Some Ideas On The Likelihood Of Time Travel Being Possible
As a scientist (albeit, not a physicist) I often ask myself “is time travel possible?”. The answer is, naturally, I have no idea. Maybe it is.
There are a large number of time travel theories. On one hand if it were possible to travel backwards in time, would we not be surrounded by millions of people from many centuries into the far future who have come to view us? Then again, why should they come now when they have a virtually unlimited number of eras to view instead.
Then again, maybe they are in fact here? Maybe it is possible to visit us, but there are limitations? Time travel movies often play a lot with these ideas, with the muddled connection between cause and effect, past and future.
One great example is the movie Timecrimes. Although a large portion of it is predictable and can be said to repeat the standard time travel genre, at some stage during the middle of the film it breaks from that and starts asking questions that aren’t normally investigated: what is cause and what is effect? It does so in a very effective and exciting manner, and when I left the cinema I couldn’t help but ask myself why so few films deal with those complex ideas.
In most movies that are about time travel one of the following scenarios may occur:
(a) The hero may travel back in time and alter something and cause 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 hero may journey back in time only to view an historical era (in a sense, this needn’t be a sci-fi film).
(d) The hero may travel to the future – in a way 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 distant future).
All these are fascinating alternatives. Until they are resolved by science, I will enjoy whatever movies and novels are written about the subject despite any (major) flaws.