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Time Travel Exists!

For thousands of years, mankind has contemplated the possibility of travelling in time.

The library of sci-fi titles is littered with countless tales based on the realisation of such a fantasy and even "real" science has searched long and hard for any mechanism that might allow such a journey.

The paradoxes surrounding time-travel are many and often used by those who claim it will never happen as proof of their argument. What if you were to go back in time and kill your parents for example.

Once Einstein came up with his general theory of relativity, the relationship of time to the other three dimensions became more obvious and the time-travel proponents were buoyed by a proof which indicated that you can actually travel forwards in time by travelling at near-light speeds.

Of course the problem is that we have no way (yet) to get anywhere close to near-light speeds so time-travel remains just a dream.

Or does it?

The reality is that we are already time-travellers, just as we're travellers through space.

Ever second of every day, we're travelling into the future (duh!).

The real challenge is not time travel per-se but altering and controlling the rate at which we travel in time.

Near-light speed allows us to travel more quickly through time (relative to those we leave behind) and practical tests of Einstein's theories have proven this to be exactly right.

But is useful time travel ever going to become a reality?

I guess that depends on how you look at time.

Perhaps, if time (like space) can be curved by some other powerful force from another dimension, we will be able to travel back and forth at will -- at least in theory.

The key thing here is the concept of dimensions.

We're strictly four-dimensional creatures. We can only perceive the universe around us in four dimensions (three physical dimensions and time). Because of this limited awareness, we may well be sharing the three dimensions we know with God-knows what -- except that our cohabitors are simply displaced in another dimension we're unaware of.

And what if one of those dimensions wasn't physical but temporal?

Well that's pretty much what's happening right now. The house in which you live may well have been inhabited by people before you and will almost certainly be inhabited by people after you. In effect, you're within those same four walls but simply separated by time.

Now imagine if time were two dimensional instead of monodimensional...

What if, instead of simply travelling inexorably from the past into the future, we could also travel sideways?

What would a sideways trip through time produce?

Well one of the popular perceptions of the universe is that there are an infinite number of "timelines". Some people believe that every decision you make effectively spawns a new fork in your timeline and a new future. Such a theory would fit very well into the two-dimensional time model. In effect, time would be infinitely long and also infinitely wide.

When scientists try to explain the quantum world by using the concept of additional dimensions, who's to say that those dimensions are physical? Why could they not be extra dimensions of time?

I'm sure this possibility has been contemplated by the egg-heads who make such things their specialty but I must admit to having read nothing about such theories to date.

Now I know that Aardvark readers are a bunch of very smart people who, likely-as-not, have also contemplated such things as "what stuff is" in some depth.

What's your take on the concept of multi-dimensional time?

Just what happens to our view of the universe if we move away from the concept of a monodimensional timeline along which we're forced to move at a constant rate?

How do you explain time?

Is time just nature's way of stopping everything from happening all at once?

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