Expert: Tom Whiting - 1/11/2008

Question
hi tom,is time travel possible?are  scientist from nasa working on this?if it was possible do you thing they will tell us?
thank you
greg

Answer
Hi Greg,
Under normal circumstances, time travel is not possible.
(We have to keep science fiction separate from scientific
facts).
But if you could locate a rapidly rotating Black Hole nearby, (with two separate event horizons) then it's theoretically possible to go forward in time, but don't plan on any return, because even theoretically, backward time travel is still impossible.
Time is a one-way arrow...forward only, thus backward in
time is still considered impossible, even theoretically.

{There's even a good theological/historical argument for backwards in time as a no-no....some unscrupulous, bad, mean person could go back in time and mess up the Cruxificion of Jesus ...or pick one of the other major religious characters in the past, OR any major historical event could be affected....and change all of history...and therefore you and I might not even exist anymore!}

But since the nearest black hole is thousands of
light years distant, it's not a practical thing to even
consider at this time...going forward in time.  
So since it's not very practical at this time, no scientist, NASA or otherwise, is wasting any time on it.
(No pun intended).

Yes, I would think that they would tell us, as they would
receive much Gov't money for the discovery. Plus, they
didn't hide their 6 trips to the moon, or the Shuttle
disasters, did they?  One problem being, since a time traveler couldn't get back to the present, how would one "prove" it?  They couldn't.
Case closed.

Of course, all this does not prevent an astronaut from
getting up close to lightspeed someday, where time slows down dramatically for the astronaut, so when the astronaut eventually returns to Earth, the Earth is much older than he is....as in the movie  "Planet of the Apes"....this would actually happen, but it's not real time travel as you are suggesting, it's simply Einstein's Special Relativity, where time slows down the faster you travel up toward light speed.
(Time becomes zero at lightspeed). {Faster than light travel is thought to be impossible because time would have to go backward above light speed, and that's impossible too, so super-light speed is deemed impossible also. And there are other factors too...like mass becomes infinite
at light speed, and that's a no-no also...and that's been
proven to be accurate in the cyclotrons too.}

The passage of time is relative to your velocity, relative to the speed of light, (Einstein's Special Relativity) and this is all true scientifically, and has even been proven, many times.
But since even our fastest spacecraft have yet to achieve
even 1% the speed of light (1860 miles per second, or
Earth to Moon in about 2 minutes) velocities of 99% light speed are probably centuries in the future.
Hope all this helps,
Clear Skies,
Tom Whiting