Time Travel: Fact or Fiction?

DALLAS, Tex. (TNA) – In H.G. Wells’ classic novel of 1895, "The Time Machine," an adventurous Londoner heads off into a dark future, where he clashes with cave-dwelling monsters, explores ruined cities and witnesses the final moments of life on Earth.

In the 1968 movie "Planet of the Apes," Charlton Heston’s character, Taylor the astronaut, arrives on a nightmarish world run by a ruthless race of talking gorillas. Only at the film’s climax, as he stumbles upon the broken remains of the Statue of Liberty, does Taylor realize with horror that he has not set foot on some far-off planet, after all. Rather, he is home, 2000 years in the future and after a worldwide holocaust has destroyed human civilization.

Then there is Michael J. Fox’s character, Marty McFly, who in the 1985 Hollywood comedy blockbuster "Back To The Future" travels through time to 1955, where he almost makes out with his then-teenaged mom, comes perilously close to wiping out his own existence as a result of his time traveling antics, and single-handedly invents rock 'n' roll.

And bringing matters up to date, last year’s box office smash hit "Déjà Vu," with Denzel Washington, told the story of government agents trying to solve a terrorist attack by using secret time travel technology to look into the past.
 
In other words, at least as far as mega-bucks movies and literary classics are concerned, the theme of time travel is a spectacularly successful one.

Tales of fictional time traveling heroes and strange futures aside, however: what of the real world? Is it possible that one day we might travel through time in much the same way that today we hop on a plane to take our yearly vacation?

"Time travel is not theoretically possible, for if it was they’d already be here telling us about it," British physicist Professor Stephen Hawking famously said a number of years ago.

And even if time travel did one day become a possibility, it would be beset by major problems, as Hawking notes: "Suppose it were possible to go off in a rocket ship, and come back before you set off. What would stop you blowing up the rocket on its launch pad, or otherwise preventing you from setting out in the first place? There are other versions of this paradox, like going back and killing your parents before you were born."

Mac Tonnies, author of the book "After the Martian Apocalypse," which is a study of the controversial "Face on Mars" mystery, believes he has the answer to the potential problems cited by Hawking.

"Stephen Hawking condemned time travel because, in his opinion, it should enable a constant stream of visitors from our own future. He assumes, perhaps unwisely, that we'd be aware of these visitors, when in truth it's remarkably easy to think of reasons our ancestors might choose not to visit at all," he said.

Tonnies continues: "Other physicists are at work refuting the paradox of going back in time and killing your parents before you are born. If they're right, a time traveler from the future could interact with others, including his or her past self, so long as no action was taken that would endanger the traveler's own continued existence. It's difficult to visualize how this might work, although the idea makes logical sense. Maybe the best analogy would be a physical system that relies on a principle of least action, such as a ball rolling inexorably downhill."

He further notes: "The fascinating upshot of this is that there's a chance we're indeed being visited by advanced beings from our own future, but their interactions with us would be necessarily limited lest they doom themselves to nonexistence."

Tonnies also wonders if the many UFO sightings that have been reported for decades may not be due to the actions of aliens from the other side of the galaxy, but the result of time-traveling humans masquerading as ET to keep secret their real point of origin.

"If time travel is possible," says Tonnies, "the behavior of UFOs may be at least partially explained: formal contact with us would result in a causality violation of some sort, so they must remain content with maintaining their presence behind a curtain of subterfuge."

And if we are indeed being visited by time travelers from the future, then surely the biggest question is: how are they getting here?

One possibility is by what is known in physics as wormholes, a term coined in 1957 by theoretical physicist John Wheeler.

The wormhole is basically a shortcut through both space and time, and although firm evidence for the existence of these so-called “time tunnels” has not yet been firmly proven, they do not fall outside of the boundaries presented in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Indeed, in 1988, Kip Thorne, a gravitational theorist at the California Institute of Technology, demonstrated that wormholes – if they existed – could be kept open by using what is known as Casimir energy, or exotic matter. The Casimir Effect is based upon a force that is exerted as a result of the energy fields that exist in the space between objects.

And, of course, if such exotic matter could be harnessed and controlled, then for our time traveler of the future, taking a trip into the past via a wormhole may be relatively commonplace.

Jenny Randles, the author of a number of books on time travel, including "Breaking the Time Barrier," "Time Storms," and "Time Travel: Fact, Fiction & Possibility," offers a cautionary view on traveling through time: "The ability to manipulate time would provide a dictator with the ultimate doomsday device: allowing one to change the past or adapt the future until it suited his or her own ends."

And as Randles perceptively notes: "Human society will face many difficult questions when that first time machine is switched on. Like the first moon landing, the discovery of time travel will change our world."

The idea of time travel fascinates us because it offers us the possibility, however remote, of revisiting and recapturing a moment from our youth: the very first time we got laid, the day we bought our first car, that special night when we first got the chance to chug down a long, cold one.

And, if time travelers from our future are secretly visiting us already – as Tonnies suggests as a possibility – at least it shows we have a future!