ThothWeb - Time Travel for Beginners

Time Travel for Beginners

Posted on Friday, October 21, 2005 (CDT) by Thoth

Since the publication of H.G Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’ in 1895, the prospect of time travel has fired the imagination of writers, provided controversy amongst the scientific community and encouraged philosophers, scientists, metaphysicians and dreamers to engage in passionate debate.

In recent years, we’ve seen people claiming to be visitors from the future, others claiming that we have evidence that time travel has happened and inevitably we now have time travel conventions where ideas about time travel can be discussed and developed.

It seems as though a myriad of people have an interest in the possibility of travelling through time. If the past exists, does the future already exist, and if it does, is our future already predetermined?

So what’s the story? Is time travel possible or should such romantic notions be confined to the movies? We thought we’d take a journey back through some of the most popular theories and also (in the spirit of the article) take a look into the future to see what’s what.

John Titor – the man who came back from the future

In November 2000, a man named John Titor suddenly appeared on an internet newsgroup claiming to be a soldier from 2036. Over a period of around sixteen months, he amassed quite a following with his accounts of how the world and, America in particular, would be changing during the next several years. Some of his reports included information about a global nuclear war in 2015, civil war in America that starts in 2004/5 and reaches its worst point in 2008, the exhaustion of oil reserves and numerous wars and other man made and natural disasters.

It remains to be seen if the mysterious John Titor was for real or whether he was an educated hoaxer looking to amuse himself. Opinion is divided, certainly when asked specific questions, Titor was able to demonstrate a sound knowledge of the subject area. When describing his method of time travel, he described it as a government issue “Time Distortion Gravity Displacement Unit” which was manufactured by General Electric. He went on to explain that it used two spinning dual-positive micro-singularities or mini black holes which would distort gravity around them; by distorting gravity the micro-singularities also distort time, enabling the traveller to travel through time. He went on to post instruction manuals and photographs of his equipment.

Unfortunately Titor failed to mention specific events such as 911, which in many ways changed the course of history and had a huge impact on the world. 911 was a significant event that occurred after he was supposedly born, suggesting he would have had knowledge of it and in theory could have prevented it. If he was serious about warning the world of the dangers that lay ahead that would have been a good place to start, as would his predicting the US loosing New Orleans in the way it did, but this did not happen. In March 2001, John Titor vanished just as suddenly as he had arrived, allegedly returning to 2036.

Ronald Pegg and the CD-ROM case – did we travel back to biblical times from the twentieth century?

What if at some point we did travel back in time and took with us a CD-ROM which contained images of our present time? Would that prove that time travel was indeed possible? This is a theory that Australian researcher Ronald Pegg has put forward. He contends that the Ancient Egyptian priests who first told the story of Atlantis were describing the imagery from a modern CD called Ancient Civilizations of the Mediterranean which was made in 1995 and not that of an ancient civilization prior to 1230BC. He bases his supposition on the idea that the legendary Ark of the Covenant was actually a computer that was taken back in time to allow those who lived in ancient times to glimpse the future; why a time traveller from the twentieth century would have done this remains to be understood, however Mr Pegg is quite sure that this occurred.

Stepping back in time - Can time travel occur naturally?

Is it possible that we can accidentally and momentarily slip back in time quite naturally without the need for time machines? In August 1901, two Oxford professors, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, were walking through the gardens of the Palace of Versailles when they observed a shimmering effect on the landscape, when the shimmering had passed the women noticed that much to their amazement they seemed to have been transported back in time to about a hundred years earlier. The people around them wore 18th century clothes and wigs and behaved in a very agitated manner, something was clearly happening, but they had no idea what it could be. Eventually the vision faded and they found themselves back in 1901. Shocked at what they had experienced they carried out a little research and concluded that they had somehow witnessed the sacking of the Tuleries and the massacre of the French Guards during the French revolution in 1789. This suggests that it may be possible that the veil between past and present can be momentarily lifted, in this case transporting both ladies back in time.

Spacecrafts that travel through time

Perhaps one of my favourite time travel arguments is from Arthur C Clarke who asserted that time travel wasn’t possible on the basis that if it were we’d be visiting ourselves already, that made sense to me when I first heard it many years ago, but lets consider for a moment that we are visiting ourselves already. There is a school of thought that suggests that UFO’s are in fact time travellers that come and go seemingly as they please.

What the scientists say

To travel through time, in theory, we first need to travel faster than the speed of light, which is something physics has never achieved itself or recorded anything else doing. Einstein's theory of relativity sets the speed of light as the speed limit for the universe. The theory of relativity also demonstrated that distance and time are not absolute but instead are affected by an objects motion – time is relative, which means if we could construct a spacecraft that was fast enough, in theory we (or whoever had the technology) could travel through time. In general though, Einstein described time as akin to a lazy river that meandered through the solar system and he didn’t consider time travel possible.

Physicist Kurt Gödel however found an ingenious solution to Einstein’s theorems that did allow for time travel, maybe. He proposed a mathematical model where timelines closed back on themselves so that in such a way that distant past and the distant future became one in the same, essentially Einstein’s ‘lazy river of time’ contained whirlpools in which time could wrap itself into a circle. Anyone moving along in the same direction of rotation of the whirlpool would find themselves back at the starting point, but backwards in time.

Amos Ori, professor of physics at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, tends to agree that mathematically the laws of physics don't stand in the way of building time machines, although the practical implementation may be a long way off.

Does the answer lie in wormholes?

Are wormholes tunnels to facilitate time travel? This is an idea that is being given some serious consideration by some scientists. One hypothesis is that a wormhole could act as a shortcut between two points, theoretically enabling you to ‘beat time’. Francisco Lobo, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal comments:

"Traversable wormholes are extremely useful as Gedanken experiments” - experiments that can be reasoned theoretically but are impractical to carry out - "to probe the limitations of general relativity".

It certainly seems feasible that different areas of the fabric of time and space could be linked in such a way.

The Philadelphia and Montauk Experiments

Did the US Navy attempt time travel using secret Tesla technology and one of their ships and did the first experiment go horribly wrong? The two experiments were conducted exactly forty years apart in August 1943 and August 1983, with the former resulting in the US Eldridge disappearing completely for twenty minutes and panic ensuing. This has left a great number of people convinced that the Navy succeed in sending the ship forward through time. Interestingly, a lot of UFO activity was reported around the Eldridge in the week prior to and during the experiment, as though they were either involved with or were monitoring the experiment. Forty years later the experiment was attempted again, allegedly to correct what had gone wrong with the Philadelphia experiment.

The Paradox of time travel

The main argument against the feasibility of time travel is that by changing one tiny thing in the past it will create a ripple effect through time that could catastrophically alter the future in incalculable ways – even to the point of time travel itself not being invented or the person who travelled through time not being born - which paradoxically means they couldn’t be there changing the past.

A counter argument to this is that all times exist concurrently but in different dimensions. It may well be that we can't physically go back and alter our personal history, but any action we did take would occur in the ‘present’ or the ‘now’ of another dimension.

Metaphysics – transcending time through the mind

From a metaphysical point of view the emphasis is slightly different because there is no burden of proof, there is simply ‘understanding’ - although again not all metaphysicians agree. One of the big differences is that in metaphysics, time travel is not necessarily a physical endeavour.

In yogic practices, mystics are said to be able to practice a range of miraculous feats such as bilocation and casting energy forward or backwards through time. If we consider spiritual healing practices such as reiki, a technique that involves channelling the universal energy for healing purposes, it is common practice to send healing back in time to heal past traumas that have occurred, or send it forward into the future so that a client might connect to it at a specific point in time, many of those involved in magick engage in similar practices.

This raises another possibility; that it might be possible for non-physical energy such as thought patterns to transcend time, but not physical energy. To understand this theory it is necessary to assume that, alongside the material and physical world that we belong to, there exists a non-physical environment that lacks the restrictions placed on its physical counterpart. While science considers the merits of the physical, in metaphysics the non-physical is given a far higher degree of importance.

In metaphysical theory, there is a point in the universe where time does not exist, past present and future are simply one. Bearing this in mind, the art of prophecy is something else that we should give some thought to. It may be possible that past, present and future do exist as one and that seers are somehow able to tap into this pool of ‘totality’ for want of a better expression, and snatch snippets of the future. Again, as with the physical world, we can neither prove nor disprove this theory; we can simply wonder.

A brief conclusion - and the big question.

Time is perhaps the one mystery that will forever elude us; it’s quite possible that we are seeking to master the impossible. If we do manage to shake the physical constrains of time then those that possess this knowledge literally control the future of humanity, and at what cost? Wars could be averted and natural disasters predicted in advance but the knock on effect of saving millions of lives would be incalculable and not necessarily beneficial. Political rivals could be erased from the history books, technology removed or introduced at will, but no one could really predict the true effects of dropping one small pebble in the sea of time. It remains to be seen if man will ever reach a point where we have not only the ability to travel through time, but also the discretion to handle the responsibility that time travel carries.

If we did have the ability to travel through time, what would we do with it?

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