I was intrigued recently to see a quote from Stephen Hawking suggesting that time travel is possible - but only to the future. I quote -
“A supermassive black hole is a time machine. But of course, it’s not exactly practical. It has advantages over wormholes in that it doesn’t provoke paradoxes. Plus it won’t destroy itself in a flash of feedback. But it’s pretty dangerous. It’s a long way away and it doesn’t even take us very far into the future. Fortunately there is another way to travel in time. And this represents our last and best hope of building a real time machine.”
Stephen Hawking
On further reading I discovered that he does indeed think that at least four of the world's greatest Physicists are wrong in saying that time travel is impossible. He sides with Arthur C Clarke who once said, "When a distinguished scientist says something is impossible, he's very probably wrong." Sir Arthur, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, has been proved right in that statement rather frequently. I can recall being told it was impossible to reduce certain electronic components because the Laws of Physics "forbade their being smaller than a certain size." There are, of course, other examples of similar statements.
It seems that Professor Hawking has, rather riskily, told the Daily Mail that "Time travel was once considered scientific heresy" and that he used to avoid talking about it, but no longer. He now says we need to look at everything in four dimensions, the fourth, obviously, being time. He continues a very interesting discussion to point out that we are, in fact, all "time travellers" in a sense. Time flows like a river, and like a river it travels primarily in one direction, though there are a lot of eddies, back flows and so on, ultimately everything ends up being discharged at the mouth. As Hawking says, we all move forward in time, so we are all, in a sense, travelling "Back to the Future."
Science, to me, is fascinating. OK, I don't have the maths to be a physicist and sometimes I have to read some scientific tract a couple of times to grasp it, but each tiny advance in knowledge simply increases my wonder at the fact that life can even exist in this chaotic, and ultimately deadly, universe. As a lover and now writer of Science Fiction, I have found it equally fascinating to see how things that even 40 years ago were definitely "fiction" are now "fact." Even in my own writing, things I wrote about as little as eight years ago, and which were "fiction" then are rapidly being turned into reality.
Sadly, I didn't think to copyright or patent some of the ideas!