Are Time Travelers in our Midst? It's Possible!

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Well, my dad JUST got me a book about someone who thinks he found the science behind time travel, only I havven't read it yet, & I'm at school so I can't tell you the name.

Someone's been playong too much chrono trigger!

or you could create another reality and when going back to your time, either you go back to your own and it was like you never went there or you would be trapped in the new reality you created. (Parallel universe)

Kinda like if you kill your grandfather you still exist and when going back to your time, nobody knows you, you have no ID and stuff like that. (kinda like 'It's a wonderful life' with the time travel theme, that makes a good scifi story)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Folded_Himself

Been there done that.

A big problem I have with all the hypotheses about how backward time travel could occur is that they are based on General Relativity, which will eventually be superseded by a quantum theory of gravity. I will bet that hypothetical forms of backwards time travel that may be allowed by the mathematics of General Relativity are not actually possible in the real world and will be shown to not be allowed in a quantum theory of gravity. I doubt that wormholes are possible for the same reason.

Yeah, but What If ..?

Forward: Yeah. Surely.

Backward: Probably not.

I guess that depends on your frame of reference, eh?

Here's a NOVA program with Carl Sagan, Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking discussing the theory and associated physics:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2612time.html

I have mixed thoughts on this subject...

Half of me says time travel can happen and that paradoxes are impossible to achieve. If person X invents time travel, and in the future person Y goes back to kill person X, that it would be impossible to kill person X - something would happen to person Y beforehand. Anyone who has travelled through time and makes a change... well that change has already happened and he's simply fulfilling the timeline. If anyone had travelled back in time prior to today in 2008, then we (as a people) would have encountered them and they would have already made their mark, even if they were from 2009, 2150, or whatever.

The other half of me says time travel is impossible because time is nothing but the human concept of monitoring and quantifying the change and movement of energy (see also: matter). Assuming there are multiple or infinite dimensions, if one were to travel interdimensionally to 1956, that would be a different dimension than ours and thus not affect the one we are in, regardless of the time traveller's perceptions.
If we are thinking matter\energy rearrangement such as say the Omega 13 of Galaxyquest (I'm aware of the movie's faults ), then you would do nothing but set back the clock, and everything would be as it was - no one would notice. If you could protect yourself from the matter rearrangement, you would then be in a different part of the galaxy, as it is constantly in motion

Totally!

I'm black

I'm white.

Retrograde time travel is not possible. Prograde time travel is possible, but only through relativistic time dilation or some form of suspended animation.

Prove me wrong, and I'll exile myself to the past.

Before the Wright Brothers, human flight was not possible. Time makes all things possible. Do you think anyone living in Shakespeare's England could get his head around open-heart surgery, CGI, or bullet trains?

Sorry, but you have committed a false analogy. Both powered flight and bullet trains were predictable by science before their advents. Brain surgery has always been possible (if sometimes impractical), and was performed during the stone age.

In contrast, retrograde time travel has not been shown to be possible by any means. The theories that have been proposed (and later debunked) assume non-existent states of matter, expenditures if more energy than even a quasar could produce, or some 'magical' principle that has not been discovered.

And before you throw out an appeal to ignorance (e.g. "We have no evidence that it does not exist, therefore, it must exist."), let me tell you that I was serious about my challenge:

Prove that retrograde time travel is possible, and I will exile myself to the past.