Ok, so Shaiyan and I were debating the idea of possible time travel, and I'm moving that debate over here.
Ok, yes ONE way is to travel faster than the speed of light, but that's only to go BACK in time. The faster you go in space, the slower time gets relative to the person. Knowing that, one can theorize that if you start traveling faster that the speed of light, one will begin to travel backwards in time. You say no one knows if wormholes exist, well at one time most people thought black holes were a bunch of hooey. I mean, a giant, invisible mass able to suck in something so fast as light? If we didn't know it existed today, we'd still think it was impossible. And even if Wormholes don't exist naturally, who's to say we couldn't synthesize them? We can create microscopic black holes with particle collider, if that's possible, why can't we create a worm hole?
Ok. Before this discussion get's outta hand, I must step in, so it is my duty as a physics geek.
First of all, we would not create mini-worm holes with a particle collider. It would rather be more likely to create mass. Take CERN for example: They spin electrons (particles of electricty) and spin it an 97% of the speed of light. They accelerate it with strong magnetic fields, in a vacuum, in a tube that is called the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) that runs through, I think 3 countries. And it would be impossible to create a blackhole outof just the few electrons they are spinning around the cirlce there since - yes we all know it, but only a few of us understand it E=mc
2. That said, we would only be able to create little mass - and guess what! - they are not even looking to do that! Researchers at CERN are trying to find the Higgs Boson Particle, a theortical (so far) particle, that, they think will be created when they are doing, the above said.
And now to the issue of time travel. First problem is: Relativity. The faster we go, the bigger our mass gets. This cannot be observed when going 50km/h or even 1000km/h, but when going at around the speed of light our mass would increase exponentially, and thus (most probably) we would be crushed because of our own gravity - since F
g=G* M
1M
2/r
2.
Ok - let's say we are able to withstand our own crushing forces. What would we do? We would have to go faster then the speed of light to - catch up to past events!
imagine two racecars. One speeds away (light), and in order to catch up to it one would have to go faster the Car #1. And then again, we would have to go incredibly fast, and it would take ages to catch up with Car #1, since it is going at 3.8*10
8 m/s, and we would have to go extra fast, since every second it travels another 3.8*10
8 meters, and it would be far gone, when we start "driving".
And then, we wouldn't be able to "travel" back in time, we would only be able to look at past events, since we are only receiving the images from the past. And again - it would be incredibly hard to see everything, since we are, by then, incredibly far away from earth, and we'd see it as if earth would be a star - a very
very dim star. So we would also have trouble seeing it.
Last point about the speed of light. The faster we go, they higher the probability of colliding with particles in space. Space isn't empty, it has hydrogen atoms, etc. floating around in it. A single hydrogen atom that collides with a spaceship at the speed of light, would just blow the whole ship apart (just think of the forces!, or if you are simple minded of the momentum of the atom at that point!). Also, the slightest variation in direction would have you tumbling from the ship, because even a variation of one degree would slow your ship down by a crapload, most probably hurting you.
Lastly, wormholes don't exist. (As far as I know), and if they are supposed to make you go instantly to any point in te universe, the acceleration
will kill us anyways.
And so ends the lesson. I can't think of anything of how to make time travel possibly possibly work right now. And wormholes are total crap in the first place, since they would NEVER EVER WORK, and they go against every physics principle out there. Sci-Fi writers can stick that one up their ass.
THE END (any questions?)