Question Doesn't time travel involve space travel too? If I travel back in time one year, say, in order to be in the same 'place' as I started, I'd need to travel across countless millions of miles of space, since the planet has moved during the last year. Since such instant space travel contradicts Einstein, how come so many philosophers seem to think it's possible? Martin, Wales, UK

Accepted:
August 13, 2009

Comments

You make a very interesting point. If time travel takes a second, then since a later Earth - say Earth in a year - might be zillions of miles away (i.e. more than 186,000), I must travel faster than light, which is impossible. But how long does my time travel take? How do we know that it takes a second? After all, if on the new or later Earth it is a year later, presumably it took me a year to get "there", the same amount of time as it took the Earth itself, even if it felt instantaneous. So there is a difficulty about the meaning of "How long does my time travel take?" If we move in time, or times moves past us, there is a difficulty about the concept of the speed of the movement. Movement in space is distance divided by time, so movement in time, or the movement of time, it seems, is time divided by time; and it is hard (as D.C. Williams pointed out ages ago in "The Myth of Passage") to attach any sense to this idea. This is the interest of your point for me; how do we attach sense to the speed of time travel? In what reference frame does it take place?

Nice conundrum. Here is a stab at it. If, in the example, time travel is traveling back one year of time in an instant of another time dimension--call it metatime--then Einstein has not been contradicted. He is silent about how much space can be covered in an instant of metatime. So time travel, conceived this way could be possible even given our actual laws of nature, if there is metatime. If, however, there is no metatime, then traveling back in time would be a case in which what would normally be a later stage of one's life occurs before what would normally be an earlier stage (see David Lewis, "The Paradoxes of Time Travel"). For this to be possible, the laws of nature would already have to be different than ours in such a way as to also allow that what would normally be the very next stage in ones' life occur far away from the current stage. If it is conceivable that the laws of nature be different than what they actually are then time travel would be conceptually possible. And this is the sense of 'possible' most philosophers appeal to in saying that time travel is possible. In other words, it is conceptually possible that something happen that contradicts Einstein.