Are Time Travelers in our Midst? It's Possible!

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Not in Shakespeare's time they weren't. No one had yet imagined them. I have committed no fallacy. You simply misunderstood what I said. How can 600 year-old science prove or disprove what exists today?

Reminds of a program on the History Channel concerning this topic:

Dr. Ronald L. Mallett - University of Connecticut

Leonardo DaVinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) conceptualized ("imagined") the helicopter - a powered flying machine - about 50 years before William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was born.

The use of a flanged wheel to support and guide a vehicle over fixed rails was demonstrated by the ancient chinese. Magnetic levitation was also demonstred then. The idea of using "tracked" roads is at least 2000 years old; quarries in Greece, Malta, and the Roman Empire used cut stone tracks to haul loads pulled by animals.

Steam engines have a history going back over two thousand years. In the first century AD; the first recorded use of steam - the aeolipile - was described by Hero of Alexandria.

All the principles were there, just waiting to be put together. The sciences of the day could have predicted them, but it took educated people of vision (who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty) to make these dream machines come true.

However, no science has so far presented, or even so much as hinted at a verifiable principle that could make retrograde time travel possible. This is the de facto standard for "impossible".

Very interesting, I would probably do that if I had a time machine

Then, by your rule, nuclear power was "impossible" (until the twentieth century).

Actually, the groundwork for atomic physics started around 500 BCE, when ancient Greeks first predicted the existance of the atom.

But that may be stretching it a bit.

However, in 1803 (beginning of the 19th century), John Dalton (1766-1844) proposed a systematic set of postulates to describe the atom. Before the end of the 19th century, Becquerel, Roentgen, the Curies, and others worked with uranium and determined the principles of radioactivity. Many of their calculations showed the basic principles of nuclear fission, which is the underlying principle of nuclear power. They just did not see the potential that was right in front of them!

I am not saying that these discoveries were impossible beforehand; what I am saying is that given the previously-known sciences, and a keen and analytical mind, these discoveries were inevitable.

So, given the current state of science - what we know today - and the intellect and insight of today's scientists, there is no known way to even begin to arrive at the first principles of retrograde time travel (RTT).

And I know that RTT is impossible, anyway, because it would violate an already-known and well-established law of physics. That is, the Law of Causality - an event can not occur before or simultaneously with its cause. Thus, a future cause could not possibly result in a past event. Any experiment designed to show violation of causality failed to do so.

Through theoretical and experimental methods, retrograde time travel is shown to be impossible <Quod Erat Demonstrandum>

Damn! It must be something to know everything with absolute certainty.

Nonetheless, for people who like to think about possibilities in accordance with logic and science, this article might be interesting:
Time Machine

From my readings over the years (and they are many), there are few real scientists who flat out rule out the possibility. They reasonably say, "we're not sure."

What I know, I know with certainty.

At least, until proven wrong ... got a working retrograde time-travel device that can translate 200 kg 100 years into the past? I'll go and report on the Tunguska Event from an underground bunker near ground zero, hop over to the north pole to greet Robert Perry, bet on the Chicago Cubs to win the World Series, try to get an interview with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid before they're croaked, and then skip off to Europe to arrange some 'accidents' for Messrs. Hitler, Lenin, Marx, and Stalin.

Then I'll leave a signed postcard, saying "Huzzah!" with the Lloyd's administrators. But by the time you get it on your eighteenth birthday, I'll be long dead.


Long on ideas, subjunctive clauses, and excuses - dismally short on results. In other words, a purely philosophical and speculative treatment of esoterical fantasies that are utterly lacking in material proof.

Although the concept of a temporal wormhole that achieves its negative time differential by looping through an intense gravity well seems intriguing...

Too bad wormholes are also impossible above the quantum level.


From my collaborations with Runs I and II of the D0 Detector project at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, I can let you in on a secret. No scientist worth his tenure will ever explicitely say the word "Impossible" to anyone but a student. The phrase "We're not sure" is reserved for published works, public interviews, and audits by the GAO; and it usually translates into something like "Impossible, but we'd like for you to continue funding our research".

Okay, I concede. Retrograde time-travel is impossible.

*weeps bitterly*

Now to pick up the pieces of my life and *sniffle* go on living.

You must be very young.
And philosophy goes hand-in-hand with science. Have you actually studied advanced logic (The Calculus)?


Ooh... with my collaborations at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, "possible" is a preferred word.

Maybe not time travel but time-viewing, looking backwards and forwards in time. "Telescopes" through time.

Pass signals through time.

How about going sideways through time, to parallel universes?

Looking back through time is already being done. The methods are part of the sciences of "Archeology", "Geology", "Paleontology", and others. As for looking forward through time...

Got Evidence?


Again, Got Evidence?

I used to like watching Star Trek and reading comic books ... excuse me ... graphic novels too; after all, they are what inspired me to take up the sciences. Unfortunately, most of my colleagues were too busy writing grant proposals, belittling grad students, or arguing about the limits of possibility to ever produce any really practical knowledge. So I dropped out of research and took up engineering instead.

Even those pampered warmongers over at Sandia Labs know that only results count (unless you have a defense contract), and that a moderate, yet reliable level of "hard" money beats intermittent spurts of "soft" money any day.

Well aren't you Gene Roddenberry?

A lot of people are saying that there are several paradoxes to time travel, i.e. killing your father before you were born, becoming your own grandfather (like Fry did in Futurama), trying to prevent disaster.

There are two ways to look at this, one I've seen covered in similar detail, the rest was a case of TLDR.

One way is that whatever has been changed has already happened and nothing we can do will make it better because if we go back to change it, we would in fact be helping it happen.

The other way is that of parallel universes or alternate timelines, depending on the context. I believe that every decision we make breaks the universe up into several different paths, each one exploring the implications that making the decision differently would entail. Say if you decided not to go for a drive, in another universe you would have decided to go for a drive, and were perhaps killed in an accident. If you go back in time and change something, it is possible that you would return to your time to a completely different world, because the timeline you are now on has progressed differently to how it did before you went back. Whether you would go on existing if you killed a member of your progeny is as yet an unresolved issue.

That's my two cents.

I rather like the idea of different quantum realities.

They did a TNG episode of that. It was boss.