Is Time Travel Really Possible?

On October 31, 2009 in Uncategorized

As a scientist (though not a physicist) I sometimes ponder “is time travel possible?”. The answer is, of course, I have no idea. Perhaps it is.

There are many time travel theories. On one hand if it were possible to journey backwards in time, would we not be surrounded by thousands of people from many centuries into the distant future who have come to say hello? Then again, why should they visit today when they have a virtually unlimited number of eras to view instead.

Besides, maybe they are in fact here? Maybe it is possible to journey to our time, but there are limitations? Time travel movies often play a lot with these concepts, with the complex connection between cause and effect, past and future.

One such excellent example is the movie Timecrimes. Although a large percentage of it is predictable and can be said to fall into the standard time travel genre, at some stage during the middle of the movie it breaks from that and begins asking questions that aren’t often investigated: what is cause and what is effect? It does so in a very effective and mesmerizing manner, and when I left the cinema I couldn’t help but wonder why so few movies deal with those fascinating ideas.

In most movies that deal with time travel one of the following scenarios may occur:
(a) The protagonist may travel back in time and change something and create a paradox (these stories tend to contradict themselves almost every single time).
(b) The hero may go back in time only to find out he can’t alter anything - he is a part of history.
(c) The protagonist may journey back in time only to investigate an historical era (in a sense, this needn’t be a sci-fi movie).
(d) The protagonist may travel to the future - in a way this is not a time travel movie but rather a futuristic movie (think ‘Buck Rogers’ - an astronaut gets frozen for 5 centuries and wakes up in the far future).

All these are thought provoking notions. Until they are resolved by science, I will enjoy whatever films and books are written about the subject despite any (obvious) flaws.

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