Introduction

From a young age, the concept of time travel captivated my imagination — offering both mental escape and a deep fascination with possibility. I vividly recall a conversation with my high school science teacher about the theoretical prospects of exceeding the speed of light. My reasoning, rooted in Einstein’s relativity, was simple: if an object is closer to me than to someone else, I effectively observe their future because light reflecting off the object reaches me sooner. Conversely, they perceive my past. Unfortunately, my teacher dismissed my inquiries as echoes of established theories, leaving many questions unanswered.

The Early Design: A Personal Time Machine

By my 18th birthday, curiosity had driven me to sketch a design for a time machine inspired by the flying saucer. This hypothetical device featured several rotating shells suspended in a vacuum, transferring enormous amounts of charge from their centres to their edges, creating a toroidal energy field.

My hypothesis was straightforward: while physically moving an object through time and space might be impossible, altering the spatial dimensions defining an object’s position could offer a method for instantaneous travel across the universe. Not moving through space, but changing where space placed you.

From Hope to Doubt

Today, I harbour significant doubts about such a device. The inherent paradoxes and the convoluted notion of alternate dimensions present formidable challenges.

Consider this: if time travel were achievable anytime within the next million years, we should already be encountering time travellers. Given human nature’s tendency toward self-interest, it seems implausible that no time tourist would reveal their origins or warn us of impending disasters. As Stephen Hawking observed, the practicality of maintaining such monumental secrets across all of future history seems vanishingly unlikely.

The absence of time travellers is itself evidence.

The Grandfather Paradox

A persistent problem with time travel is causality, best illustrated by the grandfather paradox: what happens if you travel back and prevent your grandfather from meeting your grandmother, thereby preventing your own existence?

This paradox suggests that certain actions in the past would nullify the possibility of those actions occurring — a logical inconsistency that undermines the foundation of backward time travel. You cannot cause the uncausing of your cause.

The Problem with Alternate Timelines

Some resolve the grandfather paradox by proposing alternate timelines — you don’t change your past, you branch into a different universe where events unfold differently.

But this solution creates its own problem: it implies that with every decision, every quantum fluctuation, entire universes branch into existence. Consider the energy contained within a single atom. Now multiply that by every atom in the universe, then by an infinite number of branching timelines.

The energy required becomes not merely astronomical but absurd. And frankly, the notion that the cosmos continuously generates infinite realities based on individual choices strikes me as profoundly self-centred — as though the universe exists to honour every path we didn’t take.

This violates the most fundamental principle I’ve come to understand: nature abhors an imbalance. Energy doesn’t multiply without limit. It dissipates, equalises, seeks equilibrium. Infinite branching universes are the opposite of equilibrium.

What Time Actually Is

In my view, all matter fundamentally embodies movement, pressure, and density. Matter is energy in stable configuration — but it is never static. The atoms that existed a thousand years ago still exist today, reorganised into different forms. The matter that was “yesterday” persists; only its arrangement has changed.

“Yesterday” as we remember it exists only as recorded impressions — patterns in neurons, marks on paper, bits in storage. The past is not a place you could visit. It is a configuration that no longer exists.

Time, in essence, is a measure of relative movement.

Consider entirely empty space containing a single moving object — a ball travelling through void. Without another reference point, that ball has no past, present, or future. It simply is. Time materialises only when consciousness perceives change — when there is something to measure movement against.

This suggests that time is not a dimension like space, not a river flowing from past to future. It is a relationship between states. And you cannot travel to a relationship. You cannot visit “faster” or “heavier.” These are comparisons, not locations.

The Persistent Allure of Faster-Than-Light Travel

Despite my scepticism about time travel, I maintain a belief in the potential for faster-than-light travel — though I recognise these may be more closely related than I’d like.

Light, being a waveform propagating through a medium, shapes our perception of the world. But I am not convinced it imposes an absolute speed limit on all possible motion. It may impose a limit on motion through the field — but what about manipulating the field itself?

Theoretical frameworks like warp drives and wormholes, though speculative, suggest that the geometry of space might be altered rather than traversed. You wouldn’t move faster than light through space; you would change how space relates to itself around you.

This remains deeply speculative. But if space is a field with real properties — as I’ve come to believe — then it may be engineering-accessible in ways we haven’t yet imagined.

Conclusion

My journey from childhood curiosity to scientific scepticism has been both enlightening and humbling. The dream of time travel continues to inspire, but the paradoxes it presents underscore the limitations of treating time as a place rather than a process.

The interplay between movement, pressure, and dissipation remains fundamental to how I understand the universe — shaping everything from particles to cosmic structure. Time fits into this picture not as a fourth dimension to be traversed, but as the measure of change itself.

We cannot travel to yesterday because yesterday is not a destination. It is a state that has dissipated, its energy reorganised into today. The Second Law, as always, points in one direction: toward equilibrium, toward now.

As we advance our knowledge and refine our theories, the quest to understand time persists. But I suspect the answer will not be a machine that carries us backward. It will be a deeper understanding of what time actually is — and why the arrow points only forward.

I am, of course, fully aware that I might be entirely off the mark.