Time travel is impossible, isn’t it?
Well, actually, no, it isn’t impossible.
One of the features of Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity is that time is allowed for by the equations. So, although you might think that time travel is the work of science fiction it is scientifically possible.
That’s not to say that you will be able to nip out and buy a time machine anytime soon. At present, we’re pretty much in the equivalent time to that some decades before the Wright brothers took to the air. That’s to say, it’s a time when the only potentially possible technologies which would enable time travel involve black holes and naked singularities and various things that, at the moment, appear to lie well beyond our capabilities for the forseeable future.
However, the “forseeable future” can be very near-sighted sometimes. Already experiments are going on in CERN which deal with things closer and closer to naked singularities.
But surely all the paradoxes (killing your own grandfather before you were born etc.) mean that time travel is impossible? No, just as it was often “proved” that it would be impossible for a lump of a metal to fly through the air in the decades pre the Wright brothers, just because some armchair philosopher “proves” that it’s impossible doesn’t mean anything. The fact is that it IS allowed for within Einstein’s theory which, so far, has been proven at every juncture.
Ah, but, if time travel were possible then how come we aren’t knee deep in time travellers? Good question. Perhaps we are but they’re very good at concealing themselves or perhaps our era just isn’t very interesting. Or maybe it’s just something trivial like they just don’t have enough power to get back as far as us. None of those mean that time travel isn’t possible though.
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