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Asked by mueea001 to Peter, Mark, Katharine, Jony, Ben on 21 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by georgiaxx12.
Question: what thing can travel faster than light in order to time travel?
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Mark Basham answered on 21 Nov 2011:
So the only thing which can possibly travel faster than the speed of light is a neutrino, But its important to remember that’s still not proven conclusively. And even if it does, I don’t think there is any easy way to get any useful time travel out of it. However this isn’t really my field, so I may not have all the facts!
Good question though.
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Peter Williams answered on 21 Nov 2011:
Quantum information (such as the phase velocity of a wave) can travel faster than light, but in such a way that causality is never violated.
Actual objects though cannot as far as we know. If neutrinos really do, then there are a whole host of other effects that have not been seen that would then need explaining.
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Ben Still answered on 21 Nov 2011:
Nothing we know of can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (empty space). To reach the speed of light itself you either have to have zero mass (like photons, which are particles of light) or have infinite energy. The news recently of neutrinos travelling faster than light has still to be proven as a definite way in which Nature acts – we need to test the result using different methods and experiments. Even then it may seem that neutrinos are just seen to travel faster than light because they are taking short cuts – like jumping on a bus when running a marathon – a shortcut that is against the rules.
If faster than light is possible, time travel is possible because you become outside of the usual behaviour of cause and effect – something you do (a cause) directly effects the future. You travel so fast that you are outside of this and therefore can easily effect something in the future that has yet to happen.
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Jony Hudson answered on 21 Nov 2011:
People have talked for a while about things called Tachyons. These are particles that would always move faster than the speed of light.
So far though, nobody has ever seen a tachyon, so they’re just an idea at the minute. At the moment we can’t say that we know about anything faster than the speed of light.
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