A very easy question to answer.
Since time does not exist, we cannot travel in it.(See articles on relativity and time).
It is a great romance to try to imagine traveling back in time.
Theoretically, if one goes into space, and goes even to the moon, or much further, say in the proposed MARS trip, he has traveled through time BACKWARD for by real time measuring, when he returns, he is YOUNGER by some fraction of his distance in space(Einstein E =MC squared).
But since time is an imaginary system, he has not really traveled in time, but has traveled and had his trip notated by the quantum time system.
There is no doubt that since the beginning of thinking, probably about 5,000 years, when man had set up the idea that his life progressed from birth to death in a series of things we called hours, minutes, seconds, and days, weeks, months and years, he has crawled into his bed at night and thought,”Gee , wouldn’t I like to go back sixty years and see my Mama again?” or, on a more scientific level, “I would like very much to go back and spy on Newton as that apple fell on his head and ask him about what he was thinking.”
Much more interesting things than Newton are the subject of time travel…an interesting book of the middle ages caused its writer to be executed by the church. He had written a fictional story about going back and seeing Jesus as a person.
Many mentally disturbed persons have presented cases of travel back for religious reasons, to see if the realities proposed by the churches were true…many other s have claimed to go back and interview nobles or famous personages, mostly in the form of ‘dreams”.
H. G. Wells was the author of the TIME MACHINE in which a dopey professor makes a large sphere which has levers and controls, including a large scale that shows you the years spinning by as you go back to your chosen year or day or whatever.
That book was made into movies about five times. One of the first movies ever made by MELIES indicated time travel.
What a pleasure it would be for a person to go back and see an event or go back and see if that damned thing called history was true!
Many people would want to explore their own family backgrounds and I think, many would be terribly troubled if they went a long way back!
Let’s explore the science of ‘time’ and see why we cannot even dream of time travel,in either direction, back, or forward.
The simple answer is that time of course does not exist. It is not a dimension. It does not have form, nor odor, nor can it be tasted. It is simply a system set up some five or six thousand years ago so man could keep track of his days, weeks, months, years, hours, minutes, and seconds. Now , also nanoseconds!
Man is a very romantic creature, even man’s scientists. They look at the impossible and think and think and think and sometimes, the impossible is achieved.
BUT, the starting point for all of those achievements has been dimension…the thing to be achieved has to have weight, smell, and exist as something.
But time is only a term of what we spend every day and its language is that of our control on days, nights, hours, minutes, seconds, years and so forth.
Think about it.
Your own first contact with time was very probably the first learning about a clock when you were, lets say, four years old. Its big importance for you then was probably associating it with your food, and when you woke up, amd perhaps when your Mom,or Dad would appear.
But you couldn’t, even when you got much older, put ‘time’ in a sack, you couldn’t weight it, taste it, or roll it up in a ball, because it doesn’t exist.
I wrote a novel soeme years ago about a man who finds an exotic drug while in a lost and deep jungle. He brings it back to civilization, and tries to find its purpose.
After much phony lab work, he finds that if you take it, you grow YOUNGER. So he takes a LOT of it, and finds that every MONTH he is a month younger. That’s OK from his age of 65 to age 25, but he starts worrying at that point: what will happen when he gets to the tiny baby stage? Will he evaporate or become a fetus?
My answer was of course he finally finds an antidote, and he returns to his somewhat happy age of sixty-five, or “normality”.
But my publisher would not accept the story. “You can’t travel in time” he stated, sending me back the manuscript,”because time does not exist!”
He was right.
The only hope for the scientists and pseudoscientists and dreamers who would like to go back and shake hands with Jefferson and ask him for advice for our present world. is a very slim possibility that there is a Fourth Dimension…it,too, has been piped by the dreamers and used as an excuse for Time Travel.
But, alas, we have not yet discovered that Fourth Dimension, and must be content with the three we have.
If that Fourth Dimension DID turn out to be TIME ITSELF, would we be able to enter it, and speed back or forward, and would we be able to get out of it and into Three Dimensions when we reahed the place or person that we had intended to see in our travel?
Its a moot question, for for the present, we must be content with Three Dimensions and Time that decrees us if we are lucky, three score and twenty.
Perhaps thas TIME enough without travel!
