Time travel is such an awe inspiring aspect of our imaginations that we can’t help but ask the question, Is it possible? The achievements of man in the twentieth century might lead man to believe that anything that we set our minds to is possible. We have mastered the laser, nuclear energy and even our own DNA, but is time travel really possible? It certainly seems that some people have been given the gift of prophecy. The ability to see into the future or even determine whats happened in the past might seem to verify proof that time travel might actually be possible. After all if we can travel back and forth in time to view events in the future or the past, there must be a medium that allows us to physically achieve the same result right? Unfortunately this theory just doesn’t hold water.
Lets look first at how we might interpret the past or the future. It might seem strange at first but the fact is that the past is written down. Biologically, atomicly and even in text books our past is recorded in an unmistakeable flow of physical phenomena. We can trace these events simply by back tracing the steps that must have led to the present. We do this in the physical world by looking at the evidence to determine how a particular situation or phenomena might have evolved. For instance a geologist might look at the current weathering patterns to gain a probability of how the past might have weathered certain areas of terrain. A more relatable explination would be a simple set of foot prints in the snow. We can determine the path a person might have taken by the evidence left behind. The fact is that everything under the sun leaves those footprints for us to decode and unravel the events of the past. The future is a prediction based on probabilities of whats happened in the past and knowledge of the current flow of events. A simple example of decoding a future event is something we’ve all experienced in our daily lives. How many of us have watched our children make the same mistakes that we did and knowing the outcome of our own experience we predict the events of the future. Unfortunately all too often we turn out to be right.
These examples however are all based on phenomena that are strictly contained within physical reality. Time travel on the other hand requires us to actually stop the current flow of events in the physical world and reverse them or speed them up. Even if we gain the technology to transcend current space and time ourselves, this ability does not stop the physical flow of reality in the world we left behind. Though time itself would stop for the person who removes himself from the physical world by whatever means is possible he does not change the physical reality of the rest of the world other than to be missing from it. That person might very well be able to better asses the events of the world by gaining an “outsiders” view of it, but unless the universe itself takes this same coarse the person outside of it will only be able to return to the present reality of that space and time. The person himself may be able to change his own physical reality through this journey, possibly not aging or even getting younger as he transcends the speed of light but unfortunately this does not change the reality of the world he left behind. This makes it theoretically impossible for someone to go back in time and change the events of the world he left. The reason for this is that if the world made the same journey all things would also stop aging or even reverse, thus everything would go back in time and once resumed all things would simply return to the same direction and flow that they were in before the journey took place. Generally what this means to us is that it takes an act of GOD to change the events of our world. In my oppinion thats a good thing because we would most definately mess it up!
