellite clocks are about 3 8 seconds longer per day than a clock closer to earth due to the gravitational frequency shift. They make up for this discrepancy by using time travel calculations or they could be way off from your current location and time.

Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article:

time

Everyday Thoughts in Time: Experience Sampling Studies of Mental Time Travel

Affiliations.

  • 1 Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA.
  • 2 The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
  • 3 Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.
  • 4 Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA.
  • 5 University of Haifa, Israel.
  • 6 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA.
  • PMID: 32208914
  • DOI: 10.1177/0146167220908411

Time is among the most important yet mysterious aspects of experience. We investigated everyday mental time travel, especially into the future. Two community samples, contacted at random points for 3 (Study 1; 6,686 reports) and 14 days (Study 2; 2,361 reports), reported on their most recent thought. Both studies found that thoughts about the present were frequent, thoughts about the future also were common, whereas thoughts about the past were rare. Thoughts about the present were on average highly happy and pleasant but low in meaningfulness. Pragmatic prospection (thoughts preparing for action) was evident in thoughts about planning and goals. Thoughts with no time aspect were lower in sociality and experiential richness. Thoughts about the past were relatively unpleasant and involuntary. Subjective experiences of thinking about past and future often were similar-while both differed from present focus, consistent with views that memory and prospection use similar mental structures.

Keywords: future; prospection; social cognition; time.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Ecological Momentary Assessment*
  • Forecasting*
  • Memory, Episodic*
  • Mental Recall*
  • Middle Aged
  • Young Adult

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. 

Insider Today

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.

Related stories

Put simply: It's theoretically possible to go back in time, but you couldn't change history.

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

time travel in daily life

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The Time Dilation Experiment: How Physicists Prove Its Real

The Time Dilation Experiment: How Physicists Prove Its Real

As a team of physicists, we are fascinated by the concept of time dilation. It is a fundamental aspect of Einstein's Theory of Relativity that describes how time can appear to pass differently for two observers in different frames of reference. This theory has been proven experimentally time and time again, and today we want to take you through some of the most compelling experiments that have been conducted to demonstrate this phenomenon.

The first thing we need to understand is what time dilation actually means. In simple terms, it refers to the fact that time appears to move slower for an observer who is moving relative to another observer who is stationary. This may sound counterintuitive, but it has been demonstrated repeatedly through carefully designed experiments. These experiments not only help us better understand the nature of our universe but also have practical implications in fields such as GPS technology and space travel. So let's dive into the exciting world of physics and explore some fascinating examples of how physicists prove that time dilation is real!

Understanding Time Dilation Theory

[the concept of time dilation experiment, the first time dilation experiment, recent time dilation experiments, atomic clock experiment, gravitational time dilation experiment, results and analysis, implications of time dilation, applications in space travel, theoretical implications, future research and development, frequently asked questions, how does time dilation theory relate to einstein's theory of relativity, are there any potential drawbacks or limitations to performing time dilation experiments, how do physicists account for the effects of time dilation in practical applications, such as gps systems, can time dilation be observed in everyday life, or is it only detectable in extreme conditions, what are some current areas of research or future applications for time dilation theory.

Understanding the mind-bending theory of time dilation is essential for grasping the intricacies of Einstein's theory of relativity. In simple terms, time dilation can be defined as the difference in elapsed time between two events that occur at different distances from a gravitational mass or relative to each other's motion. This means that time passes slower for an object in motion or near a massive object than it does for an observer who is stationary and far away.

To understand this concept better, let's take an example. Imagine two synchronized clocks placed at different altitudes - one on top of Mount Everest and another at sea level. According to the theory of general relativity, because gravity is weaker at higher altitudes, the clock on Mount Everest would tick faster than the one at sea level. This phenomenon can be explained mathematically using equations such as Lorentz transformations and special relativity formulas.

With this understanding of time dilation, we can now delve into the concept of time dilation experiment without missing any crucial details.

](/blog/time-travel-theories/time-dilation/time-dilation-experiment-physicists-prove-real)As we delve deeper into the concept of measuring time in different ways, a mind-bending realization starts to take shape. The theory of relativity suggests that time is not constant and can be influenced by various factors, such as gravity and motion. To prove this theory, physicists have conducted numerous experiments over the years using advanced measurement techniques and observational evidence.

To further illustrate the concept of time dilation, here are some key points to consider:

  • According to the theory of relativity, time passes more slowly in strong gravitational fields or at high velocities.
  • This means that if two individuals were traveling at different speeds or in different gravitational fields, they would experience time differently.
  • The first experimental evidence for time dilation came from the famous Hafele-Keating experiment in 1971, which involved atomic clocks being flown around the world on commercial airliners.

With these ideas in mind, let us explore how physicists were able to conduct their first time dilation experiment.

You will delve into the first demonstration of time's non-constant nature through an experiment using advanced measurement techniques and observational evidence. The first time dilation experiment was conducted by two physicists, Joseph Hafele and Richard Keating, in 1971. They flew atomic clocks on separate commercial airplanes that traveled around the world in opposite directions. This experimental setup allowed them to compare the elapsed time of one clock with respect to another.

The data collection process involved comparing the readings of the clocks after they returned from their journeys. The results showed that the clock traveling westward experienced a slower passage of time than the stationary clock on Earth, whereas the clock flying eastward experienced a faster passage of time than its counterpart on Earth. This finding provided strong evidence for Einstein's theory of relativity and proved that time dilation is not just a theoretical concept but a real phenomenon that occurs in our universe.

This groundbreaking experiment paved the way for further research into understanding how gravity affects space-time and led to more recent time dilation experiments exploring new frontiers such as black holes and neutron stars.

In recent years, there have been several groundbreaking experiments that further prove the existence of time dilation. One such experiment involved atomic clocks, which are incredibly precise timekeeping devices. By measuring the differences in time between two identical atomic clocks (one stationary and one in motion), scientists were able to observe time dilation effects predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity.

Another experiment involved observing gravitational time dilation, which occurs when an object is located near a massive body causing it to experience slower time than an observer farther away from the massive body. Scientists observed this effect by using extremely sensitive atomic clocks placed at different heights above sea level.

The results and analysis of these experiments provide even more evidence for the reality of time dilation and its importance in our understanding of physics.

You'll feel the ticking of an atomic clock in your bones as you imagine the precision and accuracy required for this experiment. Atomic clocks are the standard for measuring time with extreme accuracy, relying on the natural vibrations of cesium atoms to keep incredibly precise time. The recent atomic clock experiment conducted by physicists tested whether or not time dilation occurs at different altitudes above Earth's surface.

The test involved comparing two identical atomic clocks: one kept on the ground and another taken up to a high altitude via airplane. The results confirmed that time dilation does indeed occur, with the higher altitude clock running slightly faster than its grounded counterpart due to gravitational differences. This level of atomic clock accuracy is essential for measuring even the smallest differences in time dilation, providing crucial data for theories like Einstein's theory of relativity.

Now, let's move on to the next step where we explore how physicists conduct experiments that prove gravitational time dilation is real.

Get ready to feel the thrill of discovery as we delve into the fascinating world of gravitational time differences and how they can be measured with incredible precision. The gravitational time dilation experiment involves measuring the difference in time between two clocks placed at different altitudes in a gravitational field. As Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted, time moves slower closer to a massive object due to the curvature of space-time caused by gravity.

Experimental evidence for this effect was first observed in 1962 when atomic clocks on board airplanes flew around the Earth and were found to be out of sync with identical clocks on the ground. More recent experiments have used highly precise atomic clocks flown on airplanes or launched into space satellites to measure these effects even more accurately. These experiments have also been able to detect other factors that can affect time dilation, such as changes in velocity and gravitational waves. With this technology, physicists are able to confirm that general relativity is indeed an accurate description of our universe.

As we move onto discussing results and analysis, it's important to note that these experiments have not only provided evidence for Einstein's theory but also opened up new avenues for research into fundamental physics, including investigations into dark matter and quantum gravity.

Now we can finally see the fascinating and groundbreaking results that confirm Einstein's theory of general relativity. The gravitational time dilation experiment has provided evidence that time slows down in stronger gravitational fields, which is consistent with the predictions made by the theory. By using precision measurement techniques to compare atomic clocks at different altitudes, scientists have demonstrated that time passes more slowly closer to massive objects.

The results obtained from this experiment are statistically significant and provide strong support for Einstein's theory. They indicate that gravity affects not only space but also time, which is a fundamental concept in physics. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the universe and its behavior. As we move on to discussing the implications of time dilation, we must keep in mind how crucial these experimental results are for advancing our knowledge of physics.

So now that we understand the basics of time dilation and how it has been experimentally proven, let's look at some of its implications. First, there are practical applications for space travel: as objects near the speed of light experience less time than those at rest, astronauts on long space missions could age slower than their counterparts on Earth. Secondly, time dilation has theoretical implications for our understanding of the nature of time itself and its relationship to space. Finally, continued research and development in this area could lead to new technologies and a deeper understanding of fundamental physics.

You'll be fascinated to learn that space travel could become more efficient and faster with the use of time dilation, as demonstrated by the fictional spacecraft in the movie Interstellar. The concept behind this is simple: if astronauts travel at a speed close to the speed of light, their time will slow down relative to those on Earth. This means that they can effectively age slower than their counterparts back home, allowing them to spend more time exploring and less time aging.

This has huge implications for astronaut travel, as it means that we can potentially send humans on long-duration missions without worrying about the effects of prolonged exposure to zero gravity. Furthermore, it also opens up possibilities for interstellar travel and even time travel (in theory). Of course, there are still many technical challenges that need to be overcome before we can realize these dreams, but it's an exciting prospect nonetheless. With all of this in mind, let's delve deeper into the theoretical implications of time dilation.

We can hardly contain our excitement as we explore the mind-boggling theoretical implications of time slowing down at high speeds. Philosophical considerations arise when we ponder how this phenomenon challenges our understanding of the nature of time itself. Our traditional view of time as an absolute and constant entity is shattered by the reality that it can warp and distort depending on relative motion.

The practical implications are equally fascinating. Time dilation has been observed in experiments involving atomic clocks, which have shown that even fractions of a second can make a significant difference over long distances or high velocities. This has important implications for GPS systems, where precise timing is critical for accurate location tracking. As we continue to unravel the mysteries of time dilation, future applications in fields such as space travel and telecommunications may become possible. But first, more research and development is needed to fully harness this incredible phenomenon.

You're about to discover the exciting possibilities that lie ahead in the field of researching and developing new technologies that can harness the incredible effects of time distortion at high speeds. With the confirmation of time dilation through experiments, scientists are now exploring ways to apply this phenomenon in innovative timekeeping devices and space travel. One potential application is using atomic clocks on spacecraft to accurately measure time in space, where the effects of gravity and velocity can distort time.

Technological advancements in quantum mechanics and nanotechnology are also paving the way for more precise measurements of time dilation. Researchers are experimenting with using quantum entanglement to create ultra-precise clocks that could be used for navigation or even detecting gravitational waves. As we continue to uncover more about this fascinating aspect of physics, it's clear that there are countless possibilities for future research and development in this field.

When discussing time dilation theory, it's impossible not to mention Einstein's contributions to the field of physics. His theory of relativity revolutionized our understanding of space and time, showing that they are intertwined and not absolute. Time perception is a crucial aspect of this theory, as it suggests that time can appear differently depending on one's frame of reference. This idea has been tested and proven in various experiments, including the famous Hafele-Keating experiment where atomic clocks were flown around the world to measure differences in elapsed time due to changes in velocity and gravity. Overall, Einstein's work on relativity paved the way for further exploration into the nature of time and how it relates to our physical universe.

When it comes to performing time dilation experiments, there are certainly limitations and potential drawbacks to consider. One major limitation is the accuracy of the experiment itself. In order to measure time dilation accurately, physicists must use incredibly precise instruments and methods. Even small errors in measurement could lead to inaccurate results, which could have serious implications for our understanding of the universe. Another potential drawback is that time dilation experiments can be incredibly complex and difficult to carry out. They require a great deal of planning, resources, and expertise, which may not always be available. Despite these challenges, however, time dilation experiments remain an important tool for physicists seeking to better understand the nature of time and space.

When it comes to practical implications of time dilation, physicists have developed experimental methods that help account for its effects. For instance, GPS systems rely on precise timing to determine a user's location. However, the satellites that send signals to GPS devices are in motion relative to the Earth and therefore experience time dilation. To ensure accurate timing, scientists must adjust the clocks on the satellites based on calculations of their velocity and altitude. By doing so, they can correct for the effects of time dilation and provide users with reliable location data. Overall, while time dilation can pose challenges in certain applications, physicists have found ways to mitigate its impact through careful experimentation and analysis.

Everyday examples of time dilation can be observed in our daily lives. One example is the aging process, where time appears to pass more quickly for those who are moving at higher speeds relative to a stationary observer. Experimental methods have also been used to prove the existence of time dilation, such as high-speed particle accelerators and spacecraft traveling at high velocities. These experiments have shown that time dilation is not just a theoretical concept, but a real phenomenon that occurs in extreme conditions as well as everyday situations.

Future implications of time dilation theory are vast and exciting. Technological advancements in the field will allow for more precise measurements, leading to a deeper understanding of the universe's fundamental workings. To put this into perspective, consider that the world's most accurate atomic clock loses only one second every 15 billion years due to time dilation effects. This level of precision is necessary for research in areas such as space exploration, satellite communication, and GPS technology. As we continue to push the limits of our understanding of time and space, time dilation theory will undoubtedly play a crucial role in shaping our future discoveries and innovations.

So, there you have it – time dilation is not just a theory, but a proven fact. Through various experiments conducted over the years, physicists have demonstrated that time really does slow down when an object moves at high speeds or experiences intense gravitational forces.

But what does this mean for us? Well, it has implications for everything from our GPS systems (which rely on precise timing) to our understanding of the universe itself. It's mind-boggling to think about how much we've learned through these experiments and how much more we still have yet to discover. The possibilities are endless and truly exciting.

In conclusion, time dilation is one of those concepts that can seem too abstract and outlandish to be believed at first glance. But thanks to the hard work and ingenuity of countless scientists over the years, we now know that it's real – a verified phenomenon that shapes our world in ways we're only beginning to understand. It's proof that sometimes even the wildest theories can turn out to be true – a testament to human curiosity and perseverance if ever there was one.

Mental time travel is a great decision-making tool — this is how to use it

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time travel in daily life

When the future seems largely unpredictable, is there anything you can do to prepare for it?

“Yes!” says futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal . All you need to do is to tap into your imagination and envision all your potential futures — using what she calls “futures thinking.” 

“Futures thinking isn’t a superpower, and you don’t have to fix everything or save everyone,” McGonigal writes in her new book called Imaginable . “But futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.”

Her book draws on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience to show you how to train your mind to think the unthinkable. In this excerpt, you’ll get a taste of how you can start thinking like a futurist — and create a better future for yourself. 

For the next 30 seconds, I want you to imagine yourself waking up tomorrow morning. Try to picture it in your mind or describe it to yourself as clearly as possible. 

These questions may help make your imagined scene clearer. What room or space are you in? What wakes you up — an alarm, the sunlight, someone nudging you or calling you? Is it light out or still dark? Is there anyone with you? What are you wearing? What kind of mood are you in? And what’s the very first thing you do now that you’re awake?

Keep imagining your tomorrow morning until you have a clear answer to all of these questions.

This quick mental time trip you just took is an example of a highly imaginable future — it was likely quite easy for you to envision, with plenty of vivid details.

Now let’s try something more challenging. For the next 30 seconds, I want you to imagine yourself waking up one year from today. 

Again, try to envision this as clearly as possible. Feel free to change as many or as few details as you want from the first scene you imagined. Are you somewhere different? Are you physically changed? What’s your mood? Do you have a different morning habit? What might that new habit be?

Keep imagining your morning one year from now until you have answers to all of these questions — even the harder ones. Notice how easily and automatically ideas came to you, or how hard you had to work to come up with details.

If you’re having difficulty imagining life 10 years from now, write down a description of what you imagine. It can be easier to think about the future with words rather than with mental images.

Now let’s try one more act of imagination. This time, I want you to imagine yourself waking up 10 years from today.

Take as long as you need to come up with a vivid and plausible image — of yourself, of the space that you’re in, and who might be with you. Where are you? What’s around you? What do you see, hear, smell, and feel? What’s the first thing on your mind when you wake up? What do you have planned for the day? How are you physically different?

Try not to make this future scene a total fantasy; stay grounded in what you feel is genuinely realistic and possible for you. If you’re having difficulty, write down a description of what you imagine. Sometimes, it’s easier to think about the future with words rather than with mental images.

You’ll probably find that 10 years is a trickier challenge compared with one year. Why? You’ve never been 10 years older than you are now, so your brain doesn’t know what to expect. Plus, there’s so much opportunity for things to change in a decade — your body, relationships, life circumstances, physical environment.

Your brain intuitively grasps this unknowability, so instead of confidently projecting one possibility, it opens up a blank space for you to consider multiple possibilities. You have to start making intentional choices about what you want to imagine in your future — you have to fill in the blanks.

“Episodic future thinking” or EFT is often described as “mental time travel” — your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.

Filling in the blanks takes considerable effort. But that’s precisely why this kind of imagination is so powerful. Instead of simply remembering what it knows, your brain has to invent a new possibility. It draws on past experiences, current hopes and fears, and your intuitions about what might possibly change in 10 years.

Then, after you’ve made this new memory, something amazing happens: What was previously unimaginable to your brain is now imaginable. You can revisit this new memory whenever you want and examine how it makes you feel. Does it spark positive or negative emotions? These pre-feelings can help you decide: Should you change what you’re doing today to make this future more or less likely? And because you invented this memory, you can change it whenever you want.

Scientists call this form of imagination “episodic future thinking,” or EFT. EFT is often described as a kind of “mental time travel” because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.

EFT isn’t an escape from reality. It’s a way of playing with reality, to discover risks and opportunities you might not have considered. EFT is not a daydream in which you fantasize about waking up in a world where your problems are magically solved. It is a way of connecting who you are today with what you might really feel and do in the future.

An important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call “clues to the future,” concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out.

Because EFT allows us to pre-feel different possible futures, it’s a powerful decision-making, planning and motivational tool. It helps us decide: Is this a world I want to wake up in? What do I need to do to be ready for it? Should I change what I’m doing today to make this future more or less likely?

According to fMRI studies, EFT involves heightened activity and increased connectivity between 11 distinct brain regions. Compare this to remembering a past event, which activates 6 of the 11 regions of the brain.

There are three major kinds of sense making that happen when you engage in mental time travel to your future. First, your brain has to do what cognitive scientists call “scene construction” — mentally building the future world. Think of this as crafting the stage set, cast and props for a theatrical play.

During EFT, your brain goes on a hunt for realistic details and plausible ideas. To do this, it activates the hippocampus , the seat of memory and learning, and digs through your memories, plus any other facts and ideas you’ve stored away. Depending on what kind of future you’re imagining, the hippocampus identifies the most relevant stuff and retrieves and recombines it into a new scene.

Whatever you see in your future will always come from information your brain has already perceived and processed. Ideally, as you get better at imagining the unimaginable, you’ll incorporate not just obvious ideas and events but also surprising things that could be important in your future.

Another important part of imagination training is to try out new behaviors that could prove useful in the future. I call these micro-actions — taking no more than five minutes to do something today you’ve never done before.

That’s why an important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call “clues to the future,” concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out. When you have a hippocampus full of clues, your brain will have better data to draw on, and the scenes you construct will be way more interesting.

After scene construction, your brain starts to do what cognitive scientists call “opportunity detection.” Here, you look for ways to fulfill your needs and achieve your goals. For example: If you predict you will be hungry when you wake up in 10 years, what will future you eat? If you imagine yourself lonely when you wake up, who will future you try to connect with? Opportunity detection is like an actor showing up for rehearsal and asking, “What’s my motivation?” In other words: What do you want in this scene?

To figure this out, your brain fires up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a region that’s heavily used whenever you set goals and track your progress. Like the hippocampus, the vmPFC can suggest any goals you’ve had or previously considered. One of the most interesting things about EFT is that the motivations that pop into your mind first are likely to be closely linked to your deepest values and most essential needs, like always learning something new, helping others, pushing yourself to do brave things, taking care of your family, being creative, or  putting new ideas or art into the world.

But you still have to figure out the best way for future you to achieve these future goals. So then the putamen , also part of the motivation and reward system, kicks in. The putamen helps keep track of which specific actions and behaviors typically lead to positive results for you. It’s the part of your brain that knows things like “I feel better when I get some fresh air”; “I make my mom happy when I text her back right away”; “If I’m having a bad day, cooking helps”; or “If I don’t stand up for myself in the moment, I’ll beat myself up about it later.”

There are real benefits to intentionally and carefully imagining futures that frighten you. This can help you do the important work of getting ready for anything — even things you’d rather not experience.

The putamen is like a reality check on your future imagination. Since the putamen is trained on real experiences, the future actions it suggests will be heavily influenced by strategies that worked for you in the past. That’s why another important part of imagination training is to try out new behaviors that could prove useful in the future. I call these micro-actions — taking no more than five minutes to do something today you’ve never done before. When you experiment with micro-actions, you expand what your putamen considers realistic behavior.

Finally, as your brain works to transport you to the future, feelings will kick in. The insula and amygdala , emotion centers in the brain, fire up to give you a preview of how you might feel in the future — excited, disappointed, hopeful, afraid, proud, jealous, joyful, sad, curious, bored, embarrassed, relieved, loved, lonely, awed, confused, stressed out, free or more. These emotions give you important information and help you decide: Is this a future I want to wake up in? Should I take actions today to make this future more or less likely?

Crucially, these are real feelings. Studies show that the emotions you experience during EFT can be just as psychologically powerful as emotions experienced in the present. This is one reason why many of us prefer to imagine best-case-scenario futures and avoid imagining the futures that scare us.

But there are real benefits to intentionally and carefully imagining futures that frighten you. This can help you do the important work of getting ready for anything — even things you’d rather not think about, let alone actually experience, someday.

Excerpted from the new book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal. Copyright © 2022 by Jane McGonigal. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Watch her TED Talk here:

About the author

Jane McGonigal is a future forecaster and world-renowned designer of alternate reality games designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future and currently teaches the course “How to Think Like a Futurist” at Stanford University, as well as serving as the lead instructor for the Institute for the Future’s series on the Coursera platform. She is The New York Times bestselling author of the books "Reality Is Broken" and "SuperBetter" and the new book "Unimaginable." Her innovative games and ideas have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, O Magazine and the New York Times, among others.

  • book excerpt
  • decision-making
  • jane mcgonigal
  • personal growth

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time travel in daily life

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

Old electronic waste ready to recycle

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

time travel in daily life

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

time travel in daily life

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

time travel in daily life

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.

time travel in daily life

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Thinking about the past and future in daily life: an experience sampling study of individual differences in mental time travel

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  • Published: 20 August 2018
  • Volume 83 , pages 805–816, ( 2019 )

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time travel in daily life

  • Roger E. Beaty 1 ,
  • Paul Seli 2 &
  • Daniel L. Schacter 3  

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Remembering the past and imagining the future are hallmarks of mental time travel. We provide evidence that such experiences are influenced by individual differences in temporal and affective biases in cognitive style, particularly brooding rumination (a negative past-oriented bias) and optimism (a positive future-oriented bias). Participants completed a 7-day, cellphone-based experience-sampling study of temporal orientation and mental imagery. Multilevel models showed that individual differences in brooding rumination predicted less vivid and positive past- and future-oriented thoughts, even after controlling for depressed mood. People high in brooding rumination were also more likely to report thinking about a past experience when probed at random during the day. Conversely, optimists were more likely to report more vivid and positive future-oriented, but not past-oriented thoughts, although they did not report thinking more or less often about the past and future. The results suggest that temporal and affective biases in cognitive style influence how people think about the past and future in daily life.

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We also assessed the role of gender. Past research suggests that women ruminate more than men (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991 ), and our sample was approximately two-thirds female; however, gender did not decrease the effect of brooding on vividness.

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P.S. was supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Banting Post-Doctoral Fellowship. D.L.S received research Grants from the National Institute of Mental Health R01 MH060941.

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Beaty, R.E., Seli, P. & Schacter, D.L. Thinking about the past and future in daily life: an experience sampling study of individual differences in mental time travel. Psychological Research 83 , 805–816 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1075-7

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Life on Other Planets: What is Life and What Does It Need?

Against a background of deep space, we see in this illustration a green and brown, rocky planet In the lower right foreground, its star – a red dwarf – in the distance to the planet’s upper left. That side of the planet is brightly illuminated while the rest is slightly shadowed. Other planets in this system can be seen at various points to the planet’s far left, lower near left, and upper near-right.

One day, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, a faraway planet could yield hints that it might host some form of life – but surrender its secrets reluctantly.

Our space telescopes might detect a mixture of gases in its atmosphere that resembles our own. Computer models would offer predictions about the planet’s life-bearing potential. Experts would debate whether the evidence made a strong case for the presence of life, or try to find still more evidence to support such a groundbreaking interpretation.

“We are in the beginning of a golden era right now,” said Ravi Kopparapu, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies habitable planets. “For the first time in the history of civilization we might be able to answer the question: Is there life beyond Earth?”

For exoplanets – planets around other stars – that era opens with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Instruments aboard the spacecraft are detecting the composition of atmospheres on exoplanets. As the power of telescopes increases in the years ahead, future advanced instruments could capture possible signs of life – “biosignatures” – from a planet light-years away.

Within our solar system, the Perseverance rover on Mars is gathering rock samples for eventual return to Earth, so scientists can probe them for signs of life. And the coming Europa Clipper mission will visit an icy moon of Jupiter. Its goal: to determine whether conditions on that moon would allow life to thrive in its global ocean, buried beneath a global ice shell.

But any hints of life beyond Earth would come with another big question: How certain could any scientific conclusions really be?

“The challenge is deciding what is life – when to say, ‘I found it,’” said Laurie Barge of the Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

With so much unknown about what even constitutes a “sign of life,” astrobiologists are working on a new framework to understand the strength of the evidence. A sample framework, proposed in 2021, includes a scale ranging from 1 to 7, with hints of other life at level 1, to increasingly substantial evidence, all the way to certainty of life elsewhere at level 7. This framework, which is being discussed and revised, acknowledges that scientific exploration in the search for life is a twisted, winding road, rather than a straightforward path.

And identifying definitive signs remains difficult enough for “life as we know it.” Even more uncertain would be finding evidence of life as we don’t know it, made of unfamiliar molecular combinations or based on a solvent other than water.

Still, as the search for life begins in earnest, among the planets in our own solar system as well as far distant systems known only by their light, NASA scientists and their partners around the world have some ideas that serve as starting points.

Life That Evolves

First, there’s NASA’s less-than-formal, non-binding but still helpful working definition of life: “A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Charles Darwin famously described evolution by natural selection, with characteristics preserved across generations leading to changes in organisms over time.

Derived in the 1990s by a NASA exobiology working group, the definition is not used to design missions or research projects. It does help to set expectations, and to focus debate on the critical issues around another thorny question: When does non-life become life?

“Biology is chemistry with history,” says Gerald Joyce, one of the members of the working group that helped create the NASA definition and now a research professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

That means history recorded by the chemistry itself – in our case, inscribed in our DNA, which encodes genetic data that can be translated into the structures and physical processes that make up our bodies.

The DNA record must be robust, complex, self-replicating and open-ended, Joyce suggests, to endure and adapt over billions of years.

“That would be a smoking gun: evidence for information having been recorded in molecules,” Joyce said.

Such a molecule from another world in our solar system, whether DNA, RNA or something else, might turn up in a sample from Mars, say from the Mars sample-return mission now being planned by NASA.

Or it might be found among the “ocean worlds” in the outer solar system – Jupiter’s moon, Europa, Saturn’s Enceladus or one of the other moons of gas giants that hide vast oceans beneath shells of ice.

We can’t obtain samples of such information-bearing molecules from planets beyond our solar system, since they are so far away that it would take tens of thousands of years to travel there even in the fastest spaceships ever built. Instead, we’ll have to rely on remote detection of potential biosignatures, measuring the types and quantities of gases in exoplanet atmospheres to try to determine whether they were generated by life-forms. That likely will require deeper knowledge of what life needs to get its start – and to persist long enough to be detected.

A Place Where Life Emerges

There is no true consensus on a list of requirements for life, whether in our solar system or the stars beyond. But Joyce, who researches life’s origin and development, suggests a few likely “must-haves.”

Topping the list is liquid water. Despite a broad spectrum of environmental conditions inhabited by living things on Earth, all life on the planet seems to require it. Liquid water provides a medium for the chemical components of life to persist over time and come together for reactions, in a way that air or the surface of a rock don’t do as well.

Spectroscopy_of_exoplanet

Also essential: an energy source, both for chemical reactions that produce structures and to create “order” against the universal tendency toward “disorder” – also known as entropy.

An imbalance in atmospheric gases also might offer a tell-tale sign of the presence of life.

“In Earth’s atmosphere, oxygen and methane are highly reactive with each other,” Kopparapu said. Left to themselves, they would quickly cancel each other out.

“They should not be seen together,” he said. “So why are we seeing methane, why are we seeing oxygen? Something must be constantly replenishing these compounds.”

On Earth, that “something” is life, pumping more of each into the atmosphere and keeping it out of balance. Such an imbalance, in these compounds or others, could be detected on a distant exoplanet, suggesting the presence of a living biosphere. But scientists also will have to rule out geological processes like volcanic or hydrothermal activity that could generate molecules that we might otherwise associate with life.

Careful laboratory work and precision modeling of possible exoplanet atmospheres will be needed to tell the difference.

Going Through Changes

Barge also places high on the list the idea of “gradients,” or changes that occur over time and distance, like wet to dry, hot to cold, and many other possible environments. Gradients create places for energy to go, changing along the way and generating molecules or chemical systems that later might be incorporated into life-forms.

Plate tectonics on Earth, and the cycling of gases like carbon dioxide – buried beneath Earth’s crust by subduction, perhaps, or released back into the atmosphere by volcanoes – represent one kind of gradient.

Barge’s specialty, the chemistry of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor billions of years ago, is another. It’s one possible pathway to have created a kind of primitive metabolism – the translation of organic compounds into energy – as a potential precursor to true life-forms.

“What gradients existed before life?” she asks. “If life depends so much on gradients, could the origin of life also have benefited from these gradients?”

Clearer mapping of possible pathways to life ultimately could inform the design of future space telescopes, tasked with parsing the gases in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets.

“If we want to be sure it’s coming from biology, we have to not only look for gases; we have to look at how it’s being emitted from the planet, if it’s emitted in the right quantities, in the right way,” Kopparapu said. “With future telescopes, we’ll be more confident because they’ll be designed to look for life on other planets.”

Search for Life

This article is one in a series about how NASA is searching for life in the cosmos.

Beginnings: Life on Our World and Others

The Hunt for Life on Mars – and Elsewhere in the Solar System

'Life' in the Lab

Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life: Technosignatures

Finding Life Beyond Earth: What Comes Next?

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Two Small NASA Satellites Will Measure Soil Moisture, Volcanic Gases

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time travel in daily life

time travel in daily life

Death — and plenty of life — on a Nile River cruise

time travel in daily life

The luxury Viking Aton was built in 2023 for cruising Egypt's Nile River. The vessel has five decks, but holds just 82 passengers. Viking

The Egyptian air was an oppressive 47 degrees, fuelled by an unrelenting sun. I had taken refuge in the shade, wearing the guidebook-recommended attire: a white cotton tunic, a wide-brimmed hat and barely-there sandals consisting of two meagre pieces of leather. A breeze off the Nile provided a modicum of relief. But still – still – I could feel the sweat dripping down my spine.

From the sun deck of the Viking Aton cruise ship, I was tracking a white heron when another, larger blur of movement caught my eye: A boy was running full tilt down the small embankment. In a flash, he dove into the river and its cool, watery relief. Oh, how I envied him.

Read also: Egypt’s ancient (and lively) City of the Dead confronts bulldozers in modernization campaign

The scene is one of my most vivid memories of a recent visit to Egypt, perhaps because it caught me by surprise. I expected my Nile River cruise trip to be centred around death: tombs, sarcophagi, mummies. And there was plenty of that. But even against a backdrop of the Pyramids of Giza and the Valley of the Kings, it was the moments of everyday life that left the greatest impression.

In Cairo, for example, a visit to the Egyptian Museum is sure to enthrall tourists with even the most passing of interests in the country’s ancient history and elaborate mythology. It is a privilege to behold Tutankhamun’s iconic funerary mask. But when I think of it now, I recall its gold and lapis lazuli ornamentation more from images seen in books over the years.

My memories of the capital are instead of the cheerful energy of a packed, alcohol-free ahwa (outdoor cafe) at midnight, or the midday serenity of the al-Hakim Mosque in Old Cairo. I can still hear the endless loop of Umm Kulthum songs in the market and the cacophony of hundreds of people eating koshari – a carb lover’s dream of rice, lentils, macaroni, chickpeas, fried onions and tomato sauce – at Abou Tarek, one of the city’s most iconic restaurants.

time travel in daily life

The Viking Osiris cruises the Nile River near Luxor, Egypt. White Rain Productions/Viking

About 45 minutes outside the city, the Pyramids of Giza are engineering marvels whose magnitude and complexity must be seen up-close to truly appreciate. But amid the dusty landscape it was belligerent camels and nimble stray dogs who brought the biggest smiles to me and my travel companions. At the nearby new Grand Egyptian Museum, a stray cat dashing through the entrance hall elicited almost as many “ooohs” as the 3,200-year-old, 36-foot-tall, 83-ton limestone statue of pharaoh Ramesses 11 that towers over visitors. (Speaking of cats, I was surprised to learn the Sphinx has a tail, wrapped around its side just like any old tabby.)

After our time in Cairo, we flew to Aswan to board the Aton, the latest of Viking’s luxury ships custom-built (in 2023) for cruising the Nile. The vessel is only 72 metres long with five decks – but it holds just 82 passengers (and 48 crew), which means it never feels crowded. Viking describes the aesthetic as “elegant Scandinavian,” and yet the airy, earth-tone, clean-line vibes is perfectly in keeping with the desert landscape.

With the ship still in port, we took off in sightseeing boats to a small island to explore the Philae temple complex. You would never know by looking at the structures – which date as far back as 380 BC – that in the late 1970s they were painstakingly moved from their nearby original location, flooded because of the Aswan dam, then carefully reassembled amid towering palm trees, piece by piece (40,000 in total).

The imposing grandeur of the ancient ruins cannot be overstated – particularly the twin-tower, 18-metre-high entrance to the Temple of Isis. And yet it was the present-day humanity taking place inside that I can still picture without looking at my photos.

time travel in daily life

At the Luxor Temple complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site constructed in 1400 BC, nearly every surface is covered in hieroglyphics. In some spots, traces of the original colourful paint remains. Domini Clark/The Globe and Mail

Seeking relief in the shade were several mewling felines, including a mother cat and her young offspring. Two caretakers provided water and food, paying particular attention to the kittens, who happily ate pieces of kibble out of my hand. Perhaps such kindness to animals was to be expected in a land where felines have been honoured with mummification and worshipped as gods.

And perhaps I should have anticipated that the time spent sailing aboard the Aton would be as enjoyable as the hours spent ashore. Guests unwound on top deck loungers in the sun or shade, dipped into the pool a level below or took in the views from the privacy of their French balcony (every stateroom has one). I tended to stick to more air-conditioned comforts, be it the cozy library nook (which, like everywhere else onboard, features floor-to-ceilings windows) or the lounge. But no matter where I was, I could usually be found with another simple Egyptian pleasure: a mint lemonade. The secret is that the lemons are blended in whole – peel and all. I can still taste its refreshing tartness, like air conditioning in a glass.

After sailing up the Nile and witnessing all the ways Egyptians use the river – as a swimming pool, source of food and even, for a couple of enterprising men on boats who tried to sell souvenirs to my fellow cruise passengers, a marketplace – we arrived in Luxor.

time travel in daily life

Hot-air balloons float over houses and farms of Luxor, with the Valley of the Kings visible in the distance. Domini Clark/The Globe and Mail

Rising at a distressingly early hour the next morning, I vowed to overcome my fears and enjoy a sunrise hot-air balloon ride over the Valley of the Kings. Soaring past the ancient tombs buried deep in inconspicuous limestone hills, imagining the secrets that lie within, was unforgettable. It was also fascinating to see the routines of another gloriously sunny day unfold. At a pace so languid as to almost feel like slow motion, we passed over mooing cows waiting to be milked, donkeys trying to cool off in streams, farmers carrying unwieldy piles of sugarcane on their backs and children waving from rooftops. What would their ancestors, forever resting nearby, make of my voyage in the sky, I wondered.

At the Luxor Temple complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site constructed in 1400 BC, wonder took several different forms. Columns and archways 16 metres high, every centimetre covered in hieroglyphics detailed enough to show feathers on geese and eyes on owls. A 2.7-kilometre gauntlet of watchful sphinxes that leads directly to Karnak Temple. Colossal statues of pharaohs so anatomically accurate they boast toenails. To learn that originally most of these surfaces were painted in vibrant colour – traces still remain in some of the more protected areas – made my mouth drop.

But just when I thought I would get lost (figuratively and literally) in the spectacle of it all, a surprisingly banal wall of carvings caught my eye. Here was a simple grid of shockingly straight lines. Inside some of the boxes was a mix of small vertical lines and upside-down U shapes.

I rushed to my guide. What did it all mean?

time travel in daily life

A 3,200-year-old, 36-foot-tall, 83-ton limestone statue of pharaoh Ramesses 11 towers over visitors in the entrance hall of the new Grand Egyptian Museum. Domini Clark/The Globe and Mail

They were tables to track offerings made to the gods, she explained. How much of each item, at what time.

So, essentially ancient Excel spreadsheets?

Exactly, she said.

And what, I ask you, could possibly be more everyday than that?

Viking’s 12-day Pharoahs to Pyramids itinerary starts and ends in Cairo, and includes roundtrip cruising on the Nile between Luxor and Aswan, with multiple stops in between. All-inclusive pricing for 2024 starts at $8,399 a person and includes one complimentary shore excursion in each port; beer, wine and soft drinks with onboard lunch and dinner; internal flights; ground transfers and more. vikingrivercruisescanada.com

Flights to Cairo from Canada require a connection, typically through Munich, London or Zurich.

Currently, the Canadian government warns travellers to Egypt to exercise a high degree of caution. While “avoid all travel” advisories are in place for some regions, the typical Nile cruise itinerary avoids them anyway.

Opening mid-2024, the much-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum (construction started in 2005) promises to be another must-see in the country. Located two kilometres from the Pyramids of Giza, what will be the largest archeological museum complex in the world will showcase 100,000 artifacts, including the entire collection of King Tutankhamun’s treasures. For now, tourists can tour some non-gallery areas, including the Great Hall, the food court and the excellent gift shop.

The writer was a guest of Viking. It did not review or approve the story before publication.

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nuova's multisensory installation transforms milanese bistro into american home from 1971

Staging ‘time travel’ at milan design week 2024.

On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2024 , NUOVA Group unveils an installation that unites multisensorial design with luxury dining . Staged at the bistrot Via Stampa, Time Travel provides a momentary Americana escape, inviting guests on an experiential voyage back in time, to 1971. The immersive installation features an array of bespoke elements including furniture, lighting, tailored garments, fragrance, music, gastronomy, and theatre that have been designed as a time capsule that transports participants across dimensions of time and space. Throughout the exhibition period, the venue will also remain fully operational for lunch and dinner.

NUOVA GROUP’s time capsule transports visitors to 1971 usa

Time Travel unfolds at Via Stampa, a bistrot in the Carrobbio neighbourhood, opened just a few months ago with the aim of bringing taste and elegance to the heart of the city. Upon arrival, guests are greeted at the Time Travel Terminal by the concierge, signalling the beginning of an immersive encounter with a dedicated Milanese bar. Inside, Los-Angeles based NUOVA Group has curated the takeover of one of the main dining halls with a nostalgic ambiance reminiscent of a bygone era. It begins with the scent of Suede by Aeir — the world’s first bioengineered luxury perfume brand launched by the group in 2020.

Adorned with dark wood walls and a deep yellow palette upholstered with archival textiles from Torri Lana 1885, the debut, bespoke furniture collection awaits behind an aluminium portal — the bar area is choreographed as a waiting room, a liminal space suspended between different epochs. Guests will be offered a coursed menu of crafted drinks, choreographed by the design group’s allure of a vintage palette of flavours.

After experiencing the Time Travel’s Bar, guests will be invited by a concierge to step into the Sala, with a theatrical performance and spatial intervention that allows them to travel to 1971. The designers have orchestrated an immersive experience, lasting six minutes, engaging all senses; from scents to visuals, tactile elements, and enveloping sounds, participants are transported to a quintessential American living room. Even the accompanying staff, waiters, and concierge, are draped in period correct garments, with uniforms designed in collaboration with LA based luxury brand L’equip. ‘Whether experiencing this era for the first time, perhaps only having imagined it through movies or books, or nostalgically reliving cherished memories, Time Travel promises an engaging journey that beckons both exploration and introspection about the future,’ notes the team at NUOVA Group.

project info:

name: Time Travel, 1971 designer:   NUOVA Group

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R.I.P. Cricket. Now It’s Time to Talk About Kristi Noem’s Goat.

Condemned to death for being smelly, the animal was not dispatched easily.

Michael Daly

Michael Daly

Special Correspondent

Goat

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

In the universal outrage over South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem executing her wire-haired pointer Cricket , another victim of her cruelty seems to have been forgotten: the male goat she dragged to the same gravel pit and shot dead.

Based on Noem’s own description of the incident in her upcoming memoir, it seems likely that the animal died a terrifying death. Its crime? It had a “disgusting, musky, rancid” smell and butted her children so they fell down and got their clothes dirty.

It’s unclear why Noem, who loves to talk about how she was raised on a farm, was surprised by this behavior: Male goats in rut—a state of arousal during breeding season—become more aggressive and urinate on themselves to generate a smell that only a female of its species could love.

The killing of the goat did not go as smoothly as the shooting of Cricket just before it. Noem wrote that the first shot only caused the goat to jump, so she had to leave the wounded animal and return to her truck to get another “shell.”

That suggests she was using a shotgun and not a rifle, which would require a round or a cartridge, not a shell. Anybody who knows about goats can tell you that their skulls evolved for head-butting and are generally well able to withstand a shotgun blast.

“I would never use one of those,” Arkansas goat farmer Sarah Fish told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know how far it would penetrate.”

Sarah Fish and her husband with two of their goats.

Sarah Fish and her husband with two of their goats.

Courtesy Sarah Fish

By Fish’s considerable experience, a small-caliber rifle in just the right spot does the job with one shot and no added suffering.

“We actually put ours down with just a .22,” Fish said. “The front of the skull is really strong, but if you look behind their horns, it’s actually really weak back there. And so that’s where we typically put them down. You just have to find that spot.”

She raises goats for food and in 10 years, she only needed to fire twice on a single occasion.

“And I put down a lot, because we eat a lot of ours,” she said.

It’s not known why Noem owned the goat. But Fish said it did not need to face the death penalty for chasing the human kids.

“I would recommend the goat be penned up away from the kids,” she said.

She suggested that goat’s behavior may have resulted from Noem’s failure to set boundaries for it early on.

“A lot of people don’t realize, they think it’s all fun when the goats are babies and they play with them in a way that they shouldn’t,” Fish said. “And as they grow, they see you as competition. They don’t respect you like they respect other goats.”

Fish noted that mother goats keep weaned little ones at a distance.

“They’ll throw them in the air,” Fish said. “It’s basically tough love. It's teaching them boundaries. It's teaching them how to behave.”

She went on, “As human beings we're nurturing and caring and ‘Oh, they’re rubbing their head on my leg’ and ‘Oh, that’s cute.’ But it's actually teaching them bad manners.”

If you then push away a young goat that’s rubbing its head against your leg, its natural impulse is to come right back and butt.

“I would flick them in the nose and that makes them turn their head away,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt them, but it’s like kind of irritating, so they quit doing it. And so we just teach boundaries with our goats from the get-go.”

Kristi Noem

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem

Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty

Noem apparently failed to set boundaries for her 14-month-old dog, which angered her by killing a neighbor’s chickens and trying to bite her. Experts have said the dog could have been retrained or rehomed instead of being offed by its owner.

Word of Noem’s serial animal-killing spree appears to have doomed any chance she will be chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate —long seen as a burning ambition for her. In a desperate attempt at damage control, Noem tried to portray her slaughtering as a rural reality.

“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she said on social media.

An Arizona goat farmer who asked not to be named for fear of being embroiled in partisan politics said Noem’s decision to use a weapon on the goat that required more than one shot was tougher on the animal than it was on her.

“The goat gets shot… but the brain’s intact, it’s aware of what’s going on,” the farmer said. “And then she has to go and futz around and get another shell and then come back and do the same thing and it finally expires.”

The farmer suggested that Noem’s account “reveals not just callousness toward life and poor political acumen, but also a limited understanding of the basics of farm life.”

The public has been mainly fixated on the brutal death of Noem’s dog, who was, after all, a domestic pet. The demise of the goat, meanwhile, has gotten relatively little attention.

Perhaps people would care more if it had a name, like Cricket did. I suggest Veep, in recognition of a possibility that now seems to be as dead as a goat in a gravel pit.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast  here .

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Music + Concerts | Here’s the day-by-day breakdown of BeachLife…

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Music + concerts, music + concerts | here’s the day-by-day breakdown of beachlife festival, beachlife festival celebrates food, culture and music.

time travel in daily life

The three-day festival, which celebrates beach culture, art, food and obviously music, returns to Redondo Beach’s Seaside Lagoon May 3-5 with a lineup of more than 40 acts on four stages including headliners Sting, Incubus and My Morning Jacket as well as new wave stars Devo, classic rockers ZZ Top and British crooner Seal. The locals are coming too with Orange County’s Local Natives, Dirty Heads and Sugar Ray on the lineup. Besides the music, the festival’s DAOU SideStage, a high end pop-up restaurant on the side of the stage, returns again.

For festival founder Allen Sanford , this year’s lineup is extra special because he finally got one of the artists he has been after for years.

“I’m excited about all the artists but getting Sting on the lineup is just next level for me, talk about an icon,” said  Sanford, who co-founded the festival  in 2019.

“I’ve always told people we’re in the business of nostalgia and that’s the drug we sell. As far as BeachLife goes, I’ve been trying to get Sting for five years, so that’s going to be a special night,” he said.

But it’s not going to be the only special night.

Here’s a breakdown of the festival, from day by day vibes, to changes coming to the pop-up restaurant to the addition of DJs to its always popular acoustic stage.

Incubus is among the headliners for the 2024 BeachLife Festival,...

Incubus is among the headliners for the 2024 BeachLife Festival, which returns to Redondo Beach May 3-5. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Contributing Photographer)

BeachLife Festival returns to Redondo Beach’s Seaside Lagoon May 3-5...

BeachLife Festival returns to Redondo Beach’s Seaside Lagoon May 3-5 with a lineup of more than 40 acts on four stages. Festival founder Allen Sanford gives a day by day breakdown of the festival. (Photo by Chuck Bennett, Contributing Photographer)

ZZ Top is one of the acts performing at BeachLife...

ZZ Top is one of the acts performing at BeachLife Festival. The three-day festival returns to Redondo Beach’s Seaside Lagoon May 3-5 with a lineup of more than 40 acts on four stages. (Photo by Kevin Winter, Getty Images for Crossroads Guitar Festival)

BeachLife days

Day one opens with Sting as the headliner, which was a tough get for Sanford.

“In this case I was trying for so long, I had got so many ‘nos’. I asked a ton of times and got ‘no no no.’ And serendipitously he had an opening in his calendar and it just came together,” he said.

And it will be a very special performance because according to BeachLife officials, Sting’s headlining set is going to be his first SoCal festival appearance in more than 20 years. Sting will be joined on day one by Seal, Dirty Heads, Donavon Frankenreiter & G. Love and others. It’ll be a day that Sanford said will set the tone for the weekend.

“I think the juxtaposition of Dirty Heads and Sting is really defining of what BeachLife is,” Sanford said. “Everybody knows there’s a reggae component to Sting. The older generation loves Sting but then we got the younger generation and the beachy surfing generation that loves reggae, it’s the perfect marriage,” he said.

Saturday meanwhile is headlined by Incubus with Devo also on the lineup.

“It’s a day of hits. It’s a lot of recognizable music and Saturday is that fun hang day. It is definitely about the music but it is more about the culture and the community,” he said.

Sunday is the day for the hardcore music aficionados thanks to bands like ZZ Top, My Morning Jacket, Trey Anastasio, the guitarist and singer-songwriter of the rock band Phish, as well as Latin acts like Tito Puente Jr. and Guatemalan-born singer Gabby Moreno will be on stage.

“We decided to go in a new musical direction this year. It’s not top 40 hits, it’s very musically advanced,” Sanford said, referring to the Sunday lineup.

BeachLife also threw a curveball to fans this year with the first time addition of a couple of DJs on its smaller Speakeasy Stage . But it’s not just any pair of DJs, it’s Mix Master Mike of the Beastie Boys who performs Friday and Paul Oakenfold on Saturday.

‘We’re always trying to do new stuff. People have been talking about the fact that we should have DJs for years,” Sanford said. “We thought it would be cool to have something going on later at night that’s just out of our wheelhouse. So we decided to do some Djs. We thought it would be a cool thing to try out,” he said.

New restaurant view

One of the things that separates BeachLife from most festivals is its pop-up restaurant dubbed the DAOU SideStage Experience, a high end pop-up restaurant that’s usually on the side on the main stage where each day a celebrity chef serves a multicourse meal as bands perform on stage.

The chef lineup this year is made up of Ian Gresik of The Arbour in Pasadena on Friday, Chef Nyesha Arrington, who competed on “Top Chef” and was a judge on “Next Level Chef,” on Saturday, and Chef David Slay of Slay Steakhouse on Sunday.

This year however it’s moving the main stage to the Lowtide Stage, which is right on the sand facing the ocean.

It was all for the view.

“We have this beautiful ocean and wouldn’t it be cool that in addition to being on the side of the stage you’re watching a sunset,” Sanford said.

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ScienceDaily

Time zones and tiredness strongly influence NBA results, study of 25,000 matches shows

The body clock has a significant impact on the performance of NBA players, according to study published in the peer-reviewed journal Chronobiology International .

The authors say their findings, from more than 25,000 matches, show elite basketball coaches and teams should consider the physical and mental effects of time zone travel when planning games and preparing for games.

A first of its kind, the research is based on the achievements at home and away of NBA (National Basketball Association) league players across 21 consecutive seasons. Considered the most competitive in the world, NBA athletes frequently travel to matches across the five US time zones used by NBA teams.

The findings show that there is a near 10% better win ratio difference for home teams from the western time zone area (PDT) when playing against a team from the eastern EDT time zone, compared to when an EDT team hosts a PDT team.

  • When PDT teams play at home against EDT teams the winning percentage is 63.5%.
  • When EDT teams host a PDT team, the winning percentage drops to 55.0%.

In addition, the findings also show that teams win more home games when players' sleep-wake cycles -- linked to their circadian rhythm (CR) -- are 'ahead' of the local time. This is after they have returned west from competing in a city further east where the local time is earlier.

For example, if the LA Lakers play an away match at Miami (EDT) and then return to Los Angeles (PDT) to play a home game without much CR adaptation time (CR is ahead of the local time), the Lakers play the next home game with a CR advantage against whomever their opponents are.

Teams do not have the same success when players' internal body clocks are either behind or synchronized with the local time where their home arena or stadium is based, according to the results.

Experts from Dokuz Eylül University and Yildiz Technical University, in Turkey, led the study. Dr Firat Özdalyan, a Sport Physiology expert from Dokuz Eylül, explains that they found NBA teams need to become used to the local time when they play away games to perform well.

"One of the most important results of this research for the home games of the NBA teams is that while traveling to the west increases the performance, traveling to the east decreases the performance," he states.

"Another notable finding is that the success of NBA teams increases when they are fully adapted to the local time for away games.

"Home teams who will be exposed to such a CR phase shift (traveling from west to east) should be mindful of these potential performance detriments when constructing game plans.

"It can be suggested that coaches (of away teams) should bear this (the low shooting success) in mind during the game preparation period."

A circadian rhythm (CR) is the body's sleep-wake pattern over a 24-hour day. A CR phase shift means bedtime and wake-up times move earlier or later in the day.

This means the body clock gets out of sync with the environment which can lead to sleeplessness, daytime tiredness and other issues. The body clock needs 24 hours to adapt for every one-hour time zone change.

The study investigated the effect of a CR shift on the performance of professional NBA athletes.

Data was analyzed from 25,016 regular games across 21 consecutive seasons between 2000 to 2021. Information included the date, location, game result and home or away team. Time zones of the cities where all games were played were identified to calculate the CR phase shifts of the teams.

The expert team say teams in the Pacific time zone may have an advantage in regular season home games such as the Los Angeles Lakers, Portland Trail Blazers, and Seattle Supersonics.

Anaerobic performance could explain why home teams who travel from east to west do better, say the authors. This type of activity which is crucial for scoring, defending and other feats peaks later in the day.

The authors add that the body clock adapts more easily to a long rather than a short day. The day becomes longer traveling east to west and a natural circadian rhythm is slightly longer than 24 hours. So this means basketball players are traveling in the direction their bodies want to go.

As for away teams, the authors say that travel fatigue is more likely to blame for poor performance than phase shifts in CR.

Players who have rest time between games or have not traveled across time zones for an away match are more able to synchronize their body with the local time. As such, they are not as tired and play better.

A limitation of this research is that the traveling schedules of the teams are not known. Since this information was not available, it was not possible to determine how long the teams stayed in which city/time zone; how much they adapted to the local UTC; and what extent they were exposed to a CR phase shift with real data. Therefore, the team used a predictive model for the traveling plans and CR adaptations of the teams by following the rules determined by previous research.

Another limitation is that the games were not separated according to teams' ability differences.

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Materials provided by Taylor & Francis Group . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

  • Fırat Özdalyan, Erhan Çene, Hikmet Gümüş, Osman Açıkgöz. Investigation of the effect of circadian rhythm on the performances of NBA teams . Chronobiology International , 2024; 1 DOI: 10.1080/07420528.2024.2325641

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Will Trump back abortion bans? What happens if he loses in 2024? 5 TIME interview takeaways

WASHINGTON — With Election Day less than 200 days away, former President Donald Trump revealed what his possible second term could look like, doubling down on his signature immigration, tax and foreign policy proposals and making clear what he would do differently if elected again.

In an exclusive interview with TIME magazine published Tuesday, the former president said he wants to pursue a gristly conservative agenda that includes using the U.S. military to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants; deploying the National Guard to quash protests ; gutting the U.S. civil service; enforcing conditions for U.S. support and more, according to the outlet.

The presumptive Republican nominee also argued that he made a critical mistake when he first arrived in the White House in 2017: He was too generous.

"The advantage I have now is I know everybody. I know people," Trump said. "I know the good, the bad, the stupid, the smart. I know everybody."

Though Trump has previously spoken about his plans for a second term and has sprinkled these ideas at his rallies, the TIME Magazine sit down is arguably his most exhaustive interview on the subject should he defeat President Joe Biden. 

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Here are five takeaways from the conversation.

Trump claims U.S. has 'no choice' but mass deportation

Much like the 2016 campaign that ushered Trump into office with promises to build a southern border wall, his 2024 bid is largely fueled by fears about immigration and the migrants traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking refuge.

Trump has blitzed Biden over the issue, charging that the Democratic incumbent is not just responsible for the crisis, but unable to get it under control. Last fiscal year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 2.5 million encounters at the border – the highest 12-month total ever.

A second Trump administration would pursue a policy of kicking out 11 million people who came to the country illegally. The former president said he would pursue building migrant detention camps and use the U.S. military at the border and inland.

"Because we have no choice. I don't believe this is sustainable for a country, what's happening to us," Trump said.

However, the former president earlier this year rejected a bipartisan border deal that a group of senators, including GOP Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., negotiated for months. Republican lawmakers quickly abandoned the deal following Trump's criticism.

Abortion: No federal ban but OK with strict state rules

On the campaign trail, Trump often takes credit for nominating three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

But given the victories Democrats have notched at the ballot box in recent years as they've campaigned on protecting abortion rights, Trump has recently pumped the brakes on supporting a national prohibition.

"You don’t need a federal ban," he told TIME.

But what if Congress passed one? Trump was skeptical the Senate could ever reach the needed 60-vote threshold. Yet he didn't promise to veto such legislation either, as conservative allies continue to pursue larger anti-abortion goals.

"We have a long way to go," he said.

Trump was largely agnostic when asked about his personal views on state rules, such as monitoring pregnancies or prosecuting a person for having an abortion, but he said he feels Florida's 6-week ban was "too severe."

"It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not," Trump said. "It's totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions."

What if Trump loses in 2024?

Looming over the 2024 contest is the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, when a mob of the former president's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers tried to certify Biden as the winner of the last White House election.

Trump still doesn't accept losing the 2020 race to Biden, and he repeats that lie often in interviews and at rallies. Although he remains confident in prevailing this fall without any violence, what would happen if Trump fails to recapture the White House?

"And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election," Trump told Time, not dismissing the possibility of further violence around the 2024 election.

That answer is bound to add more anxiety to the country's political atmosphere.

A  CBS/YouGov  poll released in January, for instance, found where more than two-thirds of voters believe U.S. democracy is under threat. Almost a majority think there will be violence from the losing side, the survey found.

Using the National Guard to quell crime and protests

Crime remains a poignant selling point for the Trump campaign , which leverages it both in terms of talking about migrants coming into the country and the recent uptick of college campus protests against the war in Gaza.

"I would use certainly the National Guard, if the police were unable to stop. I would absolutely use the National Guard," he said of those demonstrations.

Trump dismissed statistics showing violent crime is down throughout the country. Homicides specifically dropped by 13% in 2023, according to the FBI.

But the former president rebuffed those figures, saying without evidence the agency's numbers are "fudged" and "faked."

Trump specifically called attention to images of shoplifting that have infuriated many voters , saying the country must work to give "police back the power and respect" they deserve.

Helping NATO allies, criticizing Netanyahu

Given the multiple international clashes that have entangled the U.S. as of late, Trump's worldview on America's role has come further into focus.

Much like on the campaign trail , Trump emphasized in the TIME interview how the U.S. will come to the aid of its allies should they be attacked.

America, he said, will "try and help Ukraine" if he is reelected. But it will have stipulations based on other countries paying their fair share to international alliances.

"Europe has to pay," he said. "We are in for so much more than the European nations. It's very unfair to us."

NATO members are asked to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense. Not all members have reached this goal, fueling Trump's criticism of the alliance.

What may surprise some onlookers is Trump's criticism of Israel and its handling of the war with Hamas. He claimed the major U.S. ally has a bad public relations campaign by sending out too many images of the death and destruction in Gaza.

Trump also had sharp words for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who he blamed for not preventing the Oct. 7, 2023 attack and for pulling out of a U.S.-led operation to assassinate a top Iranian general in 2020.

"I had a bad experience with Bibi," he said.

Contributing: David Jackson and Lauren Villagran, USA TODAY

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5 Exercises for a Better Sex Life

Any physical activity can improve your sexual health. But a few exercises are especially beneficial.

An illustration of different people doing various cardio exercises. A heart rate graphic intersects the image and vignettes.

By Danielle Friedman

As far as your muscles are concerned, sex is just another workout. And like most workouts, the more conditioned you are, the more enjoyable it can be.

Yes, you can train for sex.

“It’s important to remember that sex is movement, and it’s exercise,” said Debby Herbenick, director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at the Indiana University School of Public Health. If you want to have satisfying sex, she said, you’ll likely benefit from moving your body outside of the bedroom.

If you’re happy with your sex life, a regular fitness habit can help to ensure your body c ontinues to function properly. If you feel like your sex life could be more satisfying, exercise may help with erectile dysfunction , pain with penetration and low sex drive , among other issues.

Regular physical activity can also help you become more self aware. “You learn to listen to your body ,” Dr. Herbenick said, “and then you can carry that wisdom over to your sexual life.”

While pretty much any workout routine can improve sex over time, a few specific types of movement can be especially helpful for sexual function and enjoyment, depending on your needs and physical ability. Here are five exercises that experts in sexual health and fitness recommend.

Work in bursts of high intensity cardio.

Your cardiovascular health directly impacts your sexual health, and not just because sex can sometimes be vigorous and aerobic, Dr. Herbenick said.

The cardiovascular system powers two bodily systems that are important for sex: erections and vaginal lubrication. Without proper blood flow, one will likely have trouble achieving or maintaining either, she said. Research also suggests that, for some people, aerobic exercise itself can stimulate arousal.

If you don’t already do aerobic exercise, begin by establishing a solid cardio baseline through regular, moderate-intensity activity, said Darlene Marshall, a personal trainer in upstate New York who has helped clients train for better sex.

Then, once you can comfortably walk or jog at a “conversational” pace for about 20 minutes, add intervals of high-intensity effort, she said — to train for the bursts of exertion sex can require. Depending on your fitness level, running or cycling sprints, brisk stair climbs or high intensity interval training are all good options.

“The goal is to help your body avoid becoming overwhelmed, cardiovascularly, during sex,” Ms. Marshall said.

Do Kegels — correctly.

The health of your pelvic floor, the hammock of muscles that sits at the base of the pelvis, can make the difference between a gratifying sexual experience and a lackluster or even painful one — for women and men — said Janelle Howell, a pelvic floor specialist in Chicago. Between 10 and 20 percent of women in the United States report pain during sex.

When your pelvic floor muscles are weak or tight, you may not experience as powerful an orgasm. Tight pelvic floor muscles can also make penetrative sex painful. Healthy pelvic floor muscles need both strength and flexibility to be able to contract and fully release on command.

Kegel exercises , which mimic the effort of holding and releasing urine or gas, can be an effective way to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles, Dr. Howell said. The key is to make sure that after every contraction, you fully relax the muscles — something many people don’t do properly.

For women, Dr. Howell suggests imagining an elevator slowly going up, then slowly going all the way back down to the ground floor, to ensure the muscles fully release. For men, tighten your pelvic floor muscles, hold for three seconds, then fully relax for three seconds.

If you have a tight pelvic floor, experts advise skipping the Kegels and focusing instead on diaphragmatic breathing , which can help to relax and lengthen the muscles. (A pelvic floor physical therapist can offer a full assessment.)

Limber up your hips.

Most people spend hours a day sitting, which can lead to tight hip muscles, fascia and ligaments. When your hips are tight, you may experience back and pelvic pain during sex.

“I hear a lot that people can only do one position,” because they’re stiff or other positions hurt, Dr. Howell said.

Improving your hip mobility can help your whole lower body move more fluidly and comfortably, and may improve pelvic pain during sex, she said.

As a first step, Ms. Marshall recommends releasing some of the constricted areas by placing a tennis ball against your glutes and rolling it around, then shifting it to your hips and hamstrings, massaging each area until you feel the muscle release. This can be done sitting or against a wall.

From there, stretch your hips, hip flexors, glutes, back muscles and hamstrings by doing a figure-four stretch , 90/90 stretch , cat cow or happy baby pose , Dr. Howell said, or “any movement that’s bringing your chest closer towards your knees.”

Finally, dynamic exercises such as deep squats and glute bridges mobilize the hips and build strength. And if you want to dial up the intensity, weighted squats , leg presses and kettlebell swings can increase the power in your glutes and hamstrings.

“I love kettlebell swings for sexual training,” Ms. Marshall said, because they involve “a rhythmic movement of flexion and extension in the hips.”

Focus on your entire core.

The more strength you have in your core, the more you will be able to move easily during sex. Most of the nerves and muscles that are involved in sex are integrated into the core, and strong core muscles can also help to reduce back and hip pain before, during and after sex.

“Strengthening the core can really help with endurance during sex, helping you feel strong and solid in your body,” said Rachel Zar, a sex therapist in Chicago.

To work the full cylinder of muscles that make up the core, Dr. Howell recommends doing planks daily. “You can start small,” she said. “Say you can only hold it for five to 10 seconds — that’s going to help you to engage all of your core muscles at one time.”

Another bonus to working the core muscles? Dr. Herbenick and her team have found that, for some people, contracting and releasing their core muscles helped them become aroused. Consider your planks foreplay.

Practice five minutes of daily yoga.

Yoga can help improve hip mobility and build core strength. And practicing slow, deep, diaphragmatic breathing is especially valuable for sex, Dr. Herbenick said, because it helps to relax both the body’s parasympathetic nervous system and the pelvic floor.

“You might find that vaginal penetration is more comfortable. You might find that erections come more easily,” she said. “Stress is the enemy of erections.”

If you don’t feel up to moving through yoga positions, practicing the breath work alone is valuable, Dr. Howell noted. “Even just laying on the yoga mat, putting your hands on your belly and just breathing into your belly can really start to calm that nervous system,” she said, “which can then support more pleasure in your sex life.”

Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York and the author of “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.” More about Danielle Friedman

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