Time Travel
By Adam Maillet

Time Travel is a hotly debated subject, which for years was known only as science fiction. It has been laughed at, dismissed as merely science fiction, and not even considered to be truth by many scientists throughout history. However, in recent years the study of Time Travel has become science fact, not fiction. Many theories exist to truth of time travel.

First, it has been proven that time, is not static. It is however warped and distorted by both mass and speed. Therefore, the faster an object is moving, the slower time passes. This was proven in 1975 by Professor Carol Allie of the University of Maryland. She loaded on atomic clock into an aircraft, and has another perfectly synchronized identical clock remained on the ground. When the plane landed a few hours later, the atomic clock was found to be slightly slower than the clock that remained on the ground. This experiment has been tested many times, and has always yielded the same results (Time Travel "Brian"). Many would argue that time only seemed to go slower, but in actuality time itself was warped by the speed of the plane.

A similar thought experiment is thus: A man leaves in a spaceship traveling at speeds close to the speed of light, he returns to the Earth twenty years later, yet the man has only aged twenty minutes. This is because only twenty minutes went by in the spaceship, and twenty years went by on the earth. The man did not simply seem to be experiencing only twenty minutes, he only experienced twenty minutes of time. The idea that time is static and is the same for everyplace in the universe and all speeds in the universe is a common misconception and must be overcome. Time is warped just as the geodescents of space are warped.

By this theory it is possible to travel into the future by simply traveling at speeds close to the speed of light, therefore time on earth would go by at a rapid pace and time in our spaceship would only go by for a few minutes. This idea was illustrated in the famous movie "Planet of the Apes". This idea could also be applied to the problem of traveling great distances in space, that is we could never travel to another galaxy because our lifespan would run out in the time it would take to get there. However, if we travel fast enough we could theoretically travel thousands of light years in only a few minutes. While this is theoretically possible, it is not the only way time travel can be accomplished.

A wormhole is a warp in space-time that connects two separate time and spaces. A person goes through life, and by mass and speed is ever so slightly warping the space-time continuum. Einstein believed that great masses such as dark matter and black holes could warp time so much it could fold back onto itself. Think of a railroad track, now think of a giant that took the railroad track and bent it so that it formed a loop, a person could travel along it, but end up in a place before they started, now apply this to time and we have the basis of a wormhole. Now we would be able to travel backwards as well as forwards in time, without the use of a spaceship traveling at super speeds.

Time travel into the past raises an entire new set of questions, know as paradoxes. Say you traveled back in time and met your father, however because of something you did in the past, your father never met your mother, and you were never born. You exist so you have had to have been born sometime, so what happened? Another paradox is if you were to travel back into time and give yourself the answers to a test you were taking, you could then pass the test without thinking, but what would happen when the time came for you to give the answers to yourself in the past, if you decide you don't need to travel back into time because you already passed the test, then how do you get the answers?

I have two possible answers to the question, the first is that time is set and changing the past will have no effect on the future because the future only arrived because of events in the past. Therefore it wouldn't matter if you changed something in the past because events were at rest and that's just the way time goes. According to this it would be impossible to go back into time and alter it so you were never born, your trip to the past had already happened, you had already visited the past though you didn't know it, and your trip would never alter the future because your trip had already happened and things came out the way they are in the present, simple right? For example, if somebody wanted to go back into time and assassinate Hitler, this would not be possible, because if it was, and they accomplished this feat, Hitler wouldn't have existed in the first place and we wouldn't know about him. So if I tried to go back and assassinate him, it would be impossible for me to do so. I would inevitably fail in one way or another because I had already been there in the past and Hitler was still alive in his time.

The second is that there are alternate universes that exist, known as multiverses. The universe we know is only one part in a near infinite number of possibilities for every situation in every time that could be altered even the slightest bit. The number of universes would be a number so large no human or machine could comprehend or express. By traveling back in time I could change the future of another universe, but not my own. That universe would be a mirror of ours yet have one of the many possible differences that could arise. So if I went back in time and made it so I was not born, I was not affected because in my universe I was born, but in this new universe I would not exist.

The next step is actually being able to create a wormhole. To do so you would have to have two identical machines that could generate a force equal to that of an exploding sun, then move one of the objects to another place and time. Space and time would be so distorted you could simply walk into the tear and appear at the other gate. If these machine could be created then why do we not have them now? Shouldn't we travel back into time and give them to ourselves to speed up the production of technology infinitely? There are more than one answer. The first is that we have no way to travel back into the past where there are no wormhole creators, without the use of a wormhole creator. So when the first wormhole was manufactured that would be the farthest back into time you could travel. Maybe the power of time travel is too great to be trusted to our world and the future knows this, and for this reason they have decided not to trust our highly unstable society with the responsibly of time travel, a responsibility that could cause cataclysmic destruction.

Time travel one of the most exciting topics in science today, which is slowly becoming reality. Before you judge the legitimacy of time travel remember that in 1000 A.D. flying seemed impossible, in 1500 a combustion engine was impossible to conceive, in 1900 to send a man into space was laughable, and in 1950 the idea that computers could be as big as your hand, that almost every house would have one, and there would be a giant network connecting everyone to everyone else and allow them access to almost every piece of information ever thought up in the history of man, was not even considered. Time travel is a reality and one day may be no more different than driving a car.

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