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Phil & Lex said:
do you think time travel will ever be used to show atheists and other non believers that they are are wrong? would it be the right thing to go back in time during the biblical time?
Greetings, Phil & Lex,
I have read a couple of books about this, by serious theoretical physicists*. Apparently, no one has positively demonstrated that backwards time travel is impossible in principle. However, every time a clever strategy is proposed, it seems nature has some trick up her sleeve that defeats it.
What is far more likely than sending people or objects back in time is the possibility of sending
messages back in time. According to special relativity, if you could send information faster than light, that message would propagate backwards in time. This could be done, perhaps, by taking advantage of the instantaneous quantum connectedness between objects, even when they are separated by great distances. There is even one reputable research foundation trying to work out ways of doing it.
Think of it: One could send a message back in time to one's great-grandfather. You would tell him to leave a reply, say, bricked up inside of a wall. After you send the message, you go to the brick wall, bust it open, and read great grand-pappy's reply. One could even, in theory, send the message 2,000 years into the past, and get a reply in a similar manner.
If I could
personally travel backwards in time, I would visit the same place you would - 1st century Palestine. I would take with me a language scholar who could speak ancient Aramaic (the Lord's mother tongue) and a copy of the New Testament. I would invite Jesus to look at the information that has come down to us about Him and to check it for biographical and philosophical accuracy.
Wouldn't we all?
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* Davies, Paul.
How to Build a Time Machine. (publishing info unknown)
* Herbert, Nick.
Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics. New York: Plume, 1988.
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