Do you believe in time travel?

Philippines
September 9, 2006 6:34am CST
Past or future...
6 responses
• India
9 Jan 07
Being more scientific yes I strongly believe in time travel.Time travel doesn't violet any physical laws.
• India
9 Jan 07
I believe in both past as well as future concept of time travel.
• India
13 Dec 06
Origins of the concept There is no widespread agreement on what should qualify as the first time travel story, since a number of early stories feature elements suggestive of time travel but are nevertheless somewhat ambiguous. For example, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) by Samuel Madden is mainly a series of letters from English ambassadors in various countries the British "Lord High Treasurer", along with a few replies from the British foreign office, all purportedly written in 1997 and 1998 and describing the conditions of that era. However, the framing story is that these letters were actual documents given to the narrator by his guardian angel one night in 1728; for this reason, Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in English literature is a guardian angel who returns with state documents from 1998 to the year 1728", although the book does not explicitly show how the angel obtained these documents. Alkon later qualifies this by writing "It would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to show a traveler arriving from the future", but also says that Madden "deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the form of an artifact sent backwards from the future to be discovered in the present." In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries (1951), the editor August Derleth identifies the short story "Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism", written for the Dublin Literary Magazine by an anonymous author in 1838, as a very early time travel story. In this story, the narrator is waiting under a tree to be picked up by a coach which will take him out of Newcastle, when he suddenly finds himself transported back over a thousand years, where he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery, and gives him somewhat ironic explanations of the developments of the coming centuries. It is never entirely clear whether these events actually occurred or were merely a dream—the narrator says that when he initially found a comfortable-looking spot in the roots of the tree, he sat down, "and as my sceptical reader will tell me, nodded and slept", but then says that he is "resolved not to admit" this explanation. A number of dreamlike elements of the story may suggest otherwise to the reader, such as the fact that none of the members of the monestary seem to be able to see him at first, and the abrupt ending where Bede has been delayed talking to the narrator and so the other monks burst in thinking that some harm has come to him, and suddenly the narrator finds himself back under the tree in the present (August of 1837), with his coach having just passed his spot on the road, leaving him stranded in Newcastle for another night. Charles Dickens' 1843 book A Christmas Carol is considered by some[2] to be one of the first depictions of time travel, as the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is transported to Christmases past, present and yet to come. These might be considered mere visions rather than actual time travel, though, since Scrooge only viewed each time period passively, unable to interact with them. A clearer example of time travel is found in the popular 1861 book Paris avant les hommes (Paris before Men), published posthumously by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard. In this story the main character is transported into the prehistoric past by the magic of a "lame demon", where he encounters such extinct animals as a Plesiosaur, as well as Boitard's imagined version of an apelike human ancestor, and is able to actively interact with some of them. Another clear early example of time travel in fiction is the short story The Clock That Went Backward by Edward Page Mitchell, which appeared in the New York Sun in 1881. The first time travel story to feature time travel by means of a time machine was Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's 1887 book El Anacronópete. This idea gained popularity with the H. G. Wells story The Time Machine, published in 1895, which is often seen as an inspiration for all later science fiction stories featuring time travel. Since that time, both science and fiction (see Time travel in fiction) have expanded on the concept of time travel, but whether it could be possible in reality is still an open question. [edit] Time travel in theory Some theories, most notably special and general relativity, suggest that suitable geometries of spacetime, or specific types of motion in space, may allow time travel into the past and future if these geometries or motions are possible.[3] Concepts that aid such understanding include the closed timelike curve. Although the possibility of traveling to the future by moving at relativistic velocities is taken for granted by physicists, many in the scientific community believe that backwards time travel is highly unlikely. Any theory which would allow time travel would require that issues of causality be resolved. What if one were to go back in time and kill one's own grandfather (see grandfather paradox)? Additionally, Stephen Hawking once suggested that the absence of tourists from the future constitutes an argument against the existence of time travel—a variant of the Fermi paradox, with time travelers instead of alien visitors (but Hawking noted elsewhere that time travel may only be possible in a region of spacetime that is warped in the right way, and that if we can't create such a region until the future, then time travelers would not be able to travel back before that date, so 'This picture would explain why we haven't been over run by tourists from the future.'[4]) However, the theory of general relativity does suggest scientific grounds for thinking backwards time travel could be possible in certain unusual scenarios, although arguments from semiclassical gravity suggest that when quantum effects are incorporated into general relativity, these loopholes may be closed. These semiclassical arguments led Hawking to formulate the chronology protection conjecture, suggesting that the fundamental laws of nature prevent time travel, but physicists cannot come to a definite judgment on the issue without a theory of quantum gravity to join quantum mechanics and general relativity into a completely unified theory. [edit] The "presentist" view Main article: Presentism (philosophy of time) Presentism holds that neither the future nor the past exist; that the matter of the universe only exists in the present moment, that time is merely a concept of man used to describe what is going on around him. This could be interpreted to mean that there is nowhere for a time traveller to go, thus rendering the whole topic of time travel null and void. However, some presentists argue that although past and future objects do not exist, there can still be definite truths about past and future events, and that it is possible that a future truth about the time traveler deciding to return to the present date could explain the time traveler's actual presence in the present.[5] In any case, the relativity of simultaneity in modern physics is generally understood to cast serious doubt on presentism and to favor the view known as four dimensionalism (closely related to the idea of block time) in which past, present and future events all coexist in a single spacetime. [edit] Time travel to the past Time travel to the past is theoretically allowed using the following methods[6]: Traveling faster than the speed of light The use of cosmic strings and black holes Wormholes and Alcubierre 'warp' drive [edit] The equivalence of time travel and faster-than-light travel If one were able to move information or matter from one point to another faster than light, then according to special relativity, there would be some inertial frame of reference in which the signal or object was moving backwards in time. This is a consequence of the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity, which says that in some cases different reference frames will disagree on whether two events at different locations happened "at the same time" or not, and they can also disagree on the order of the two events (technically, these disagreements occur when spacetime interval between the events is 'space-like', meaning that neither event lies in the future light cone of the other).[7] If one of the two events represents the sending of a signal from one location and the second event represents the reception of the same signal at another location, then as long as the signal is moving at the speed of light or slower, the mathematics of simultaneity ensures that all reference frames agree that the transmission-event happened before the reception-event.[7] However, in the case of a hypothetical signal moving faster than light, there would always be some frames in which the signal was received before it was sent, so that the signal could be said to have moved backwards in time. And since one of the two fundamental postulates of special relativity says that the laws of physics should work the same way in every inertial frame, then if it is possible for signals to move backwards in time in any one frame, it must be possible in all frames. This means that if observer A sends a signal to observer B which moves FTL in A's frame but backwards in time in B's frame, and then B sends a reply which moves FTL in B's frame but backwards in time in A's frame, it could work out that A receives the reply before sending the original signal, a clear violation of causality in every frame. An illustration of such a scenario using spacetime diagrams can be found here. It should be noted that according to relativity it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a slower-than-light object to faster-than-light speeds, and although relativity does not forbid the theoretical possibility of tachyons which move faster than light at all times, when analyzed using quantum field theory
@ssh123 (31073)
• India
9 Sep 06
For fun, for taking a flight of imagination, one can talk about time travel. There is no way one can rewind or make fast forward one's life or anyone's life.
@asa010 (1128)
• India
9 Sep 06
no, i live in present...as said fold the time and see urself in two places at once...come on who wants to know past,thats gone...and y be at unrest by knowing the future.
@DeenaD (2684)
• United States
9 Sep 06
If time travel is possible, then where are all the time travelers?
• India
13 Dec 06
in future, i believe in time travel .