Understanding Time Travel

Time is but an illusion. We as humans, hopelessly attempt to classify such an elusive idea. So what is time anyways? It is just an idea that we humans cooked up to maintain stability within our society, otherwise a section of our lives would be overcome by chaos and confusion. From the moment we are born, time becomes an integral idea in our minds. It almost becomes something of our identity in public. From our birth certificate, to our driver's license, our everyday activities, time is something we come to rely on as a constant in universe, and something that we cannot change, something that is dependable. But what if that constant could be broken?

The very concept of time is a complex idea that has been explored by the greatest scientists of the century. But through all their valiant efforts, it is something that we humans can only touch upon, constraining us to the basics of time and how we explain it.

Before we start to explore time travel, there is one crucial idea that you need to absorb. The inertial frame of reference states that everything only seems as it is through your eyes. For example, the Earth is currently moving at 1,000 miles per hour, along with everything else that is moving along with it. Yes, that means you and I are both moving at 1,000 miles per hour through space. So if you're moving that fast along with everything else besides you, everything will seem like it's not moving; that's the basic idea of the inertial frame of reference.

Time is based upon the belief that we humans see time through the variable of light. Since light is a wave, it refracts on most surfaces, and bounces back to our eyes as the source of the refraction or reflection. Now, say that I walk across a room. All the time, light is hitting me at infinite points in time; at point A, at point B, at point C, and so forth. Think of time as breaking down an action into an infinite number of actions, so that you are actually in an infinite number of places in time. Still with me? It's only going to get more complicated from here!

Ever wish you could freeze a moment? If you traveled at the speed of light, then you would be seeing the same thing over and over again. In the inertial frame of reference sense, because you are traveling so fast, everything would appear to stop before your eyes. Earlier, I used the analogy of walking across a room. Light is hitting me at infinite points in time, yet if I travel at the speed of light, then I would be seeing myself over and over again in that same position. The best example I can think of is the example of a clock. Say the time on the wall clock says it is currently 11:00. As light hits the clock, it would reflect back to my eyes the image of the 11:00 on the wall at one meter away, then two meters away, and so on until it hits my eyes at the speed of light. Now if I were to travel at the speed of light, if I moved away from the clock at the same time the 11:00 image hit me, then I would be seeing 11:00 over and over again as I moved away.

Now, how would you theoretically travel into the future? Remember how earlier in this article, I said that light is a variable of time? Well, let's say you could travel faster than the speed of light, then you would be seeing everything before the light hits them. Because we only see things as light hits them, you would actually be beating the light to the object, and be theoretically seeing things as they are in the future. Using the clock example again, earlier I said that you would be seeing 11:00 over and over again as you traveled at the speed of light. But if you traveled faster than the speed of light, then you could race past the 11:00 that reflected off the clock, and the 11:01, and the 11:02 of the future. So theoretically, you would be racing past all these images of the future, and actions that theoretically already happened, but you're just seeing them at an earlier stage.

Traveling into the past is not entirely out of the question, though this section of the article has little association to the previous means of travel through light. Wormholes are supposedly holes in our universe that lead to other parts of the universe or parallel universes. In a parallel universe, there may be another you leading another life. So if somehow we found a wormhole in the universe, it could possibly be the means to travel into the past. The wormhole would almost be like a portal of time where you could experience past and future parallel universes.

All of this is purely hypothetical. The energy required to accelerate our own body to light speed nears infinity. As light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, we would need a vehicle of some sort to be able to approach and withstand that kind of speed and force that comes from traveling at such a speed. And our top speed ever? 8,000 meters per second set by our space shuttles sent into space. We still have a very long way to go before we even reach a fraction of the speed that light travels at.

Yet despite all the theories, humans have already discovered a form of time travel. Shuttles that travel into space and then come back to Earth are found to have lost twelve minutes of time during their flight. Yes, this relates back to the inertial frame of reference. If Earth travels at a certain speed, and you step out of that frame of reference and travel another speed, you could in fact time travel in a way. We are all aging at the same rate because we all live on Earth and are moving at a certain speed. But if we were to leave that speed and travel another speed, we could age at different rates. Thus, you could in a way see the future through aging at a different rate than everything and everyone else around you.

Time, space, and light are all subjects that border on the edge of human understanding. Once you start to delve into the complexities of it all, alternate dimensions, the bending of time space fabric, all these issues become commonplace among the mysteries of the universe. It is something that we barely understand, yet something us humans like to fantasize about, because for all we know, someday time travel may be possible.