The Hypothesized Nature Of Time Travel
Time travel is one of the best/the most interesting topic in science fiction. Time travel is usually depicted in films such as Back to the Future, and Star Trek, you will see people hopping in strange contraptions or using a device that will take them throughout time. At one point almost every ones overwhelming dreams or science fiction fanatic’s vast imagination consist of some sort of time traveling to alter their history or go into the future. Time travel is described as a hypothesized occurrence in which humans or artifacts somehow are transported into, or between, various particular past or future times, that is particular times which are well removed from the present or from one another.
If technology could be designed to allow time travel back and forth in time in any sort of controlled outcome, I would be among one of the first in line to purchase a ticket. The concept of time travel has long held an almost magical allure for men and scientists alike. And no wonder why. How fascinating it is to go back and visit the Earth during The Age of Dinosaurs, or perhaps to explore the world as it will be experienced by those destined to inhabit our planet during untold centuries in the future. Unfortunately, I have become convinced that such impractical adventures are destined to remain forever in the realm of science fiction. The fact that time travel remains a subject of serious speculation, not only among fans of science fiction, but also among respected scientists as well, reflects what I believe to be misperceptions about the fundamental nature of time. No one has ever built a time machine thas capable of taking a person back to an earlier time. No one should be seriously trying to build one, because there is a good argument exists for why the machine can never be built. The argument goes like this.
Suppose you’ve got a time machine right now, and you can step into it and travel back to some earlier time. Then your actions in that time might then prevent your parents from ever meeting one another. This would make you not born, and thus not stepping into the time machine. So, the claim that there could be a time machine is self-contradictory. Travelling forwards in time is shockingly easy. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, developed in 1905, indicates that time passes at different rates for people who are moving relative to one another however the effect only becomes significant when you get close to the speed of light. If one were to leave Earth in a spaceship moving at a substantial fraction of lightspeed, turn around and come back, only a few years might have passed by on board but many years could have gone by on Earth. This is known as the twins paradox, since a traveller undertaking such a voyage would return to find itself much younger than its twin.
There’s only one problem from anyone wanting to get a glimpse of the future getting back. It would mean travelling faster than light and that’s not possible with our current technology. One kind of time travel is so common, so familiar, that it is rarely ever recognized for what it is. All of us except those at death's door have an ability to travel forward in time. All we have to do is wait. Waiting is the most straightforward and most direct form of time travel.
Most people know this intuitively, although perhaps without ever having realized that they do. But waiting has two disadvantages. First, it is strictly forward directed one can travel into the future by waiting, but not into the past. In addition, there does not seem to be any comparable operation which will take us backward in time. There is no such thing as reverse waiting or unwaiting. The second drawback to waiting as a mode of time travel is that it proceeds in lockstep with the ticking of the clock. To get from night today to night tomorrow takes twenty four hours of waiting. People who are seeking better methods of moving about in time clearly want a way of getting from night today to night tomorrow without having to spend twenty four hours in the process. A minute or two of traveling time is far more appealing to them. Lets begin by inspecting the hypothesized nature of time travel. What would it entail if it were possible?
In order to convince a justifiably skeptical scientific community that time travel is not only possible, but, moreover, that we had actually achieved it we would need to demonstrate unambiguously that someone or something had in fact somehow traveled or transitioned or been transported from one particular time, call it some particular directly to some totally and distinctly different particular time. But even if backward time travel were to be physically impossible, might it still be logically possible? Even if this world is of such a sort that traveling backward in time cannot be realized, might there be other possible worlds where traveling backward in time does occur? It is logically impossible to travel backward in time. ' Such arguments have been around for years. They are especially tricky because they involve what are called modal concepts, in particular the notions of possibility and impossibility. Does the very concept of travel into the past entail contradictions? Exactly how would one demonstrate the reality of such a phenomenon? Maybe we can agree that as one of our first steps we would need to establish some unambiguous way to define and identify various particular times. Lacking this basic capability, we would be hard pressed to design a convincing demonstration of having traveled from one particular time to another. So what do we mean by the term a particular time? In other words, how would we go about defining and identifying a particular time?
Correctly answering this question is the key not only to answering our question about time travel, but also the key to a greater understanding of the fundamental nature of time. As used in everyday talk, the phrase a particular time can serve a variety of purposes. For example, when we speak of The Age of Dinosaurs we mean a particular time roughly 200 million years earlier than our own. Similarly, we might speak of the American colonial period as being a particular time in the Earthʼs more recent history. Even yesterdayʼs dinner time might be a particular time worthy of revisiting in a time machine if such were possible. What is the common thread running through these various uses of the phrase? Let me suggest that the common thread is the fact that each serves as a convenient pointer or reference to some loosely defined configuration of a relatively small portion of the universe. When we speak of The Age of Dinosaurs, for example, our purpose is to refer to the rough configuration of one small part of the universe, the Earth, as it existed when our planet had made roughly 200 million fewer revolutions around the sun.
One interesting feature of that earlier configuration was the presence of large living creatures which we call dinosaurs. Many other features of the universe were also different at that particular time, but we typically focus on the presence of dinosaurs as being one especially noteworthy feature, and certainly one which distinguishes it from other particular times such as our own. Now let us ask how the particular time which we call The Age of Dinosaurs became the particular time which we call “today, or the present. The way it happened is amazingly simple; the various components which made up the universe in The Age of Dinosaurs subsequently have been rather dramatically rearranged, courtesy of the laws of physics, which clearly were fully functional even before they were discovered. The many bits and pieces of the universe which existed in The Age of Dinosaurs did not simply vanish. Quite the contrary, all the bits and pieces are still with us today. But they are arranged quite differently. It is reasonable to postulate, for example, that a calcium atom which once made up a tiny part of the tooth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex might today be a tiny part of one of my own teeth, or a part of one of yours. Or that a carbon atom which once resided on the tip of Cleopatraʼs eyelash may now reside on the tip of your eyelash, or perhaps it might be part of the salad you will have for dinner this evening. The configuration of the universe, is the arrangement of all its many bits and pieces relative to one another, is constantly changing.
As sentient beings, we are able to observe some of these changes; we are aware of our surroundings. In some particularly interesting cases, moreover, we may find it possible not only to observe the changes going on around us, but also to influence them, a fact which raises issues. Using our relatively recent and still imperfectly honed invention called language, we humans have come to refer to the changing configurations of the universe as “the flow of time. ” It is absolutely crucial to recognize here, and to point out explicitly, however, that the changes which we observe in the configuration of the universe are not caused by, and are not in any way a consequence of, the flow of time. Rather, the changes we observe (as well as those we donʼt observe) are the flow of time. If the configuration of the universe did not change, there would be no flow of time.
In conclusion if time travel was real the world we know today would not exist due to the fact
that someone will be trying to stop one bad phenomenon from happening causing a domino effect of many other time travelers to stop or continue the action causing a downfall to mankind. There are always two sides to a story and I do not believe in time travel as much as I want to travel back in time and win the lottery it is something that is far superior to anything mankind can ever do.
