Time Travel: A Philosophic Study (without the Math)

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We are all ‘scientists’ in our own right; especially while whittling away an evening sitting in a dark corner of a local public house and debating with friends over a few pints of the usual. We each have our own theories and explanations for all questions of life the universe and everything…

The concept of time travel is one spawned from man’s regret – an elusive ambition and notion of fantasy that has plagued mankind since the first wish to take back or do things differently. And henceforth the queries “if only I’d warned him” and “if only I’d left a little earlier” evolves over an evening to the more radical tier of thought: ‘what will happen if I cross an Einstein-Rosen Bridge in space?’

But regardless of any amateur opinion, time travel is a serious question that rages even now among the communities of science: ‘is it possible?’ And from Einstein to Hawking the answer has never been entirely conclusive.

After several scientific research jaunts to the aforementioned watering hole, I have perceived three main strains of thought on the matter…

The first is this, a flippant query immediately observed by those quick to dismiss the idea:
If traveling backward in time is possible then surely we would have met a time traveler from our future declaring that it is possible by now?  Or at least one that could prove he or she had come from the future and do it without sounding crazy… This conjecture is also one that was once put forward by Stephen Hawking, regarded as many to be one of the smartest physicists of the modern age.

However, having consumed the ideology of the many movies and books written on the subject, most of us are aware of the obligated responsibilities that should befall the inventor of such a machine in order to protect causality. So naturally, if in the future, we invent time travel, it would surely be safe to assume that there would be some kind of policing – some rules created to protect such a machine from any unruly use. Perhaps one of these strictly controlled laws would be that travelers are not allowed to reveal themselves? After all, if the traveler’s purpose is to merely observe and thereby protect causality, revealing their travel would not be desirable or intentional.