The 1895 novel The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was instrumental in moving the concept of time travel to the forefront of the public imagination, but the earlier short story, "The Clock That Went Backward" by Edward Page Mitchell, involves a clock that, by means unspecified, allowed three men to travel backwards in time.[1][2] Non-technological forms of time travel had appeared in a number of earlier stories such as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Historically, the concept dates back to the early mythologies of Hinduism (such as the Mahabharata). More recently, with advancing technology and a greater scientific understanding of the universe, the plausibility of time travel has been explored in greater detail by science fiction writers, philosophers, and physicists.
Charles Dickens' 1843 book A Christmas Carol is considered by some[16] to be one of the first depictions of time travel in both directions, as the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is transported to Christmases past, present and yet to come. However, these might be considered mere visions rather than actual time travel, since Scrooge only viewed each time-period passively, unable to interact with them.
Some theories, most notably special and general relativity, suggest that suitable geometries of spacetime or specific types of motion in space might allow time travel into the past and future if these geometries or motions were possible.[24] In technical papers, physicists generally avoid the commonplace language of "moving" or "traveling" through time ("movement" normally refers only to a change in spatial position as the time coordinate is varied), and instead discuss the possibility of closed timelike curves, which are worldlines that form closed loops in spacetime, allowing objects to return to their own past. There are known to be solutions to the equations of general relativity that describe spacetimes which contain closed timelike curves (such as Gödel spacetime), but the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain.
Some theories, most notably special and general relativity, suggest that suitable geometries of spacetime or specific types of motion in space might allow time travel into the past and future if these geometries or motions were possible.[24] In technical papers, physicists generally avoid the commonplace language of "moving" or "traveling" through time ("movement" normally refers only to a change in spatial position as the time coordinate is varied), and instead discuss the possibility of closed timelike curves, which are worldlines that form closed loops in spacetime, allowing objects to return to their own past. There are known to be solutions to the equations of general relativity that describe spacetimes which contain closed timelike curves (such as Gödel spacetime), but the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain.
Presentism vs. eternalism[edit]
The relativity of simultaneity in modern physics favors the philosophical view known as eternalism or four-dimensionalism (Sider, 2001), in which physical objects are either temporally extended spacetime worms, or spacetime worm stages, and this view would be favored further by the possibility of time travel (Sider, 2001). Eternalism, also sometimes known as "block universe theory", builds on a standard method of modeling time as a dimension in physics, to give time a similar ontology to that of space (Sider, 2001). This would mean that time is just another dimension, that future events are "already there", and that there is no objective flow of time. This view is disputed by Tim Maudlin in his The Metaphysics Within Physics.Presentism is a school of philosophy that holds that neither the future nor the past exist, and there are no non-present objects. In this view, time travel is impossible because there is no future or past to travel to. However, some 21st-century presentists have argued that although past and future objects do not exist, there can still be definite truths about past and future events, and thus it is possible that a future truth about a time traveler deciding to travel back to the present date could explain the time traveler's actual appearance in the present.[75][76]
Relativity predicts that if one were to move away from the Earth at relativistic velocities and return, more time would have passed on Earth than for the traveler, so in this sense it is accepted that relativity allows "travel into the future" (according to relativity there is no single objective answer to how much time has really passed between the departure and the return, but there is an objective answer to how much proper time has been experienced by both the Earth and the traveler, i.e., how much each has aged; see twin paradox). On the other hand, many in the scientific community believe that backwards time travel is highly unlikely. Any theory that would allow time travel would introduce potential problems of causality. The classic example of a problem involving causality is the "grandfather paradox": what if one were to go back in time and kill one's own grandfather before one's father was conceived? But some scientists believe that paradoxes can be avoided, by appealing either to the Novikov self-consistency principle or to the notion of branching parallel universes (see the 'Paradoxes' section below).
Time travel to the past is theoretically allowed using the following methods:[30]
- Travelling faster than the speed of light
- The use of cosmic strings and black holes
- Wormholes and Alcubierre drive
Daniel Greenberger and Karl Svozil proposed that quantum theory gives a model for time travel without paradoxes.[71][72] The quantum theory observation causes possible states to 'collapse' into one measured state; hence, the past observed from the present is deterministic (it has only one possible state), but the present observed from the past has many possible states until our actions cause it to collapse into one state. Our actions will then be seen to have been inevitable.
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