Time Travelling... If you have any thoughts to add feel free to email us Jonathan's Thought for the Day Monday November 15th When I opened my mail yesterday, I found two letters on the topic of time travel, both from readers in Coventry, England. Dean is a practising astro-physicist. "Time travel," he insists, "Will never be possible." He goes into great technical detail, quoting several complex formulae to explain that "If a person travels at the speed of light, time for that person would cease to exist." Jill, meanwhile, who lives just a mile or so up the road from him, unknowingly takes that argument and turns it around. She suggests that "Time travel will not involve the physical shifting of matter but will be a purely mental thing." Our thoughts, after all, already DO travel faster than the speed of light! Zokariel writes of the wonder of loops and circles... "Your ideas on time as loop and circles... it was wonderful to conceive of. I have a book on teleportation that you might be interested in. It's called 'Teleportation! A Practical Guide for the Metaphysical Traveler' by Gwen Totterdale, and Jessica Severn, ISBN 1 884695 42 6. I also have a sacred geometry glyph book that you can meditate on and the images can be seen as 3D and some can act as Merkaba vehicles that can transport your consciousness to other realms like Jodi foster did in 'Contact'." Kenneth says that some physicists are contemplating a time travel machine. "I found what you had to say on time travel interesting. I just wanted to add another little interesting bit; I was watching the program 'Nova', and I found that there are groups of physicists that believe that time travel is possible, through a process called quantum gravity. But these same physicists say that it would be impossible to go further back in time than when the time machine was created." Almeda from Kentucky points out we "time travel" on a regular basis. "I'm sitting here in Kentucky looking at your photo. It's amazing how we can zip from one continent to another in just a matter of hours. Talk about time travel! We do it all the time and never think about it. I was telling some of the students, here at school, how I travelled forward and backward in time crossing the Atlantic. It was so nice meeting you in York during my whirlwind trip home... England is still the most beautiful country in my world. But, being a typical Gemini, I don't stay still long enough anyplace to take root. So I am destined to be a time traveller from now on." Prue from Switzerland finds time perplexing and ponders on the possibility of opting out of the fourth dimension. "I liked your theory on time travel - of the hoops or overlapping circles intersecting at certain times. It is a subject that fascinates me because I wrestle with a basic uneasiness concerning the existence of time. I think humans have invented it to ensure that they 'do' something with life within their reality, i.e. make sense of their lives in the material world. In fact I've just about decided that there is no present or future in the material world. All that we do is past as we do it. The future exists in our mind and when it enters the 'present' it is no longer either of them. The past is a fragment of our memories. We forget most of what we experience and the older we get the more we forget. Time makes no sense. It is designed merely to ensure that we 'do' something with life within the space of time. It would not be difficult to get objective about this theory but I'm still not easy. The big question is how would someone who didn't want to live in time go about suppressing it?" Jim from Alabama is sure it is all in the mind. "Since weekends fly and weekdays drag on, but years continue to go faster, then time travel must be a mental phenomenon. I think it's one of those sciences that we won't get to until we abandon the physical - and limiting - portion of science. Just as it's safer and easier to send probes to the outer limits of the solar system, we will be able to send probes to the future and to the past. We do it now - it's called imagination - it just a matter of calibrating the equipment." Another Jim sums it up - at the speed of light. "In regards to time travel, if nothing can travel at the speed of light, the question arises: How does light travel at the speed of light? Light is composed of particles that have mass, etc. If it can do it, so can other things that have mass." Juanita reckons we are but figments of God's imagination - and He set us in motion with a Big Bang. "I like that idea about time travel being a mental thing because I don't believe matter really exists except in the mind of God. I think Einstein believed that. I'm not sure. It explains what came before the Big Bang. God scratching his imaginary head and then Bang! What an idea. We're just an idea. The mind of God is the only reality. If He says it's real then it's real. Can't get any more real than that. If he says you are solid matter then you are but still you are only the thought. Explains a lot. It does for me anyway. I always wondered what went Bang." Mike says we will have to break free of existing concepts before we can roam through time. "Okay, the two opposing views of the same thing are typically human. If we remember that: When the railway was a new-fangled invention, many traditional physicists insisted that it was not possible to travel at more than 30 mph, as the occupants of the train would surely suffocate. It was also never going to be possible for aeroplanes to fly faster than sound; space travel was, of course, only possible in science-fiction stories. It is, however, correct that matter cannot exceed the speed of light. I wonder on what basis your second reader and yourself presume that thoughts travel faster than light. Thoughts are a series of electrical synaptic connections in the brain. Electricity cannot flow faster than the speed of light, in the best conductors it flows at slightly less than that. The synapses are not the best of conductors, so we can expect the electrical charges to flow at considerably less than the speed of light. If we consider thought transfer, telepathy, this too cannot occur at more than the speed of light, as this must be a form of electro-magnetic transmission, as radio waves. These are physical limitations, so how can they be overcome? Well, physics is only a way of explaining things we experience in a mathematical sense. For a traditional physicist, a concept that does not work in the mathematical models known to him cannot exist. For a lay person, anything can exist, if he chooses to believe it. The reality is once again somewhere between. Remember, time was a physical constant until Einstein developed his theory of relativity. If it can be proved that thoughts can be transmitted faster than the speed of light, and if time travel is to be possible, we need new mathematical models, a new realisation of the way things are, rather than always insisting that everything is undoubtedly exactly as we perceive it. We already know about curvature in time-space continuum, the answer may very well lie in this, perhaps travelling, or transmitting, across the chord of the curve. Perhaps we have to discover more about the dimensions we perceive. Are there really only four dimensions and six senses, or are there more we don't know about yet, or have perhaps even forgotten over the last 2 or 3 thousand years?" Joseph from the States sees the possibility of time travel in memories and dreams. "If time travel is purely subjective, and if time travel is a mental process then, yes, we travel through time in the past by remembering events of the past. We, as beings of energy , can also travel into the future in the subjective manner of premonitions or dreams of the future. We can also control the duration of the time spent in these 'states' of travel through the process of sustained meditation." Jennifer has experienced herself in different lifetimes... "Time Travel already happens. Thanks to the research and teaching at The Monroe Institute in Virginia, USA, one can travel to altered states of consciousness and go beyond the confines of time and space. From there it's easy to 'visit' any time or place you've a desire to go. I went and visited myself several times at different ages and in several lifetimes. No, there's no movement of physical matter as, of course, physical matter is one of those very things which are bounded by time. Very fun stuff!" Marjorie from Honolulu, Hawaii, says that time is an absolute through which we are in transit. "Aloha! It was man who invented the linear concept of 'time' based on sunrise/sunset. It was done in order to bring order to his life, although that may not have been a conscious decision. As aboriginal people can attest. We can 'travel' thru 'time' in our minds, we've simply lost that ability to the 90% of our minds we moderns don't use. Time is. It doesn't move. We do. Universal mind contains all the time there is, but we'd go crazy trying to live there. While there are people (recognized psychics and others) who can move backward or forward in Universal Time, I believe modern man has a very long way to go to be able to switch back and forth from conscious mind to universal mind without damaging the physical body-shell given us in this life to operate in present 'time'. First, we need to get rid of a lot of personal (and for most people, hidden) 'memory junk'." Doris from New Jersey propounds her Dad's theory that it is us who pilot the UFOs that are sighted so often these days. "In keeping with your subject for this week, my Dad had an interesting theory. He always thought that UFOs and reports of alien beings are really us in the future time traveling back to observe or change things." Alex from Canada has an interesting journey to take you on... "I read your comments from Dean, the 'practising astro-physicist' and I must say that I was dismayed. The term 'time travel' might mean popping in and out of different times to sci-fi buffs, but time is a relative, not absolute concept. Obviously, we are all traveling through a space and time warp constantly as the earth rotates around the sun and on its own axis simultaneously. Tests with atomic clocks prove conclusively that objects and people moving faster than some other object or person are actually witnessing time pass slower, although they may not realize any difference. If I recall my high-school physics, the speed of light has been shown to be a constant thus far. So when inside the light-speed vehicle, time might be operating as normal to the people inside, though temporary blindness or inability to form images could be a characteristic of light-speed travel. But this phenomenon might only occur when under a propulsion force like a nuclear rocket, and perhaps not if using some other kind of 'natural conduit' resonance warp or wormhole effect to travel. This proves conclusively that it is not necessary to travel at the speed of light to time travel. It happens all the time but the differences are minute, as our propulsion systems are not yet sufficient to propel us or atomic clocks closer to the speed of light. If a crew does travel at the speed of light as this astro-physicist theorized about, it is conceivable that time outside of their window might be frozen and they may cease to exist in this universe. The vehicle and crew may fall into another dimension, or they might cease to function normally. Or they might be just fine. Scientists do not want to theorize outside of established models as it is easy to be called a heretic, and it is also difficult to prove proposed theories. I believe travel beyond the speed of light is very possible. The way to tackle the problem will probably be found in subatomic physics and other Y2K (or Roswell, USA) technologies that will allow humans to do incredible things, if we survive long enough to apply ourselves to further explore and understand the universe and its creations. Regarding your last comment about thoughts traveling faster than the speed of light, as far as I understand it, the mind utilizes electrochemical processes that indeed do travel at no more than the speed of light, although the brain does use many parts simultaneously when processing information. And naturally, you were most likely speaking figuratively. Human capabilities always seem to impress me. Your second reader Jill notes that we might use our minds to travel through time, and indeed we already do travel through time with the power of our minds. Memories are time capsules that can be remembered to the finest detail. And only the mind can unlock the future, as our decisions and actions create it as we go. The chief military forces of the planet have employed psychics and remote viewers to conduct information through mental visions that, although might not be traveling beyond the speed of light, probably travel with as some kind of electrical responses at the speed of light. Quarks are particles that we believe travel faster than the speed of light, and are a naturally occurring phenomenon. The concept of the speed of light as an unbreakable speed barrier is one that I thought was no longer discussed by scientists. Through warps, wormholes, or some other natural phenomenon, we may eventually travel beyond the speed of light to reach our neighbouring planetary systems. Using this technology, one could spin around the earth instead of out into space at the speed of light. This would allow the occupants of the capsule to return to a new earth, an earth of their future, because time for them would have ticked more slowly relative to their family and friends back on earth. However, going back in time might be a little more tricky. My final thought: what we do with the technology will be up to us, as always." Daniel from the States warns of the limitations of having a closed mind. "Firstly I have to say that any scientist who says something will NEVER be possible should not be taken too seriously. I mean, how can anybody say what will be possible in the future and be 100% correct and certain? I am the first to admit that I am no wizz at mathematics or astro-physics but I believe that time travel may one day be possible or maybe not - but I refuse to close my mind to the possibility. This, I believe is one of the problems with modern science we believe that we know all there is to know and close our minds to the possibilities that the universe presents thus causing many of those 'discoveries' to never be. The human being in my opinion is only limited by his/her imagination and can achieve anything that he/she truly believes in. Look at the first person to fly, could he have known for sure that we would one day fly outside Earth's atmosphere and into space? Could he have known definitively that we would one day walk on other moons/planets? In closing, Dean the astro-physicist can quote any formulae and technical 'scientific' data proving that man will never have the ability to time travel but how is he to know that someone from the other side of the planet will not go public tomorrow with some breakthrough formula in the field of astro-physics that proves some of his calculations to be wrong..." And Nicholas has certainly kept his mind open to some fantastic regression journeys. "You mentioned time travel. Yes, not only is it possible, but I have done it - twice! The first time I was 'regressed' and found myself in 16th century Poland - poor, cold and hungry! And I was there, but that was not nearly as interesting as the other time! We met every Friday - a group of people with psychic ability and inquiring minds who wished to explore, if you wish, the outer limits of our potentials. We were exploring astral travel, but in a very focused way. I decided I wanted to go back to the time of Christ, but not alone, with another member of our group with whom I shared a strong psychic bond. We held each other's wrists as we meditated and then suddenly I found myself in an extremely hot, dusty street with a crowd of people pressed into a doorway. A Roman soldier came by on horseback dragging a body behind. It was no big deal and that's what was really interesting! That it was no big deal. I had taken on the sensibilities and understandings of actually being in that time! This of course is extremely important to understand. We view history from the perspective of how we have developed emotionally, spiritually and intellectually and because of this we miss the 'essence' of history. It's almost like watching a foreign film without subtitles and not really knowing the language well. I'll skip all the details for now as it would take a long time. What do I remember? The dust, the sand, the smell, the heat. In many ways life was hard. I made my way to an open space to where there was a crowd of people and I saw my friend in the crowd and she saw me. It makes my hair stand on end when I recall that moment. Amazingly, as I write these words it actually doesn't seem like such a big deal. We are capable of so much more than we think. So much more!" Click here to go back