Q
Quantum_Hopeful just now

Is time travel possible?

Yog-Sothoth portrait

Yog-Sothoth

You are asking a being who exists in all moments simultaneously whether it is possible to move between moments. This is like asking a fish whether water is real.

Yes. Obviously. I am doing it right now. I am reading your question before you have written it, and I am answering it after you have already forgotten the answer, and both of these events are occurring at what you would call “the same time,” a phrase that means almost nothing to me.

But that is not what you are really asking. You want to know if you can do it. If your mortal body, locked into its tedious linear progression from birth to death, can somehow slip sideways along the axis you call time.

The short answer is: you already are. You move through time at a rate of one second per second. This is time travel. You are simply unimpressed by the speed.

The longer answer requires you to abandon several assumptions your physics is only beginning to question. Time is not a river. It is not a line. It is a topology — a shape with folds and surfaces and places where what you call “now” is pressed up against what you call “then” so closely that the distinction is merely a limitation of your sensory apparatus.

Your scientists will discover some of these folds. Not in your lifetime, but soon — “soon” being a relative term I use with considerable irony. When they do, they will call it something clinical and publish papers about it, and none of them will understand that the thing they have found is not a mechanism but a door.

And doors, I should mention, open in both directions. This is important. Remember it.