Are Time Travelers Changing The Past?

Join my Twitter feed | Like my Facebook page

On May 14, 2012, I published an article about people who believe that the timeline changed after the terror attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Now others are beginning to question the possibility that our past is not set in stone, but mutable and may even be altered again and again by time travelers. Scientists are discovering that causality is not necessarily a one-way street and although it seems logical that a cause must precede an effect, evidence is emerging in theoretical physics that (at least at the quantum level) a cause may follow the effect. It’s known as retrocausality.

Even the argument that time travelers cannot change the past without changing their own future may only be true to a point. What if time travelers from the far distant past changed far future events? In that case, their own immediate futures would remain unaffected while those in the distant future would experience a timeline change in their own past.

Join my Twitter feed | Like my Facebook page

The enigma of time travel

Is time travel possible? Some claim they’ve already accomplished it. Theorists argue for and against it. Some physicists like Stephen Hawking flatly discount it, except for the relativistic effect of slowing time as the velocity of mass approaches light speed.

Famous science fiction writer and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke once pronounced time travel as one of the impossibilities in his popular book, Report on Planet Three.

But to loftily pronounce that something—almost anything—is flatly impossible may be arrogant as the human race has just barely begun to scratch the surface of real knowledge about the forces and factors that drive the multiverse and the underlying nature of existence.

Dismissing time travel as impossible is disturbingly similar to the early 20th Century aeronautical professors that went on record with their strong assertions that heavier-than-air flying machines were nothing but a fantasy…and they had the math to prove it. Some even denounced the Wright brothers first flight as a fraud.

Can time travelers change the past?

The Internet science site io9.com recently raised this intriguing question and set about to investigate if any evidence exists that time travelers have affected the past.

Christian Wüthrich, a professor of Philosophy and Science Studies at University of California San Diego told io9.com that “If the changes to our past occur instantaneously and completely consistently, that is, involving updates to all memories and record of the past, then we may not know it for certain.”

While the answer is definitely a hedged one, it does contain wriggle room. Especially the part about all memories being changed.

Evidence exists, and hypotheses abound, that the human mind is not necessarily a prisoner of time, or even locked into this universe. The mind may operate at the quantum level. If it does slip the surly bonds of its mortal cognitive anchor then memories may exist of a previous timeline that existed before the old one was wiped out by time travelers manipulating past events.

This intriguing possibility may have some supporting evidence, which again was visited in the Before It’s News article Timeshift: Did Reality Reset After 911? Yet since the evidence is subjective and not objectively verifiable, it’s next to impossible to prove.

‘Grandfather paradox’ states time traveler ceases to exist

Many physicists claim that time travel—at least in the classical sense—is impossible. They argue that traveling in time seems to violate quantum mechanics although not relativity. Many cite the famous “grandfather paradox” (a time traveler returns to the past and kills his own grandfather thus assuring the time traveler could never be born, therefore, the traveler could never return to the past at all), and argue the paradox proves time travel is an impossibility.

The ‘many worlds’ theory says time travel is possible

Not so fast say other scientists.

Those scientists hypothesize that time travel to the past can be accomplished and events can be changed. The physicists that argue this support the “many worlds” hypothesis developed by Dr. Hugh Everett.

Advocates of “many worlds” believe that changing the past in even minor ways results in the traveler never being able to return to the original timeline of the future. Instead, the erstwhile chrononaut will find himself or herself in a different future after they return. A new multiverse will have been created accomodating the change they initiated in the past. Even traveling backwards a few fractions of a second in time may result in the creation of a new bubble universe.

Time travel is coming, or may already be here

Professor Ronald Mallet is convinced that time travel is possible and it’s coming soon. The University of Connecticut physicist is working hard to make it happen. [See Time Travel Coming, American Physicist Declares]

Illustration of one type of time travel methodology

Another American scientist has actually already applied for a patent on a time traveling device. [See U.S. Scientist Patents Time Machine]

Vadim Chernobrov with working model of time machine

Still others say time travel is already a reality.

Russian engineer Vadim Alexandrovich Chernobrov at the Moscow Aviation University claims he built two working time machines. But the engineer cautions everyone about the potential dangers of traveling to the past. “Those who attempt to return to the past to keep certain historical events from occurring—for example, the collapse of the Soviet Union—would fail in the attempt and would run the risk of not being able to return to the future,” he says. [See Scientist Builds Working Time Machine]

Alfred Lambremont Webre writes about “a physicist who claims “the existence of U.S. government development of time travel technology and emphasize[s] the importance of the real-world application of such technology for achieving planetary sustainability.

“Dr. David Lewis Anderson, director of the Anderson Institute, emerged publicly in a two-hour interview on December 23, 2009 to give an extensive account of his time control research for the U.S. Air Force, which he later continued at his Time Travel Research Institute and other organizations.”

Dr. David Anderson’s video presentation:

Some scientists say time only exists in the mind

Despite all this, some physicists still maintain that time itself is merely a construct of the human mind and doesn’t really exist.

Can time travelers and time travel be detected?

Traceability of time travel

Then there are those that argue against time travel to the past by pointing to the fact (in their perception) that any travel backwards would have to leave a trace of the time traveler’s passage. Since there is no trace, or any anomalous artifacts from the past, time travel cannot exist.

So they say.

But wait! There are anomalous artifacts from the past that cannot be explained: aluminum alloy screws millions of years old, manufactured cubes and spheres, even art objects and jewelry discovered in coal mines and rock quarries. The objects must have been dropped and lost millions of years ago. Is that evidence of time travelers? Or could it be the misplaced objects of Erich von Däniken’s gods when they wandered too far from their chariots? [See Time Traps: Artifacts And Animals Caught In Time and Time Travelers Footprints Found]

The author of the io9.com article points out that changing timelines and past events would likely skew the laws of probablity.

“If someone really could go back and change the past, this could mean that effects would precede causes, Brun tells io9. And that, in turn, could mean that everything would go topsy-turvy, leading to logical inconsistencies that we might well notice.”

Brun explained to the author that: “The mixing up of cause and effect can make otherwise improbable events become much more likely. So if we suddenly find the laws of chance violating our common sense estimates of probability, that could mean that time travel is going on nearby. In principle this means that one could detect the existence of time machines—perhaps even before they are ever built!”

Can such a thing actually happen? The answer is a definite…maybe. The phenomenon is called retrocausality.

The mystery of retrocausality

Antonella Vannini, a Ph.D Student in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Rome, has written an incredible paper: “Advanced Waves, Retrocausality and Consciousness.” In his abstract, Vannini explains that “In quantum mechanics, advanced waves, which propagates backward in time, have been usually ignored, as they were considered to be unphysical. Nevertheless, in the sciences of life, advanced waves may permit to answer some of the major mysteries and paradoxes. In this paper, a model which relates advanced wave solutions with the properties of living systems will be examined, and a retrocausal model of consciousness will be briefly presented.”

Much has been written about retrocausality. A partial list of scientific papers about the phenomenon are available here.

Website sfgate.com went so far to predict “Science hopes to change events that have already occurred” in their article explaining retrocausality. This has huge implications not only for the foundation of reality, but the possibility of time travel to both the past and future.

That evidence exists causality may travel both ways lends support to the hypothesis that more than just information, but matter as well, may be able to travel backward and forward through spacetime.

Chamber of the time travelers

Can traveling through time really be possible?

No less than theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku believes it is possible. A professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York of City University of New York and a co-founder of string field theory, Kaku explains why he believes time travel will be accomplished in the following video:

So those that believe they remember a different past than the one the history books now tout, don’t despair. Time travelers have probably changed the past.

Again.

Read my exciting NEW book ‘MYSTERIES OF THE MULTIVERSE’ learn more now – click here

Join my Twitter feed | Like my Facebook page