comments on Time Travel

Seeing as how about 50 of you replied to Andy's post, I decided to post this so everyone could read it. Thought you might find it interesting.

For those of you that took college physics, quantum physics, and celestial mechanics (I have, but it ISN'T my major), please correct me if any of my info is false.

I'm not sure about traveling back in time. I do have a belief about traveling foward though. According to Einstein's theory of Relativity, if you could move at the speed of light for a period of time and somehow get back to earth, you would return in a time that to you may have been minutes or even seconds. However, from the viewpoint of everyone that is on earth during your journey, it may have been a period of months or even years.

I believe that there was a movie or two that might have made use of this theory of time travel. Does anybody know of any?

It sounds as ridiculous as any other theory about time travel. However, I'm not sure that it's really a "theory" at all as the common misconception about theories is that they are not proven but are actually ideas or hypothesis. This is wrong; theories typically have an overwhelming amount of evidence to support them. In essence, there are no (outside the bound of the theory of Relativity) that can even be considered as theories about time travel.

So if you're looking for proof or an actual theory on time travel. Look into Einstein's work on quantum mechanics and celestial physics. If you want instant gratification or some kind of explanation that might help you believe that some sort of time travel actually exists, I'll take a stab at it.

Einstein actually recorded and witnessed this (apparently as a boy, although I can't be sure). Imagine a train passing by as you watch it at a perfect 90 degree angle. At noontime, light from the sun will pass directly downwards through the top of a cattle car through cracks in the roof. You would think that the light, which travels at 2.998 x 10^8 m/s (about 186,000 mps), would simply pass straight down and hit the point on the floor of the car DIRECTLY below the point that it touched on the roof. But it doesn't. The light actually BENDS; it hits a point farther back from the point that you would think it would hit (in the opposite direction that the train is traveling). Now I don't believe that Einstein actually saw this as a boy, but I know that he proved it to be true. If you want to really understand what the hell this has to do with Einstein's theory and the possibility of time travel, I suggest you check out some of his work AND a little experiment that was performed with a certain jetplane and an atomic clock.

Oh yeah, Andy. I wanted to ask you...I didn't quite understand your connection between a time machine and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I don't see how the relationship between momentum and position (if you know your exact position, you cannot know your exact momentum and vice versa) has anything to do with how a time machine might change the course of history. Maybe I'm missing something. Fill me in. And oh yeah, sorry (if this is irritating) for liking science (and science fiction) so much.

In case anyone missed my question...Does anyone know of any movies that include the use of Einstein's theory to (if you haven't figured it out yet, everything the equation E=mc^2 is based upon) explain the possible existence of time travel?

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