Who invented time travel?

[MacLuv]

Le temps est une illusion. C'est une mesure inventée par des humains. Seulement dans votre esprit existe a après et un futur. La réalité existe seulement dans maintenant. Même pendant que vous lisez ce passage votre esprit va vers l'arrière.

Time is an illusion. It is a measurement invented by the human ones. Only in your spirit exists has after and a future. Reality exists only in now. Even while you read this passage your spirit goes backwards.

[edX]

i'll go with Albert Einstein.

but Al Gore sounds more reasonable

[Jason]

i say albert as well

space is time in essance

and albert einstein first made those connections i think, so why not?

but then since space is time, then in theory whomever invented space travel (that being travel outside of our atmosphere) could be it

but then again, we travel through space on our planet, so then whomever realized that could have been said to invent time travel, but really they didnt invent it, just discovered it

so actually, really... no one invented time travel, but someone could invent controlled time travel, which is a totally different thing, and thusly i have no answer to

so when you are done pullin the strings of our mind i look forward to your insightful answer to the questions of the universe

[boi]

haha, i like the travelling through time RIGHT NOW bit.
i can TRAVEL THROUGH TIME. i'm travelling through time RIGHT NOW. i ALWAYS travel through time!

like dodging bullets. i can dodge bullets. i've dodged EVERY BULLET EVER FIRED!
hah! even Neo couldn't do that.

[chemistry_geek]

Well, the question "Who invented Time Travel?" implies that someone intentionally set out to discover/invent controlled time travel. That being the question, I have no answer yet. But, if I recall correctly, when an object's speed is faster than its surroundings, time slows down for that object (actually only happens for relativisitc speeds). So, since no human has approached relativistic speeds, then no one has achieved time travel by this method.

This little exercise certainly set in motion the cogs and wheels turning in my head. I would think that time is "moving" at a constant rate. I came across this ideal visually by imagining a series of particles in 2D space with trajectories. All particles are bouncing into one another (much like the "planets" screensaver some of us have seen). Now take that 2D motion in a plane and add the third dimention moving at a constant rate. You would see the plane of 2D particles moving along an axis normal to the plane with the particles moving about. As the particles move about, they plot out 3D trajectories as the plane moves in one direction. From the perspective of being outside the plane, one could tell future or past position of any particle by looking along the trajectories that have predetermined paths.

Now extending this analogy to people might explain how psychics are able to sometimes accurately predict future and past events of people they come in contact with. This assumes the psychics are not mentally ill, or fakes, or any other type of crack pot (i.e. the real true blue psychic such as John Edward who is able to predict some future events though his real gift appears to be talking to dead people). While I don't think psychics can transcend the space-time contunuum and leave the rate constant of time, I do know that the human brain is a non-linear processing system, and somehow these people are able to predict with limited accuracy future events and tell of past events which they previously knew nothing about by taking a few bits of present information and computing/extrapolating along the trajectory a little away from the constantly moving "plane" (from our perspective a cube or sorts) of space.

Of course this little mental exercise is probably bogus and full of nonsense.

[chemistry_geek]

Was the person who invented time travel Herbert George Wells?

[gregarios]

There actually is absolutely no way to tell if time is moving in a constant rate. If there was nothing but you treading water in a river, and you couldn't see the shore or the bottom, there is no way to tell how fast it is flowing or you are moving. If you can tell that time is a constant, then you must be able to see the edge of time, or something else not within it.

[chemistry_geek]

Originally posted by gregarios
There actually is absolutely no way to tell if time is moving in a constant rate. If there was nothing but you treading water in a river, and you couldn't see the shore or the bottom, there is no way to tell how fast it is flowing or you are moving. If you can tell that time is a constant, then you must be able to see the edge of time, or something else not within it.

Incorrect, if I was treading water in a river and I could not see or hear anything, the only thing I could feel/detect would be acceleration in one direction. Hence, there should be some physically measureable property that one could use be it electromagnetic properties (red/blue shift), mass(gain/loss), energy(gain/loss), etc... to detect acceleration in/of time. The laws of physics simply can't be broken.