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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.

Unfortunately, this first strain of thought fails to answer the possibility one way or another. Damning confabulation in agreement with the dismissal of time travel is the theory that it is far more likely that we will destroy ourselves before we ever advance to grasping the complexities of tourism to the past. Such is Oppenheimer’s legacy… However, it could be that we advance to this level of science but decide not to use it (for reasons such as causality, paradox etc).

Nonetheless, we still have no conclusion to the crux which is: “is it possible?” And not: “has it happened?”
One of the most frequently discussed concepts of time travel is the ability to move faster than light. Though the level of understanding of this idea varies, it is commonly announced (whether spoken in laymen terms or by a quantum physics enthusiast) that, regardless of whether or not mankind will end up destroying itself before the scientific development of time travel, the primary aim of such is prohibited by our inability to travel faster than the speed of light. And it is this problem that will ultimately bring closure to the skeptical mind, because faster than light travel is very much considered being in the realms of impossibility… or at the very least, highly improbable… currently…

Evidence has been discovered that (although infinitesimal) the motion of time slows relative to the increase of velocity (this has been measured by comparing astronaut’s chronometers moving at high speeds in orbit with those ‘relatively’ stationary on Earth – this is a hypothesis for time travel that is also accepted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity).  Therefore, despite our current inability to travel faster than the speed of light, any future advances closer to this achievement would show that time moves slower for objects accelerating at higher velocity in comparison to the movement of time of a stationary object. By reaching speeds faster than light it is thought that time would then effectively inverse or reverse relative to the object.

2. The second strain of thought is an unproven yet imaginative suggestion by the avid sci-fi fan –vastly more entertaining but cut full of contradiction and conjecture:

It may be possible to travel through time based on another strange theory: the bizarre phenomena, never actually seen, but theorized by Einstein (and others – notably Mr. Rosen) to exist in space-time known as an ‘Einstein-Rosen Bridge’ – or ‘Wormhole’ as more commonly known. If these objects did exist (though they appear to have been whimsically invented purely to entertain or counter the negative theory in 1.) we could possibly use one to travel through time… Admittedly, this sounds a bit of a stretch of the imagination… Isn’t it? What is it? How can it?

There is some varied and complex science devoted to it and the theory is derived from the field of quantum physics.
In rudimentary terms, a Wormhole is a natural random space event able to fold the fabric of space and time thereby connecting two points that would otherwise be thousands or perhaps millions of light-years away from each other. If you can imagine the universe metaphorically as a single sheet of paper with point ‘A’ at one margin and point ‘B’ at the opposite, a straight line would appear to be the shortest route between the two. However, a wormhole at point A which connects to point B would bend the sheet of paper (space and time) until A and B met – thusly, if you were to step through at one location you would have effectively traversed vast tracks of space to the other location and done so at a speed that is instantaneous and ergo faster than the speed of light, or at least faster relative to a beam of light that traveled between the same points in a straight line… allegedly…

A wormhole is usually depicted as two funnel-like holes (or mouths), one at the departure point, the other at the destination point, and a tunnel through ‘subspace’ which connects the two points.

Science fiction would have us believe that an artificial and stable wormhole between two points of folded space can be traversed by human travelers in one of 2 ways (generally): 1. By entering the wormhole whilst protected by a vehicle or spacecraft of some sort, or 2. if they are molecularly broken down to basic particles as they cross the event horizon, and then reassembled safely on the other side – whether by machines set at either end or a natural event caused by entering and exiting the wormhole.

The ‘wormhole’ theory is, therefore, a concept initially derived as a means to travel vast distances rather than time itself – a means to explore the galaxy – to give story-tellers a convenient method of telling a tale within a human lifespan… to give film writers a more instant and dramatic alternative to the previously conceived ideas of ‘stasis’ or ‘deep sleep’. These ideas suggested that, in order to travel long distances in space, astronauts would hibernate in a state of non-aging while a spacecraft piloted by computers would amble for centuries through the endless black vacuum. The plus side of this was, assuming the spacecraft didn’t encounter any form of space debris on its journey; the crew would survive to explore the uncharted deep reaches of space.  The unfortunate dilemma of the idea was that none of the astronaut’s friends or family would still be alive by the time they returned home!)

However, wormhole travel is theorized to possibly allow a person to arrive at destination point ‘B’ prior to actually having left the starting position ‘A’. This is something fairly difficult to fathom, but nonetheless, agreed by many to be a sound suggestion. This is a concept derived to beat the faster than light conundrum by creating extraordinary circumstance or event that will allow one to circumnavigate the normal physics of space-time.

To offer jocular example: you could enter a wormhole in the evening but, as if by magic, arrive the morning before – proverbial furrowed brows all round – again: you leave at dinner time and arrive (albeit elsewhere) at some point earlier that same morning, probably around breakfast – that’s the concept…

But how on Earth (or more likely in space) does that work?
Einstein’s equations for ‘general’ and indeed ‘special’ relativity denote the speed of light as the constant ‘c’ as this is essentially the fastest known movement of particles through space (in a vacuum light reaches a speed of approximately 300,000 km per second). This constant, although conditions can be present to slow down ‘c’ and light is often affected by other variables such as atmospheric conditions and by substances that can cause refraction (or even varied forms of vacuum energies), is still the quickest possible method of transferring data from one point to another (apart from ‘tachyons’ which are another hypothetical sub-particle that can move faster but are not able to be used as a vehicle for the transfer of information… thereby perhaps pointless to mention… but they are a favorite particle to gain mention whilst engaging in talks about so called ‘warp’ speed, as these apparently aid in the science fiction version of this).

Einstein theorized that, despite requiring infinite energy to do so, anything moving faster that the speed of light would have to consider time as well as distance in their calculation. Tachyons apart, the heart of this theory is to again imagine two points (A and B) separated at a distance of, let us say, 300,000 km.  Put object ‘X’ at point A. If X moved from point A to point B at the speed of light it would take it approximately 1 second to reach point B – a result to match the above agreed speed of light. If X were to generate enough kinetic energy to accelerate beyond the speed of light, it could eventually reach a degree by which X travels literally ‘instantaneously’ between point A and B – thusly, there would be a flashpoint at which X would appear to be at point A and B at exactly the same time. Therefore, at this speed, you are effectively traversing 300,000 km in 0 seconds. Without an element of time to measure against an element of distance, some scientists might suggest that this speed was impossible. However, this argument does not help support the theory!* In order to proceed we have to make the assumption that it is possible and that this unit of instantaneous speed (on my personal made up space-time scale) is equal to ‘0 sc’.  Developing this idea further: what if X was able to accelerate beyond even that immense speed (i.e. faster than instantaneous)? There is only one plausible outcome, and that is that X would appear at point B prior to even having left point A. There you have it! A stretched but somewhat plausible method to challenge relativity itself and to even upset causality! A new and infinite space-time scale is created; beginning at ‘0 sc’ and counting backward: -1 sc,-2 sc,-3 sc etc… where each accumulative negative represents a greater period of time between reaching the destination prior to departure (rather than the normal and reversed scale of time between reaching a destination after departure).

But again, is it possible? *Despite the previously mentioned lack of a distance to time ratio that allows the determination of velocity in standard terms, there have been two top physicists, Gunter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, who have already claimed to experimentally achieved ‘instantaneous’ travel of a particle known as a photon (considered an elementary particle that is a physical unit of light) between two points. Apparently this is yet to be verified by the rest of the scientific community and this is hardly conclusive that anything other than photons themselves can exceed the speed of c.

However, physicists have suggested that a vacuum created between to smooth metal plates creates a vacuum energy in which light can move faster than usual and quicker than c and further stipulates that a series of these plates could hypothetically be used to rebound and force other particles or data to travel faster than c, but the power required would be insurmountable (especially for the purpose of human travel), not to mention exacting extreme forces that a human body could not withstand. So unfortunately, it would seem to rule out the possibility of an effective time machine. There is only one venture of hope and that is back again to the theory of wormholes and how they can be manipulated to suit our purposes.

Wormholes, however, have not been proven to exist. They are based upon the similar concept of a Black Hole (which sucks time and matter out of the universe) in one point in space that is hypothetically bridged with a White Hole (that is an opposing force and spews time and matter back into the universe) at another point in space – wormholes are also random space-time events that cause a bridge between two separate points of space-time but, unlike in the event horizons of black holes and white holes, they allow the passage of particles without the same huge densities and mass gravitational aspects. Although one has never been viewed in space, they are suspected by scientists to exist purely due to exceptions found in the complex rules of general relativity – a concept best described through the science research of Kip Thorne or Matt Visser (to name but two experts).

Unfortunately, like the previously proposed faster than light machine with smooth metal plates, the power required to artificially create a wormhole is apparently equal to that of an imploding star, which of course would have to be contained in a safe non-lethal, non-supernova kind of way between constructs the size of planets. Can we use them to travel in time? …that is somewhat improbable. It would appear from tenuous science fiction rambles that judging solar flares and black hole singularities are also further concepts to be calculated. There is no plausible theory to suggest that wormholes would create a situation where any data could be transferred faster than c (the bridge being a suspected sub-space conduit existing outside the normal parameters of space-time rather than a faster than light jump point) or even that one could transfer data any faster than ‘instantaneous’ speed.  That said, however, the proposal of flight and telecommunications to a caveman would have no doubt appeared equally baffling … We await scientific prodigy…

3. The third school of thought follows quite closely after the second school, but is technically a lot more decisive:
The answer given by the ‘scientist’ of assured practicalities is simply “no, it is not possible.”
You cannot change time, create a machine to manipulate time or traverse through wormholes. This approach is founded in Determinism which stipulates that all things have happened according to the natural order and ‘fate’ of the universe and cannot be altered.

The constraints of time travel are so great that even if the power existed to generate a portal to the past, the human body would simply not be able to survive passing through it – and even if you did, you would not be able to change anything in the past, natural laws of physics would simply not allow it to happen. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen proposed the possibility of wormholes early in the 20th century prior to World War I, but also included the idea of so called ‘exotic’ matter, an unstable energy at the nucleus of the wormhole. It was never conceived that this was a valid means of human travel to other universes or galaxies – especially in time. This portrayal of wormholes was something that was theorized by over-imaginative science fiction writers looking for convenience rather than fact…

But who knows? – Even if by some genius of invention it became possible, what would you do and what could you do anyway? What about causality? – The oft mentioned ‘butterfly effect’ or ‘grandfather paradox’? You might inadvertently blink yourself from existence…

We’re still no closer to answers. Even the practical ‘scientists’ appear simply skeptical.

Here be my science…

I theorize that despite the complexities we will one day reach a future where such equation is a valid and easily proposed reality. During my own journey of research and exploration into this matter, it has occurred to me that there are several hundred factors to be considered before a plan for time travel can even be put into action – some of these factors are not even directly linked to time travel itself and propose altogether different issues for scientific design and study. A thousand years from now, human kind may reach a pinnacle of scientific understanding that will allow time travel. But before this advancement, there are several others that will need to be achieved prior, the greatest of these being from George Langelaan’s famous short story “The Fly” and his concept of teleportation. Beam me up Scotty!

A machine that can transfer particles from one point to another faster than the speed of light is something that could plausibly be developed in the future; the ability to deliver solid matter via this machine looks unlikely and somewhat inconceivable – which is an inconvenience to any humans that wish to time travel.

Unless, as per the theory of teleportation, human tissue can first be relayed into particle information, fed into the machine, boosted to a speed faster than light and then reconstructed somehow at the other side…

This, I can see, begs the question of exactly how one may be able to rematerialize on the other side without a similar machine existing in the past!

Perhaps, and I address this to Mr. Cynical scientist of the first strain of thought, this is why we have not seen any visitors from the future… Perhaps, with hindsight, we will create a machine capable of reconstructing molecular particles of a person sent back in time first, and then create a second machine much later to be used to send a person back in time to the original machine. It could be the first steps in our grand experiment of time travel. How will we know if it works? The moment we complete the first machine a traveler will arrive within it. He (or she) will explain which year he has traveled from and then most likely spend his remaining years helping to develop the technology to build the machine he traveled from – thereby creating and maintaining the proverbial ‘up yours’ to causality!

Unfortunately, no matter which way time travel is eventually achieved, I don’t believe it to be something that will ultimately benefit us. It is more likely to be used as a weapon of deterrent, such as the nuclear missile is used today – no one will like the idea of someone messing with time in order to achieve political gains, wealth and land.

Here is my further train of thought:

There are two ways to view the passing of time:
A: as one singular straight line (the usual and most common approach)
B: multiple lines and multiple event points (my approach)

Assuming we reach the aforementioned scientific horizons enabling us to attempt time travel, there are some various paradoxical dangers that will need to be assessed before you could even consider any form of benefit from doing it in the first place. For example, (and likely the most cliché) you want to go back in time and kill Adolph Hitler and thereby prevent the atrocities of World War II. A noble suggestion, but why would you do this? You would have to be able to calculate every single effect this would have on everyone’s lives, the cultural and global impact that it would have – not to mention the effect on the baby boom when the army and navy returned from the war that sired many of our parents. You may inadvertently prevent your own birth! Despite the terrible horrors of the war, it was surviving through adversity that shaped the powers of Europe and America today. Is time travel really something to invest in considering the potential damage it could do?

Theory A presumes that if a man (or woman) were to travel back in time, their every action would, under the laws of causality, alter everything along the same line of time no matter how small the change. Even the tiniest microscopic event could alter the future and ergo the travelers present. It is popularly known as the ‘Butterfly effect’ – a term derived from a short story written by Ray Bradbury that suggested a change in the Jurassic period as small as treading on a butterfly (thereby killing a species) would have an insurmountable knock on effect in the future.

In the scenario of time travel relative to a single straight line of time, a time traveler must select a point in time to arrive at. However, whatever impact they make by disturbing that point in time will potentially create and change historical events into new and different ones. And like dominoes falling this would effectively create a whole new future very different to the one that the traveler came from.

But what happens to the traveler in this instance? Would they retain the memories of their traveling back in time and of the events they altered? Well, perhaps they would if you believed all those lying Hollywood movies!

My thoughts based on the one single straight line of time are as follows:
The events altered by the traveler would create vast ripples through time, like a pebble thrown in a still lake. The waves of the ripple would move out. There would still be an extra pebble in the lake but the lake surface would smooth out erasing all evidence that it was ever thrown. Therefore, from the splash of the pebble to the end of the ripples all memory and actions of the event changed in time would be ironed out and forgotten. What would happen to the traveler? Who knows? Maybe he would cease to be. Maybe he would remain trapped in the past facing mirror images that were not their own! Or maybe he would be yanked forward in time again and awake the in the present at which he left, hurled back on the tidal wave that was the last ripple of the splash and possess no memory of the events leading to their travel. This would however, no doubt leave the bewildered traveler wondering why on earth he had gone to bed that evening still wearing shoes and jacket. And without question, the further thought that may initially elude satisfactory answer: what on earth is that strange but colorful winged insect doing crushed in the tracks of my favorite sneaker? This of course would all pale in comparison to the thought of what the chief giant penguin would do if he was late for work again. It’s been tough since they took over the world…

And so in short, Theory A (Straight Line Time) would only result in a change of history that we would never remember. Or at least we would remember it but wish we could change it.  Is it possible? Unlikely… Could we prove it if it was? No.

Privy people may be leaping back in time and changing things every day for all we know. But for every change of history is a subsequent change in our memory, so we will always believe the past to be as it always was and be oblivious to the efforts of the traveler. Therefore, in reference to my previous example: if a traveler went back in time and prevented World War II, we in the present (if still in existence) would all suddenly become blissfully ignorant of there ever having been a World War II. Make sense…?

Theory A is definitely the lead culprit as the creator of the scenario known as the ‘Paradox’. A time travel paradox is when a traveler changes an event in the past and that change subsequently leads to an effect that would ultimately prevent the change happening in the first place. I.e. if a man in grief builds a time machine and goes back in time to save his belated lost love and succeeds, then of course it is feasible that, having changed his life for the better, he would no longer devote his time to the building of the machine. Therefore, the machine was never built and he could not go back in time to prevent her death in the first place… Effectively a paradox is a loop in the line of time, but unstable and cannot be maintained as the cause and effect are in opposites and should cancel each other out. The ‘Grandfather Paradox’ runs on an even more dangerous theory – this is where you travel back in time and accidentally (somehow) kill one of your direct descendants (i.e. your grandfather when he was a teenager perhaps), thereby effectively deleting your own self. How could you then have traveled back in time to commit the ‘accident’ in the first place?

Summary of Theory A:
If time travel was possible, and if time only runs in one constant direction, then no one would ever be the wiser. This is because of two things:

1. Any events changed in the past forces time to realign and recreate itself as the history we know and learn. We will never know that the previous chain of events existed.

2. Any man/woman who breaks the above scientific law will ultimately be driven by a motive that will inevitably lead to an unsustainable paradox.

In fact, it is hard to see how any form of time travel in this type of timeline would succeed without creating a paradox… But on a lighter note, if any man on the planet has (or will have) a time machine, the most likely candidate would have be someone like Mr. Bill Gates! IBM never saw it coming… And this spurns the extra thought – “what if History is literally written by the winners?” After all, one would imagine that only the winners would be in a position of wealth to invest in a time machine project anyway!

Beating the Odds – possibilities:
The only possible way a time traveler may be able to beat the law of paradox would be to create a stable loop in the timeline. How could this be done? In the example of the man who saves his lost love; that man, should he be fortunate enough to retain the memories of his former life (i.e. experiencing the loss which prompted the build of the machine and going back and saving her etc) which as established is unfortunately highly unlikely, he would then have to ensure that he carried on to build the time machine anyway and use it at the same date and time he did before. This of course would send him back in time again to prevent her death and thereby create a stable loop – an ever continuing circle. This however, would leave the man circling through time forever and living an eternity of necessary repetition in order to maintain the loop. It would be the metaphorical equivalent to performing the same stage act forever. Unfortunately, it would also mean that rather than spending time with the love he saved he would have to devote all time and energy to completing the Time Machine. Although I imagine that after having done this a couple of times and retaining the memory of doing so, perhaps the machine building part would get a little easier…

But more questions arise… if time is a straight line, how would a stable loop affect the rest of us? Would we all go around the loop with the man oblivious to reliving the same days over and over? Would the loop be seamless? Would it create various versions of him? And having created the first loop, will sending himself back in time again make him arrive to save her life, or will her life have been saved already? What a headache! Too many questions and not enough answers… However, I would go as far to say that no copies of him are likely because it is a loop and he will always be the same man traveling it… I think… But surely by traveling backward as the older man he will intersect with the life of his younger self, and it will be his younger self that continues to live with his beloved and not him. He would be forced to return to his own time, if he could, and hope all was changed to suit his desire… Still very confusing, it prompts the thought that by traveling backward in time he has actually created an additional version of himself that will forever be an outcast to his original younger self that will live with his beloved and thereby destroy the point of his building the time machine anyway…!

The above would only work, however, if the traveler remembers all that has transpired. But this is not likely to happen (as memory will be ironed out the moment he returns to the present) and the only way one might theorize around this would be if he was to leave a note of some kind for himself so that after the change of event occurs, in his new life he would find the note and somehow be compelled to create the machine. But again, this would only lead to another smaller paradox within a paradox. How could he go back in time and leave a note for himself if the note he wrote was only written for him to make a time machine that he never would make… Frankly, it gets far too perplexing and best left alone…

Ultimately this theory of time travel would be rather pointless as well as dangerous. Provided you could avoid the Grandfather Paradox, the only motivation for time travel would be for personal gain without caring of the consequence to others or yourself, but in doing so you would inevitably just end up eradicating the will and reason to build the machine in the first place. This leads me to the conclusion that, unless all paradoxes have already taken place and time travel is merely an essential loop to be made to ensure everything remains as it was, this form of singular timeline cannot exist. There has to be a multi-verse of infinite timelines, thereby making the question not just about traveling in time, but also about traveling in multiple dimensions where different versions of yourself (and all others) exist. And this leads to Theory B…

Theory B removes some of the boundless and unfathomable issues surrounding the paradox – or at least redefines the term into a broader more agreeable circumstance. The point in time in which an event is altered by the arrival of a time traveler can still be noted as cause for a paradox, but rather than reassembling the future into new events, a new branch of time is formed instead where the new events are played out. The original timeline remains as it was.

The basis of this theory collaborates with another one regarding the possibility of different dimensions and alternate realities. Some would argue that these two are effectively separate areas of scientific study where ‘dimensions’ are phenomena that could potentially provide parallel universes in which completely absurd physical laws are in effect; and ‘alternate realities’ that are a more stringent phenomena and only effect different branches of reality within the currently recognised laws of physics. However, it is fairly difficult to distinguish between the two… Effectively the summary of both theories is that there are an infinite number of universes where every probable outcome of each encountered ‘event-scenario’ is played out. Many describe it as the “Multiverse”.

Unfortunately, although this dispels the myth of silver screen time travel stories and eradicates the mind boggling consequence of paradox, it does represent a whole new can of proverbial worms. The Multiverse is as it sounds – infinitely large and ever increasing in size.

Before this idea came to light, the arrogant human mind was still engaged in trying to justify our importance and existence in a seemingly dwarfing universe of insurmountable size and mystery. We are now faced with the even greater challenge of coping with the idea that even our universe is but a tiny spec within an infinite Multiverse. Consider this concept: each one of us is but a microscopic life form inhabiting a tiny blue planet, the third one orbiting the Sun of a tiny solar system, hidden within the millions of solar systems in our galaxy (Milky Way), which in turn is but one of hundreds of millions of galaxies within a universe, which in turn is one of millions of millions of universes within the Multiverse. Still feeling important?

To get to the point however, a time traveler within this scenario would theoretically be able to change the past. The question is however, to what purpose? To use the same example as discussed in Theory A, a man loses his one true love in a terrible tragedy. Consumed by sorrow, he devotes his life to creating a time machine. He then uses that time machine to go back to the day of the tragedy and prevent it from happening. In doing so he will inadvertently (or perhaps even deliberately) create a brand new branch of time in which she does not die and they live together happily ever after. The big ‘but’ here though is: “but what happens to the traveler himself?” – This is followed up by “how does he benefit from this?” and “what happens to the original timeline where he created the time machine?”

To answer the first question I would have to investigate and propose that, due to the length of time it would take for him to create the time machine and then to use it, he would be an older and different version of himself than he was at the time of the tragedy. Therefore, by sending himself back through time to prevent it from happening, he would simply avert the danger and then watch his younger self live on with his one true love happily ever after (unless of course he aged well and was able to convince her that he was his younger self… but lies beget lies of course, you may even have to go as far as to eliminate your younger self! This, of course, would either split time again to another alternate reality or create the mother of all paradoxes).  In this method (as the traveler) you are still going to follow your own individual path through time. And although by doing it you create a further duplicate of yourself, you the traveler will always have to live with the knowledge of the events that have transpired. Therefore, in answer to the second question, there is no benefit to be found here. Finally, for the third question, there could be several theories surrounding the possible fate of the original timeline from which the traveler left. One might theorize that, due to breaking the laws of space-time, the original timeline becomes redundant and collapses to nothing. Another theory would be that it continues along its natural course until the next ‘event-scenario’ but the time traveler no longer exists in that time line (unless of course the traveler was ill-educated enough to jump forward in time, hoping his lost love would then be there to meet him – which of course she wouldn’t be due to the new branch of time he had created which veered off his own). The mind boggles with the third option, because this theory proposes that by creating a new timeline, the time traveler will be stuck in a personal paradoxical loop (forever ensuring he builds the time machine in order to go back in time and create the new line of time) and both timelines old and new will continue to progress toward their natural outcomes.

Summary of Theory B
There are just far too many variables with this form of time travel, it would be nigh on impossible to make this work for you. All you would be doing is ripping holes in the space-time continuum; holes where there aren’t supposed to be any – you could simply end up collapsing the entire Multiverse! Or at least create enough damage to destroy most of it and create a permanent time dilation field in the fabric of space-time…

This entire investigation has lead me to believe that time travel itself is actually a rather redundant goal. Who would want to travel through time only to either destroy themselves or be caught in a never-ending paradox and ultimately achieve very little to benefit yourself?

Science need not look into the possibility of time travel (see part 1. – we have seen no time travelers from the future in our time for good reason: it is not a viable effort to do so!).

To seek scientific advancement of benefit, physicists would do well to investigate the possibilities of ‘dimensional travel’ rather than time travel.
Dimensional travel would allow travelers to leap from one reality to an alternate one (assuming the Multiverse exists). Therefore, should the sorrow filled man in the aforementioned examples build a dimension machine, he could theoretically jump into an alternate reality where his lost love did not die in the same tragedy as his version did. He could even detect and jump to a dimension where either he previously did not exist (thereby eliminating any competition derived from another version of himself) or one where they had never met (so he can attempt to establish new relations with her – though I imagine she may be very unnerved at the thought of meeting someone who appeared to have intimate knowledge about her already!)

Naturally, however, there would be little reason to mount a scientific experiment of such magnitude merely to benefit the needs of a single man. The true rewards to be gained would lie in the study of prosperity (or lack of) in each visited reality and then delivering the best of these to our own dimension.

Detecting the correct dimensions will obviously be the key to the success of such travel. Scientists would have to be able to identify different dimensions, their location in space-time and (preferably) be able to design a Multiverse map (of sorts). The intricacies of this would be unfathomable to our current understanding of science and would not only involve the mental strain of determining how and where an alternate reality was but would also require determining mass probabilities to understand what kind of ‘reality’ to expect and what existed there. The laymen concept of this idea would be that a man steps into a dimensional gate or doorway on Earth and is transported to another version of Earth that has been shaped by a history of different ‘event-scenarios’ to his one. That’s the gloss finish version, but of course the concept is so much deeper and infinitely more complex than that…

If for every decision made by any person/creature or life-form, the alternative is played out in another reality, then each person/creature or life-form could potentially create thousands of these per day (or even per minute!). And if you try to count the number of decisions made for every person/creature or life-form that ever lived throughout known history, then you are literally looking at a googolplex of alternate realities.

Assuming that each and every decision that is made creates a new reality (shall I catch the bus or walk? Shall I shower or bath? Shall I walk or run? Shall I write a thesis on Time Travel or do something constructive?)  Then tens of thousands of realities are being formed by the second – billions of which would probably be very similar to our own. And that is not all… It is not enough merely to count the number of decisions made by people or creatures on Earth. At this moment in time we are only aware of life on our planet. What else could be out there? What other life-forms are also generating random realities (advanced aliens could well be thinking: “shall we announce our presence to Earth today or stay at home?” etc). And this also, is not all…

There are also tens of thousands of random occurrences happening all the time: suns burning out, black holes forming, gravitational anomalies, meteors flying, matter moving and gasses accumulating, pressure building, planetary tectonic activity, planetary weather anomalies – any random issue you can conceive that may influence or even stamp out any further decision making by the creatures that inhabit the universe… All of these things will naturally affect the way in which our timelines are played out and each difference is played out elsewhere.

The Multiverse – is it just one huge equation? Is there a great master plan to govern it all? Only time will tell…

Wormholes, it has been theorized, are gateways to another point in space-time. But what if they are not? What if wormholes are actually gateways to alternate dimensions, created where similarities between the other universes are close enough to form a bridge with ours – or more simply, where points of the Multiverse collide. As already discussed, it is a feasible concept that traveling back in time will inevitably create a new branch of time and ergo reality.  It has also been considered that wormholes are an occurrence of natural phenomena that could transport us there. It is surely a no greater stretch of the imagination to offer that rather than bending our current space-time, they are in fact a crossing to a new and alternate universe. Although traversing vast tracks of space in moments would be a useful power to harness, there does not seem to be any logical reason for nature to create a faster than light form of travel that can be used to manipulate time. Philosophically speaking, it would appear from the data I have gathered, that the generation of a portal to another dimension would be a far more useful and poignant utilization of nature’s creation than a portal to another point of time. In further development of this idea (and in effort not to rain on Einstein and Rosen’s parade or discredit their clearly far more academic achievements in the field) considering that the wormhole is a theorized bridge of space-time, and although unable to apply mathematical feasibility, could it be reasonable to theorize the existence of a dimension bridge existing in space-time?

Unfortunately, we can only dream of a future where this sort of technology and understanding of quantum physics is a reality (within our reality). Who knows, but there may be a dimension out there in which we have already reached that point. More interestingly, it would be a fantastic science fictional tale to imagine an alternate dimension with very different laws of physic to our own in which dimension travel is an easily achieved aspect for the beings within – a visitor from there to our dimension would be magically bizarre!

For now though, despite the fantasy of wild scientific theory and ambition well ahead of our time, we should note that we have a far greater and immediate challenge – the exploration of our solar system and our own local space. This challenge in itself still remains an immense and profound mission. We are still far from completing exploration of even our own planet let alone the intricacies of space-time, and although interesting, we should not forget the undiscovered knowledge and development of our own world before we attempt to venture too far into others!

Additional theory – Time Bubbles and Warp Drive:

As a final thought to stir some further consideration, there has been other scientific research by a Mexican physicist called Miguel Alcubierre, who theorised the posibility of what he called the Alcubierre Drive or Warp Drive. Warp Drive is a science fiction concept used in the popular television series Star Trek in which the starship ‘Enterprise’ uses Warp Drive as method of travelling faster than the speed of light. However, in this instance the Drive is used as a means to travel vast distance in a short period, rather than travel in time (though the concept of mixing tales of unintended Warp Drive errors with time travel theories has undoubtably been utilised in the storyline at some point).

The basic science behind the Alcubierre Drive is that a device (currently of unknown design) would somehow generate a filed that would distort the fabric of space-time ahead of the spacecraft and envelope it in a warp bubble. Presumably this would be in a similar vein to a ship creating a wake in water or and aircraft creating a vortex in the air, where the fabric of space-time is wrapped about the spacecraft. The warp bubble effectively becomes the object that is travelling faster than light, the space craft simply nestles safely within it and is stationary (i.e. light still moves just as fast within the bubble but the bubble travels faster that light outside the bubble). Thusly those within the bubble are not subject to any of the G forces or any other effect of travelling that fast as they would be if outside of the bubble. 

Unfortunately, Alcubierre has not defined exactly how this sort of field could be generated, and therefore the idea remains as an early concept, however, the thought process behind it is an interesting one.

Although it would seem that Gene Roddenberry never really investigated Einstein’s theory that anything travelling faster than light would also have to factor in time as well as distance, the concept of a warp bubble could be conceived as a promising theory for time travel. This leads me to a proposal in which time travel could escape the trap of causality if a similar device to the Alcubierre Drive could be designed to create some sort of ‘time/causality bubble’.

A time bubble would surround the traveller as they venture back in time.

The bubble would trap the traveller within their own personal and secure causality, in which time moves independently to that outside the bubble. Therefore creating one of three possible outcomes to the traveller:

1. The traveller can view and be viewed as a person in the past, but he will ultimately be protected from causality and operate within his own space and time as a singular universe. Therefore, he will be able to make changes in the past with the additional effect that he will be free of any paradox or butterfly effect because he had now permanently removed himself from everyone else’s causality.

2. The traveler can view but not be viewed as a person in the past. By creating a time bubble the traveler becomes what is considered “out of phase” with the past and not be visible or able to interact due to being within his own personal time field. He has therefore temporarily moved himself out of kilter with the rest of reality and causality. In this manner, it would be feasible to conceive travelers from the future that we are unaware and cannot see. They are effectively cloaked from our detection and, from their perspective, they will be nothing more than ghosts. Perhaps that is what ghosts are!

3. The traveler can view and be viewed as a person in the past, but due to the restrictions of the generated time bubble, is unable to influence or perform action in the past that would change events in the future. This could be because the time bubble reacts to any action that might change events as one time period is hypothetically restricted by the laws of physics to affect the other. Therefore history is determined and cannot be altered. If the traveler saves someone from dying in one incident, they will inevitably die in another. It can’t be prevented or escaped from. 

Option 2 is the most appealing of the above. It mainly supports the singular line of time which is also a more generally appealing and understood manner for the flow of time. It removes the aspects of being able to alter the past and thereby is a far more logical and feasible method of time travel. It also fantastically removes the possibility of paradox and protects the laws of causality, not to mention eradicating the Multiverse theory which is a thoroughly complex and contradictive facet of space-time study.

There is a fictional and similar example of a time bubble featured the 2002 movie adaptation of H G Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’. In this version of the well known story, the visual artist incorporated a time bubble about the machine that the traveler sat in when going forward and backward in time. The hero of the story used this device to eventually kill the arch villain by pushing his head outside of the bubble as the machine hurtled forward in time, thereby aging the exposed part exponentially in comparison to the rest of his body that was safe in the bubble.

The time bubble provides an answer to time travel. Perhaps it is possible after all, with the simple benefit that we can learn from history first hand rather than from the teachings of history’s winners. Given the choice, I think I’d like to travel back in time to the Ascension of Jesus Christ – either that, or to the point of creation at the Big Bang. It would be interesting to discover the truth behind that tale once and for all! I leave you with that thought…

Footnote: in progress thesis – “Religion versus Science, a Philosophical Study”