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Time travel: A dream in our time
By RAPHAEL BONHART
The passage of time in is nothing more than the passing moments of
an inescapable present . This present is the boundary line between
a constant vanishing past and a non-existent future, and it seems
to be moving at a constant rate and in one direction only for all
observers.
According to the Webster's Family Encyclopedia, time is defined as
a concept that measures the duration of events and the periods
that separates them. It is a fundamental parameter of all changes,
measuring the rates at which they occur, it provides a scale of
measurement enabling events that have occurred to be distinguished
form those that are occurring and those that will occur.
But if we put this definition to its simplest form without
complicating this article, it is the present where reality takes
place, where time is executed or the future is programmed into
schedules, where the past is written and etched into our memory,
with our deeds and other natural changes as the catalysts that
shapes its history.
This present is like an immovable vessel that takes us in one
direction only, with the future like a light shining on the
present and casting a shadow of the past. It is like that zero
that separates positive numbers from negative numbers, with the
negative numbers as the observed past and positive numbers as the
unknown future.
This is the inevitable direction of the passage of time and no man
has been able to break away from that bondage of slavery to it.
Neither one can come after or go before this time capsule of the
present. It seems also that your time and my time must be the same
in the present in order for us to see ourselves, because a time
traveler is an unseen and can be seen only by those when he
arrives at their time, and it must be their present.
This is the defining reality of being in our time, the
consciousness of our existence, and man is speculating that time
travel is possible only if we can break away from the grasp of the
present and go into yesterday or tomorrow.
Imagine if you can go back in time to the past to correct a flawed
history if our present time demands it for the benefit of
humanity. Will that rectification of the past effect history of
the present, be written, in living memory or still in the cradle?
I tend to imagine, contrary to move like H.G. Wells Time Machine
and Time Cop, that if we are visitors of a different time, we will
be mere spectators only and not part-takers. But it is time only
that well tell us when man finally shakes it foundations, by
unlocking the secret of its speed and direction.
I was first fascinated by time travel when I saw the movie H.G.
Wells Time Machine about 20 years ago. In that movie, the designer
of the time machine explained why it had disappeared. "It is still
there at the same place, but in a different time, that is why we
cannot see it."
In a universe of space, time and matter, matter will always move
through any dimension of space at the cost of time. We can move
forward, backward, up and down and do so by taking time. But it is
possible too that we can remain in the same place in space and
move in the dimension of time. But the grasp of the present is
like the colossal weight of the total mass of the universe,
dictating that we all move in time with one rhythm, in
synchronization and in one direction.
One of the statements I always say to myself is this, "If moving
though time to visit the past or future a definite possibility, or
if psychics can have a glimpse of the future, then time must be
like a computer program. It is running in sequence, has its own
conditional statements, with our deeds and the forces of nature as
the input variables that determine the output, thus shaping its
history. It must also have a master programmer that is able to
debug it to correct catastrophic errors that might be beyond our
control or when we appeal to him take care of the unknown future."
In Relativity, matter and energy are two different forms of the
same thing as shown by Einstein's famous equation E=mc2, the
single equation that led us to the dawning of the nuclear age-a
direct evidence of man's manipulation of matter of the highest
order.
Space travel is another sure sign of man's prying of our universe
and does so at the expense of the energy of matter. But to man,
time is still an enigma to meddle with it. But once he solves that
riddle, a new age will begin. Einstein, up until his death,
attempted to unlock that tiny bit of God's mind by trying to unify
gravitation and electromagnetism into a single field. If he was
successful, I believe that building a time machine would have been
possible by now.
So far, matter and space are at the discretion of man for
exploitation. But not time yet. And we do not know the
consequences of time travel. It could be a catastrophic experiment
because the same matter separated by time cannot go back in time
and occupy the same space. This means that if you go back in time,
for instance, and touch your past being, a probable spontaneous
reaction might be initiated meaning that chaos might be introduced
to an orderly creation. So, far man is able to change matter into
a multiplicity of commodities for his benefit, and will eventually
conquer the vast space of the universe, but he cannot yet alter
the course of time from now till the end because it seems at the
moment that time belongs to God.
 
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