The Misconception to Understand Time

Is time travel possible? Though there are many movies and books, it is a common thing to not believe or becoming confused that if this all idea of the special and general theory of relativity is correct. In this article, we will investigate for that reality and really understand if there is any chance that time travel is possible.

For that, we need to understand the time itself. Because there is a lot of misconception. Nearly everyone today (even including Physicists) have a very wrong idea about what Time Dilation is. Albert Einstein certainly first described the idea of The Time Dilation in his presentation of Special Theory Relativity. Einstein clearly realized that Time Dilation is merely a Perception and not actually a “real” process, but apparently he didn’t really explain it clearly enough for most others to understand this idea. And the general public was immediately fascinated with what they thought were “Implications” of a “Real Process”. But still, there are some real possibilities of time travel.

Understanding The Time in Reality

Since it’s simply a perceived situation, and it’s not really “Real” then all the various speculations that people have attributed to it are not possible. There is really a rather simple example which should prove to everyone Why Time Dilation is not a real process. Imagine that YOU have a giant telescope in your back yard, and you have it pointed at a star (and its planets) which are receding from us at enormous speed, 0.6 of the speed of light.

We all then agree that we would (apparently) see a guy on such a planet appear to be living very slowly, at 0.8 times the rate we would expect. Consider two things. Do you really believe that his life massively slowed down, just because you aimed a telescope at him? No. His life would continue as it always. The other thing is now to consider that he had a giant telescope in his backyard, and he carefully aimed it at you. He clearly can easily see that the Sun and Earth are receding from him at 0.6 of the speed of light. (His planet does not feel any effects of high-speed motion, in fact, he would not even feel any motion from his planet rotating on its axis, just like we Earthlings do not realize that we are “rotating” at around 700 mph. So, When he aimed his telescope at you, did your life slow down to 0.8 times as fast? No. Your life wouldn’t experience anything unusual at all.

Both of the guys would see the opposite guy seem to be aging at zero. as fast as himself. But neither of their lives was affected in the least. By the way, this also explains the logical approach that they both see the opposite guy showing to age very slowly. (Most people who don’t understand special theory of relativity (wrongly) right away claim that one or the other is truly aging more slowly. Shortly after Einstein had died, even some Physicists fell into this logical error, in publicly presenting a silly story called the Twins Paradox (which is totally wrong). And ever since, everyone discards all logic and they present all sorts of silly ideas which claim that Time Dilation is an actual process.

When did time start?

Time began when the first particle acquired mass. So this is a Higg’s field thing. Before the Higg’s field, all particles had no mass and relativity tells us that massless particles have to go at the speed of light and that particles going at the speed of light have a mathematically undefined time. Once at least one particle acquired mass then it would have to travel at less than lightspeed and then time would have a definition for it.

Is time travel possible in the future?

To find that the “Is time travel possible in the future” we need to understand some facts of strong gravitational object. Black holes are fascinating, in each attainable method, as well as the method that gets us to time travel. They are “Born” once stars “Die”, stars that are a minimum of three times more huge than our Sun. Now, every object in the Universe which is made of matter, from the smallest grain of dust to the most ginormous galaxy, has got mass. You can imagine “mass” as the property of mass to modify, stretch if you want, the space around it.

Visualize balls, some of them smaller, some bigger, that you can put on a very elastic surface, and watch them sinking on this surface. The more massive they are, the more they will deform that surface. Gravity is a direct consequence of that curving of the surface. And that is the key to travel time in the future.

But that surface isn’t just space, it’s space-time. The more an object is capable of deforming that mesh, the more it will deform time. Ordinary stars can be pretty massive, and have enough of an effect on space-time that if you could get close to them with a spaceship and then go back home to your family, you’ll find that the watch that you’re wearing and the one hanging on the wall in the kitchen is not synchronized anymore, by seconds or minutes, depending on the star and how close to it you dared to go. And for how long of course.

If you’ve got a very precise watch, you can measure this effect even just going to the moon and back. You’ll be measuring tiny fractions of a second difference, but that’s all you need to do to travel through time. Go somewhere where the gravity is stronger and you’ll effectively travel forward the future. Or escape from Earth’s gravity well and you’ll see your friends on Earth age terribly slightly slower than you. That’s exactly what happens to the astronauts in orbit in the ISS.

Now, let’s go extreme and back to black holes. Black holes aren’t more huge than the stars they originate from, actually a bit less (because the stars explode violently and lose the outer shell when they “die”). But, and this makes all the difference in the Universe, they are immensely denser than the original star. Basically infinitely dense. Most of the initial mass has been compressed into an infinitesimally little point. How can we visualize black holes using the same image of the balls on the elastic mesh? Imagine that instead of putting a ball as big as a soccer ball of the weight of 1 kg on an elastic sheet, we exert the same force of 1 kilogram using a long needle, or, like in the next image, a small metallic ball made from an ultra-dense metal.

The force is the same but it acts far more powerfully on the realm instantly around the point where the ball is touching the mesh.

What happens if you take your spaceship and go where the mesh is deformed violently? You’ll experience a much more extreme time-dilation. For every second you spend there, so many seconds or minutes may pass away on Earth, and therefore the extent of the time dilation will increase or decrease a lot simply with the small movements towards the lowest of the pit or faraway from it. You might zap there along with your super quick ship, orbit for maybe half-hour, just the time to arrange a cup of tea and sip it calmly, zap back home and notice that simply within the time you were having tea, your smart little brothers have done an entire semester at college (this, only if you’ll avoid going beyond the point of no return, called event horizon. After you pass that, there’s nothing in the Universe that can make you see your family again).

In all of these cases, you’ll be traveling to the future. There is no known mechanism in the Universe which isn’t wildly speculative that could make you go back to the past. No way to recover the time you have been away from your family. As you can see we haven’t mentioned wormholes yet. Because they are not necessary at this point since black holes are all you need to travel to the future.

And for other reasons, wormholes are only theoretical fact, again wildly speculative. They are sort of a stretch of the laws of modern physics that we know, but nobody really believes that they can exist and if they exist nobody thinks that they could be actually useful. And, they actually would not even occur naturally, hanging around black holes. We would have to produce them ourselves, using preposterous amounts of energy.

Is time travel possible in the past?

Our universe has four dimensions at least. Let’s know is time travel possible in the past through any whole of four dimensions. Three of space one of time. And we know that we can rotate/trade space with time by changing our velocity. That is the consequence of special relativity. But general relativity says that the geometry of space is not necessary euclidean. Space and time can be warped by gravity.

So consider a spinning black hole. It is known to drag space around with it the consequence of its spin. This dragging of space alters the direction of time with respect to the dimensions of space so that they are no longer orthogonal (at right angles to each other). If no longer orthogonal moving through space in the vicinity of such an aberration would also as a simple consequence of geometry result in movement through time. Moving in the widening direction of this angle would cause the time to advance faster while moving in the opposite direction would cause it to slow.

Now, if the spin was enough to cause this angle to become sufficiently far from orthogonal, one could slow time enough to reverse it without exceeding the speed of light. This would, in theory, permit one to move backward in time.

However, there is a big problem with time travel to the past. At the instant when you changed directions in time you would collide with yourself moving forward in time. Traveling backward in time you’d behave like antimatter colliding with you the instant before who was matter. So you wouldn’t succeed in this venture of yours, but you would go out in a blaze of glory.

Conclusion

Finally, Is Time Travel Possible in the future or past? We all move forward in time at the rate of one second per second. Our experience of the length of a second can vary in relation to motion or gravitations forces according to the Theory of Relativity. Other than that variation, we can’t stop in time, or go backward, or go forward faster. Of course, this means that, according to what most people expect, time travel is not possible just like we see in movies.