The Pros and Cons of Time Travel

A proposed time-travel machine using a traversable wormhole would (hypothetically) work something like this. A wormhole is created somehow. One end of the wormhole is accelerated to nearly the speed of light, perhaps with an advanced spaceship, and then brought back to the point of origin. Due to time dilation, the accelerated end of the wormhole has now aged less than the stationary end, as seen by an external observer. However, time connects differently through the wormhole than outside it, so that synchronized clocks at either end of the wormhole will always remain synchronized as seen by an observer passing through the wormhole, no matter how the two ends move around. This means that an observer entering the accelerated end would exit the stationary end when the stationary end was the same age that the accelerated end had been at the moment before entry; for example, if prior to entering the wormhole the observer noted that a clock at the accelerated end read a date of 2005 while a clock at the stationary end read 2010, then the observer would exit the stationary end when its clock also read 2005, a trip backwards in time as seen by other observers outside. One significant limitation of such a time machine is that it is only possible to go as far back in time as the initial creation of the machine; in essence, it is more of a path through time than it is a device that itself moves through time, and it would not allow the technology itself to be moved backwards in time. This could provide an alternative explanation for Hawking's observation: a time machine will be built someday, but has not yet been built, so the tourists from the future cannot reach this far back in time.¹

There is no possible way to travel faster than the speed of light (or even approach it since anything with mass could never possible reach the speed of light). If one were to travel at the speed of light, he or she would would observe that time had stopped. So, in theory, if one were to travel faster than the speed of light, time would go backwards. Since most students are taught that time is a vector and only travels in one direction, this would contradict modern teachings of Physics.

                     (German for confusing)