by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 1 November 2009 @ 18:38 UCT

WEAVERVILLE, NC -- I have always been fascinated with the prospect of traveling back or forward in time.  From an early childhood, I often imagined what it would be like to travel back in time to visit my relatives, for instance, before I was born, visit loved ones before they had died, visit individuals with whom I had never met, or better yet, to change the present by altering past events.  Even more exciting for me was entertaining the possibility of traveling into the future to get a glimpse of what might happen to me or to the world in which I lived.  What technologies might exist in my future that I or others have yet to even comtemplate?  Could these technologies be brought back into my present time so that it could be used for some human good, such as a cure for cancer or a solution to world hunger, for example?  Are these simply fantasies conjured up in the mind of a young adolescent boy or is it possible to transcend the boundaries of time and space in order to achieve time travel?  These are the very questions that we will explore in this article.

Before we can begin to look at time travel and investigate whether it is possible to achieve such a feat, we must first look at defining exactly what time is and how we perceive it.  If time were absolute, then there would be no past, no present, and no future.  For someone living in absolute time, the past, present, and future would be meaningless.  There would be no yesterday, no today, or no tomorrow, only now.  However, there is the possibility that one must consider that absolute time might have a past, present, and a future, but that they would all coexist simultaneously rather than exist separately.  But, if we lived in absolute time, how would it be measured?  Would it be measured at all?  Would we be born or would we die?  For us, the concept of absolute time is somewhat incomprehensible.  And, for this reason alone, we will not consider it.  Rather, we will investigate what we can comprehend more fully, which is that time, for us, is relative.

What do we mean when we speak of our time as being relative?  We are fascinated with measuring time.  Our day is broken down into hours, minutes, and seconds.  The 24-hour day, which is determined by the rotation of the Earth about its axis in relation to our Sun, dictates how we live, work and play.  The movement of our moon in orbit about our planet marks the course of our months on the calendar and affect our biological makeup.  Our annual cycle is determined by the orbit of our planet about the Sun, and so forth.  However, we are no longer satisfied that we can mark our time merely in years, months, weeks, days, hours, or even seconds, but we have chosen to break each second into millions and billions of parts so that we can harness the power of our modern computers which make millions and even billions of calculations per second or CPU clock cycle.

Indeed, time, for us, is relative because we perceive it--whatever it is--as existing in three distinct phases: (1) past events, (2) our present or now, and (3) future events.  What is our present or what is now will be our future instantaneously.  What was our past has been instantaneously transformed into our present.  But does time exist as a separate entity apart from everything else?  Is time, as some have perceived it, like a river in which we find ourselves floating along from the past, into the present and then on to the future like a log floating with the current of time?  Or, as others have contemplated, is time somehow intrinsically linked with space (that we view in three dimensions) in the Universe in which we live as another dimension that we perceive, such as the fourth dimension?  That is to say, is time somehow linked to space or is it mutually exclusive of it?  Or is time something that mankind created to explain what we observe in our Universe.  I would argue that time is most certainly linked to the space we occupy in our Universe whether it is something that we created to explain the phenomena we observe in our existence or whether it is actually the fourth dimension within our Universe.  Since our Universe is constantly expanding at a particular rate (another concept that might be questionable in the minds of some scientists) if we travel from point A to point B in our Universe, we cannot do so instantaneously whether this distance is one foot or 300 light-years; that is, if we travel from point A to point B, we can expect that we cannot do so instantaneously, but, rather, there will be a certain amount of time, if you will, before we reach point B from point A depending on how fast we travel.  In other words, our speed of travel is a measure of this time element through the space (or distance) we travel and, thus, time and space are intertwined.  If we could somehow move through space with infinite speed, then, we could traverse the distance between points A and B instantaneously.  But, as Dr. Albert Einstein proved through his General Theory of Relativity, it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light because to do so would require an infinite amount of energy, which is not possible.  The speed of light, therefore, is the uppermost boundary in the relationship between time and space.  Moreover, in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, he proved that time with respect to two objects traveling with respect to one another in space is relative depending on how fast these objects are moving toward or apart from one another because the speed of light is the same for both observers regardless of how fast they are traveling away from or toward this light source.  He also showed that time (as we measure it) appears to slow down as we approach the speed of light and, if it were possible to travel the speed of light, we would observe that time has stopped for us relative to an observer on Earth or from some other fixed position in space.

So, since space and time are linked in this fashion, is it possible for someone to travel a thousand light-years in space in less time than Einstein’s limitation of the speed of light says it would take us to travel?  In other words, would it be possible for us to traverse this distance in less than a thousand years (as marked on Earth)?  Well, as it turns out, Albert Einstein predicted that if we were able to warp the space in the Universe (which has been shown through experimentation not only to be theoretically possible, but is a reality) then this warping of space would or could cause point A and point B to be brought closer together to one another similar to two points on a 2-dimensional sheet of paper would be brought closer together if you folded one edge of the paper over the other in 3-dimensional space.  This would, in fact, tremendously reduce the distance between points A and B and allow one to travel across this distance in far less than a thousand years as would be predicted even if one could travel the speed of light.  To a fixed observer in space, the traveler would have exceeded the speed of light when, in fact, s/he did not.

How does all this discussion relate to time travel?  If time and space are interrelated in some fashion, then is it possible for a person to go back in time or forward in time through the warping of space-time?  In other words, would that person become a time traveler?  How would this remotely be possible?  How would the warping of space be accomplished?  Scientists have theorized that the warping of space in the Universe that would result to the degree that has been previously mentioned here might be accomplished through the existence of “black holes,” which are stars within our Universe that have collapsed to the extent that the densities of their bodies are several thousand tons per cubic inch and their gravitational fields are so massive that even the light that is escaping from them is bent backward upon itself, thus causing them to appear black in space.  These collapsing bodies would literally warp the space surrounding them to the extent that they would cause “worm holes” or corridors in space that would allow points that might have been several hundreds or even thousands of light-years apart to be only a few light-years or less from one another.  Someone traveling through this “worm hole” corridor would be able to do so in far less time than would have previously been possible.  However, not only would space be affected by these “worm holes” but time itself would be altered as well.  This begs the question then, is it possible to travel back in time or into the future by passing through these tears in the fabric of space-time within our Universe?

Is it possible, therefore, to replicate the power of “black holes” and the “worm hole” effects that exist in our Universe here on planet Earth?  Can someone create a device that mimics the power of “black holes” to create the “worm hole” effect such that it would allow the passage of an object into the past or into the future if introduced into the device.  Bottom line, is it possible to create a “time machine” that replicates the space-time warping on Earth?  This is something that Dr. Ronald Mallet, professor of physics at the University of Connecticut,  is currently undertaking.

I encourage you to watch the following videos to gain a greater insight into time travel.  You decide whether it is a reality or simply science fiction.

Time Paradox                                                                                     First Time Machine