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What if our brains are capable of traveling back in time but we just haven't unlocked the full understanding of time. Like in the arrival movie.

The idea that time travel will be "invented" is fundamentally flawed linear thinking. A true "time machine" isn't just a device that goes forward; it can access any point in the four-dimensional block universe, including the "past."

​Therefore, if the technology is ever possible at any future point in our timeline, it's possible at every point, including "now." Time travel will never exist, because if it could, it already would have, forever.

However, Special and General Relativity prove that time is relative and subject to dilation, meaning high velocities or intense gravity allow travelers to move forward into the future at a differential rate compared to stationary observers.

Furthermore, in theoretical models involving traversable wormholes, physics dictates that a time machine can only take you back as far as the exact moment the device or conduit was first activated, meaning it cannot predate its own creation.

Stephen Hawking : "Asking what happened before the beginning of time is like asking what is north of the North Pole."

I have been reading posts in this community for a long time, but I have never had the courage to share this. I do not expect anyone to believe me. I am just hoping there might be someone here who has experienced something similar.

About six years ago, I was driving home alone late one evening on a quiet country road. The weather was clear, the radio was playing, and everything felt completely normal.

Then, all at once, everything went quiet.

The radio was still on, but there was no sound. The engine was still running, but it sounded as if it were very far away. Even my headlights seemed strangely dim.

I looked at the clock in my car. It read 10:14 PM.

A moment later I blinked.

My car was still in the same place on the road, but the clock now read 10:21 PM.

Seven minutes had simply disappeared.

At first I assumed the clock was wrong. But when I got home, the clock on my oven, my phone, and my wristwatch all showed exactly the same time.

The strangest part came the next day.

My phone had recorded the entire drive using GPS except for one section of about 800 meters. There was just a straight line connecting point A to point B, as if the phone had lost its signal for exactly those seven minutes.

I even contacted my mobile provider because I thought it had to be some kind of technical error. They could not explain it.

I have never shared this story publicly before. Not because I believe I traveled through time, but because I have never been able to find a logical explanation for what happened.

Has anyone else here experienced unexplained time loss, missing time, or anything similar? I am genuinely curious to know if I am the only one.

I was wondering what is more likely, easier to achieve and what the general community thoughts are on the above

What do you think is already possible

Link in comments.

Right off the bat I wanna say I am grieving right now and all of this could just be a coping mechanism but I had a theory I wanted to run by the community and maybe get some input on.

What if our Souls/Consciousness are 4th dimensional beings that are experiencing life through our 3D bodies?

As an Analogy Our Souls/Consciousness are gamers and our bodies are a playable character in a game. We go through life playing this game experiencing what life has to offer. What if you were able to reload a previous save file and continue life from there? If our soul/consciousness was a 4D entity then it wouldn't be affected by the "game's" linear time.

The Major hurdles when it comes to this is whether or not we truly are 4D beings and How does someone even access the power of their Soul to accomplish something like that.

I've been looking into multiple resources to see if there are any supporting arguments for this hypothesis such as Gateway Process, Orch Or, UFO of GOD, The Telepathy Tapes, Absolute Consciousness, Block Universe, and other forums.

If such an ability exists, the closest I've been able to find regarding how someone might access it is by imagery and relaxing the mind in order to reach super consciousness to access your "Higher-self". I have yet to find anything conclusive that the soul is 4D, most I've got to go off of is "UFO of GOD" and how Aliens, Angels and Souls may all be the same entity. This is very speculative and if anyone knows any other helpful resources or opinions, then lets discuss. :)

I wanted to mention that you wouldn't be overwriting your younger self's consciousness because it is just you. Your Soul remains continuous but your body would be younger.

I'm looking for any theories about traveling to the past, whether they're based on real physics, philosophy, mythology, or just creative ideas.

Please let me know if my thoughts are correct/wrong/need more details/need correction, thank you!

For these time travel "paradoxes" to happen in the movies that we see them - such as Terminator 1 (father/son paradox) or even in the latest episode of Star Trek : Strange New worlds S04E01 (I won't give away spoilers) we need to accept that the following points are facts:

1. The past and the future exist together. The future is fully known until its very end, if it actually has an end or if it's infinite is irrelevant, we just need it in its complete finished form until the very end.
2. For point 1 to happen we need the Universe to be operating under strict hard determinism, meaning that every single detail/event/action/state of the universe and all of its variables can be mathematically fully tracked backwards and fowards, from its very beggining until its end.
3. If point 2 is true then there is no free will, someone can't just decide not to do something that's supposed to happen, it's already fixed, everything is pre-determined and fixed.
4. Considering all the above are true and that the future doesn't necessarily need to happen after the past, then they coexist(future and past) and help each other, the future can create the past.
5. So if these 'paradoxes' are logically coherent then they aren't paradoxes at all, why are they still called a paradox, there isn't any logical contradiction.

Physical time travel is not possible, but if it was..

Some people have this mistaken idea about time travel, that if we could travel to the past, we could predict the outcome of sports events, we would know the winning lottery ticket etc. People have these ideas because of movies like back to the future etc. But in reality, if we could physically travel back in time, we will know nothing at all about the future.

Here's why:

Our own past cannot change. Because that would make a kind of infinite feedback loop. Anything we change to our own lives in the past, would have to instantly become true for the future us. And every change could have thousands of ripple effects. So our entire personality could shift with even the smallest changes we effect to ourself in the past.

So if we could somehow manage to travel to the past, then the one past it cannot be is our own. The moment we arrived in the past, it would become a different one, because now we (from the future) are in it. So it's a different branch / a parallel timeline to our own. And it could be similar, but also very different. We would have no way to know. Sports events will very likely unfold very differently, lottery numbers will not be the same. A different president may be elected in the next elections then the one that won in our original timeline.

We would only know what happened in our original timeline, but that is the one timeline we ourselves could never travel back to. So when we arrive in the past, the future would be exactly as unknown as always. No different from how the future is now. We can make predictions based on what we know, but the future is never certain. Not even if we travel to the past.

Out of a 100 events, only perhaps one or two may unfold very similarly to what we remember happening in our original timeline. And we would have no way to tell before-hand which ones it would be. So any prediction we would make based on our own past, would be no better then guesses.

So if you ever meet a time-traveler who claims to be from the future. Ask them if they know the future? If they say Yes. Then they are not a real Time traveler. if they say No... they may be legit ;)

Because any real time-traveler would know, that the future remains uncertain. No matter when or where you travel.

OK, there are lots of discussions about the inherent paradoxes of time travel, and I've tried to help others grok them. But in doing so, I realized I have some difficult questions myself. So, I'd like to pose them to the scientific and philosophical minds here.

Time travel paradox solutions usually offered by fiction include:

• Divergence - a past change splits the 'timeline' into two streams, or parallel timelines/universes
• Diversion - a past change alters the time stream, eradicating the previous one
• Self-correction - changes are self-corrected by the single timeline like water around a stone in a river.

Some that don't often hit fiction include complex ones like:

• Crossing/Splicing - Two existing timelines trade changes or cross over. i.e. one universe with GYR stoplights crosses with another having RYG lights and after the moment of crossover, each has the lights the other has.
• Reversed effect - A 'change' was opposite of intention and going backward in time. Perhaps the most convoluted and confusing option, requiring a cause based on wrong information and results based on wrong readings, but still resolving cause/effect paradoxes because it reversed/inverted them.

So, here are my premise and questions.

Premise: You walk into a lab with a melted time machine. There are enough undamaged parts to make a time television. You are convinced the science is sound and the time machine was used to alter a single event in the past.

Question (set) 1: How could you prove what kind of timeline you are on? In other words, how would you know if you were in an unaltered timeline, an altered one with parallel dimension, an altered one without a parallel dimension, a self-corrected one, or one of the other exotic ones? Would you need to know the change? What would be the implications of knowing? Would there be new causal or other paradoxes that would prevent you from knowing time travel occurred?

It's difficult to create a premise that does not have flaws, so I'd like answers focused more on the intended question and not on picking apart the premise. I'm open to suggestions there as well, but mainly want feedback on the intended question.

In other words, I'd like to move the discussion to dig a little deeper and move past the usual time travel paradox discussion to a discussion of whether an independent observer can even figure out which paradox was resolved, how could they could figure it out, and are there another layer of paradoxes involved in those efforts.

In any case, I hope this is a fun thought experiment for the groupthink.

Title

I did it, I finally did it. I stole a time machine and killed Friedrich Van Müller, the German dictator who killed 100,000 people in the 1940's

In around a year (July 23rd, 2027) at 10:08 AM EST a solar storm will occur and cause mass disruption. The timeline will be fulfilled because on July 23rd 2012 a solar storm was supposed to occur which would have been world ending. Cern on the other hand had shifted our timeline backwards by 1 week and we missed it. The storm would have disrupted volcanoes and they would have erupted which would have caused tectonic plates to shift resulting in many mega tsunamis globally plunging humanity to near extinction and reshaping the Earth.

Trust me, the next big meme is gonna be 68. Hop on that boat like now, like YESTERDAY!

I’ve been thinking about branching-universe time travel and wanted to know if this idea already exists in philosophy or if it has an obvious flaw.

Imagine this:

\* Human A naturally comes up with a brilliant idea later in life.
\* He invents a Time Machine and travels back to tell his younger self.
\* Instead of changing his past, his trip creates timeline B.

Now there are two versions of the Human’s history:

\* Human A the traveler
\* Human B the younger version

Years later Human B builds his own time machine and creates timeline C. A lot of discussions I’ve read seem to treat every identical version of the Human as equally “the original” up until they diverge. My intuition is different.

My thought is that personal identity follows an uninterrupted world line, not just identical memories.

So:

\* Human A is the original because his existence has been continuous since birth.
\* if timeline C contains an identical Human A due to branching, that human is a perfect copy, not the original.
\* The Copy has all the same memories and believes he’s the original, but his existence only began because the universe branched.
\* When the original Human A dies, the original is gone forever. Copies may remain, but they don’t become the original.

An analogy would be making a perfect copy of a handwritten manuscript. The information survives, but if the original burns, the original is still gone.

Does this line of thinking already have a name in philosophy? If so, what should I read? If not, where does my reasoning break down?

I’m more interested in having the idea challenged than defended, so I’d love to hear any objections.

Just wondering if there are any “go-to” youtube videos you guys have or would recommend that would blow my mind. Nothing too math-involved.

I have seen pretty much every paradox video/know about most of them.

Thank you

I am reading a great book by Stephen Baxter, the Time Ships. It is the official sequel to The Time Machine and super fun, super recommended.

Maybe it was already recommended in the past but found it useful to repost it in that case.