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Time travel is a fascinating subject and we have discussed it more than once on this site. It is one of those topics that seems so way out as to be fantasy, yet many respected scientists think that it may be possible, at least in one direction. The direction that I am talking about is forward. We know that Einstein predicted that the faster someone travels the slower his life passes. Because of this quirk, a person that leaves Earth in a ship that is traveling at almost the speed of light, on a three year one way trip, might come back to an Earth where everyone he knew had died of old age, yet he might only have aged a few years depending on how long he was gone in his estimation. Some might say that this is not true time travel and that there are other ways of traveling through time such as going through worm holes or bending space and time. These have yet to be proven, but the slowing down of time in a space ship has been observed by sending up atomic clocks in ships that were orbiting the Earth.

A professor at a respected college is looking for funding for his new time machine project. Yes you heard me right, he wants to build a time machine and he says that one will be built and used before the end of this century. The machine utilizes lasers and is based on Einstein's theory of relativity. He believes that his method will be proven by science within the next ten years. Do we have a true time machine waiting to be built or just the hope of one? No one can say one way or the other, but the professor is very sure that his invention will work. Before we laugh at him, remember that people and scientists, laughed at the Wright Brothers and Marconi. I am not saying that the machine will actually work, but I am saying maybe we should give it a chance.

I do have some trouble believing in time travel. It is very hard for me to understand how traveling into the past would ever be possible. What I mean is, what is the past? Are there dimensions that contain every aspect of our lives at all the different ages? Is this the past or can the clock actually be turned back? If we do turn the clock back what will we see? Will there just be shadows of what we did, will it be like watching a movie where we will not be able to interact or will it be like our lives now, only in years before? Maybe the past will contain nothing but an empty world. Could it be that since the events of the past have happened already we will see nothing? Oh this boggles my mind. If the past is a place where all we can do is watch some sort of movie, we may not have to worry about altering anything and thus affecting the future, but if the past can be altered then even traveling to the past may effect future events thus making time travel inherently unsafe.

The professor claims that his machine will be capable of looping time. He believes that his lasers will warp space. To illustrate his point, the professor took a cup of coffee with a spoon in it and said to think of the coffee itself as space and the spoon as the laser. Stirring the coffee with the spoon warps the coffee, just as the laser. will warp space. Now here is where things get tricky. He goes on to state that while the coffee or space is twisting, you drop a cube of sugar in it. He says that if space were twisting the way the coffee is, you could detect the sugar by observing a sub atomic particle moving in space. Einstein said that when you do something in space it also does something in time.

There is an admission by the professor that time travel will depend on new technology and inventions to some extent. Things like this can never be predicted. It could be that this will never come to pass or they could come about a lot faster than suspected. But would we know if a time travel machine was ever invented? Think about it. If a time travel machine was invented in this country, it would probably be the most secret device that was ever made. Who is to say that one hasn't been made already? It seems unlikely, but how do we know? Even if we don't have one yet, how do we know that the government isn't working on one? In a society where more and more things are being kept secret from us, how could we ever expect to know if time travel ever gets invented? If there is a past that can be altered, then the most powerful weapon ever invented would be the time travel machine. If it were used as a weapon, it would probably mess up everything anyway, since you never know what the effects of altering past events may turn out to be. You might figure that you will get rid of Hitler and avoid World War II for example, but by eliminating Hitler, the Germans of that era may put in someone just as ruthless but much smarter and the NAZIs win the war.

At this point in history it is very hard to even define time. The professor calls time the separation between events. I guess that is as good a definition as any. The professor doesn't think that time machines are dangerous. That may be, but the use of them could be the most dangerous thing ever done as I stated above. So why does the professor think that time travel isn't dangerous? This is because he subscribes to the theory that when you go into the past, you are going into a different universe or dimension and what you do there will not have any effect on the future. If he is right, then time travel can not be used as a weapon and we will all be better off. In World War II we thought that we were better off having a nuclear weapon and we did everything to invent one and succeeded. Today it is obvious that nuclear weapons are not a benefit because any terrorist might be able to eventually get his hands on one, making him as powerful as a nation and capable of creating great damage on an enormous scale. The same might be true of time travel, specially if it is not too expensive to do or too complicated to create.

The professor himself is said to have dreamed of changing the past to create a better future. The credentials of the professor include research in relativistic cosmology, quantum gravity and *gauge theories to mention a few and the publication of a book about time travel. Lets hope that the professor is right about his theory of time travel and that things can't be changed to alter the future because if he is wrong and they can be changed, this world may turn out to be hell for all of us.

*in physics, gauge theories are a class of physical theories based on the idea that symmetry transformations can be performed locally as well as globally.- Wikipedia the free encyclopedia.