Time travel

From TinWiki.org

Time travel is the ability to move forward or backwards through time, at will. Doing this would make the person or entity involved, a time traveler. There are many different theories on how one might move through time, however science pretty much rules out the means to do so. While time travel is one of the staples of science fiction, one of the biggest problems with time travel is often overlooked. And that is the motion of matter through space, over time. For example, if a time traveler wanted to travel to this time yesterday, he or she must also take into consideration the point on the Earth's surface movement through space. Since yesterday, the Earth has rotated on its axis, has moved around the sun, has rotated around the center of the galaxy and so on. If a time traveler does not account for this motion, they will end up in empty space.

1 Problems
2 Real possibilities
3 In popular culture
4 External Links
5 Related Discussion Threads on AboveTopSecret.com

[edit]

Problems

H. G. Wells The Time Machine.

The main problem with time travel is when and where would you end up. If you are to go back in time approximately 3 billion years, the world will be a much different place, and more importantly the planet as a whole would be much smaller. So now that we can say that the planet is smaller, we can start to think about the effects of this. A day may not be 24 hours, a years may not be 365 days. Which means when the traveler thought he or she was going back 3 billion years, they may have gone back 3.5 billion years or more from the effects of the mass of our planet. So if you manage to calculate the growing mass of a planet and so on, you can start to predict the correct amount of years to go to. Now we hit the problem of, you might end up in a Volcano or you might end up in the middle of a rock, or worse in space; that is a problem with no obvious way of getting around. How can you tell where you will end up ?

[edit]

Real possibilities

At one point time travel was just thought of as science fiction, nothing more than a dream. But with more recent scientific breakthroughs we are starting to see that it may come true. With a new phenomenon called Time Dilation it has been given hope. Time Dilation is the effect of time being slowed down. This has been proven by the Hafele-Keating Experiment.

The Hafele-Keating experiment was conducted in October 1971. Four Cesium atomic clocks were flown on two planes, one of which was heading eastward the other, westward. The plan was to fly the clocks around and then compare then to the clock at the U.S Naval Observatory, they had all be set at the said time down to the nano-second. When all the clocks were compared, the two in the air had gained 0.15 microseconds, which in theory tells us that time travel may be possible.

[edit]