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Physicists Searched The Internet For Evidence Of Time Travelers

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Einstein's work does not rule out the existence of closed time-like curves.

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On June 28, 2009, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking sat alone in a college at the University of Cambridge and waited patiently for party guests to arrive. Then he sent out invites.

Hawking was doing a (presumably, quite tongue-in-cheek) experiment to see if time travel is possible. The idea was that if he sent the invites out after the event took place, only time travelers would know to arrive.

Of course, nobody showed up . You could conclude from that that time travel to the past does not get invented by humans, or that they have a better use for it than partying hard with Stephen Hawking. Maybe there are more interesting times to visit, or paradoxes to be avoided.

But there have been other attempts to look for signs of time travelers visiting our timeframe, including one team of physicists who searched the Internet for evidence of knowledge nobody could have had unless they had traveled back in time. Of course, time travelers might want us to know they are here, might want to keep themselves hidden, or not really care either way.

"Even time travelers who want to advertise their presence may do so ineffectively," the team writes in their paper, "those who want to hide their presence might make a revealing mistake, and those indifferent might or might not leave traceable Internet content."

The team focused on searching for time travelers from the future rather than the past, figuring that the technology to create a time machine has not existed in the past, and any knowledge they had would relate to events in our past , making it pretty difficult to distinguish from people who have studied history.

The team attempted to find unique events that could not be referenced by anyone without a time machine, but would hopefully be recorded for a significant amount of time into the future. They eventually settled on the discovery of Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) in 2012, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio choosing the name " Pope Francis " upon his selection as the head of the Catholic church.

"Histories of bright comets like Comet ISON are generally well kept by societies and journals around the world, indicating that Comet ISON might remain memorable well into the future," the team explained. "Conversely, there is little reason for anyone without prescient information to be referring to something as 'Comet ISON' before 2012 September. Therefore, discussions or even mentions of 'Comet ISON' before 2012 September were searched for as potentially prescient evidence of time travelers from the future."

The team searched through Facebook posts, tweets, and Google Trends, which shows when people are searching for particular terms (once a particular threshold has been met). Though disappointing – who wouldn't want to know there are time travelers vacationing in the 21st century? – the team found no evidence of these terms being used on the Internet before the events took place, as detailed in their paper, which has not been peer-reviewed.

To widen the net and catch any time travelers who wanted to make themselves known, the team also performed a similar test to Stephen Hawking. They asked time travelers on the Internet to email them, and then later revealed the email address. To get the attention of time travelers, they created a hashtag to make it visible on X (then Twitter).

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The team also created a hashtag for time travelers who are worried about changing the past.

"Alternatively, time travelers who believe that they cannot change the past were requested to tweet '#ICannotChangeThePast2' on or before 2013 August, or include that hashtag at the end of an email sent to "[email protected]" between 2008 November and 2013 August," the team explained. "For this part of the experiment, we were careful NOT to search Twitter or email until after the hashtag was publicly advertised in 2013 September. Therefore, by not pursuing a pre-advertisement search, the past might not have had to be changed in order for this tweet to have been discovered in 2013 September."

Unfortunately, no prescient tweets or emails were received from time travelers, sent before knowledge became available to all non-time travelers. While disappointing, and indicating that time travelers are not hanging around in the early days of the Internet, the team suggested a number of other reasons why.

"First, it may be physically impossible for time travelers to leave any lasting remnants of their stay in the past, including even non-corporeal informational remnants on the Internet," the team explained. "Next, it may be physically impossible for us to find such information as that would violate some yet-unknown law of physics, possibly similar to the Chronology Protection Conjecture. Furthermore, time travelers may not want to be found, and may be good at covering their tracks."

The study is posted to preprint server arXiv .

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Can we time travel? A theoretical physicist provides some answers

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Time travel makes regular appearances in popular culture, with innumerable time travel storylines in movies, television and literature. But it is a surprisingly old idea: one can argue that the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex , written by Sophocles over 2,500 years ago, is the first time travel story .

But is time travel in fact possible? Given the popularity of the concept, this is a legitimate question. As a theoretical physicist, I find that there are several possible answers to this question, not all of which are contradictory.

The simplest answer is that time travel cannot be possible because if it was, we would already be doing it. One can argue that it is forbidden by the laws of physics, like the second law of thermodynamics or relativity . There are also technical challenges: it might be possible but would involve vast amounts of energy.

There is also the matter of time-travel paradoxes; we can — hypothetically — resolve these if free will is an illusion, if many worlds exist or if the past can only be witnessed but not experienced. Perhaps time travel is impossible simply because time must flow in a linear manner and we have no control over it, or perhaps time is an illusion and time travel is irrelevant.

a woman stands among a crowd of people moving around her

Laws of physics

Since Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which describes the nature of time, space and gravity — is our most profound theory of time, we would like to think that time travel is forbidden by relativity. Unfortunately, one of his colleagues from the Institute for Advanced Study, Kurt Gödel, invented a universe in which time travel was not just possible, but the past and future were inextricably tangled.

We can actually design time machines , but most of these (in principle) successful proposals require negative energy , or negative mass, which does not seem to exist in our universe. If you drop a tennis ball of negative mass, it will fall upwards. This argument is rather unsatisfactory, since it explains why we cannot time travel in practice only by involving another idea — that of negative energy or mass — that we do not really understand.

Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler conceptualized a time machine that does not involve negative mass, but requires more energy than exists in the universe .

Time travel also violates the second law of thermodynamics , which states that entropy or randomness must always increase. Time can only move in one direction — in other words, you cannot unscramble an egg. More specifically, by travelling into the past we are going from now (a high entropy state) into the past, which must have lower entropy.

This argument originated with the English cosmologist Arthur Eddington , and is at best incomplete. Perhaps it stops you travelling into the past, but it says nothing about time travel into the future. In practice, it is just as hard for me to travel to next Thursday as it is to travel to last Thursday.

Resolving paradoxes

There is no doubt that if we could time travel freely, we run into the paradoxes. The best known is the “ grandfather paradox ”: one could hypothetically use a time machine to travel to the past and murder their grandfather before their father’s conception, thereby eliminating the possibility of their own birth. Logically, you cannot both exist and not exist.

Read more: Time travel could be possible, but only with parallel timelines

Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five , published in 1969, describes how to evade the grandfather paradox. If free will simply does not exist, it is not possible to kill one’s grandfather in the past, since he was not killed in the past. The novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, can only travel to other points on his world line (the timeline he exists in), but not to any other point in space-time, so he could not even contemplate killing his grandfather.

The universe in Slaughterhouse-Five is consistent with everything we know. The second law of thermodynamics works perfectly well within it and there is no conflict with relativity. But it is inconsistent with some things we believe in, like free will — you can observe the past, like watching a movie, but you cannot interfere with the actions of people in it.

Could we allow for actual modifications of the past, so that we could go back and murder our grandfather — or Hitler ? There are several multiverse theories that suppose that there are many timelines for different universes. This is also an old idea: in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol , Ebeneezer Scrooge experiences two alternative timelines, one of which leads to a shameful death and the other to happiness.

Time is a river

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that:

“ Time is like a river made up of the events which happen , and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.”

We can imagine that time does flow past every point in the universe, like a river around a rock. But it is difficult to make the idea precise. A flow is a rate of change — the flow of a river is the amount of water that passes a specific length in a given time. Hence if time is a flow, it is at the rate of one second per second, which is not a very useful insight.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that a “ chronology protection conjecture ” must exist, an as-yet-unknown physical principle that forbids time travel. Hawking’s concept originates from the idea that we cannot know what goes on inside a black hole, because we cannot get information out of it. But this argument is redundant: we cannot time travel because we cannot time travel!

Researchers are investigating a more fundamental theory, where time and space “emerge” from something else. This is referred to as quantum gravity , but unfortunately it does not exist yet.

So is time travel possible? Probably not, but we don’t know for sure!

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Is Time Travel Possible?

We all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second.

We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.

However, when we think of the phrase "time travel," we are usually thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That kind of time travel sounds like something you'd only see in movies or science fiction books. Could it be real? Science says yes!

Image of galaxies, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxies that are very far away as they existed a very long time ago. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)

How do we know that time travel is possible?

More than 100 years ago, a famous scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He called it relativity. This theory says that time and space are linked together. Einstein also said our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Einstein's theory of relativity says that space and time are linked together. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What does this mean for time travel? Well, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true.

For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set to the exact same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane (going in the same direction Earth rotates).

After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. So, the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Can we use time travel in everyday life?

We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day.

For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. (Check out our video about how GPS satellites work .) NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town?

GPS satellites orbit around Earth very quickly at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second (similar to the airplane example above).

Illustration of GPS satellites orbiting around Earth

GPS satellites orbit around Earth at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. Credit: GPS.gov

However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 km) above the surface. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slighter larger fraction of a second.

Here's how: Einstein's theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth's gravity is much weaker. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground.

The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Luckily, scientists can use math to correct these differences in time.

Illustration of a hand holding a phone with a maps application active.

If scientists didn't correct the GPS clocks, there would be big problems. GPS satellites wouldn't be able to correctly calculate their position or yours. The errors would add up to a few miles each day, which is a big deal. GPS maps might think your home is nowhere near where it actually is!

In Summary:

Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.

If you liked this, you may like:

Is time travel even possible? An astrophysicist explains the science behind the science fiction

Published: Nov 13, 2023

By: Magazine Editor

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Written by Adi Foord , assistant professor of physics , UMBC

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] .

Will it ever be possible for time travel to occur? – Alana C., age 12, Queens, New York

Have you ever dreamed of traveling through time, like characters do in science fiction movies? For centuries, the concept of time travel has captivated people’s imaginations. Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time, just like you move between different places. In movies, you might have seen characters using special machines, magical devices or even hopping into a futuristic car to travel backward or forward in time.

But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen?

The question of whether time is reversible remains one of the biggest unresolved questions in science. If the universe follows the laws of thermodynamics , it may not be possible. The second law of thermodynamics states that things in the universe can either remain the same or become more disordered over time.

It’s a bit like saying you can’t unscramble eggs once they’ve been cooked. According to this law, the universe can never go back exactly to how it was before. Time can only go forward, like a one-way street.

Time is relative

However, physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity suggests that time passes at different rates for different people. Someone speeding along on a spaceship moving close to the speed of light – 671 million miles per hour! – will experience time slower than a person on Earth.

People have yet to build spaceships that can move at speeds anywhere near as fast as light, but astronauts who visit the International Space Station orbit around the Earth at speeds close to 17,500 mph. Astronaut Scott Kelly has spent 520 days at the International Space Station, and as a result has aged a little more slowly than his twin brother – and fellow astronaut – Mark Kelly. Scott used to be 6 minutes younger than his twin brother. Now, because Scott was traveling so much faster than Mark and for so many days, he is 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds younger .

Some scientists are exploring other ideas that could theoretically allow time travel. One concept involves wormholes , or hypothetical tunnels in space that could create shortcuts for journeys across the universe. If someone could build a wormhole and then figure out a way to move one end at close to the speed of light – like the hypothetical spaceship mentioned above – the moving end would age more slowly than the stationary end. Someone who entered the moving end and exited the wormhole through the stationary end would come out in their past.

However, wormholes remain theoretical: Scientists have yet to spot one. It also looks like it would be incredibly challenging to send humans through a wormhole space tunnel.

Paradoxes and failed dinner parties

There are also paradoxes associated with time travel. The famous “ grandfather paradox ” is a hypothetical problem that could arise if someone traveled back in time and accidentally prevented their grandparents from meeting. This would create a paradox where you were never born, which raises the question: How could you have traveled back in time in the first place? It’s a mind-boggling puzzle that adds to the mystery of time travel.

Famously, physicist Stephen Hawking tested the possibility of time travel by throwing a dinner party where invitations noting the date, time and coordinates were not sent out until after it had happened. His hope was that his invitation would be read by someone living in the future, who had capabilities to travel back in time. But no one showed up.

As he pointed out : “The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

Telescopes are time machines

Interestingly, astrophysicists armed with powerful telescopes possess a unique form of time travel. As they peer into the vast expanse of the cosmos, they gaze into the past universe. Light from all galaxies and stars takes time to travel, and these beams of light carry information from the distant past. When astrophysicists observe a star or a galaxy through a telescope, they are not seeing it as it is in the present, but as it existed when the light began its journey to Earth millions to billions of years ago. https://www.youtube.com/embed/QeRtcJi3V38?wmode=transparent&start=0 Telescopes are a kind of time machine – they let you peer into the past.

NASA’s newest space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope , is peering at galaxies that were formed at the very beginning of the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

While we aren’t likely to have time machines like the ones in movies anytime soon, scientists are actively researching and exploring new ideas. But for now, we’ll have to enjoy the idea of time travel in our favorite books, movies and dreams.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Tags: CNMS , Physics , The Conversation

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Is Time Travel Even Possible? An Astrophysicist Explains The Science Behind The Science Fiction

If traveling into the past is possible, one way to do it might be sending people through tunnels in space..

multiple-red-alarm-clocks-drifiting-in-a-spiral-of-cosmic-matter

But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen?

Time is relative

Time isn’t the same everywhere.

However, wormholes remain theoretical: Scientists have yet to spot one. It also looks like it would be incredibly challenging to send humans through a wormhole space tunnel.

Paradoxes and failed dinner parties

As he pointed out : “The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

Telescopes are time machines

NASA’s newest space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope , is peering at galaxies that were formed at the very beginning of the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

Adi Foord is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license . Read the original article .

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Is time travel possible? Why one scientist says we 'cannot ignore the possibility.'

A common theme in science-fiction media , time travel is captivating. It’s defined by the late philosopher David Lewis in his essay “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” as “[involving] a discrepancy between time and space time. Any traveler departs and then arrives at his destination; the time elapsed from departure to arrival … is the duration of the journey.”

Time travel is usually understood by most as going back to a bygone era or jumping forward to a point far in the future . But how much of the idea is based in reality? Is it possible to travel through time?

Is time travel possible?

According to NASA, time travel is possible , just not in the way you might expect. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity says time and motion are relative to each other, and nothing can go faster than the speed of light , which is 186,000 miles per second. Time travel happens through what’s called “time dilation.”

Time dilation , according to Live Science, is how one’s perception of time is different to another's, depending on their motion or where they are. Hence, time being relative.

Learn more: Best travel insurance

Dr. Ana Alonso-Serrano, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, explained the possibility of time travel and how researchers test theories.

Space and time are not absolute values, Alonso-Serrano said. And what makes this all more complex is that you are able to carve space-time .

“In the moment that you carve the space-time, you can play with that curvature to make the time come in a circle and make a time machine,” Alonso-Serrano told USA TODAY.

She explained how, theoretically, time travel is possible. The mathematics behind creating curvature of space-time are solid, but trying to re-create the strict physical conditions needed to prove these theories can be challenging.

“The tricky point of that is if you can find a physical, realistic, way to do it,” she said.

Alonso-Serrano said wormholes and warp drives are tools that are used to create this curvature. The matter needed to achieve curving space-time via a wormhole is exotic matter , which hasn’t been done successfully. Researchers don’t even know if this type of matter exists, she said.

“It's something that we work on because it's theoretically possible, and because it's a very nice way to test our theory, to look for possible paradoxes,” Alonso-Serrano added.

“I could not say that nothing is possible, but I cannot ignore the possibility,” she said.

She also mentioned the anecdote of Stephen Hawking’s Champagne party for time travelers . Hawking had a GPS-specific location for the party. He didn’t send out invites until the party had already happened, so only people who could travel to the past would be able to attend. No one showed up, and Hawking referred to this event as "experimental evidence" that time travel wasn't possible.

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Exploring the Reality of Time Travel: Science Fact vs. Science Fiction

By Adi Foord, University of Maryland, Baltimore County November 16, 2023

Time travel, a longstanding fascination in science fiction, remains a complex and unresolved concept in science. The second law of thermodynamics suggests time can only move forward, while Einstein’s theory of relativity shows time’s relativity to speed. Theoretical ideas like wormholes offer potential methods, but practical challenges and paradoxes, such as the “grandfather paradox,” complicate the feasibility of actual time travel.

Will it ever be possible for time travel to occur?

But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen?

The Science Behind Time Travel

Time Is Relative

Theoretical Possibilities and Challenges

Some scientists are exploring other ideas that could theoretically allow time travel. One concept involves wormholes, or hypothetical tunnels in space that could create shortcuts for journeys across the universe. If someone could build a wormhole and then figure out a way to move one end at close to the speed of light – like the hypothetical spaceship mentioned above – the moving end would age more slowly than the stationary end. Someone who entered the moving end and exited the wormhole through the stationary end would come out in their past.

However, wormholes remain theoretical: Scientists have yet to spot one. It also looks like it would be incredibly challenging to send humans through a wormhole space tunnel.

Paradoxes and Failed Dinner Parties

Famously, physicist Stephen Hawking tested the possibility of time travel by throwing a dinner party where invitations noting the date, time, and coordinates were not sent out until after it had happened. His hope was that his invitation would be read by someone living in the future, who had capabilities to travel back in time. But no one showed up.

As he pointed out : “The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

James Webb Space Telescope Artist Conception

Artist’s rendering of the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: Northrop Grumman

Telescopes Are Time Machines

Interestingly, astrophysicists armed with powerful telescopes possess a unique form of time travel . As they peer into the vast expanse of the cosmos, they gaze into the past universe. Light from all galaxies and stars takes time to travel, and these beams of light carry information from the distant past. When astrophysicists observe a star or a galaxy through a telescope, they are not seeing it as it is in the present, but as it existed when the light began its journey to Earth millions to billions of years ago.

NASA’s newest space telescope , the James Webb Space Telescope , is peering at galaxies that were formed at the very beginning of the Big Bang , about 13.7 billion years ago.

Written by Adi Foord, Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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8 comments on "exploring the reality of time travel: science fact vs. science fiction".

Until the problem of the second law of thermodynamics(entropy) is solved, the concept of time travel will remain the subject of science fiction. Since this is a basic law of our universe, there is no conceivable way that we know of to do this. The great thing about our knowledge of the universe is that it continues to grow and with that our view of what is possible continues to change. After all, at one time it was believed we could never leave earth!

The 7 planets are soul pollen in the space @ life has been the world has been prepared @ The pollen of the universe is hidden @ Around the axis of the galaxy, the universe is hidden@@ The pollen of the galaxies is a hidden cluster Itis made that we thought about what wisdom is in God’s work and how it is arranged in the form of words.The verse that is made is as follows @@ John, you are in time @ worlds, planets around the axis of the branches of galaxies @@ 8 Prophets, divine prophets, God-aware witnesses @ God’s words of revelation, they are aware @@ 48 What the words of revelation that every prophet has about @ sometimes Sometimes the message of God has become a verbal cliché in the head @@ 62 The message of God was given to every prophet @ The message was made around the power of God @@ 46 The truth of the religions of the cradle of time is said in the world @ Prophets always came for justice in time @@ 62 A warrior became brave in time @ Delaver Ghahrmani Boud Taarani@@ 43 Omar Noah never died, who knows!@ Imransan Is there an unseen world, immortality!?@@ 49 Men’s rights in the sign @ Human rights, the observance of world justice @@ 40 We have God’s love @ A love that is not patched, separation!!!: @@ 39 Take one word from the end of the first and second stanzas to the bottom of these eight verbal verses, and this sentence is made @@ God-aware, the world is born, you know the sign of God @ Agah,the beginning of time, the world, eternity, the world of separation @@ The meaning of this sentence is That God, who before us humans lived on the earth, formed the earth’s crusts with full knowledge, and we humans know the sign of God, which is on the earth, on the continents and countries, and some names have been shown by God for our knowledge since the end of time.In a later video, if I have a lifetime left, I will explain exactly about these poems, God willing @@ The word of the Prophet 17 is the 17th and Muhammad (PBUH) said that the Bedouin Arabs should pray 17 rakats so that theyperform ablution and be clean and not kill and loot.From the caravans, these were all God’s will, and he is good everywhere, in every nation, God does not like evildoers, sinners, and oppressors.Muhammad (PBUH) was God’s last messenger to the Arab people, he was God’s best prophet, and the third verse is because they do not accept Muhammad (PBUH).Some Iranians who were in contact with me, that’s why in the third verse of this surah, he said that his message was given to every prophet, the message is based on divine power, and the word truth, the first two letters of which istruth, is truth, and truth is the 43rd and forty-third word, and the word is time.It is exactly 46, and this song of the Prophets was revealed at the age of 46 ببخشید اگر قبلآ مطالبی فرستادم که به مذاهب مذاهم ارتباط داد شاید به درد شما نمیخورد من در کامنت های بعدی سعی میکنم از نجوم و حیات زمین سخن بگویم این چند بیت را به خارجی انگلیسی که تبدیل کردم معنی آن حیرت انگیز تعغیر کرد گفتم برای شما بفرستم و بداند که این کلام من نبوده کلام خداوند بوده شما نظرتان در مورد خداوند چیست من میگویم خداوند که پدر ومادر انسان بودند قادر به ساختن ما بودند اما آیا آنها قادر به ساختن ستاره ها هم بودند

Your comment has validity to God. But it surely has no place here, it is only fare if the hole comment were in english and has less of a convincing push in a belief a person either believes or not.

It’s too bad physics can’t come to a complete consensus about time, I would like to add some thought about discoveries it has been proven that time travels in only one direction forward, the experiment dealt with light thru glass and how it reacts in the middle and what change happens after light exits the other side, a simple explanation of this experiment. Brings me to theorize and start that time existed before the big bang and is outside of our universes influence, when time is acted on by gravity the ( Form ) of time is changed until the influence no longer has effect, this could go hand in hand with light photons the photon has a influence in the Form that time has. This can not be a observed difference unless we were to see beyond the speed of light. We do agree that physics changes at a subatomic state and also does some strange changing once the speed of light has been exceeded.

The experiment I referred to was posted on IFL in October 2023 headlined ( Solution to complex light problem shows that time can only go Forward ).

One of the problem with travel time is the one people keep forever. And, that is that the earth is always move through space. Matter of fact, the earth is not in the same place that it was 50 years ago. So you will have to move through space as well as time.

Ironically, the only science fiction that seems to handle this is the original story “The Time Machine”.

Time travel is happening now. It has been done since the 1950s. The method satisfies all the requirements. Traveler can’t change the past, but only observe. You can’t go farther back than when the machine was first invented (1950s). There’s one more limitation, you can only observe what the machine was directed. The time machine, the common video camera, and video tape recorder. Now it’s the camera, and file capture computer. Yes, viewing a video tape is effectively going back in time. It’s more than the video, it’s the sound too. There are working versions of smell, and touch which can be recorded too. If you record, and replicate all the senses, you have effectively complete time travel. The most primitive form is the picture. This technology has been around for thousands of years, and is manually intensive. Later many pictures were strung together to make a film. Using a camera to record film was the first example of complete visual time travel (back to when the film was made). Later sound was added, and we have the movies. A way of going back in time that included sight, and sound. Now we have video systems (YouTub) that can play back past events selected by you. Yes, video systems are virtual time travel machines we have now.

How Stellar Cannibalism Illuminates Cosmic Evolution

جزایر فیلیپین دایناسوری که توسط انسان خلق شده در بیش ده ها میلیون سال و بخاطر ریخته شدن دوهزار متر خاک غرق شده بخاطر بالا آمدن آب اقیانوس اما جزایر فیلیپین شبیه دایناسوریست

The address of the above comment on the site about a thief who was trained by a dinosaur bird who was trained by humans tens of millions of years ago and who arrested murderers and robbers.The police were arrested by big birds.don’t the scientists of the world think about this?They were buried in the bed of important cities, they were buried with all the tools and machines, the traces of humans tens of millions of years ago, they had a civilization and a history of hundreds of thousands of years, they built a base underthe earth, from the meteorites that explode from the planets when they hit the sun, and they knew that several thousand meters of soil is poured on the surface of the seas and islands, and they knew that the shapes they made of the islands in thecountry of Papua may go under the ocean, of course, the Philippine islands.The picture is of a baby dinosaur that went under the ocean, but the northern island of Australia, which is Papua, is quite clear.It is a big dinosaur whose tail is towards the east and its mouth is open towards the west.There is the Philippines, but it was more difficult to take the soil to the Philippine islands to create a dinosaur than the island of Papua, that is why the height of the soil in the Philippines is lower, and when the meteorites fell a few kilometerson the surface of the ocean, the image created by humans under the ocean in the shape of a dinosaur is hidden in the American continent The picture is of a bird in the shape of a dinosaur that is flying, and this bird was made to flyby the Indians of the tribe, that bird was talking to people, but its spirit might have heard something from the police because a thief while in the bird’s mouth He was handcuffed by the police and the weapon, which is a machine gun, is fromthe east of the American continent on the coast

The country of Florida is a machine gun.When you continue to New York City, you will reach the mouth of the dinosaur, where a thief is trapped in the mouth of a bird, and the little finger of the police handcuffed the thief’s hand, and a small colt is in the hand ofthe thief, who the police caught in the mouth of the dinosaur.put in the mouth of the bird dinosaur, you can clearly see that the thief fell on the ground and was shot in the head, and it is clear that his forehead was pierced, the bird’s mouth is open in flight, the head of the birdis from the east of the American continent, and a fish is placed in the bird’s mouth in the water of the ocean.The stretched glove of the police, which is in the form of a fist, with a handcuff attached to the left hand of the thief who fell on the ground in the sea and the mouth of the bird, the head of the thief and the killer, is located towards the southwest and west coast of America.All these images were created from the American continent and islands by Humans were created, but they didn’t have enough fuel and time to create more accurate images and meteorites ruined the beauty of the images, but it is clear that all these changes were createdby humans, but you have to consider that two thousand meters of soil from meteorites are fish.And they buried the whales under the beaches, and after a very long time, the bodies of the whales turned into oil under the two thousand meters of soil on the beaches, and on the other hand, the presence of two thousand meters of soil onthe surface of the seas and droughts could not make the created images disappear.

According to current physical theory, is it possible for a human being to travel through time?

As several respondents noted, we constantly travel through time--just forward, and all at the same rate. But seriously, time travel is more than mere fantasy, as noted by Gary T. Horowitz, a professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara:

"Perhaps surprisingly, this turns out to be a subtle question. It is not obviously ruled out by our current laws of nature. Recent investigations into this question have provided some evidence that the answer is no, but it has not yet been proven to be impossible."

Even the slight possibility of time travel exerts such fascination that many physicists continue to study not only whether it may be possible but also how one might do it.

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One of the leading researchers in this area is William A. Hiscock, a professor of physics at Montana State University. Here are his thoughts on the matter:

"Is it possible to travel through time? To answer this question, we must be a bit more specific about what we mean by traveling through time. Discounting the everyday progression of time, the question can be divided into two parts: Is it possible, within a short time (less than a human life span), to travel into the distant future? And is it possible to travel into the past?

"Our current understanding of fundamental physics tells us that the answer to the first question is a definite yes, and to the second, maybe.

"The mechanism for traveling into the distant future is to use the time-dilation effect of Special Relativity, which states that a moving clock appears to tick more slowly the closer it approaches the speed of light. This effect, which has been overwhelmingly supported by experimental tests, applies to all types of clocks, including biological aging.

"If one were to depart from the earth in a spaceship that could accelerate continuously at a comfortable one g (an acceleration that would produce a force equal to the gravity at the earth's surface), one would begin to approach the speed of light relative to the earth within about a year. As the ship continued to accelerate, it would come ever closer to the speed of light, and its clocks would appear to run at an ever slower rate relative to the earth. Under such circumstances, a round trip to the center of our galaxy and back to the earth--a distance of some 60,000 light-years--could be completed in only a little more than 40 years of ship time. Upon arriving back at the earth, the astronaut would be only 40 years older, while 60,000 years would have passed on the earth. (Note that there is no 'twin paradox,' because it is unambiguous that the space traveler has felt the constant acceleration for 40 years, while a hypothetical twin left behind on a spaceship circling the earth has not.)

"Such a trip would pose formidable engineering problems: the amount of energy required, even assuming a perfect conversion of mass into energy, is greater than a planetary mass. But nothing in the known laws of physics would prevent such a trip from occurring.

"Time travel into the past, which is what people usually mean by time travel, is a much more uncertain proposition. There are many solutions to Einstein's equations of General Relativity that allow a person to follow a timeline that would result in her (or him) encountering herself--or her grandmother--at an earlier time. The problem is deciding whether these solutions represent situations that could occur in the real universe, or whether they are mere mathematical oddities incompatible with known physics. No experiment or observation has ever indicated that time travel is occurring in our universe. Much work has been done by theoretical physicists in the past decade to try to determine whether, in a universe that is initially without time travel, one can build a time machine--in other words, if it is possible to manipulate matter and the geometry of space-time in such a way as to create new paths that circle back in time.

"How could one build a time machine? The simplest way currently being discussed is to take a wormhole (a tunnel connecting spatially separated regions of space-time) and give one mouth of the wormhole a substantial velocity with respect to the other. Passage through the wormhole would then allow travel to the past.

"Easily said--but where does one obtain a wormhole? Although the theoretical properties of wormholes have been extensively studied over the past decade, little is known about how to form a macroscopic wormhole, large enough for a human or a spaceship to pass through. Some speculative theories of quantum gravity tell us that space-time has a complicated, foamlike structure of wormholes on the smallest scales--10^-33 centimeter, or a billion billion times smaller than an electron. Some physicists believe it may be possible to grab one of these truly microscopic wormholes and enlarge it to usable size, but at present these ideas are all very hypothetical.

"Even if we had a wormhole, would nature allow us to convert it into a time machine? Stephen Hawking has formulated a "Chronology Protection Conjecture," which states that the laws of nature prevent the creation of a time machine. At the moment, however, this is just a conjecture, not proven.

"Theoretical physicists have studied various aspects of physics to determine whether this law or that might protect chronology and forbid the building of a time machine. In all the searching, however, only one bit of physics has been found that might prohibit using a wormhole to travel through time. In 1982, Deborah A. Konkowski of the U.S. Naval Academy and I showed that the energy in the vacuum state of a massless quantized field (such as the photon) would grow without bound as a time machine is being turned on, effectively preventing it from being used. Later studies by Hawking and Kip S. Thorne of Caltech have shown that it is unclear whether the growing energy would change the geometry of space-time rapidly enough to stop the operation of the time machine. Recent work by Tsunefumi Tanaka of Montana State University and myself, along with independent research by David Boulware of the University of Washington, has shown that the energy in the vacuum state of a field having mass (such as the electron) does not grow to unbounded levels; this finding indicates there may be a way to engineer the particle physics to allow a time machine to work.

"Perhaps the biggest surprise of the work of the past decade is that it is not obvious that the laws of physics forbid time travel. It is increasingly clear that the question may not be settled until scientists develop an adequate theory of quantum gravity."

John L. Friedman of the physics department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has also given this subject a great deal of consideration:

"Special relativity implies that people or clocks at rest (or not accelerating) age more quickly than partners traveling on round-trips in which one changes direction to return to one's partner. In the world's particle accelerators, this prediction is tested daily: Particles traveling in circles at nearly the speed of light decay more slowly than those at rest, and the decay time agrees with theory to the high precision of the measurements.

"Within the framework of Special Relativity, the fact that particles cannot move faster than light prevents one from returning after a high-speed trip to a time earlier than the time of departure. Once gravity is included, however, spacetime is curved, so there are solutions to the equations of General Relativity in which particles can travel in paths that take them back to earlier times. Other features of the geometries that solve the equations of General Relativity include gravitational lenses, gravitational waves and black holes; the dramatic explosion of discoveries in radio and X-ray astronomy during the past two decades has led to the observation of gravitational lenses and gravitational waves, as well as to compelling evidence for giant black holes in the centers of galaxies and stellar-sized black holes that arise from the collapse of dying stars. But there do not appear to be regions of spacetime that allow time travel, raising the fundamental question of what forbids them--or if they really are forbidden.

"A recent surprise is that one can circumvent the 'grandfather paradox,' the idea that it is logically inconsistent for particle paths to loop back to earlier times, because, for example, a granddaughter could go back in time to do away with her grandfather. For several simple physical systems, solutions to the equations of physics exist for any starting condition. In these model systems, something always intervenes to prevent inconsistency analogous to murdering one's grandfather.

"Then why do there seem to be no time machines? Two different answers are consistent with our knowledge. The first is simply that the classical theory has a much broader set of solutions than the correct theory of quantum gravity. It is not implausible that causal structure enters in a fundamental way in quantum gravity and that classical spacetimes with time loops are spurious--in other words, that they do not approximate any states of the complete theory. A second possible answer is provided by recent results that go by the name chronology protection: One supposes that quantum gravity allows microscopic structures that violate causality, and one shows that the character of macroscopic matter forbids the existence of regions with macroscopically large time loops. To create a time machine would require negative energy, and quantum mechanics appears to allow only extremely small regions of negative energy. And the forces needed to create an ordinary-sized region with time loops appear to be extremely large.

"To summarize: It is very likely that the laws of physics rule out macroscopic time machines, but possible that spacetime is filled with microscopic time loops.

A beginner's guide to time travel

Learn exactly how Einstein's theory of relativity works, and discover how there's nothing in science that says time travel is impossible.

Actor Rod Taylor tests his time machine in a still from the film 'The Time Machine', directed by George Pal, 1960.

Everyone can travel in time . You do it whether you want to or not, at a steady rate of one second per second. You may think there's no similarity to traveling in one of the three spatial dimensions at, say, one foot per second. But according to Einstein 's theory of relativity , we live in a four-dimensional continuum — space-time — in which space and time are interchangeable.

Einstein found that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time — you age more slowly, in other words. One of the key ideas in relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second), or one light-year per year). But you can get very close to it. If a spaceship were to fly at 99% of the speed of light, you'd see it travel a light-year of distance in just over a year of time.

That's obvious enough, but now comes the weird part. For astronauts onboard that spaceship, the journey would take a mere seven weeks. It's a consequence of relativity called time dilation , and in effect, it means the astronauts have jumped about 10 months into the future.

Traveling at high speed isn't the only way to produce time dilation. Einstein showed that gravitational fields produce a similar effect — even the relatively weak field here on the surface of Earth . We don't notice it, because we spend all our lives here, but more than 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers) higher up gravity is measurably weaker— and time passes more quickly, by about 45 microseconds per day. That's more significant than you might think, because it's the altitude at which GPS satellites orbit Earth, and their clocks need to be precisely synchronized with ground-based ones for the system to work properly.

The satellites have to compensate for time dilation effects due both to their higher altitude and their faster speed. So whenever you use the GPS feature on your smartphone or your car's satnav, there's a tiny element of time travel involved. You and the satellites are traveling into the future at very slightly different rates.

But for more dramatic effects, we need to look at much stronger gravitational fields, such as those around black holes , which can distort space-time so much that it folds back on itself. The result is a so-called wormhole, a concept that's familiar from sci-fi movies, but actually originates in Einstein's theory of relativity. In effect, a wormhole is a shortcut from one point in space-time to another. You enter one black hole, and emerge from another one somewhere else. Unfortunately, it's not as practical a means of transport as Hollywood makes it look. That's because the black hole's gravity would tear you to pieces as you approached it, but it really is possible in theory. And because we're talking about space-time, not just space, the wormhole's exit could be at an earlier time than its entrance; that means you would end up in the past rather than the future.

Trajectories in space-time that loop back into the past are given the technical name "closed timelike curves." If you search through serious academic journals, you'll find plenty of references to them — far more than you'll find to "time travel." But in effect, that's exactly what closed timelike curves are all about — time travel

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There's another way to produce a closed timelike curve that doesn't involve anything quite so exotic as a black hole or wormhole: You just need a simple rotating cylinder made of super-dense material. This so-called Tipler cylinder is the closest that real-world physics can get to an actual, genuine time machine. But it will likely never be built in the real world, so like a wormhole, it's more of an academic curiosity than a viable engineering design.

Yet as far-fetched as these things are in practical terms, there's no fundamental scientific reason — that we currently know of — that says they are impossible. That's a thought-provoking situation, because as the physicist Michio Kaku is fond of saying, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory" (borrowed from T.H. White's novel, "The Once And Future King"). He doesn't mean time travel has to happen everywhere all the time, but Kaku is suggesting that the universe is so vast it ought to happen somewhere at least occasionally. Maybe some super-advanced civilization in another galaxy knows how to build a working time machine, or perhaps closed timelike curves can even occur naturally under certain rare conditions.

An artist's impression of a pair of neutron stars - a Tipler cylinder requires at least ten.

This raises problems of a different kind — not in science or engineering, but in basic logic. If time travel is allowed by the laws of physics, then it's possible to envision a whole range of paradoxical scenarios . Some of these appear so illogical that it's difficult to imagine that they could ever occur. But if they can't, what's stopping them?

Thoughts like these prompted Stephen Hawking , who was always skeptical about the idea of time travel into the past, to come up with his "chronology protection conjecture" — the notion that some as-yet-unknown law of physics prevents closed timelike curves from happening. But that conjecture is only an educated guess, and until it is supported by hard evidence, we can come to only one conclusion: Time travel is possible.

A party for time travelers

Hawking was skeptical about the feasibility of time travel into the past, not because he had disproved it, but because he was bothered by the logical paradoxes it created. In his chronology protection conjecture, he surmised that physicists would eventually discover a flaw in the theory of closed timelike curves that made them impossible.

In 2009, he came up with an amusing way to test this conjecture. Hawking held a champagne party (shown in his Discovery Channel program), but he only advertised it after it had happened. His reasoning was that, if time machines eventually become practical, someone in the future might read about the party and travel back to attend it. But no one did — Hawking sat through the whole evening on his own. This doesn't prove time travel is impossible, but it does suggest that it never becomes a commonplace occurrence here on Earth.

The arrow of time

One of the distinctive things about time is that it has a direction — from past to future. A cup of hot coffee left at room temperature always cools down; it never heats up. Your cellphone loses battery charge when you use it; it never gains charge. These are examples of entropy , essentially a measure of the amount of "useless" as opposed to "useful" energy. The entropy of a closed system always increases, and it's the key factor determining the arrow of time.

It turns out that entropy is the only thing that makes a distinction between past and future. In other branches of physics, like relativity or quantum theory, time doesn't have a preferred direction. No one knows where time's arrow comes from. It may be that it only applies to large, complex systems, in which case subatomic particles may not experience the arrow of time.

Time travel paradox

If it's possible to travel back into the past — even theoretically — it raises a number of brain-twisting paradoxes — such as the grandfather paradox — that even scientists and philosophers find extremely perplexing.

Killing Hitler

A time traveler might decide to go back and kill him in his infancy. If they succeeded, future history books wouldn't even mention Hitler — so what motivation would the time traveler have for going back in time and killing him?

Killing your grandfather

Instead of killing a young Hitler, you might, by accident, kill one of your own ancestors when they were very young. But then you would never be born, so you couldn't travel back in time to kill them, so you would be born after all, and so on …

A closed loop

Suppose the plans for a time machine suddenly appear from thin air on your desk. You spend a few days building it, then use it to send the plans back to your earlier self. But where did those plans originate? Nowhere — they are just looping round and round in time.

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Andrew May holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Manchester University, U.K. For 30 years, he worked in the academic, government and private sectors, before becoming a science writer where he has written for Fortean Times, How It Works, All About Space, BBC Science Focus, among others. He has also written a selection of books including Cosmic Impact and Astrobiology: The Search for Life Elsewhere in the Universe, published by Icon Books.

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Physics > Popular Physics

Title: searching the internet for evidence of time travelers.

Abstract: Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.

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Time Travel Proof: The Mounting Evidence Of A Broken Timeline

Time traveling tourists & other things.

Evidence of time travel is not something to be ignored — these periodic blips of stories, pictures, and artifacts are nothing less than blatant signs that our universe is in peril. The space-time continuum is breaking apart!

Eight years ago, I shared the first batch of this evidence. A handful of photographs and video clips that many believed were proof that time travel not only existed, but that individuals from the future had already visited us. Some, it was claimed, had even journeyed back to ancient times.

But they left footprints. They dropped artifacts. They were mistakenly caught on camera. Others deliberately shared knowledge of their strange voyages.

Others, if their stories are to be believed, were not quite so deliberate — they were like you or me. Ordinary people caught in time slips, temporarily whisked away to other eras, or perhaps even other universes.

Who were these alleged time travelers? These are some of their stories…

The 1917 Photograph

The Mummy’s Modern Boots

Project Pegasus & Nikola Tesla’s Jump Room
A Watch Found In A Chinese Tomb
Time Traveler Bridge Photo
Charlie Chaplin Time Traveler
An 1800s CD Case
The Time Slip Hotel
A Mysterious Near-Miss

Time Traveler In 1917 Photograph

It’s an odd thing when something, or someone, doesn’t quite fit in. At first, you may not notice. But upon closer inspection, the anomaly becomes clear.

So is the case with this seemingly ordinary photograph taken in 1917 Canada, found in a 1974 book titled The Great History of Cape Scott . It shows a group of people sitting upon the rocks of a beach, but among the crowd is a man who appears suspiciously out of place.

Many believe his clothes do not match those of the other beach-goers. Wearing a tee shirt, shorts, and with a hair style that seems quite modern in comparison, the mysterious individual hits all the check boxes for a person displaced in time.

In the photo, others even appear to look at him, perhaps in confusion.

This particular time traveler is colloquially known as the “surfer dude.”

Others, however, raise incredible questions.

For some time now, many have wondered about the existence of the so-called “Adidas Mummy,” the preserved body of a 30 to 40-year-old woman discovered in the Altai mountains region of Mongolia in 2016. She had been buried there for about 1,100 years.

Those studying her found that she had likely died of a “blow to the head.” However, her feet drew the most attention.

She wore what looked uncannily like modern day shoes, perhaps resembling a pair of snowboarding boots, as the Daily Mail mused in 2017 . They were made of felt, with splashes of bright red, and “knee length” with leather soles.

Their unique design, likened to Adidas, led many to question if perhaps the ancient Mongolian woman was in fact a time traveler. Perhaps, even if the shoes themselves were not from current times, they were made, or possibly inspired, by someone from the future utilizing the same style.

Among her other belongings was what archaeologists described as a “beauty kit,” including a mirror, a comb, and a knife. However, scientists brushed off any claims that she was a time traveler, though they did say the style of the boots was “very modern.”

Nikola Tesla’s Jump Room

Artistic rendering of what the jump room may have looked like, an ominous room with a purple hue

For years, Andrew Basiago has told the story of Project Pegasus, the alleged covert time travel initiative that was funded and maintained by the United States government throughout the 1960s and 70s. But perhaps the most interesting detail of his peculiar story is the existence of the so-called Jump Room.

It was in this room that Basiago claimed participants such as himself performed their secretive time travel experiments.

Built using designs by the late Nikola Tesla, recovered from his New York apartment shortly after his death, the room housed what some would call a teleportation machine. It consisted of a “shimmering curtain” made of “radiant energy,” a special, and allegedly as-yet-undisclosed, form of energy that is “latent and pervasive” throughout the cosmos. It is, if this story is to be believed, what makes time travel possible.

The curtain stood between two elliptical booms, and by passing through it, would-be travelers could journey across vast distances — and time itself. Basiago claims to have visited Gettysburg using the jump room, and that the experiments even took him as far as the planet Mars.

Beyond that, there are few other details about the mysterious Jump Room, and no physical proof remains. Did it really exist?

Evidence Of Time Travel In A Chinese Tomb?

A story from 2008, originally published by none other than the Daily Mail , claimed that Chinese archeologists found a watch in a 400-year-old Si Qing tomb in Shangsi County, China. This story then went extremely viral, after I shared my original article on it (“Are These Images Proof Of Real Time Travel,” published March 22, 2012). The images, which are still scattered around out there (source unknown), show a group of archeologists examining a stone block within a room, as well as the singular image of someone holding up a tiny piece of metal in the shape of a watch.

Allegedly, the timepiece was “frozen” at 10:06, with the word “Swiss” engraved on its back. However, the object looked much more like a sculpted piece of stone than an actual functioning watch, not to mention the fact that its circumference appeared smaller than that of a finger.

If I were charitable, I could say that perhaps 400 years ago some people carved this to look like a watch someone had seen, perhaps one worn by a visiting time traveler. That, or I’m incorrect and it is an actual watch and the time traveler was just very tiny. Maybe we all do shrink in the future, like the Shrinking Man Project suggests we should. You never know! Moving on!

Time Traveler Visits A Bridge?

Time Traveler Caught In Virtual Museum Photo?

A strange photo, once available at the Virtual Museum Of Canada (which has since been decommissioned), appeared to show a group of people attending the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in 1941. The bridge was located in Gold Bridge in British Columbia, Canada, and quite a few people showed up for it. But like the 1917 Canadian surfer dude mentioned earlier, someone in this photo seemingly doesn’t belong.

Who was this oddly out-of-place individual, wearing what looks like modern clothing all the way back in the 1940s? Who knows? The photo went absolutely viral some time around 2010, with the man in question becoming dubbed the “Time Traveling Hipster.”

What’s fun about this one is that, time traveler or not, it’s a real photo. The man certainly stands out from his cohorts – he’s wearing sunglasses, possibly a hoodie or light jacket, and what appears to be a branded t-shirt. He’s also holding a relatively small camera. Was he simply ahead of his time? Or out of it? We can’t be sure, but but the story of this photograph is one to remember. Next!

Lights! Camera! Action!

Next up we have two, count them two, short videos which many claim show time travelers unwittingly caught in the act of…talking on the phone!

Indeed, smartphones are the bane of any would-be time traveling tourist, as they seem like the most obvious thing to be spotted in photos, videos, and even paintings .

The above video, uploaded October 27, 2010, currently has over 4.3 million views, and contains a clip from a special feature found on the DVD edition of the Charlie Chaplin film The Circus. It’s of the movie’s premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1928.

But what’s so special about it? What’s worth 4.3 million views on YouTube? Well, you see that woman in the dark coat walking behind zebra? What’s she holding up to their ear? Is it a cellphone? Or was she just scratching her head, like the rest of us?

Meanwhile, from over in 1938 Massachusetts, we have the following video that some also suggest proves the existence of smartphones long before their time (or have at least mused about the possibility). A crowd of people exit a DuPont factory, and one woman is seen holding something to her ear.

Smartphones, brushes, other handheld rectangular objects of a dubious nature. Our universe is one filled with mystery, and some questions may forever remain unanswered. Onward!

A Compact Disc Case In The 1800s?

A painting from the 1800s appears to show a man holding what some have described as a fancy CD box. You can see another man depicted to be lifting up what looks like a square plastic “sleeve” that you’d place individual CDs into. The earliest form of plastic didn’t exist until the mid-1800s, and Compact Discs wouldn’t arrive on the scene until the 1980s.

Of course, it’s possibly this is just an ordinary box made for ordinary 1800s-era items.

Safety Not Guaranteed?

In 1997, an unusual classified ad appeared in Backwoods Home Magazine:

“WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview, CA 93022. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.”

As you can imagine, some people found that odd, and it naturally wound up on the Internet. In 2012, they even made a film based on it called, well, Safety Not Guaranteed .

The Time Slip Hotel: Proof That Even Buildings Time Travel?

It’s not unusual to, on occasion, find yourself at what you might describe as a “strange” place, especially if you happen to be in a country you’ve never visited before. Two couples who vacationed to Spain in the late 1970s know this all too well. In fact, their story has become something of a time slip legend.

In 1979, they were on their way to Spain, leaving England and venturing through France. While near Montelimar, they decided to stop and search for a hotel. Their original choices were packed, but eventually they did find one — an odd place, an old two-story building with the simple word “HOTEL” above the entrance.

They got a room, and stayed for the night, despite everything seeming particularly old-fashioned. The bed was hard, the place didn’t have a telephone, and there was no glass in the windows. Likely out of bemusement, they took a number of photographs.

When they went down to the dining room the next morning, they had a chance to see the hotel’s other customers. They too looked strangely out of place, dressed in outmoded clothing, two in old uniforms. Strangest of all was the bill for their stay — 19 francs, far less than they had anticipated.

All in all, it was a somewhat strange experience, but not unpleasant. They’d found a place to rest for the night, and continued on their way to Spain, where they presumably had a decent time. It wasn’t until they returned to France and looked for the hotel again that they knew something was truly amiss.

The hotel didn’t exist.

This wasn’t a matter of the hotel simply shutting down, or their being unable to find it again. It simply was not there. They even asked around in Montelimar, and no one had ever heard of it.

When they returned to England, the mystery deepened: Their photographs of the hotel were gone. Not only was there no proof that the hotel existed, but there was no proof that they’d ever been there at all.

Their odd tale was later featured on an episode of the television series Strange But True .

Is One Man’s Near Miss Proof of Time Travel?

In 2019, a very curious video from Turkey showed a man nearly meeting his fate, only to be saved in the strangest way by a mysterious passerby.

According to Demirören News Agency , the event happened in late February in the Turkish city of Adana. Serdar Binici was standing outside of his store when another man, who happened to be walking by, tapped his left shoulder.

Binici, for reasons even he claims to not understand, instinctively looked over to his right, and in that moment a truck drove by, and its rear metal door swung open toward his head. Binici was able to move out of the way just in time.

The story was featured by news outlets in Turkey, and was eventually shared on Reddit .

During a follow-up interview, Binici questioned how and why the events played out as they did. Why did he look over his opposite shoulder, and not the one he’d been tapped on? Why did the stranger tap his shoulder at all? Binici supposes the stranger may not, himself, know why any of this happened. Perhaps, he thinks, it was all some kind of divine intervention.

However, the peculiarity of this video has led many to speculate that the passing stranger wasn’t just some random person, but actually a time traveler — possibly one on a mission from the future, striving to put right what once went wrong. Could this incident be yet more proof of real time travel?

Somewhere In Time

Even if these stories and strange photographs are not evidence of anything, these tales are part of our shared paranormal folklore, and have become online urban legends. Some, like the tale of Rudolph Fentz, date back decades. And while others are easily disproved, they stand as fun little anecdotes that do make you wonder, what if?

At the end of the day, it’s all just a bunch of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff. Best not to take it too seriously. Still, if you’re looking for more on possible time travelers, consider checking out the following:

Rudolph Fentz , an accidental time traveler from a series of short stories
John Titor , the alleged time traveler from 2036
The HDR , an alleged time traveling device powered by crystals
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Photo Appears to Capture Path of Bullet Used in Assassination Attempt

Michael Harrigan, a retired F.B.I. special agent, said the image captured by Doug Mills, a New York Times photographer, seems to show a bullet streaking past former President Donald J. Trump.

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Donald Trump, in a red hat and a blue suit, speaks at a lectern. A red oval is drawn around what appears to be a bullet’s path.

By John Ismay

Reporting from Washington

Published July 14, 2024 Updated July 15, 2024

Follow the latest news on the Trump assassination attempt .

In documenting the Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday afternoon that turned into an attempt on a former president’s life, Doug Mills, a veteran New York Times photographer, appeared to capture the image of a bullet streaking past former President Donald J. Trump’s head.

That is the assessment of Michael Harrigan, a retired F.B.I. special agent who spent 22 years in the bureau.

“It absolutely could be showing the displacement of air due to a projectile,” Mr. Harrigan said in an interview on Saturday night after reviewing the high-resolution images that Mr. Mills filed from the rally. “The angle seems a bit low to have passed through his ear, but not impossible if the gunman fired multiple rounds.”

Simple ballistic math showed that capturing a bullet as Mr. Mills likely did in a photo was possible, Mr. Harrigan said.

Mr. Mills was using a Sony digital camera capable of capturing images at up to 30 frames per second. He took these photos with a shutter speed of 1/8,000th of a second — extremely fast by industry standards.

The other factor is the speed of the bullet from the firearm. On Saturday law enforcement authorities recovered an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle at the scene from a deceased white man they believe was the gunman.

“If the gunman was firing an AR-15-style rifle, the .223-caliber or 5.56-millimeter bullets they use travel at roughly 3,200 feet per second when they leave the weapon’s muzzle,’’ Mr. Harrigan said. “And with a 1/8,000th of a second shutter speed, this would allow the bullet to travel approximately four-tenths of a foot while the shutter is open.”

“Most cameras used to capture images of bullets in flight are using extremely high speed specialty cameras not normally utilized for regular photography, so catching a bullet on a side trajectory as seen in that photo would be a one in a million shot and nearly impossible to catch even if one knew the bullet was coming,” he said.

In Mr. Harrigan’s last assignment, he led the bureau’s firearms training unit and currently works as a consultant in the firearms industry.

“Given the circumstances, if that’s not showing the bullet’s path through the air, I don’t know what else it would be,” he said.

John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy. More about John Ismay

Our Coverage of the Trump Rally Shooting

The Investigation : F.B.I. officials told Congress that the 20-year-old gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump used his cellphone and other devices to search for images of Trump and President Biden .

Security Blind Spots : Even as investigators continue to examine what happened at the Trump rally, it is already clear that there were multiple missed opportunities to stop the gunman before the situation turned deadly.

The Gunman : In interviews, former classmates of the suspect described him as intelligent but solitary , someone who tried to avoid teasing by fellow students.

Secret Service Director : Kimberly Cheatle returned in 2022 to lead the agency she had served for nearly 30 years. Now, the assassination attempt on Trump has thrown her tenure into uncertainty .

Fears of What’s Next : Among voters, there is growing anxiety that America’s political divide is nearly beyond repair, and the shooting only made things worse .

Do you believe in time travel? I’m a skeptic myself — but if these people’s stories about time travel are to be believed, then I am apparently wrong. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll have to eat my words. In all honesty, that might not be so bad — because the tradeoff for being wrong in that case would be that time travel is real . That would be pretty rad if it were true.

Technically speaking time travel does exist right now — just not in the sci fi kind of way you’re probably thinking. According to a TED-Ed video by Colin Stuart, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev actually traveled 0.02 seconds into his own future due to time dilation during the time he spent on the International Space Station. For the curious, Krikalev has spent a total of 803 days, nine hours, and 39 minutes in space over the course of his career.

That said, though, many are convinced that time dilation isn’t the only kind of time travel that’s possible; some folks do also believe in time travel as depicted by everything from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine to Back to the Future . It’s difficult to find stories online that are actual accounts from real people — many of them are either urban legends ( hi there, Philadelphia Experiment ) or stories that center around people that I’ve been unable to verify actually exist — but if you dig hard enough, sincere accounts can be found.

Are the stories true? Are they false? Are they examples of people who believe with all their heart that they’re true, even if they might not actually be? You be the judge. These seven tales are all excellent yarns, at any rate.

The Moberly–Jourdain Incident

Paris, France- April 10, 2010: Paris is the center of French economy, politics and cultures and the ...

In 1901, two Englishwomen, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain , took a vacation to France. While they were there, they visited the Palace of Versailles (because, y’know, that’s what one does when one visits France ). And while they were at Versailles, they visited what’s known as the Petit Trianon — a little chateau on the palace grounds that Louis XVI gave to Marie Antoinette as a private space for her to hang out and do whatever it was that a teenaged queen did when she was relaxing back then.

But while they were there, they claimed, they saw some… odd occurrences. They said they spotted people wearing anachronistic clothing, heard mysterious voices, and saw buildings and other structures that were no longer present — and, indeed, hadn’t existed since the late 1700s. Finally, they said, they caught sight of Marie Antoinette herself , drawing in a sketchbook.

They claimed to have fallen into a “time slip” and been briefly transported back more than 100 years before being jolted back to the present by a tour guide.

Did they really travel back in time? Probably not; various explanations include everything from a folie a deux (basically a joint delusion) to a simple misinterpretation of what they actually saw. But for what it’s worth, in 1911 — roughly 10 years after what they said they had experienced occurred — the two women published a book about the whole thing under the names Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont simply called An Adventure. These days, it’s available as The Ghosts of Trianon ; check it out, if you like.

The Mystery Of John Titor

John Titor is perhaps the most famous person who claims he’s time traveled; trouble is, no one has heard from him for almost 17 years. Also, he claimed he came from the future.

The story is long and involved, but the short version is this: In a thread begun in the fall of 2000 about time travel paradoxes on the online forum the Time Travel Institute — now known as Curious Cosmos — a user responded to a comment about how a time machine could theoretically be built with the following message:

“Wow! Paul is right on the money. I was just about to give up hope on anyone knowing who Tipler or Kerr was on this worldline.

“By the way, #2 is the correct answer and the basics for time travel start at CERN in about a year and end in 2034 with the first ‘time machine’ built by GE. Too bad we can’t post pictures or I’d show it to you.”

The implication, of course, was that the user, who was going by the name TimeTravel_0, came from a point in the future during which such a machine had already been invented.

Over the course of many messages spanning from that first thread all the way through the early spring of 2001, the user, who became known as John Titor, told his story. He said that he had been sent back to 1975 in order to bring an IBM 5100 computer to his own time; he was just stopping in 2000 for a brief rest on his way back home. The computer, he said, was needed to debug “various legacy computer programs in 2036” in order to combat a known problem similar to Y2K called the Year 2038 Problem . (John didn’t refer to it as such, but he said that UNIX was going to have an issue in 2038 — which is what we thought was going to happen back when the calendar ticked over from 1999 to 2000.)

Opinions are divided on whether John Titor was real ; some folks think he was the only real example of time travel we’ve ever seen, while others think it’s one of the most enduring hoaxes we’ve ever seen. I fall on the side of hoax, but that’s just me.

Project Pegasus And The Chrononauts

Close up of golden pocket watch lean on pile of book.

In 2011, Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings stepped forward, claiming that they were former “chrononauts” who had worked with an alleged DARPA program called Project Pegasus. Project Pegasus, they said, had been developed in the 1970s; in 1980, they were taking a “Mars training class” at a community college in California (the college presumably functioning as a cover for the alleged program) when they were picked to go to Mars. The mode of transport? Teleportation.

It gets better, too. Basiago and Stillings also said that the then- 19-year-old Barack Obama , whom they claimed was going by the name “Barry Soetero” at the time, was also one of the students chosen to go to Mars. They said the teleportation occurred via something called a “jump room.”

The White House has denied that Obama has ever been to Mars . “Only if you count watching Marvin the Martian,” Tommy Vietor, then the spokesman for the National Security Council, told Wired’s Danger Room in 2012.

Victor Goddard’s Airfield Time Slip

World War II P-51 Mustang Fighter Airplane

Like Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, senior Royal Air Force commander Sir Robert Victor Goddard — widely known as Victor Goddard — claimed to have experienced a time slip.

In 1935, Goddard flew over what had been the RAF station Drem in Scotland on his way from Edinburgh to Andover, England. The Drem station was no longer in use; after demobilization efforts following WWI, it had mostly been left to its own devices. And, indeed, that’s what Goddard said he saw as he flew over it: A largely abandoned airfield.

On his return trip, though, things got… weird. He followed the same route he had on the way there, but during the flight, he got waylaid by a storm. As he struggled to regain control of his plane, however, he spotted the Drem airfield through a break in the clouds — and when he got closer to it, the bad weather suddenly dissipated. But the airfield… wasn’t abandoned this time. It was busy, with several planes on the runway and mechanics scurrying about.

Within seconds, though, the storm reappeared, and Goddard had to fight to keep his plane aloft again. He made it home just fine, and went on to live another 50 years — but the incident stuck with him; indeed, in 1975, he wrote a book called Flight Towards Reality which included discussion of the whole thing.

Here’s the really weird bit: In 1939, the Drem airfield was brought back to life. Did Goddard see a peek into the airfield's future via a time slip back in 1935? Who knows.

Space Barbie

I’ll be honest: I’m not totally sure what to do with thisone — but I’ll present it to you here, and then you can decide for yourself what you think about it. Here it is:

Valeria Lukyanova has made a name for herself as a “human Barbie doll” (who also has kind of scary opinions about some things ) — but a 2012 short documentary for Vice’s My Life Online series also posits that she believes she’s a time traveling space alien whose purpose on Earth is to aid us in moving “from the role of the ‘human consumer’ to the role of ‘human demi-god.’”

What I can’t quite figure out is whether this whole time traveling space alien thing is, like a piece of performance art created specifically for this Vice doc, or whether it’s what she actually thinks. I don’t believe she’s referenced it in many (or maybe even any) other interviews she’s given; the items I’ve found discussing Lukyanova and time travel specifically all point back to this video.

But, well… do with it all as you will. That’s the documentary up there; give it a watch and see what you think.

The Hipster Time Traveler

In the early 2010s, a photograph depicting the 1941 reopening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia in Canada went viral for seemingly depicting a man that looked… just a bit too modern to have been photographed in 1941. He looks, in fact, like a time traveling hipster : Graphic t-shirt, textured sweater, sunglasses, the works. The photo hadn’t been manipulated; the original can be seen here . So what the heck was going on?

Well, Snopes has plenty of reasonable explanations for the man’s appearance; each item he’s wearing, for example, could very easily have been acquired in 1941. Others have also backed up those facts. But the bottom line is that it’s never been definitively debunked, so the idea that this photograph could depict a man from our time who had traveled back to 1941 persists. What do you think?

Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor

According to two at least two books — Catholic priest Father Francois Brune’s 2002 book Le nouveau mystère du Vatican (in English, The Vatican’s New Mystery ) and Peter Krassa’s 2000 book Father Ernetti's Chronovisor : The Creation and Disappearance of the World's First Time Machine — Father Pellegrino Ernetti, who was a Catholic priest like Brune, invented a machine called a “chronovisor” that allowed him to view the past. Ernetti was real; however, the existence of the machine, or even whether he actually claimed to have invented it, has never been proven. Alas, he died in 1994, so we can’t ask him, either. I mean, if we were ever able to find his chronovisor, maybe we could… but at that point, wouldn’t we already have the information we need?

(I’m extremely skeptical of this story, by the way, but both Brune’s and Krassa’s books swear up, down, left, and right that it’s true, so…you be the judge.)

Although I'm fairly certain that these accounts and stories are either misinterpreted information or straight-up falsehoods, they're still entertaining to read about; after all, if you had access to a time machine, wouldn't you at least want to take it for a spin? Here's hoping that one day, science takes the idea from theory to reality. It's a big ol' universe out there.

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The Secret Service is investigating how the man who shot Trump got as close as he did

The Associated Press

Police snipers return fire after shots were fired while former President Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., on Saturday. Gene J. Puskar/AP hide caption

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a gunman armed with an AR-style rifle was able to get close enough to shoot and injure former President Donald Trump at a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania, a monumental failure of one the agency's core duties.

The gunman, who was killed by Secret Service personnel, fired multiple shots at the stage from an "elevated position outside of the rally venue," the agency said.

An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos taken at the Trump rally, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows the shooter was able to get astonishingly close to the stage where the former president was speaking. A video posted to social media and geolocated by the AP shows the body of a man wearing gray camouflage lying motionless on the roof of a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm Show grounds, where Trump's rally was held.

The roof was less than 150 meters (yards) from where Trump was speaking, a distance from which a decent marksman could reasonably hit a human-sized target. For reference, 150 meters is a distance at which U.S. Army recruits must hit a scaled human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M16 assault rifle in basic training. The AR-15, like the shooter at the Trump rally had, is the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M16.

Former President Donald Trump is rushed offstage during a rally in Butler, Pa.

Trump is fine after an assassination attempt at his rally

The FBI early Sunday identified the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa.

The Secret Service didn't have anybody at a late-night news conference where FBI and Pennsylvania State Police officials briefed reporters on the shooting investigation. FBI Special Agent in Charge Kevin Rojek said it was "surprising" that the gunman was able to fire at the stage before he was killed.

Members of the Secret Service's counter sniper team and counter assault team were at the rally, according to two law enforcement officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss details of the investigation.

The heavily-armed counter assault team, whose Secret Service code name is "Hawkeye," is responsible for eliminating threats so that other agents can shield and take away the person they are protecting. The counter sniper team, known by the code name "Hercules," uses long-range binoculars and is equipped with sniper rifles to deal with long-range threats.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said his department and the Secret Service are working with law enforcement to investigate the shooting. Maintaining the security of presidential candidates and their campaign events is one of the department's "most vital priorities," he said.

"We condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms and commend the Secret Service for their swift action today," Mayorkas said. "We are engaged with President Biden, former President Trump and their campaigns, and are taking every possible measure to ensure their safety and security."

The Picture Show

Photos: see how the trump rally shooting unfolded.

Calls for an investigation came from all sides.

James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who is the House Oversight Committee chairman, said he contacted the Service Service for a briefing and called on Director Kimberly Cheatle to appear for a hearing. Comer said his committee will send a formal invitation soon.

"Political violence in all forms is unamerican and unacceptable. There are many questions and Americans demand answers," Comer said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, called for investigating "security failures" at the rally.

"The federal government must constantly learn from security failures in order to avoid repeating them, especially when those failures have implications for the nation," Torres said.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, posted on X that he and his staff are in contact with security planning coordinators ahead of the Republican National Convention set to begin Monday in Milwaukee. "We cannot be a country that accepts political violence of any kind — that is not who we are as Americans," Evers said.

The FBI said it will lead the investigation into the shooting, working with the Secret Service and local and state law enforcement.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department "will bring every available resource to bear to this investigation."

"My heart is with the former President, those injured, and the family of the spectator killed in this horrific attack," Garland said in a statement. "We will not tolerate violence of any kind, and violence like this is an attack on our democracy."

Donald J. Trump

Pops, screams and then blood: On the scene at the Trump rally shooting

A view from the press riser of the chaos surrounding what authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

BUTLER, Pa. — The gunshots were high-pitched pops, slight and hollow in the open air.

Donald Trump , the former president set to accept the Republican nomination in five days, was less than 10 minutes into his speech here to a crowd of tens of thousands. A miles-long line of cars crawled for hours to pass through metal detectors and bag inspections, just like any Trump event, until these green fairgrounds became a sea of red hats.

Trump was almost an hour late, and his supporters waited impatiently under the blazing sun and thumping music. In the middle of the crowd, opposite the stage, a platform of TV cameras pointed at the stage, with reporters huddled underneath for shade.

Finally Trump walked out, as usual, to chants of “USA” and marveled: “This is a big crowd. This is a big, big, beautiful crowd.” A bright red MAGA cap shaded his eyes, and his white shirt was open-collared in the heat as he leaned his arms on the lectern.

He launched into his stump speech but quickly got bored with the prepared script. He offered to invite the Republican Senate candidate, Dave McCormick, to speak, but McCormick wasn’t ready.

2024 presidential election

“You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter, do you?” Trump teased. “Because these teleprompters are so damn boring.” He asked to show “that chart that I love so much,” showing border crossings across his and Joe Biden’s presidencies, and acted amazed that his producers obliged, projecting it onto the giant screens to either side. “Wow, you guys are getting better with time.”

He was pointing to one of the screens, narrating the increase in immigration since he left office in 2021. “Look what happened to our country!”

The pops came in pairs, a burst of five or six total. Trump swatted his ear, as if he heard a mosquito. Then he hunched his shoulders and ducked.

Podcast episode

“Get down, get down, get down!” Secret Service agents shouted as they rushed up onto the stage and surrounded him. The crowd screamed. Another burst of popping noises. More screaming. The people in the bleachers behind Trump shuffled, unsure about where to go. The people in chairs or standing crouched or fell to the ground. A dense cloud of smoke hung to the right of the stage, then dispersed quickly.

One more solitary shot.

More suited Secret Service agents rushed the stage, then black-clad men wearing body armor and helmets, and carrying assault rifles. The crowd shouted in confusion.

“Are we good?” one of the officers said, audible from the podium microphone.

“Shooter’s down,” another answered.

“We’re good to move.”

“Are we clear?”

“We’re clear!”

“Let me get my shoes on,” Trump said, as the agents lifted him.

“I got you, sir.”

“Hold on, your head is bloody.”

“Let me get my shoes on,” he said again, as the agents formed a ring around him.

The crowd, seeing him standing, started to cheer.

Photos from the Trump rally shooting

“Wait,” Trump said, and thrust up a fist. “Fight!” he said. “Fight!”

Then the people roared and chanted again: “USA!”

“We gotta move,” an agent said. Leaning on the agents for assistance, Trump kept his fist raised as he hobbled off the stage, down the stairs and into his black SUV. One black dress shoe remained on the red-carpeted stage.

Officers — Secret Service, county sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, U.S. Department of Homeland Security — started telling the crowd to evacuate, calling the site an active crime scene. The rallygoers walked out, calling and texting family and friends and recording videos. People were shocked but calm.

As people passed the press risers elevating the cameras, some took out their anger on the media.

“You’re not safe. It’s your fault.”

“You wanted political violence, now you got it. Hope you’re all f---ing happy.”

“The shot heard ’round the world.”

“The liberal media is responsible!”

“Every f---ing one of y’all!”

Others sought out the cameras to offer eyewitness accounts, but they were jumbled and sometimes contradictory amid the panic.

The crowd trudged glumly to the parking lot, a few stopping for a last-minute hot dog or snow cone.

A man with a cane cowered behind the bathrooms, vomiting.

They walked to their cars past Trump flags streaming in the wind over a long row of vendors selling MAGA hats and mug shot T-shirts and Trump keychains and vulgar bumper stickers and Trump visors topped with bright orange fake hair.

A man with a bullhorn wearing a homemade “JAN 6 SURVIVOR” shirt called on people to march on Main Street, “peacefully and patriotically,” echoing Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 , 2021. Most everyone ignored him. One young man accused him of being an undercover federal agent and told him to shut up.

They left behind a field strewn with empty plastic water bottles. A giant American flag hoisted from two cranes flapped high above the empty white bleachers bordered with red, white and blue bunting.

Election 2024

A majority of Democratic delegates have pledged to support Vice President Harris , signaling she is likely to secure the presidential nomination next month. Follow live updates on the 2024 election .

Biden drops out: Here’s what happened in the hours before Biden said in a letter that he is ending his reelection campaign . This is how Democrats can pick a new candidate .

Trump VP pick: Trump has chosen Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) as his running mate , selecting a rising star in the party and a previously outspoken Trump critic who in recent years has closely aligned himself with the former president.

Presidential election polls: Check out The Post’s presidential polling averages of the seven battleground states most likely to determine the outcome of the election. Here’s how Harris performs against Trump in recent polls .

Key dates and events: Voters in all states and U.S. territories have been choosing their party’s nominee for president ahead of the summer conventions. Here are key dates and events on the 2024 election calendar .

10 Most Compelling Pieces Of Evidence That Prove Time Travel Exists

What we don't talk about when we talk about time travel.

What we talk about when we talk about time travel: going back to kill Hitler, Back To The Future, treading on butterflies causing irreparable damage to history, Doctor Who, whether or not it's ethical to use it to cheat on the lottery, and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

What we don't talk about when we talk about time travel: whether it actually exists. Or will exist. Or has existed. We don't know, this wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff kinda messes with our tenses a little.

The idea of being able to travel backwards or forwards through history has appeared in countless forms through pop culture, conversation, and daydreams for ages, but how come we don't discuss whether it'll actually ever be real? Does it just seem too beyond feasibility?

Well, we're here with good news! Not from the future, sadly, just in the grimly predictable present. A grimly predictable present that includes quantum physics, Higgs Bosons and other science-y things we don't quite understand but apparently have something to do with a conceivable way for us to travel through time. No less a genius than Stephen Hawking spent years looking for a reason that time travel couldn't exist, only to find the concept didn't contravene any laws of physics, eventually admitting "time travel may be possible, but it is not practical".

Plus, there's the fact that the history of time travel in our culture has frequently strayed into the non-fiction - so long as you're inclined to believe the possible crackpots that are discussing it - all of which adds up to some pretty compelling pieces of evidence that prove time travel is real.

Ten, in fact.

Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/

IMAGES

More evidence of time travel? : r/timetravel
Evidence of Time Travel : r/surrealism
19 Real Photographs You'd Swear Were Proof Of Time Travel
Is this evidence of time travel? : r/juxtaposition
Is this photo evidence of time travel? : r/Hololive
3 MYSTERIOUS EVIDENCE OF TIME TRAVEL

VIDEO

THE TRUTH ABOUT TIME TRAVEL!
13 Photos That Can Prove That Time Travel Exists
CapCut Time traveler reveal the “year of 2749” future of Humanity
NYPD Detective Time Travels From 2024 to 1994
Time Traveler From 2750 Makes A Shocking Revelation
20 Photos That Can Prove Time Travel Exists

COMMENTS

Are there proofs of time travel so far? : r/askscience
This is a consequence of relativity. If you go on a spaceship at 99% the speed of light for six months and return at the same speed for six months, seven years will have passed on earth. 2. How can one time travel, say, in a past period, without physically destroying one's self. If people will have had figured this out, there'd be time tourists ...
More evidence of time travel? : r/timetravel
Its Mr. Checov from the movie Star Trek: The Voyage Home. Its not real bro. In other news, a time traveler with a Scottish brogue hacked into a computer at a plexiglass company, entering information that altered time and space, resulting in US dominance over the world and an eventual collapse of civilization.
Does anyone have evidence of time travel ? : r/timetravel
Agreed. We time travel at a rate of 60 seconds per minute through time without even trying. Except at night when I jump into my comfortable time travel machine that takes me about 4-6 hours into the future. It used to take me 8 hours into the future each night, so I think it might need some maintenance. Or not. I'll have to sleep on it.
Physicists Searched The Internet For Evidence Of Time Travelers
Hawking was doing a (presumably, quite tongue-in-cheek) experiment to see if time travel is possible. The idea was that if he sent the invites out after the event took place, only time travelers ...
Can we time travel? A theoretical physicist provides some answers
The simplest answer is that time travel cannot be possible because if it was, we would already be doing it. One can argue that it is forbidden by the laws of physics, like the second law of ...
Is Time Travel Possible?
In Summary: Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.
Is Time Travel Even Possible?
And we move through space in all directions just fine, and according to physics, travel through time should be just as possible. One way that people have looked into is via a wormhole—a shortcut ...
Is Time Travel Even Possible? An Astrophysicist Explains The Science
Time isn't the same everywhere. Some scientists are exploring other ideas that could theoretically allow time travel. One concept involves wormholes, or hypothetical tunnels in space that could create shortcuts for journeys across the universe.If someone could build a wormhole and then figure out a way to move one end at close to the speed of light - like the hypothetical spaceship ...
Is Time Travel Even Possible? An Astrophysicist Explains The Science
Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time, just like you move between different places. In movies, you might have seen characters using special machines, magical devices or even hopping into a futuristic car to travel backward or forward in time. ... "The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, ...
Will time travel ever be possible? Science behind curving space-time
According to NASA, time travel is possible, just not in the way you might expect. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity says time and motion are relative to each other, and nothing can go ...
Exploring the Reality of Time Travel: Science Fact vs ...
Time travel, a longstanding fascination in science fiction, remains a complex and unresolved concept in science. The second law of thermodynamics suggests time can only move forward, while Einstein's theory of relativity shows time's relativity to speed. Theoretical ideas like wormholes offer potential methods, but practical challenges and ...
According to current physical theory, is it possible for a human being
"Time travel into the past, which is what people usually mean by time travel, is a much more uncertain proposition. ... as well as to compelling evidence for giant black holes in the centers of ...
Do we have ANY proof that time travel has occurred before?
Yes and no, depending on what you consider time travel. Time Dilation, which is a form of quasi-time travel, happens all the time-- albeit on a very, very small scale. We've also witnessed retrocausality (i.e. going back in time) on the quantum level. Again, it's nothing like you see in sci-fi, but it's not nothing. 15.
How I Became Obsessed With Accidental Time Travel
An Inescapable Kidnapping: Fifty years ago, he was taken at gunpoint. Then he went on with his life — and that's the part that haunts Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Ti West's Horror Show: The ...
A beginner's guide to time travel
One of the key ideas in relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second), or one light-year per year). But ...
Inside Biden's unprecedented exit from the presidential race
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden. Calla Kessler/The New York Times/Redux Pictures Biden speaks with Jacquelyn Brittany, a security guard at The New York Times, in ...
Time travel claims and urban legends
The story of Rudolph Fentz is an urban legend from the early 1950s and has been repeated since as a reproduction of facts and presented as evidence for the existence of time travel. The essence of the legend is that in New York City in 1951 a man wearing 19th-century clothes was hit by a car. The subsequent investigation revealed that the man ...
[1312.7128] Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers. Robert J. Nemiroff, Teresa Wilson. Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention ...
Time Travel Proof: The Mounting Evidence Of A Broken Timeline
A handful of photographs and video clips that many believed were proof that time travel not only existed, but that individuals from the future had already visited us. Some, it was claimed, had even journeyed back to ancient times. But they left footprints. They dropped artifacts. They were mistakenly caught on camera.
Photo Appears to Capture Path of Bullet Used in Assassination Attempt
Michael Harrigan, a retired F.B.I. special agent, said the image captured by Doug Mills, a New York Times photographer, seems to show a bullet streaking past former President Donald J. Trump.
What is the most convincing evidence that time travel exists ...
Smart people are absolutely convinced Time Travel can be done, based on The Theory of General Relativity. Which presents the possibility of Wormholes existing, through those Wormholes one can theoretically travel back or forwards in time. A number of Physicist accept this possibility. Me, I think it is irrelevent.
7 Stories Of People Who Have Claimed To Travel In Time
Teleportation. It gets better, too. Basiago and Stillings also said that the then- 19-year-old Barack Obama, whom they claimed was going by the name "Barry Soetero" at the time, was also one ...
CrowdStrike deploys fix for issue causing global tech outage
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has deployed a fix for an issue that triggered a major tech outage that affected industries ranging from airlines to banking to healthcare worldwide, the company's ...
Is there any legit proof of time travel that you know of ...
The lack of proof itself is evidence against the theory that time travel will ever exist. 1. posteriormumble. • 9 yr. ago. Only into the future except it's all relative. Thats why clocks on satellites have to be adjusted for time dilation. 1. PuzzleDuster. • 9 yr. ago.
Secret Service investigates how Trump shooter was able to get so ...
An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos taken at the Trump rally, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows the shooter was able to get astonishingly close to the ...
When gunshots erupted at the Trump rally, there were pops, screams and
"Wait," Trump said, and thrust up a fist. "Fight!" he said. "Fight!" Then the people roared and chanted again: "USA!" "We gotta move," an agent said. Leaning on the agents for ...
Is there evidence for time travel?? : r/timetravel
If you want to time travel, you only have to change your clock, as we do with daylight standard and daylight savings time. The answer you are probably looking for: We don't know. Our best understanding and testing of physics gives us the default assumption of time travel to the past is impossible.
10 Most Compelling Pieces Of Evidence That Prove Time Travel Exists
10 Theories That Prove Time Travel Exists. Watch on. What we talk about when we talk about time travel: going back to kill Hitler, Back To The Future, treading on butterflies causing irreparable ...

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Physicists Searched The Internet For Evidence Of Time Travelers

If you are a time traveler reading this, here is your chance to prove it.

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