Time Travel Paradox

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The only thing that has a chance of realistically going back in time is electromagnetic energy. Particles of both matter and anti-matter would experience friction upon acceleration toward the speed of light. This friction would come from contact with other particles in their path. There exists a point where the force of friction would essentially break the substructure, causing the particles to revert back to the electromagnetic energy that they were created from. Sure, you could move the particles into outer space to reduce the friction that they would encounter. But, outer space is still not a perfect vacuum, so a small amount of friction from the few particles floating around would always exist. As the target particle speeds up towards the speed of light, this friction force would still increase to the breaking point (well below the speed of light).

This “death of particles” effect potentially occurs in the inside of black holes. The gravity force pulls the particles towards the center once it has past the event horizon. At a certain threshold limit, the gravity force literally pulls the particles apart into electromagnetic energy. If the gravity force is strong enough, as in a super massive back hole, it may pull the electromagnetic energy past the speed of light limit. But, that is pure speculation and would be nearly impossible to test for.

Time travel is kinda like absolute zero. We can see it would be cool to do, but sadly we will never reach it on Earth.

Maybe we could capture some tachyons, and then harness them to pull our space craft, and (in effect) make our space crafts into timecrafts.

Tachyons are particles that exist only in theory that move faster than the speed of light. They would find it harder and harder to come DOWN to the speed light the same way that we find it hard to go up to the speed of light. And the equivalent of "rest" for a tachyon would be to move at infinite speed. They like to go infinitely fast (whatever THAT means- they can be everwhere in universe at once. WTF?). But as my Astronomy professor said "so far tachyons only exist in the Never Never Land of physics".

Not so much missing the point as failing to finish what I was saying! (whoops.) Once a person has arrived from the future, thus becoming a part of our present, I do not think that the Universe is obliged to repeat itself exactly up to the point where they set out. It isn't even obliged to repeat itself so that they're able to set out, or even so that they're ever born. I would expect "orphaned" time travellers from futures that will never happen to be the norm, not the exception.

Its not that light somehow causes time travel. Its that light moves at a finite speed, and the cosmos is so damned big. It takes even light four years to travel to our next door neighbor- the nearest other solar system. And many of the stars you can see in the night sky with the naked eye are hundreds of doors down in the neighborhood.

But yes, if we ever do achieve interstellar space travel then the astronauts we would send to the stars would also, of necessity, be time travelers in some sense even if we only achieved sub light speeds.

Here is an odd consequence of subjective time dilation: IF a person could travel at the speed of light, they could be all the way across the universe in zero subjective time.  However, enough time would have passed in the universe for every atom, every nuclear particle, and even every black hole to have decayed and evaporated into a thin, dim haze of quarks.

In other words, while a near-infinite amount of time would have passed in the universe, practically no time at all would have passed for our light-speed voyager.

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Here is another idea: IF a person could teleport instantaneously from Earth to a hypothetical planet ("Prometheus") orbiting Alpha Centauri, the person would experience no passage of time at all.  They would just step through the portal and arrive at their destination as easily as if walking from one room to another.

However, for an outside observer, 4.3 years would have passed between the person's departure from Earth and their arrival at Prometheus.  Furthermore, if they were to arrive, take a selfie, and immediately return to Earth, they would experience only a few seconds (to pose and take a picture) of delay between their departure from Earth and their return to Earth; but to the people at Teleport Control, 8.6 years would have passed between the person's departure and their return.

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Note the big IF in both examples.  Speed-of-Light travel for people and Teleportation (an example of Faster-Than-Light travel) are both only conjectural ideas, and not even hypothetical situations due to the limitations imposed by the principles of physics.  While it is nice to believe otherwise, Speed-of-Light travel and Teleportation are simply not possible ... unless a previously-unknown principle of physics is discovered.

Your "teleporter" example is an interesting one- I'm trying to get my head around the implications. If the people at Teleporter Central hit the button, then instantly recieved a signal saying that the passenger has safely arrived at Alpha Centauri, that would imply that they've actually been teleported back in time as well as through space! Also wondering if "wormholes" have the same issues?

A teleporter that transports you to Alpha Centauri, which is 4.3 light years away, and which takes only 4.3 years to get you there (that amount of time from the pov of us remaining on Earth) would be a type of speed of light travel.

For you time would stand still, and the trip would be instantaneous. But if you hit a button when you got there the folks on earth would not hear the buzzer or whatever for (what for them would be) 4.3 years.

Anyhow...if you could hit light speed, or even a large fraction of light speed you would in effect be traveling into the future, because time would slow for you, and stay the same for everyone else.

But if you could somehow go OVER the speed of light then you actually be moving backward in time.

It's called the "Time Cone" model.  You'll have to look it up because I've been braining too much already today.  Sorry 'bout that.

Time Conundrumsss ..... ....

Unfortunately one can not go at light speed or higher and sustain particle formation, let alone survive the process. We are just not built that way. As we come from “light” (electromagnetic energy), it would have to travel at those speeds in a closed loop coil (substructure inside the particles) and as a strait path outside at the same time.

One part would have to give if both are equal in speed and that would be the breakage of the coils first, thus converting the particle back into light energy. It would continue down the strait pathway as a coiled set of vectors. E <= mc^2 would happen instantly as the matter converts back into energy. (<= means going towards the left side of the equation, as if it was an equilibrium chemical reaction that has been perturbed by the addition of products to the right side.)

I have an interesting side note that I wanted to add to the going backwards in time part. Richard Feynman treated anti-matter particles as if they were matter particles traveling backwards in time in his energy diagrams. That makes perfect sense to me because it reverses the charge of the particle and would allow for annihilation events to occur as opposite pairs interacted. It also fits my hypothesis on how particles form and what makes them tick. I came across that tidbit of information years after I initially thought up my explanation for matter/anti-matter formation.

Hmmm...

I have often wondered if that was the case. That antimatter is really matter going backward in time.

At the moment of the Big Bang maybe there were two universes formed. An Antimatter one going backward in time, and a matter one going forward in time.

I forget where I saw this, or what the theory was called. But there was an idea that positrons (=anti-electrons) really are just electrons going backwards in time. One physicist "took it up to eleven" by proposing that they're all the same electron, endlessly bouncing from one end of time to the other!

Not quite that simple, but close. I like to think of it like this. Matter is formed of light energy that has been bent onto itself, forming a complete circle of the vectors (one electro, one magnetic). I will concentrate on the electro vector for the definition of matter/anti-matter for simplicity. These vectors will have a net directionality to which way they travel around the loop that they formed when they closed on their ends.

If you say the vectors direction in matter travels clockwise, the direction in anti-matter would be the opposite, counter-clockwise. This concept would explain why they have opposite charges and how they can undergo annihilation events. Breakage of the loop will reform the original light energy that it was created from. The loops can be twisted into ball like shapes to make higher energy particles like protons and neutrons, without breaking the loops. The sub stuctures of those particles are very complex to explain, as the coiling in the quarks work in tandem too build the main loop structure up.

Per the energy diagrams of Richard Feynman, particles that have opposite vector directionality than regular matter particles would appear to go back in time. It fits well because I have crunched through nuclear reactions equations with my concepts for both matter and anti-matter without breakdowns. It gives hints at what may actually cause these reactions to occur in the sub structures of the particles involved.

These subjects always fascinate me, ever since I saw Back to the Future at the theater as a kid. One theory that correlates with OP's post is the Everett Wheeler multiverse theory. It states that instead of one mutable timeline, as seen in Back to the Future, there exists multiple universes containing every possible outcome simultaneously. For example, if you were to purchase a lottery ticket tomorrow, there exist universes for every possible outcome for that venture, whether that's winning the lottery, losing, the place being out of lottery tickets, getting it stolen, etc. To me, this theory connects perfectly with time travel as you would not be altering time but rather traveling to a parallel universe where your actions were always the norm. Your original universe would continue to exist without you and your new universe would proceed as it always would have.

The original example was one of a single non-mutable timeline. By trying to stop the original patient from contracting it, history would autocorrect and cause you to be the original patient. Another great example of that is in Futurama, where Fry accidentally kills the man he though was his own grandfather but ends up impregnating his grandma, preserving the timeline and becoming his own grandpa (silly I know). In the Everett-Wheeler theory, you would instead travel to an alternate universe where the disease didn't exist. Our universe would still remain as we've always known it but the time traveler would now exist in a parallel universe where it doesn't.

Just food for thought.

Well you beat me to it. The concept of time is a mental construct so you are 100% correct that we are debating hypothetical concepts that are impossible to prove.