Time Travel--Fact or Fiction?

This great article appeared in the NYT-- I thought people might find it of interest:

Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times

Current theories of space and time, including Einstein's, aren't perfect, but scientists haven't been able to replace them -- yet.

(June 28) -- There was a conference for time travelers at M.I.T. earlier this spring.

I'm still hoping to attend, and although the odds are slim, they are apparently not zero despite the efforts and hopes of deterministically minded physicists who would like to eliminate the possibility of your creating a paradox by going back in time and killing your grandfather.

"No law of physics that we know of prohibits time travel," said Dr. J. Richard Gott, a Princeton astrophysicist.

Dr. Gott, author of the 2001 book "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time," is one of a small breed of physicists who spend part of their time (and their research grants) thinking about wormholes in space, warp drives and other cosmic constructions, that "absurdly advanced civilizations" might use to travel through time.

It's not that physicists expect to be able to go back and attend Woodstock, drop by the Bern patent office to take Einstein to lunch, see the dinosaurs or investigate John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Rest of article:

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050628110309990014&_ccc=5&cid=842

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

Certainly a hoax, but a pretty good hoax nonetheless.

Interesting. Too many loopholes to make him more real, though the guy obviously knew something about computers and a few other things.

I seriously think that if people were going to visit the past, it would only be as observers, and I think that they would thoroughly research an era to be as authentic as possible, including language, slang, method of dress and current world history.

Stephen Hawking once said that he didn't believe in time travel because we would have had visitors from the future in bulk by now. (paraphrased!) I think he is wrong, because time travelers would have to integrate themselves into the time period they were coming to in order not to stand out in any way. There would not be an obvious sign that someone was a time traveler as a result, and I would also think that time machine dynamics would be such that "field operatives" would have to be carefully chosen to keep certain elements of personalities contained. And more importantly, time travel would be highly guarded to keep some of the undesirables out of the time stream.

In fact, if I were a betting woman--oh, wait, I am!--I would suspect that time travel in the future would be as closely hidden as Area 51 is now. A secret government project, or perhaps a private endeavor, would be as big a secret as could possibly be kept.

In addition, I believe in the timestream theory--that if a change is made, the future becomes two streams--the original stream and the alternate stream. Therefore, changing something in the past would not affect the current timestream, but would create a new one. People in the original stream would likely never know any difference.

That shit is so interesting to me. Thanks for posting this!

:D