Time travel, wormholes, and casual loops.

I am very interested in time travel. Ever since I've read about the possiblity of traversing the seemingly constant of time, I would have never thought it would have been possible. Perhaps it isn't, but just what if it is?

Here is an article on how wormholes and such other singularities can make time jumps possible.

If you have ever seen sci-fi shows such as Star Trek, they do delve on some time jumping in some episodes. The problem, or solution, to what they do in the episodes is that casual loops are usually the point of the episode. Let me explain, in one episode of Voyager, a ship from the 29th Century was thrown into the 20th century, and then Voyager (24th I believe) was thrown back in time as well, though like 20 years after the other ship was. The crew found out that it was the 20th Centurity peoples' understanding of 29th century technology that created the computer industry. Now, if the computer was created from 29th century technology, but 29th century technology was evolved from the computer technology of the 20th, then where did the technology originally come from? It didn't, it is reasonableless because it never existed, but it does because of a casual loop.

So many paradoxes can be caused from time travel. If I went ahead into the future and saw that I was going to be shot by someone, I would avoid it. But how could I avoid it if I seen it happen? Perhaps what I saw caused me to get shot because I tried to avoid the place but I went there by accident (or so I thought).

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Even if time travel isn't strictly paradoxical, it is certainly weird. Consider the time traveler who leaps ahead a year and reads about a new mathematical theorem in a future edition of Scientific American. He notes the details, returns to his own time and teaches the theorem to a student, who then writes it up for Scientific American. The article is, of course, the very one that the time traveler read. The question then arises: Where did the information about the theorem come from? Not from the time traveler, because he read it, but not from the student either, who learned it from the time traveler. The information seemingly came into existence from nowhere, reasonlessly.

Okay, so we got all the weirdness of time travel out of the way, but what about actually doing it?

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Speed is one way to jump ahead in time. Gravity is another. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein predicted that gravity slows time. Clocks run a bit faster in the attic than in the basement, which is closer to the center of Earth and therefore deeper down in a gravitational field. Similarly, clocks run faster in space than on the ground. Once again the effect is minuscule, but it has been directly measured using accurate clocks. Indeed, these time-warping effects have to be taken into account in the Global Positioning System. If they weren't, sailors, taxi drivers and cruise missiles could find themselves many kilometers off course.

At the surface of a neutron star, gravity is so strong that time is slowed by about 30 percent relative to Earth time. Viewed from such a star, events here would resemble a fast-forwarded video. A black hole represents the ultimate time warp; at the surface of the hole, time stands still relative to Earth. This means that if you fell into a black hole from nearby, in the brief interval it took you to reach the surface, all of eternity would pass by in the wider universe. The region within the black hole is therefore beyond the end of time, as far as the outside universe is concerned. If an astronaut could zoom very close to a black hole and return unscathed--admittedly a fanciful, not to mention foolhardy, prospect--he could leap far into the future.

This is all food for thought, but what are your thoughts? Hit discuss this to talk about this issue. Perhaps something like Minority Report or something worse may actually be possible.