Time Travel

I'm sorry this article is so short; if you want a much longer version of this, you can visit here (my name at that site is PhysicsMan).

I have been interested in time travel for many years and I have formulated several theories about the subject. There are two facets of time travel: travel into the future, and travel into the past. Traveling into the future is easy. You're doing it right now. Traveling at a faster-than-usual rate is also easy: just by manipulating special relativity, you can change the rate at which time passes. For example, if you get into a spaceship and travel rapidly away from earth, time will travel more slowly for you. If you then return to earth, you will find that more time has passed on earth than in your spaceship. You will have effectively traveled into the future.

Traveling into the past is much harder. Most proposed time machines would be very difficult to build. One suggested design involves wormholes. The plan is as such: you create a stable wormhole, accelerate one end of the wormhole to nearly the speed of light, and then return it to where it came from. The accelerated end would then be in the stationary end's future, because of special relativity. So, if you were to travel from the accelerated end to the stationary end, you would travel into the past. The problem with this plan is that it would be very difficult to create a stable wormhole, and most scientists believe that you would need some sort of anti-gravity to keep the wormhole from collapsing. Without the stable wormhole, this plan will not work. In conclusion, though travel into the future is easy, with what we currently know, travel into the past is all but impossible.