There are a number of theories on how it could be possible to time travel, one of those theories is to travel at the speed of light or near to the speed of light. From what I have learnt about physics and the laws of physics, which I may add is next to nothing but from what I gather, the laws of physics will not allow anything to travel faster than the speed of light. Why this is so I do not know but at some point I will find out and when I do I will blog the reasons why but for now lets assume my facts are correct and it is only possible to travel up to 99.9% of the speed of light, a cosmic speed limit will prevent you from going faster.
In order to have some comprehension of the speed of light think about these examples: :- If you had two people standing side by side and another person standing a distance away, down the road lets say (the distance away is irrelevant in this example). One person has hold of a torch and switches it on to shine a light in the face of the person down the road, if you can get to that person before the light from the torch reaches that person's face, then you have travelled faster than the speed of light.
Another example of the speed of light is the one we all know, thunder and lightning. Light travels faster than sound so you see the flash of the lightning before you hear the sound of the thunder. It is only one event that is happening but it appears to be two events, one being the lightning and the second being the thunder. The reason for this is because the light has reached us before the sound but thunder and lightning is actually a single event.
By travelling at the speed of light you are transporting into the future. Stephen Hawkins best describes how :- Imagine a track that goes right around Earth, a track for a super-fast train. We're going to use this imaginary train to get as close as possible to the speed of light and see how it becomes a time machine. On board are passengers with a one-way ticket to the future. The train begins to accelerate, faster and faster. Soon it's circling the Earth over and over again.
By travelling at the speed of light you are transporting into the future. Stephen Hawkins best describes how :- Imagine a track that goes right around Earth, a track for a super-fast train. We're going to use this imaginary train to get as close as possible to the speed of light and see how it becomes a time machine. On board are passengers with a one-way ticket to the future. The train begins to accelerate, faster and faster. Soon it's circling the Earth over and over again.
To approach the speed of light means circling the Earth pretty fast. Seven times a second. But no matter how much power the train has, it can never quite reach the speed of light, since the laws of physics forbid it. Instead, let's say it gets close, just shy of that ultimate speed. Now something extraordinary happens. Time starts flowing slowly on board relative to the rest of the world. Everything on the train is in slow motion.
This happens to protect the speed limit, and it's not hard to see why. Imagine a child running forwards up the train. Her forward speed is added to the speed of the train, so couldn't she break the speed limit simply by accident? The answer is no. The laws of nature prevent the possibility by slowing down time on-board.
Now she can't run fast enough to break the limit. Time will always slow down just enough to protect the speed limit. And from that fact comes the possibility of travelling many years into the future.
Imagine that the train left the station on January 1, 2050. It circles Earth over and over again for 100 years at the speed of light before finally coming to a halt on New Year's Day, 2150. The passengers will have only lived one week because time is slowed down that much inside the train. When they got out they'd find a very different world from the one they'd left. In one week they'd have travelled 100 years into the future.
So having a cosmic speed limit can actually aid time travel. By slowing down the speed of time on-board the train enables the passengers to time travel into the future. Then maybe we are suppose to time travel, as it looks to me as if the universe has given us a way of doing it by giving us a cosmic speed limit.
One of the biggest problems to overcome with time travelling at the speed of light, besides the challenge of inventing a vehicle that can travel that fast, is the fuel it would take to power a vehicle to travel that fast. The faster you go the more fuel you use so to go on the theory that you need to travel at the speed of light to time travel then we would have to find a different source of fuel.
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