I Believe in Time Travel

“You’re not serious?”
Wyoming Longhorn. Copyright by WyoJones. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

June did not treat me kindly and so far July, well, it has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, Lost Valyr released and I managed to get the Embrace the Passion: Pets in Space 3 preorder going with only several glitches. I’m behind on writing the latest Big Uneasy book, our moving truck is missing in action (or would that be inaction), and I just want to curl up and read someone else’s book.

Don’t ask me why this all makes me ponder time travel. Perhaps I’m seeking a redo? There is a part of me that believes time travel is possible, but I’ll be the first to admit that the reality of time travel is befuddled. Some scientists don’t think it’s possible at all. There are two types of time travel—to the future and to the past.

Many scientists believe we can travel to the future since Einstein showed us that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. So if we are traveling in space near the speed of light, and come back to earth, we would then be in the future on earth. We would have time traveled. Also, the theory of general relativity shows that gravity can bend time. So, if we’re by the edge of a source of gravity like a black hole, time will slow down for us, so when we return to Earth, we’ll be in the future.

However, most scientists believe that we cannot travel to the past. But, there are those that consider wormholes a possible way of traveling to the past.  They’re like a shortcut through a tunnel, and if we go through a wormhole that is near a black hole we’ll travel in time, one direction takes us to the past and the other to the future.

Again, these are theories only. Moreover, we can’t power any kind of time machine to travel that way with our current technology, it would require negative energy or the energy of a star.

Another theory for traveling to the past or future is cosmic strings—thin energy tubes that stretch across the universe. With the great mass they hold, the strings can warp the space-time surrounding them. If two of these strings were aligned a certain way they could bend space-time, which would let us travel through time.

Time has a huge effect on our everyday lives. To us, time always faces forward. But in physics, which governs the behavior of the Universe, it doesn’t matter if time runs forward or backward. Decoherence is the point where particles transition from being ruled by the arrow of time to being governed by the directionless laws of the Universe. And when we run gravity measurements through the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which predicts when the seams between quantum and classical mechanics are erased due to gravity, the math doesn’t explain how time’s forward-moving direction actually emerges. This indicates that time’s arrow is subjective, determined by the observer, which is us.

To sum it all up, when it comes to time they’re a lot of theories and opinions. As far as time travel goes, we may be able to do it one day, but we simply aren’t there yet. And I keep looking around for someone to show up from the future and tell me they did it. I will admit that the chances of a time traveler coming to ME is pretty remote. LOL

But I reserve the right to live in hope. 🙂

Perilously yours,

Pauline