Some Thoughts On The Possibility Of Time Travel Being Possible
As a scientist (though not a physicist) I sometimes ask myself “is time travel possible?”. The answer is, clearly, I have no idea. Perhaps it is.
There are numerous time travel theories. On one hand if it were possible to journey in time, would we not be surrounded by countless people from countless centuries into the far future who have come to visit us? Then again, why should they come this year when they have a virtually unlimited number of eras to visit instead.
Regardless, maybe they are in fact here? Maybe it is possible to journey to our time, but there are rules? Time travel movies frequently play a lot with these concepts, with the muddled connection between cause and effect, past and future.
One great example is the film Timecrimes. Although a large portion of it is unsurprising and can be said to repeat the standard time travel genre, at some point during the middle of the film it breaks from that and begins asking questions that aren’t often investigated: what is cause and what is effect? It does so in a very convincing and exciting way, and when I left the cinema I couldn’t help but wonder why so few films deal with those fascinating issues.
In most movies that deal with time travel one or more of the following scenarios may occur:
(a) The protagonist may travel back in time and alter something and create a paradox (these movies tend to contradict themselves almost every single time).
(b) The protagonist may journey back in time only to find out he can’t change anything – he is a part of history.
(c) The protagonist may journey back in time only to view an historical era (in a sense, this needn’t be a sci-fi movie).
(d) The protagonist may travel to the future – in many ways this is not a time travel movie but rather a futuristic movie (think ‘Buck Rogers’ – an astronaut gets frozen for 500 years and wakes up in the far future).
All these are interesting concepts. Until they are resolved by science, I will enjoy whatever movies and novels are written about the subject despite any (obvious) flaws.