Time travel

[Garmard]

Will time travel into the past/future ever be possible like in the film, "The Time Machine" ?

[jake-the-peg]

Time travel "into the future" is simply a matter of going fast enough - sub atomic particles do it all the time.

Interestingly there's no reason in physics why time travel into the past is forbidden however you'd find that things played out differently, so taking a list of lottery numbers with you would most likely be disappointing.

However the practical nature of what you need to do to achieve this normally involves things like huge warps in space from things like black holes and I really can't see a solution that a human body would survive.

So no, not like in the film.

Could we send signals back and forward? that's a much more interesting question.

Fancy phoning your future self?

[Garmard]

Thanks jake-the-peg

[Mortartube]

I did phone my future self once, But I ignored the phone. Afterwards I recall thinking. "I wonder who that was? It may have been important".

[R1Geezer]

You can be sure their will never be a time machine because bookmakers exist!

[Whickerman]

I'll tell you yesterday

[rojash]

Consider this:
We don't know how long the future will be, but it's long enough to be considered infinite.
No consider if time travel to the past was invented.
Even if only one person per year travelled into the past, that's still an infinite number of people.
Now If only 1 in a million decided to arrive on April 1 2009, that's still an infinite number of visitors all arriving tomorrow.
We just won't be able to move for time travellers!

[chakka35]

Elegant reasoning,rojash.

[Garmard]

That maybe the case of going forward into the future,but i cannot imagine one million or even a trillion time travellers doing that at once,the irony is the afore mentioned April1st.
But travelling into the past is another,entirely different action indeed. The laws of temporal causality dictates that if you go back in time,just being there alters the whole space,time continuim stream and you end up in a whole new time line,so you could not go back to your original present if you wanted to.......................scary eh!
An infinite number of timelines could indeed cross and you might end up back at your place of origin........................probably after a billion tries;but the universe is a wondrous thing and there are so many things we have yet to learn.

[Stevesw]

Is this the same as 'chaos'?