Time Traveling to the Future

As a person who has read a lot about time travel, and who still plans to do some time traveling one day, I was pleased to see Brian Greene’s simple explanation of traveling into the future. I have been thinking about this since I was a kid and read the Classics Illustrated comic book version of H.G. Wells The Time Machine. Those comics led me on to many classic novels and to the library to find books about topics like time travel.

When it comes to time travel, there’s a misconception  – one that most of you are probably aware of – that’s important to clarify: It is only time travel to the past that’s speculative and, as many physicists anticipate, will one day be ruled out by a deeper understanding of physics.

Time travel to the future, by contrast, is an established part of modern understanding. As I briefly describe in the video below, Einstein showed us how you can — at least in principle — travel as far into the future as you’d like.

There are “technological/engineering” obstacles to doing so — the difficulties of achieving sufficiently high speed or traveling to the edge of a black hole — but the laws of physics themselves are unequivocal: time travel to the future is possible.

This video is part of World Science U, a new free digital education platform for teaching and learning science that I signed up for recently. Check it out at www.worldscienceu.com

There are other videos of Greene talking about time and answering questions about things like why the way we measure the passage of time using clocks and watches is merely an attribute of time, not its essence.

I have always loved listening to Greene explain complicated theories of physics in ways that I can fully understand – until he stops talking and I have to explain it to someone else. Then, I am back to, if not square 1, at least square 3.