Traveling to the Past is Possible??
Hello World.
I had a random thought today while thinking about the concept of time and light, and I want to share it and hear what you guys think. It is widely accepted that, in theory, going forward in time is possible but not into the past. I would like to offer my explanation as to why I think it is possible to travel into the past.
Before we begin, I would like to give a quick refresher on the concept of light. When we are observing some object, the object that we see through our eyes is nothing but an information that our brain processed using the light particles that had bounced off from the object. Thus, light particles relay information of the object that they had either bounced or originated from it, and our brain simply compiles the relayed information into a picture of the object and uploads it into our mind. Thus, a light is synonymous to a code of information, our brain is synonymous to a compiler that translates the given information from the light, and the source of light is synonymous to a programmer (read my next post for the explanation for why).
Moving on to my "theory", I would like to start with an illustration. Imagine you are standing next to a huge clock that has bright lights shining on it for clear visibility. And, now, imagine you're accelerating away from the clock. As you accelerate and look back at the clock, you should see that the tickings of the clock are slowing down, since the amount of the light particles that are bouncing from the clock and reaching your eyes are decreasing in intensity, meaning the light particles relaying the clocks' information are updating less rapidly into our eyes.
To intuitively better help you understand this, imagine getting hosed by a super strong water gun (synonymous to the light particles carrying the information of the clock), how would you feel as you are running away from it? It would hurt you less as you run from it since the water is hitting you less rapidly as you accelerate away from it; this is the same concept with the light particles carrying the clock's information.
Going back to the illustration where you are accelerating away from the clock, now imagine that you had kept accelerating until you reached the speed of light. This means, you will be now traveling in the same speed with the light particles right when you had reached the speed of light, meaning you are no longer able to process any more of the newer light particles that are carrying updated informations of the clock. Thus, at this point, I would imagine that you would see the clock as static. But has the time stopped?
Yes, this is what I would call the static time zone. This phenomenon of slowing down of time is actually backed by many science experiments that involve moving objects and their relative experience of time compared to a stationary object. But what they did not realize is why the time slows down, stops and goes back- not forward!
The absence of newer light particles that carry updated information from a light source during our light speed traveling, our brain has no newer information to compile, thus no changes occur in our observation, in our case, we would see a static clock, however, the clock itself is actually still ticking at the origin, all the while we are jumping the timeline. Someone standing next to the clock would not able to see us but we would be jumping into their past (distance away from them) and of our own past (traveling past the light speed).
To give you a better understanding, ask yourself what you consider as the "present moment". Some of you will say, now. But what is now? We humans tend to derive what is "now" by what our individual selves observe. You see someone walking, and you would think that person is "now" walking, but is that person really "now" walking? By the time light that carries the walking person's information leaves his body, that information is already in the realms of the past but we would consider that old information as the present. So, what we see are only the pasts of them, and we must physically be in touch to be apart in their present moment- since no light (time) can travel when there is no space between two objects. So, we are all connected by light that creates a web of all the objects in the universe. The distances between us and all objects in the universe represent how far apart we are within all the timelines of all the objects in the universe.
Technically, we are never able to perceive the actual present moment of anything else but only of our individual selves present moment, and we had never actually observed the present world as it is. Because, as I explained earlier, we can only perceive our world through the light, and it always takes time for the light to travel. The greater the distance between an object that I observe and myself, greater the difference in time of what I perceive as that object's "present moment" and it's actually present moment. Just look up to the sky, some of the lights from the stars are billions of years old.
Going back to the clock illustration, the stopped clock that we observe when we are traveling at the speed of light means the time had stopped for us but not from the perspective of the source of the light. When we are traveling at the speed of light, away from an object that is emitting the light, the object's time will flow but our time will be stopped, all the while we are moving at a greater speed than light
Continuing on with our illustration, now, imagine that you are slowly accelerating faster than the light. Now, you are catching up to the light particles that went past you while you were still accelerating to the speed of light. And lo and behold... you will now see that the clock ticking backwards in time!
But is the time really ticking backwards? Yes, I believe you are now in the realm of the past, but at the cost of putting great distance between you and the object. The actual clock back at the origin has been ticking all the while you have been traveling, regardless of your speed, but as you broke past the speed of light you have now jumped into the past of the clock's timeline and your's.
But not only of the object's timeline but your timeline as well. Why?
That is because we are also a light ourselves. E=MC^2 states that all matters are energy and light; we ourselves are no different than a mass of emitting energy and light. Thus, as we travel faster than the speed of light, we are also jumping our own timeline. By traveling faster than the speed of light, we are able to receive and process informations from varying timelines, including ours.
By traveling towards the edge of our universe at a greater speed than light, we are in fact traveling into the past of ourselves and towards the lights carrying the information of the beginning of the universe. If we travel towards the center of the universe at that speed, we are in fact traveling toward the very beginning of all the present moments, the great present moment of the universe itself.
CryptoGates.
I agree, you would not be in the past. I think the travelling faster than light would put you outside of time.
update: traveling faster than light would put you in the past. Please read my most recent post.