Will time travel ever be possible?

[nightsurge]

WereKitten said:

nightsurge said:

Stephen Hawking held a party for time travelers to come back and socialize with him.  No one showed up.

I'm gonna go with Time Travel will never be possible, at least not to the past, or not in any controllable fashion.  Maybe someday if we figure out wormhole travel there could be some goofup that sends someone to another time as well as place.  Until then I think whoever said the "near light speed travel is close to time travel" is right.  You can actually do that now with real space shuttle travel, the aging difference just isn't as drastic.  I think it's something like an earth day goes by every 7-9 hours when traveling at high velocity in a space shuttle/rocket.

Whoa, not even close. Warning: wild numbers follow :)

If T is the time as measured in a lab on Earth and t is the time measured in a rocket travelling at speed v then

T=t/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)

where c= speed of light.

A factor of about 3 (24hours/8hours) would require 9 = 1/(1-v^2/c^2) i.e. v^2/c^2=8/9 or in other words to get that big an effect the rocket should be travelling at sqrt(8/9)*c = 94% of the speed of light.

Obviously our shuttles and rockets travel only at a very small fraction of that, as the shuttle orbits at about 10Km/s, while light travels at about 300000Km/s - that's about 0.003%.

As you can imagine, that means that the time dilation effects on planes, rockets and shuttles are really small. But they can still be measured with atomic clocks (the first experiments date back to the '70s).

Lol, I believe ya.  I just remember reading a book where they took a shuttle around the earth and every 7-9 hours they could communicated with the people on earth as their "next day" or something.  I am probably not remembering the time correctly or something.  I read this book when I was like 10...