NEWSFLASH — Time travel is not difficult!
Contrary to what you may have seen in the modern world’s version of educational videos (Hollywood movies), time travel is neither difficult nor expensive. It doesn’t involve fancy phone booths or decked-out Delorians but is in fact a mode of transportation available to all of us for the very low price of “using your mind.”
Allow me to explain.
According to the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, time is a mechanism of our brains that permits us to see the universe. In fact, the entirety of the universe, its past, present and future all exist as a single instant. However, because most of us exist in what I like to call the “slow lane of life,” we see all of this as one instant after another.
An analogy I like to use is to imagine you are standing just a few millimeters away from a massive mural painted on an infinitely large wall. From this perspective, you would have no idea what the mural actually looks like.
But if you were to slowly move along the mural taking in a very small amount of information at a time, you would gradually start to form a picture of the small part of the mural you are able to scan. The more you did this, the more the mural would start to come into view for you. This “scanning” is what we experience as “living.”
Now, imagine pulling further away from the mural, say by one metre. You would see more of the mural, but still not all of it. Pull away farther and you would see even more, but still not the whole thing. At some point, if you pull far enough away, you would see the entire mural.
This “distance” from the mural is analogous to approaching the speed of light, and the distance required to see the entire mural is the speed of light itself: a fixed number in our universe.
A particle that travels at the speed of light, like a photon or a neutrino, will in fact see the universe’s past, present and future all at once! True story!
And the universe, just like the mural, does not change. It is a constant. Although it seems like it is changing to us, that is only because we see very small pixels of it, one pixel at a time. The past always looks like the past, the present always looks like the present and the future always looks like the future.
So how then can we travel to the past and the future? Well, it’s pretty easy and, quite anticlimactically, a bit boring.
The first thing we need to understand about time travel is that because the past is always the same, when we travel back to it, we travel back to ourselves as we existed at that point. Unlike in most stories about time travel, we can not go back in time and change things.
If I were to travel back to last week, for example, I would go back to the Chris that existed at that point. I do not bring with me the knowledge or experience I gained later that week. I simply travel back to the same Chris that forgot his nachos in the oven and burnt them. I can never change that. My burnt nachos are a universal constant. This doesn’t mean I can’t travel back in time, it simply means that I won’t know that I have because I will be the me that existed before I chose to travel back to “that” me.
The future, however, is slightly different. I can travel to a point in the future, but I can only travel at the speed of time, which is what we do every day. If I want to drive to Crow’s Nest for a coffee, I still have to travel that distance. I can’t just magically teleport to Crow’s Nest. Similarly, if I want to travel to next week, I must traverse the distance between now and next week, and that distance is time, and I traverse it at the speed of time.
Now to the fun part — actual time travel! To travel back in time, you must pick a time from your past and imagine yourself as that past version of you. (This can require quite a bit of concentration or perhaps a few marijuana cigarettes.)
Once you have this version of you squarely in your mind, remember your present self. You will have the feeling of travelling back to the past you.
Travelling to the future is a bit more fun. Imagine a “you” in the future. (The nearer the future, the easier this is to do.) Now make a note to yourself that you are going to travel forward to that future version of yourself. Once you arrive at your future self (the length of this journey will match exactly the amount of time into the future that you have imagined) recall the “you” that decided to make this trip, and voilà!
You have now time travelled into the future! Make sense? It might require a bit of practice but it’s well worth it, believe me. And now I will travel forward in time to the me that will eat a nice tuna melt for lunch.