How to Build a Time Machine - It wouldn't be easy, but it might be possible

Scientific American ^ | September 2002 issue | By Paul Davies

[Joe Hadenuf]

Outstanding article!

[abishai]

"No participating in D-day or Pickett's Charge... In short, no fun at all."

Don't get me wrong, I honor the men who did both. I just don't think it was a real hoot for them.

[Consort]

Time travel is not time dependent. Once it is developed in any time period, it can be made available to any other time pariod in history. Thus, time travel exists "now".

[Cogadh na Sith]

Heck, I time travel every single night.

I lie down and close my eyes and like magic, it's hours later. I have no recollection of this, but my wife says I'm unconscious and making funny noises.

It sounds funny, but what if our brains are simply filtering through all possible events and manufacturing causality for us as a survival mechanism?

Each person's 'causal reality' that their brains create are very nearly similar simply by virtue of the fact that we are human and conscious.

The reason no one can grasp 'time' and all this 'chronological protection' nonsense come up, I think, is because it doesn't exist outside of our own heads.

[Freemyland]

OK, that was spit all over myself funny.

[PoorMuttly]

So...I take it that I shouldn't have thrown my old one out last week?

[TrappedInLiberalHell]

We are seeing stars as they were years and years ago (even our own Sun only shows us what it looked like eight minutes ago). So, all we need to do is invent faster-than-light travel, book it on out to some spot X light-years from Earth, and invent a super-high-powered telescope to observe events on Earth as they occurred X years ago! Want to witness Hiroshima? Just go about 57 light-years away and point your telescope at Japan!

This idea has always seemed more plausible to me than actually travelling back in time. Of course, considering that we don't even have the technology to view the flag we planted on the moon, from telescopes on Earth, this is pretty far-fetched too. Not to mention cloud cover on Earth obscuring events in the past, and forget about anything important that happened at night.

It occurred to me that visiting the past will never happen on Earth, because if it were possible, we probably would have been visited by someone from the future by now. Maybe. Damn, this stuff gives me a headache!

[ward_of_the_state]

That made my head hurt. I'm gonna go watch Bill Nye the Science Guy now....that's more on my level of scientific understanding.

[Freemyland]

ANd when one is invented, Algore will use it to go back in time and really invent the internet.

[PoorMuttly]

Hmmmm...LAST week...

I have a plan. It involves instant coffee.

[AFreeBird]

But if Kirk sold them and McCoy bought them, who made them?

I believe they were 18th century American "very rare" (in the 20th century)... made long before Kirk pawned them. McCoy bought or aquired them in what the 24th century? So they had 300 years to travel to whereever McCoy got them.

[11B3]

The article forgets that there's more to physics than relativistic theory - Quantum.

In quantum, all things exist simultaneously, the only way we differentiate our lives (as well as linear time) is that our point of observation along our quantum path moves in a linear fashion. In quantum, the ability to travel in time only requires that you move your obsrvation point rather than the entire universe.

[Cogadh na Sith]

Yeah, see my post #24 above...

You're not too stupid for an 11 bang-bang--are ya...

[Come get it]

If time travel into the past is theoretically possible, and if it will ever be done in the future, then that means that people that are here now may be from the future. We are currently in their past, so they could be coming back to change things here.

Since we don't see people now who are from the future, then we can assume that we won't ever be able to travel in time.

[SGCOS]

Marty McFly helps out his friend Doc Brown, and ends up being taken back in time by Doc's time-machine. Marty, a boy of the 80's, has to come to grips with being in the 50's and get his parents to fall in love to set straight the damage his presence has done to the events of the past.

[asformeandformyhouse]

Didn't I read this article already tomorrow?

[TrappedInLiberalHell]

Didn't I read this article already tomorrow?

Yes, you did. And you will. Call it 'deja view'.

[techcor]

Bump. "How can you be in two places at once, when you're not anywhere at all?"-sung.

[TrappedInLiberalHell]

Bump. "How can you be in two places at once, when you're not anywhere at all?"-sung.

The same way Bill Clinton can talk out of both sides of his mouth and say nothing at all.

[Sir Gawain]

Crucially, no theory supports the possibility of traveling into the deep past, only into a past where an already constructed wormhole awaits.

All we have to do is find and stabilize a naturally occurring wormhole that exists in the deep past. Simple!