Time Travel
For an observer, in a four dimensionsal space time that has three dimensions of space, and one dimension of time, time is sequential and appears to move forward; but is it reversible?
Most natural laws are "reversible" apart from entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder that requires a time-forward direction. As time moves forward, entropy (chaos) increases.
How fast would one need to move in order for time to appear to move backward?
There was a young lady of Wight,
Who traveled much faster than light,
She departed one day,
In a relative way,
And arrived on the previous night.
–A. H. Reginald Buller
According to current knowledge, time travel requires an infinite source of energy to accelerate an object faster than the Speed of Light (SOL,c).
The light that shines from stars takes light years to reach an observer on Earth. So, when
you look up at the sky, you see events that happened in the past.
Space and time are bound. If space is dimensional, time is dimensional. If time is
dimensional, it can be traveled, even if only at a rate of 60 seconds per minute moving forward, here on Earth; Or 1000 minutes per second relative to the moon.
Traveling to Mars could take an astronaut 128 to 333 days. Once the astronaut arrived, they would exist in the future relative to the Earth because a second on Mars is shorter than a second on Earth.
However, if a person from Earth could observe an astronaut on Mars, they would be looking back in time (~14 mins into the past).
The firmament is a window of time that allows us to peer into the past and the future.
If time were infinite, there would be no beginning or end. The past would be endless, and the sky would be filled with light from an endless number of stars that always existed.
If time existed without space, it would be an infinite loop, and the limit of time placed on
space would not exist. If space and time were not bound, space would infinitely expand in
timelessness. There would be no change or transformation, a paramount process that defines life.
According to Einstein, “the distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” The perception of time can vary depending on the experience of a moment. As Einstein explains with simplicity, “sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute; sit on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like many hours.That's relativity”.
If time is just another dimension in space, traversable in either direction, then the human perception of a moment passing, is nothing more than an experience of the mind. While some scientists may argue that time is an illusion, in terms of what it means for existence, physicists do not doubt that time exists as a measurable, observable phenomenon.
“Time is paramount, and the experience we all have of reality being in the present moment, is not an illusion, but the deepest clue we have to the fundamental nature of reality.” – Dr. Lee Smolin, Physicist
If time is an illusion, the future is just as concluded as the past, which changes our
understanding of human consciousness and free will. If the end is already written, then the things that make us human, like the ability to make decisions, are also an illusion.
While Einstein’s theories appear to make time travel difficult and as relevant as sneaking
a peak at the end of a book (if traveling to the future), time travel is theoretically possible with the exceedance of the SOL (c) or breaking free from the illusion of time.
How fast would one have to travel to break free from the illusion of time? Approximately
300,000 km/s or 670,000,000 mph. To put this velocity in perspective, it is equivalent to
traveling at Mach 900,000 (a 747 jet travels just under Mach I, which is the speed of sound).
However, the concept of time as an illusion is more philosophical and theoretical than physical, and it doesn't lend itself to a solution as straightforward as achieving a certain velocity to "escape" the illusion. In theoretical physics, particularly in discussions related to the nature of time, the idea that time is an illusion reflects the notion that our perception of time flowing from the past to the present into the future might not accurately reflect the true nature of time.
For instance, in the block universe theory of relativity, all points in time (past, present, future) exist simultaneously, and the flow of time is an emergent property of consciousness or a feature of the universe that humans perceive subjectively. This interpretation is derived from how relativity treats time as a dimension that's intertwined with the three spatial dimensions, forming the four-dimensional spacetime continuum.
In such a framework, moving through time in a way that would allow someone to "escape" the illusion of its flow would not be about speed in the conventional sense but would require mechanisms or phenomena such as wormholes or cosmic strings.
Additionally, if the SOL is the ultimate speed limit in the universe according to relativity, than no object with mass can reach or exceed this speed. Therefofe, escaping the "illusion" of time requires transcending physical laws as we know them.
But what if there was another explanation? What if life doesn't exist in a four dimensional spacetime? What if time is not a unidimensional, chronological sequence from past to future but a three-dimensional construct that parallels the three dimensions of space, forming a six-dimensional framework of the universe?
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