Could we (unknowingly) be stuck in an infinite time-loop?
812727
no\n\nno\n\nno\n\nno\n\nno
502465
There is no such thing as time travel, it's a physical impossibility. The reason we haven't had any visitors from the future is because time travel simply cannot occur.
1005791
Huh?  We solved time travel long ago.  Go somewhere real fast.  Come back and we'll all be dead.  You made it to the future.\n\nNow, by the nature of your question I assume you are looking for the physicist who is plotting to take over the universe with his new time machine.  Turn off the TV for a few minutes.  No 'branch' is trying to 'solve' time travel.  Unified theory be damned!  Someone throw me a string!
847758
I really don't think it's possible to travel through time, though...
823216
Yes!\n\nWell, in theory, at least.\n\nThe "Time Machine" would require the existence of a worm hole - something that scientists believe may exist in theory. Sadly, of course, we haven't actually found one yet, so this is all pie-in-the-sky, but if we *did* find a worm hole, then it's dead easy! (Sort of.)\n\nHere's how we do it.....\n\nFirst, find your worm hole.\n\nSecond, drag one end of the worm hole across space until it is next to the other end.\n\nThird, drag the end of the worm hole round and round the other end, at a speed as close to the speed of light as you can.\n\nNow, as we all know (don't we?) time travels more slowly for a moving clock. (Actually, this has been proved to be true, but that's something for another question - ask and I'll tell you how they proved it.) So, since time is travelling more slowly for the end of the worm hole that you're dragging around it will slip into the past relative to the end that isn't moving.\n\nLastly, simply jump in the end that you've been dragging around and you'll appear out the other end in the future. Then do it again and appear even further in the future. Repeat until you are as far into the future as you want to be.\n\nOnce you've got bored with the future (as if!) just go around the other way and you'll go back in time until you arrive back at the time you started.\n\nYou can't use it to go back into the past though, because you'll simply return to a time before you made your time machine i.e. before you dragged the other end across space.\n\nSee? It's easy! LOL
850612
According to Hitchhikker's Guide, it is impossible to know the Question to Life, the Universe and Everything at the same time as the answer (42). So since we know the answer, we can never, ever know the question, for they cancel each other out and life as we know it will cease to exist and start anew.\n\nDeeep. . . .
752397
I would go to the distant future and speak with people who perhaps allready have the time machine so I could understand how to use it carefully without disrupting the continuum. I would be careful on going to the future to get reports on sports games and the stock market because each future you visit is only one particular future, and with each passing second it creates a completely differrent future. I also might take christians and other religeous fanatics to the far distant past to prove to them that evolution occured once and for all and their bible thumping is basicaly meaningless. However this could also be dangerous because any foreign disease on us, or exhaled by us that was exposed to the primordial world could totaly change what we know to be current history. Every invention created by us happens very carefully, we make nothing before we are ready. If (in total speculation) a future time traveller visited the past he would have all precautions accounted for, such as disease, mistakes, and keeping a low profile. In our century we have no such precautions. So if I ever did get a hold of a time machine, I would return it to whoever it came from. Another problem with using a time machine to change the past or "the grandfather" paradox is Richard Feynmans theory of "a particle will take every possible path in space time" meaning if I went back and changed a past, I would change the past in a totaly differrent time frame then the temporal continuum I am used to, so when I returned everything would be the same. However I would be still messing with the universe. Theirfore if I ever found a empty time machine I would indeed leave it alone, or return it to the big temporal lost and found. We are not ready for such technology, and probaly wont be for a long time.
1065560
Anything is possible "if" another impossible thing is found to be possible; so long as the original thing is made possible by the formerly impossible thing.\n\nIn other words, of course time travel is possible so long as other impossible things become possible that would make it possible, such as your catalyst which would open a space and time rift.\n\nTherefore, the real question is not whether time travel is possible, but whether any catalyst does exist that would make it possible.\n\nThanks for the post!
730142
Possibly so. Possibly no. I'd say the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes foremost into play here. Maybe also Schrödinger's cat. Is it dead or still alive? That would make a significant difference, you know. These questions can't just be taken so lightly. And how could you even consider Y!A as a forum to resolve such complex issues as this? More to the point, even assuming Planck scale dynamics can be fully understood with the mathematical tools we have at hand today, where exactly does that get us? We still don't know what topping to put on our pizza this weekend. Or whether a third eye would make a good chick magnet. Or even whether that darn cat is still alive or dead.... 'tis an enduring mystery. And we wouldn't want to take all the mysterious challenge out of life, now would we?....Meow.
248955
I don't think it is possible, and if so the experiment itself would probably detroy the fabric of our reality to the point that people's answers would disappear, and reappear as different answers. The time machine does make for some fine fiction, though.
138044
Science fiction has explored this in tremendous detail, and has come up with no solid answer.  I'm not going to, either, but let me see if I can share a little bit of thought to help you find an answer you're comfortable with...\n\nEnvision the existence of a human being as a path that the human moves along, moving only in one direction: always closer to the end of the path, and further from its start.  So far, so good?  (Mathematically, it would be a 3-dimensional curve in a higher dimensional space; (string theory wants it to be 10 or 11 dimensions, I hear) your perception of time would be caused by your traversing that curve.)\n\nNOW: Time travel says that there is a way of bending this path around so that, although you're still moving closer and closer to the end of the path, the path itself loops around behind itself.  Think of a rope that's laid on the floor in a zigzag or a loop.\n\nFirst: the person who is me in, say, 2020, and comes back to visit me in 2006 is not identical to the 2006 me: that person is further down the path...  I might not even recognize the future me as me...\n\nSecond: I suspect that what happens depends whether the path zigzags without crossing itself, or actually crosses itself, forming a loop.  What the loop would do is pure guesswork...  It might separate off (See: "The Lincoln Hunters"); it might do nothing (See: "The End of Eternity") or it might cause an incredible release of energy, possibly destroying the individual altogether, and maybe lots of other things, as well.  (See: "The Weapons Shops of Isher")\n\nUntil we develop the ability to travel backward in time, we just don't know; all we can do is guess, guess, guess.\n\nWhich is fun--and the source of a lot of good fiction I've read!
680669
we r travelling at 1 second forward per second.\n\nIf that's not that u meant, the easiest and most likely way to get a time machine to time travel is for yourself in the future to travel back now to give yourself the time machine now which u got in the "past" from the "future yourself" coming back to gave it to u.
154209
It doesn't end.  It goes on. If you took a line and ran it in any direction off the planet's surface it would just keep going into infinity,  if you could freeze time and walk on that screen,  you would never get to the end.  There is no end.
194273
Everything is impossible, until proved. Seeing as things have happened, it strikes the nothing possibility. It is possible that nothing eventful will happen to you in the next ten minutes, previous experience stands as evidence for this, however hopefully previous evidence also shows that something big might in fact happen, therefore going on both of these sets of data it has been proven possible that a wide variety of possibilities may happen.
493463
Yes I did. I built a "time machine" ___ years to perfect it. It took me ___ years. Of course there is no time, so you may have noticed that there are times which are not listed above. This proves time does not exist. I rest my case. And I would like to thank the academy for not revoking my birth certificate.\n\nMy first discovery was that there is no such thing as time.\nThat helped alot, because now, all the time it would take to invent a time machine didn't exist, so I would be able to have invented one already.\n\nI instantly realized that if you travel at the speed of light, time stops. Go faster than the speed of light, and you start going back in time. Therefore, go slower than the speed of time and you go forward in time. Make sense so far?\n\nSince time doesn't exist anyway, why figure out how to go faster than the speed of light. You are already there. And if you had an accident, while traveling that fast, surely your insurance wouldn't cover it and your speeding ticket would be astronomical, and I wouldn't be rich enough to pay it (wait a minute - if time is money, and there is no time, there is no money, so I can afford to speed again. See how great life is? (but if your lifetime is made of time, and there is no time, you are dead right now. That seems inconvenient. But I feel great if I'm dead right now. Maybe I've been worrying for nothing.\n\nI then remembered (my first step in going back in time) that the infinite Universe in which we live goes "out" forever. Since I, as a human being, go infinitely IN forever (no matter how small the piece of my, you could always cut it in half) and the inner-most in of infinity is already inside my body, and since there is no number bigger than infinity, everything is inside me already...all of infinity. I slowed down and realized that I don't need speed, time, life, money or insurance, to travel in time. Why, the electrons in every one of my atoms are already traveling at the speed of light and particles in them are going even faster. That should help too. \n\nViola! If there is no time, therefore I am already infinity years old, I don't have (but I could) go anywhere in time, because I have already been there, and there is here, and here is now, so there you go.\n\nI don't have to sell any of you my time machine. Each of you already has one. I wouldn't call it a time machine though, because there is no such thing as time (which is easy to prove by just picking up a phone in one country and talking to someone in another a few "time" zones forward or back, you are "time travelling" talking to someone in today or tomorrow (your choice) so you can make yourself time travel at will.\n\n"But I can't SEE the person I'm talking to on the phone" you might say.\n\nFine. Go out tonight and look at the stars. By the "time" it took light to travel to your eye from the star, thousands of "years" passed, so you are actually seeing them as they looked thousands of years ago...and, you are seeing those stars with eyes that "weren't even alive thousands of years ago. So you can see without eyes too.\n\nBut I guess the short answer would be "yes".
973027
dont worry about "time". remember that big circle curving back into itself? aka,, infinity.
918005
If time is stopped exactly at 00:00, you'd be in neither.  Theoretically, you'd be bending spacetime so you be everywhere at once and time would not matter to you.  Oooooh....Scary!\n\nBut if your legs were hanging split over a fence (left foot one side(the west) and the right foot on the other side (the east) ) and the "time line" went over your chest, your left leg would be 1 day ahead and your right would be in the current day.  Your chest would be in the current day since theoretically 23hr:59m:59s.2999999ss is the last instance you are in a current day.