Time The Great Mystery

When time travel is spoken about many people will say that is bunk, no one can time travel. The truth is all of our astronauts have time traveled. It may have been for the slightest fraction of a second, but they all traveled into the future. You may be wondering how I can say this, but the answer is not only scientific, it is true. The faster we go the slower time moves. This means when astronauts travel to the space station, moon or into orbit they are moving a heck of a lot faster than we do so they are traveling into the future. Their bodies are not aging as fast as they would if they were still on earth. There is also another factor to consider in time travel and that is height from the center of the earth. The higher one goes on earth the faster time travels. We may not realize it, but gravity is a component of time and time is not traveling at exactly the same rate for all of us.

We are all time travelers. If we drive our cars time is slowing down inside the car when it is moving and the faster we go the more it slows down taking us into the future. It is a lucky thing for us there isn’t very much difference in the flow of time on earth or we would have a real problem. If this phenomena were to be worse think of the problems we could have. One might be you get into your car and now you are an hour ahead of everyone else you left and you have aged an hour less. What if the discrepancy was even greater, you go into your car and travel to the store and while that took you ten minutes, ten months passed for those at home. In under a hundred trips to the store your family could be dead from old age while you were still young. I know this kind of thing boggles the mind, but maybe if I apply it to space travel you can better see what I am talking about. We send astronauts to the closest star system, Alpha Centauri and it takes them 4.3650 years because we have figured out how to travel at the speed of light. They spend another year in that system and 4.3650 years on the return journey. They were away 9.73 years. If we subtract the one year they spent in the alien solar system because they were not traveling very much but exploring, we are left with the total passage of time being 8.73 years for them. The people on earth would have aged so much they would either be very elderly or deceased when they got back.

We can see how traveling into the future would work, but we could not return to the past and that is the rub. Astronauts on a very long space journey traveling at the speed of light or even slower might have to bid their families farewell forever. It is a chilling choice and I wonder how many would be willing to do this? At this point in time we do not know if it will ever be possible to go back to the past or even if the past exists in any shape, manner or form. You would think after saying this, that would be the end of this article or at least the end of being able to go back into the past, but there are not only several theories about this, there are even people who have said they did exactly that and many of them claim it was an accident.

First I would like to mention the fact there are some who believe in a theory which states everything we have done is happing at the same time. While this might sound insane on the surface, if it were true we would only have to figure out how to step out of this time and into the next one. It would no longer be a case of going back in time because there would be no back to go to. It might be a lateral move. There is another theory which states we do not live in the present, but slightly in the past but our brains make us believe we are in the present. This certainly would change our concept of things. One theory states time is not running at the same speed for everyone even if they are living in the same circumstances and this may be why some of us seem to age slower or quicker depending on your view. Some say time is only an illusion. Time may be one of the most misunderstood concepts we have, because we think we understand it, but we really don’t know that much about it. It sort of reminds me of what we know about electricity, in that case we know how it works but not really what it actually is.

Because of the fact time is so mysterious many of us are interested in it and reports about things which affect time. We know when clocks which are synchronized to clocks on earth are sent into space to orbit they run faster than the ones on earth, this is scientific fact and it is because they are traveling much faster as they orbit our planet. There are also stories about vortexes which people have been caught in which have altered time. One of my favorite has to do with a man who regularly flew from Jamaica to Florida in his light plane. One day while flying he got caught in a strange looking electrical storm. He said it was cone shaped and he struggled to get the plane out of the small end before it closed up entirely. When he made it, he couldn’t believe his location. He was over Florida, but he had reached it over an hour earlier than ever before and his plane was not capable of traveling that fast. He said somehow he believed he had traveled in time. Bye the way his route was over the Bermuda Triangle.

There are stories about people who claim they have been transported instantly into the past and returned and sometimes it is more than one person at a time. It is claimed to have happened in the early 20th century to two women on the grounds of Versailles. The women were school teachers and kept it secret for years until one wrote a book about her experience.

There is a story about a time traveler which is said to have the best recorded evidence. In 1876 a man named Rudolf Fenz disappeared and no answers were found at that time to indicate what had happened to him. Seventy four years later a man was said to have materialized in the middle of a downtown Manhattan road and was struck and killed by a car. The police decided to investigate the death of this strangely dressed man. The driver who hit him said he materialized out of thin air. His clothes looked new but were almost a century out of date. The man was in his early 30s. Not only were his clothes out of date, the money in his pockets was composed of out of date coins and some looked new. Some had been pulled out of circulation long ago. Bank notes were found and the newest was dated 1870. A new pack of playing cards was found in his pocket engraved Rudolf Fenz Sr. The police could find no relatives or a home address so they turned the case over to missing persons. They found a Rudolf Fenz Jr. in a 1939 telephone directory. They were able to interview Mrs. Rudolf Fenz and she told them her father-in-law had disappeared during a walk in in 1876 when he was 31 years old. The police found the report where he was listed as missing that year.

Time is very strange and maybe we will find out it doesn’t exist at all and the concept is only in our brains. Some very smart people are wrestling with the concept of time as I write this article and it will be interesting to see what they find.