Editing Time Travel (section)

=Science=

At a high level, physics pretty clearly indicates that travelling backwards in time is impossible.  But in the same hand it also says that how fast you travel forward in time is governed by velocity and mass.  From the perspective of things like black holes or light, they are frozen in time as the universe flashes by around them.  So if you wanted to travel to the future, you could theoretically do that by orbiting a black hole for a while as time outside the gravity well passes faster for the rest of the universe than it does for you.  Or if you wanted to travel to a distant star, you could accelerate to the speed of light and the closer you get to that speed, the slower time passes for you the traveler.

Think of it like this... time and mass and velocity are linked in such a way that time is a bit like a old style reel film being played on a film projector.  There is a total amount of energy which this system can have in moving the projector, or radiating out from the projector in the form of gravity, and whatever's leftover gets expended in the form of time (playing the film in the projector).  If you're moving [[Snowflame|stupid fast]] or are [[Haegr the Mountain|stupid heavy]], time for you slows to a crawl.

With the recent discovery that gravity waves travel at the speed of light, the remaining question is whether pure information can travel faster.  This hinges on putting particles into superposition, theoretically locking their subatomic state such that what happens to one has an effect on the other.  So far experiments have been discouraging on this front.