Relativistic Time

The idea of relativistic time is a direct result of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity

Since Albert Einstein published his Theory of Relativity (the Special Theory in 1905, and the General Theory in 1916), our understanding of time has changed dramatically, and the traditional Newtonian idea of absolute time and space has been superseded by the notion of time as one dimension of space-time in special relativity, and of dynamically curved space-time in general relativity.

It was Einstein’s genius to realize that the speed of light is absolute, invariable and cannot be exceeded (and indeed that the speed of light is actually more fundamental than either time or space). In relativity, time is certainly an integral part of the very fabric of the universe and cannot exist apart from the universe, but, if the speed of light is invariable and absolute, Einstein realized, both space and time must be flexible and relative to accommodate this.

Although much of Einstein’s work is often considered “difficult” or “counter-intuitive”, his theories have proved (both in laboratory experiments and in astronomical observations) to be a remarkably accurate model of reality, indeed much more accurate than Newtonian physics, and applicable in a much wider range of circumstances and conditions.

Space-Time

One aspect of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is that we now understand that space and time are merged inextricably into four-dimensional space-time, rather than the three dimensions of space and a totally separate time dimension envisaged by Descartes in the 17th Century and taken for granted by all classical physicists after him. With this insight, time effectively becomes just part of a coordinate specifying an object’s position in space-time.

It was Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s one-time teacher and colleague, who gave us the classic interpretation of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Minkowski introduced the relativity concept of proper time, the actual elapsed time between two events as measured by a clock that passes through both events. Proper time therefore depends not only on the events themselves but also on the motion of the clock between the events. By contrast, what Minkowski called coordinate time is the apparent time between two events as measured by a distant observer using that observer’s own method of assigning a time to an event.

An event is both a place and a time, and can be represented by a particular point in space-time, i.e. a point in space at a particular moment in time. Space-time as a whole can therefore be thought of as a collection of an infinite number of events. The complete history of a particular point in space is represented by a line in space-time (known as a world line), and the past, present and future accessible to a particular object at a particular time can be represented by a three dimensional light cone (or Minkowski space-time diagram), which is defined by the limiting value of the speed of light, which intersects at the here-and-now, and through which the object’s world line runs its course.

Modern physicists therefore do not regard time as “passing” or “flowing” in the old-fashioned sense, nor is time just a sequence of events which happen: both the past and the future are simply “there”, laid out as part of four-dimensional space-time, some of which we have already visited and some not yet. So, just as we are accustomed to thinking of all parts of space as existing even if we are not there to experience them, all of time (past, present and future) are also constantly in existence even if we are not able to witness them. Time does not “flow”, then, it just “is”. This view of time is consistent with the philosophical view of eternalism or the block universe theory of time (see the section on Modern Philosophy).

According to relativity, the perception of a “now”, and particularly of a “now” that moves along in time so that time appears to “flow”, therefore arises purely as a result of human consciousness and the way our brains are wired, perhaps as an evolutionary tool to help us deal with the world around us, even if it does not actually reflect the reality. As Einstein himself remarked, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.

However, if time is a dimension, it does not appear to be the same kind of dimension as the three dimensions of space. For example, we can choose to move through space or not, but our movement through time is inevitable, and happens whether we like it or not. In fact, we do not really move though time at all, at least not in the same way as we move through space. Also, space does not have any fundamental directionality (i.e. there is no “arrow of space”, other than the downward pull of gravity, which is actually variable in absolute terms, depending on where on Earth we are located, or whether we are out in space with no gravitational effects at all), whereas time clearly does (see the section on The Arrow of Time).

With the General Theory of Relativity, the concept of space-time was further refined, when Einstein realized that perhaps gravity is not a field or force on top of space-time, but a feature of space-time itself. Thus, the space-time continuum is actually warped and curved by mass and energy, a warping that we think of as gravity, resulting in a dynamically curved space-time. In regions of very large masses, such as stars and black holes, space-time is bent or warped substantially by the extreme gravity of the masses, an idea often illustrated by the image of a rubber sheet distorted by the weight of a bowling ball.

Time Dilation

Time dilation is just one consequence of the Theory of Relativity and curved space-time

Also as a result of Einstein’s work and his Special Theory of Relativity, we now know that rates of time actually run differently depending on relative motion, so that time effectively passes at different rates for different observers travelling at different speeds, an effect known as time dilation. Thus, two synchronized clocks will not necessarily stay synchronized if they move relative to each other. There is a related effect in the spatial dimensions, known as length contraction, whereby moving bodies are actually foreshortened in the direction of their travel.

Time dilation (as well as the associated length contraction) is negligible and all but imperceptible at everyday speeds in the world around us, although it can be, and has been, measured with very sensitive instruments. However, it becomes much more pronounced as an object’s speed approaches the speed of light (known as relativistic speeds). If a spaceship could travel at, say, 99% of the speed of light, a hypothetical observer looking in would see the ship’s clock moving about twice as slow as normal (i.e. coordinate time is moving twice as slow as proper time), and the astronauts inside moving around apparently in slow-motion. At 99.5% of the speed of light, the observer would see the clock moving about 10 times slower than normal. At 99.9% of the speed of light, the factor becomes about 22 times, at 99.99% 224 times, and at 99.9999% 707 times, increasing exponentially. In the largest particle accelerators currently in use we can make time slow down by 100,000 times. At the speed of light itself, were it actually possible to achieve that, time would stop completely.

Perhaps the easiest way to think of this difficult concept is that, when an object or person moves in space-time, its movement “shares” some of its spatial movement with movement in time, in the same way as some northward movement is shared with westward movement when we travel northwest. What forces this sharing of dimensions is the invariant nature of the speed of light (slightly less than 300,000km/s), which is a fundamental constant of the universe that can never be exceeded. Thus, the slowing of time at relativistic speeds occurs, in a sense, to “protect” the inviolable cosmic speed limit (the speed of light).

It should be noted that, although a spaceship travelling at close to the speed of light would take 100,000 years to reach a distant star 100,000 light years away as judged by clocks on Earth, the astronaut in the spaceship might hardly age at all as he travels across the galaxy. This characteristic of relativistic time has therefore spawned much discussion of the possibility of time travel (see the separate section on Time Travel).

According to Einstein, then, time is relative to the observer, and more specifically to the motion of that observer. This is not to say that time is in some way capricious or random in nature – it is still governed by the laws of physics and entirely predictable in its manifestations, it is just not absolute and universal as Newton thought (see the section on Absolute Time), and things are not quite as simple and straightforward as he had believed. Some commentators, like the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, have suggested that there may be a need to distinguish between the realityof time and our measurement of time: according to this line of thinking (which, it should be mentioned, is not a mainstream position in physics), time itself MAY be absolute, but the way we measure it must be relativistic.

One casualty of the Theory of Relativity is the notion of simultaneity, the property of two events happening at the same time in a particular frame of reference. According to relativistic physics, simultaneity is NOT an absolute property between events, as had always been taken for granted up to that point. Thus, what is simultaneous in one frame of reference will not necessarily be simultaneous in another. For objects moving at normal everyday speeds, the effect is small and can generally be ignored (so that simultaneity CAN normally be treated as an absolute property); but when objects approach relativistic speeds (close to the speed of light) with respect to one another, such intuitive relationships can no longer be assumed.

Gravitational Time Dilation

When Einstein extended his Special Theory of Relativity to his General Theory, it became apparent that a similar time dilation effect would also occur in the presence of intense gravity, an effect usually referred to as gravitational time dilation. It is almost as if gravity is somehow pulling or dragging on time, slowing its passage. The closer an object is to another object, the stronger the pull of gravity between them (according to an inverse-square law first identified by Sir Isaac Newton), and thus the more the time drag.

Again, these effects are negligible at the kinds of gravitational differences experienced in everyday life: even though, technically, a person living in a ground floor apartment ages slower than their twin who lives in a top floor apartment of the same building (due to the difference in gravity they experience), the effect might amount to maybe a microsecond over a full lifetime. There is, however, one aspect of modern everyday life where we do experience the effects of gravitational time dilation: it has a noticeable impact on the Global Positioning System (GPS), which many of us now rely on for navigation. The orbiting satellites used by the GPS system experience significantly less gravity than the Earth’s surface, and are also moving very fast, so that the time distortion effects of about 38 microseconds a day have to be specifically factored in or GPS would very quickly begin to accumulate errors.

But, just as with a spaceship travelling at near the speed of light, in the extreme gravity at the edges of a black hole, for example, substantial time differences can become apparent. A black hole spins at close to the speed of light, dragging anything in the vicinity around with it, and the huge gravitational pull of a black hole can bend and warp space-time to a substantial degree. Over the “event horizon” of a black hole – the gravitational point of no return – a hypothetical clock on a spaceship (and indeed the progress of the spaceship itself) would appear from the outside to stop completely due to the infinite time dilation effect. At the gravitational singularity at the centre of a black hole, gravity and density is infinite, and all the normal rules of physics just break down. Time effectively stops, just as there is no time beyond the singularity of the Big Bang (see the section on Time and the Big Bang).

Twins Paradox

The dilation of time also gives rise to the so-called “twins paradox” or “clock paradox”, whereby a hypothetical astronaut returns from a near-light speed voyage in space to find his stay-at-home twin many years older than him (as travelling at relativistic high speeds has allowed the astronaut to experience only, say, one year of time, while ten years have elapsed on Earth). Because of the time dilation effect, a clock in the spaceship literally registers a shorter duration for the journey than the clock in mission control on Earth.

The real paradox, though, as Einstein explained it, arises from the fact that (because there is no “preferred” frame of reference in relativity) we could just as easily consider the traveller in the spaceship as the one remaining at rest, while the Earth shoots off and back at close to the speed of light. In that scenario, Einstein argued, one would expect the astronaut to age much more than the inhabitants of the Earth. In fact the “paradox” is explained by Mach’s Principle: the spaceship is accelerating away at near-light speed from the bulk of the universe, whereas the Earth is not. Hence, it is the spaceship (and its astronaut) that experiences the relativistic time dilation, not the Earth.

Source www.exactlywhatistime.com

Time Travel and Dreams: Spend More Time in the Future

Source www.wilnexus.com

From the time I was a little, I’ve always been envious of good sleepers. I would marvel at the kids who needed nothing more than their trusted sleeping bag on a sleepover to snooze effortlessly. At sleepaway camp, I was floored by how simple it was for my bunkmates to fall into a deep sleep while fellow campers stayed up late chatting loudly and laughing. Me? I would have to wait until every single conversation died down, the flashlights turned off and the rest of my bunk fell asleep to even have a chance at entering REM.

As an adult, my sleeping challenges have changed a bit. It’s no longer that I have anxiety about falling asleep, it’s that I have an exhausting time while asleep.

On the average night, I will have about four-to-five vivid dreams, rife with stories, experiences, people and emotion. At least three times a week, my dreams include living the day I am about to have. For example, when I fall asleep on a Tuesday night, there is great likelihood I will live out Wednesday while sleeping—starting from my 5:30 workout, coffee run, work meetings and tasks, and so on and so forth.  The next day is nothing short of fascinating as I am often living out something I already experienced in my sleep. It is also incredibly confusing as I battle the déjà vu feeling all day long. For instance, I will often start at point C in a discussion with a colleague because in my dream we already talked about points A and B.

I have been experiencing this “day ahead” phenomenon for about five years. Sometimes I worry that my brain is never in rest because of this. Consider my husband, for example, who falls asleep the minute his head hits the pillow and doesn’t wake up once—let alone change position—in the middle of the night. I’ll often ask him what he dreams about and he seldom remembers. Sleep to him is peaceful, calming and restorative. Sleep to me can be draining, especially when I am doing my 5:30 workout at 1 am!

But on the other hand, my sleep patterns excite me. They even leave me wondering if I am borderline prophetic.

Three years ago, I took my Gallup StrengthsFinder Assessment, a powerful tool for unlocking your dominant strengths. The assessment helps you understand where you are most naturally skilled and talented so you can live a more engaged, empowered life. Gallup states there are 34 strengths that we all embody but that the order our strengths fall is incredibly important. In fact, the odds that you will find someone with the same top five strengths in the same order as you are one in 33.4 million. That’s how unique you are!

The test revealed that my No. 1 strength is Communication—no surprise to those who know me! What was most interesting, though, is that my No. 2 strength is Futuristic, or being able to peer over the horizon. According to Gallup, people who are Futuristic are utterly fascinated by the future:

“As if it were projected on the wall, you see in detail what the future might hold, and this detailed picture keeps pulling you forward, into tomorrow... You are a dreamer who sees visions of what could be and who cherishes those visions. When the present proves too frustrating and the people around you too pragmatic, you conjure up your visions of the future and they energize you. They can energize others, too. In fact, very often people look to you to describe your visions of the future. They want a picture that can raise their sights and thereby their spirits. You can paint it for them.”

Upon reading this, my dreaming patterns made perfect sense! I am living out my days before they happen because I get my energy from spending time in the future. I am a time-traveler, ever fascinated by what could be rather than what is.

Earlier this year, we brought in the dynamic and powerful Katie McDonald, self-care strategist and founder of bnourished, to speak with us at our Women in Leadership Nexus event. Katie shared so many poignant lessons with us, but namely the fact that we need to spend more time with our future self. She encouraged us to talk with her often and to make decisions every single day that are in service to her and where she desires to be. (My favorite way to apply this on the most basic of levels is to ask my wise future self if she wants that second glass of wine; she never does!)

When I think about these two concepts together—spending time in the future and consulting with my future self—I see the inherent connection between futuristic tendencies and transformative leaders. In fact, the leaders who can spend more time looking ahead than looking backwards will catapult their organizations and teams forward at greater speed.

As leaders, our teams look to us for the answers, vision and perspectives for what they can’t yet see. They want us to dream wildly, pursue fearlessly and show them how they can shape and expand the vision. They don’t want us to spend too much time in the here and now, or dwelling in the past. Rather, they are counting on us to steer the bus and bring them to unbelievable opportunity.

We all have Futuristic in our makeup, says Gallup… we just might not have it in our top five. But we can actively work on this muscle and strengthen it over time. Consider the following:

• Visualize what the future looks, feels, sounds and operates like. Free your mind to conjure up any image—no matter how outlandish! When we actively engage our mind to visualize the future, we start to get more comfortable seeing it.

• I’ve long believed the universe sends us signs about what we are supposed to do next, where we should head, how we should evolve. It’s our job to listen and see what the universe puts in front of us. This is how we start to become more visionary and evolutionary.

• Honor the past but keep a keen eye on the future. Though it’s incredibly important to pay homage to and visit with our past, it’s even more important to see around the bend. It can feel scary and ungrounded, but our future holds the greatest potential for us.

• The beauty of the future is that because it hasn’t yet happened, it can’t be right or wrong. It can only be the dream and promise of what tomorrow can bring.

I’ve always loved this quote by Elanor Roosevelt: “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

We all have the power to achieve the extraordinary, to try something daring and to manifest our own realities. And spending time in the future allows us to inch closer to something greater. So try it yourself!

Start checking in with your future self. Engage with you dreams. And celebrate the beauty and power in time travel.

Experience time-travel with light

Source

In order to make time-travel possible, the speed of light has to be exceeded which is approximately 300,000 km/s.

Such speed would clearly require a tremendous amount of energy.

In fact it’s impossible according to Special relativity, which says nothing can exceed the speed of light if started slower than it. Chances are only if there exists an inherently faster-than-light particle (Tachyon), which is just a hypothesis.

But there’s a whole new way of experiencing time travel that most of us aren’t aware of. To do that we don’t have to chase light but rather use it.

All you need is to look up. If you’re used to gaze at night sky as if it is happening now, you’re wrong.

The stars will appear instantaneous to you only if the speed of light is infinite. But the speed of light is finite. So it takes time for the star’s light to reach us.

For example, it takes 8 minutes for the light from sun to reach us, which means we see sun only how it was 8 minutes ago.

All the stars appear as how they were a time ago, not how they are now.

If you spot a shooting star, it has already fallen probably a thousand years ago, and the moment you see it is indeed a form of time travel.

These delay in lights (including the nearest moon which lies one-second in the past), depends on distance between the star and earth, calculated in light years. If a star is 100 light years away – you are looking 100 years straight back in time.

But even that is a small number. An unaided eye is capable of seeing distant star as far as 4000 light years away (in the constellation Cassiopeia).

And how did you think scientists confirmed Big-bang theory as the origin of universe without traveling back in time?

Of course – they looked up in the sky. Using special telescopes, they were able to map the oldest light in the universe, Cosmic Microwave Background  

– the fingerprint of baby universe frozen in time as how it was 13.7 billion years ago.

This is definitely a beautiful phenomenon hiding behind the numerical value of speed of light.

You can’t gaze at the sky without looking into the past. 

Google Street View Offers Time Travel

Street View images from different periods can now be compared to see how places have changed over time.

Google Maps Street View in 2014 gave us a way to travel through time.

Street View has always offered time travel of a sort: Its images show the past. But now Street View can display multiple pictures of a place taken over a span of years.

"Starting today, you can travel to the past to see how a place has changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps for desktop," said Vinay Shet, Google Street View product manager, in a blog post. "We've gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world."

If you could actually travel to the past, your view of Street View would be different. Were you to travel back to 2007, for example, you might watch a Google Street View car drive past, unaware that it was capturing private data from open WiFi access points.

[Google plans to use drones to bring the Internet to remote locations. Read Google Has Plans For Titan Drones.]

A visit to 2008 would take you a time when the US Defense Department banned Street View cars from military bases as a matter of operational safety. Photography during this period was often assumed by authorities to be a precursor to terrorism. That was the year London's Metropolitan Police launched a counter-terrorism campaign warning citizens to watch for "odd" photographers. It was also the year Google began testing a way to blur the faces of people in Street View images.

In 2009, you might find Google scrambling to correct sensationalistic claimsthat its Street View cars had photographed a naked toddler, or wondering why the residents in the Buckinghamshire village of Broughton in the UK refused to allow a Street View car to enter town.

That same year, in Greece and Switzerland, Street View cars were briefly banned until Google could reassure officials that adequate privacy protections were in place. And Google had to reshoot some of its Street View imagery in Japan because the roof-mounted cameras on its cars could see into people's backyards.

But as you move closer to the present, the controversies diminish. You'd see Google settling the Street View privacy litigation. You'd see the world grow weary of fighting for privacy rights that governments ignore while telling others to observe. You'd see people getting over their fears and realizing just how useful Street View can be.

Street View's temporal scope is limited by the number of Street View car visits since the service launched, which in many cases is only two or three. Even so, the ability to access a time-lapse view of a place can be useful from a historical perspective. If you travel back in time from the 2013 default Street View image of this street in San Francisco to the image taken in April 2011, you can see how things looked before a mural was added to the wall on the left.

Just imagine how interesting Street View time travel will be after a few more decades of data.

source www.informationweek.com

Companies House use time travel to help them.

Time travel has always been a popular subject for science fiction writers. From H G Wells’, The Time Machine, to Looper and Minority Report, the concept of being able to alter the future by making a small change in the past is a familiar theme.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could go back and change a mistake you made in your earlier life, or see how your parents met or visit a historic moment in time? But, you need to be careful as travelling to the past brings the problem of a temporal paradox. Take Back to the Future, as an example. Marty travels back in time and, in one scene, prevents his parents from meeting. And if they don’t meet, how can he exist to go back in time?

Another excellent film which covers a similar topic, is The Butterfly Effect. The central character has the ability to travel back in time to inhabit the body of his younger self, and make changes which alter the future. But, with unintended consequences.

Travelling to the past would seem to be the easier concept to visualise, as recreating a historic scene can be based on archive photos or films. But, creating a futuristic city means trying to imagine or envisage what the world of tomorrow might look like and, to some extent, predict the future.

It’s interesting to see how some films have got this right, and where others have not been so successful.

Back to the Future was based in 1985 and took us 30 years into the future to 2015. There were flying cars, flat screen voice-operated televisions, self-drying clothing and hoverboards. Total Recall and I Robot both predicted automated cars, which are being trialled at the present.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey gave us the first example of a tablet computer. There's a scene in the 1968 classic, in which a pair of astronauts can be seen using tablet computers while eating breakfast. The iPad debuted in 2010, just 9 years after the setting of A Space Odyssey.

Everyone these days has a smartphone which, to some extent, was predicted in the original Star Trek series with Captain Kirk’s use of the communicator; “Beam me up, Scotty” (the exact phrase was never actually spoken in any Star Trek television episode or film).

But, even more impressive was Star Trek writer David Gerrolds, 1999 accurate prophecy:

The size will be determined by what’s convenient to hold, not by the technology inside.

He further foretold:

The box will have a high-res colour screen, a microphone, a plug for a headset or earphones, a camera lens, wireless connectivity, cellphone and beeper functions, a television and radio receiver, a digital recorder, and it will have enough processing power and memory to function as a desktop system.

So, no flying cars, no time travel. But, the ability to change the future is possible, certainly within Companies House.

Our transformation programme has started, but we need your help to tell us what you would like us to do. Our short survey will only take 10 minutes. Have your say on how you would like to see us evolve, what can we improve, what services would you like us to offer?

By completing the survey, you have the opportunity to enter a draw to win a iPad Pro.

Help make Companies House better: complete our survey and enter a free draw to win an iPad Pro (as predicted in 2001; A Space Odyssey).

Help us boldly go where no survey has been before.

link to source

Rank these time travel films from favourite to time waster

Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception

The time we have at our disposal each day is elastic, Proust claimed. It sounds an odd remark. Surely we have precisely 24 hours, no more and no less. Even the occasional leap second – introduced to keep calendars accurate – hardly changes the fixed time we have every day on Earth.

But as Claudia Hammond, presenter of Radio 4's All in the Mind, argues in this lively account of our perception of time, our experiences of passing minutes differ greatly according to circumstances. "A watched pot never seems to boil, but go and check your emails and it will be boiling over before you know it."

And you know what she means: that moron moment when you realise you have locked yourself out of your hired car, with your keys inside its boot, seems to stop time in its tracks while the most pleasurable experiences race by at light speed. Much has to do with the event being experienced. However, your mood, health and attentiveness also affect the rate at which time appears to pass.

Consider the fate of innocent test subjects who were tricked into believing no one on their psychology experiment liked them. Asked to estimate the passage of a minute, they reported times that were far longer than test subjects who had been told people liked them. Suffer rejection and time starts to drag, in short. "Thus the belief that a few strangers dislike you can alter your time perception," concludes Hammond.

Such observations are important because the way we perceive time is crucial to our lives. The intelligibility of spoken language depends on millisecond precision in pronunciation, for example, while the word "time" turns out to be the most widely used noun in English.

Oddly, however, there appears to be no single part of the brain that measures the passage of hours and minutes, which is just one of the many curiosities about our species' attempts to assess time. Of these paradoxes, the most intriguing – quoted by Hammond in her final chapter – was expressed by Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards."

Link to Time Warped Book

Widow claims seeing younger version of her dead husband, (A possible Time Traveller)

Conspiracy theory YouTube channel Apex TV has released an eerie video which could be an irrefutable proof of time travel. The video reveals a telephone recording between emergency number 911 and a widowed woman named Cathy. During the call, the woman informs the police that there is someone hiding in her bathroom.

"I think someone just broke into my house. I heard glass break in the bathroom downstairs. I think someone came in through the window. I am upstairs now, and the door is locked," told Cathy to the 911 respondent.

The officer who answered Cathy's call then asked her to stay quiet in the upstairs bedroom and advised her never to enter the bathroom. However, Cathy ignored the instructions of the officer and entered the bathroom to know what has happened there.

Even after repeated requests, Cathy opened the bathroom and saw something mindblowing. In the bathtub, she saw a man lying with blood-tinged everywhere, and interestingly, the man was the younger version of her husband who died in 2001.

"He's my husband. He died in 2001. But he's not, oh my, oh my God. He's not, he's not, he's not him. But he has the same tattoo. He's younger, he's much younger. Like when we first met. oh my God,'' said Cathy.

The video of Apex TV has already gone viral on online spaces, and most of the people watched consider this experience as a solid proof of time travel. However, some people argue that this may be the evidence of the existence of a parallel universe.

It would be interesting to read your thoughts in the comment section below.

Goodbye Regrets: Why You Should Stop Wanting to Turn Back Time

The biggest reason I feel that a lot of people may wish to time travel, is to try and correct something which has happened in their lives. Below is an article from a self improvement site, and where as I don't agree with the Time Travel will never be possible bit. I do feel that some of the reasons as to why someone would wish to time travel are relevant.

I think we should appreciate more of what we have now, not yearn for what we believe another direction taken could have led too. As for me, if I went and changed the past, it would mean more than likely I wouldn't have met my wife. So I would have to be very careful with travelling in time as to not muck that up.

But it doesn't stop me from wanting to view the past or seeing what the future has to hold, it's seeing that unknown, and who doesn't want to get a glimpse into that?

Would love your thoughts on the piece below, feel free to comment.
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Source to this piece goalcast.com

People go through a series of difficult experiences in life that might force them to contemplate their past. During these periods of reflection or regret, they’ll sometimes wish they could turn back time, either to return to “the good old days” or to undo the mistakes they’ve made. They might long for a time machine because they believe it would make their lives better and happier.

Goodbye Regrets: Why You Should Stop Wanting to Turn Back Time

Last night, out of curiosity, I asked a few friends of mine to answer one of two questions, either “What would they change first if they could turn back time?” or “Where would they go in time if they could?” Although none of them were expecting the questions, they each had an answer ready: “I’d like to go back to my high school years,” “If I could turn back time, I would’ve never let X into my life,” and “I would’ve never accepted my last job.” The more we discussed their regrets, the more we realized there were far more periods they would want to return to, and far more mistakes they would want to fix.

Life won’t always be easy to live. It won’t always be fair. You will fall. But you will also get back up. It’s important to remember that the ups and downs in life are what make us us, and what makes each of us unique. Time-traveling wouldn’t solve anything.

So if you are one of those whose regrets often have them wishing they could turn back time, then here are 5 reasons you should stop looking backward, and start moving forward.

You will never be able to turn back time

Scientists have proven that time travel is physically impossible. So why even bother thinking about it? It’s just a waste of time!

You need to make mistakes to grow

Remember, you are human. You will always make mistakes. Undoing mistakes from the past will not prevent you from making mistakes in the future. And even if you could undo all the wrong you’ve done throughout the years and live a perfect life, would you want to? After all, making mistakes is crucial for self-growth and development. In fact, the best lessons learned often come from the worst mistakes made.

Turning back time would change your entire future

Perhaps you’re in an amazing relationship. Perhaps you have beautiful children. And perhaps you have the greatest job. Do you realize that turning back time could affect all of this? Think about it — would you want your life to be completely different? Would you want to erase all that you currently have?

You are who you are because of where you’ve been

Every choice you’ve made, every mistake you’ve made, every single person you’ve met, and every problem you’ve encountered, has taught you something important. Everything in life is a lesson in disguise.

There’s always been a plan out there for you

Although it might not seem like it, you are exactly where you are supposed to be. Trust the timing of your life! Don’t fight it!

So what is the lesson learned? Stop thinking about the past. Accept past hurts and mistakes, forgive yourself, and move on. In order to live a life that is fulfilled and truly happy, you must live in the present and without regrets. Start appreciating the moments that today offers. Appreciate the fact that you have friends who you can go out with and family who you can spend time with. It’s those little things that make a world of difference.

Jacob Skilling says coming out of prison after seven years is like a grim version of time travel.

Time Travel comes in all sorts of ways, the physical and the mental, imagine being locked away from society for years and you then return home to find everything changed. The article below points out these facts and the experience for the former inmate.

I have always been wishing to spend a month away from all media and just see what the experience would be like. What would you miss? What would the end of the world be like, if you wasn't in the loop? I had the thought of a story idea, where a couple were watching TV on pause, so were 30 minutes behind the live TV, something me and my wife do a lot,, so we can fast forward through the adverts. But what if a newsflash came up and over rode the programmes? How would that pan out? How would your five minute warning information be given to you five minutes too late?

Would love your thoughts, feel free to comment below.

Link to news article

"You get out and everything has changed. Cars have changed, people have changed, the style has changed. I never thought I'd wear bloody shoes like this I'll tell you. This is what people wear? Skinny jeans? I'm thinking, do I have to wear this? Is this how you look good?"

Jacob Skilling was 19 when he was jailed for nine years for wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. He was paroled in 2016, and since then has had the support of rehabilitation centres which have helped him get on his feet. Claiming to have turned his life around, Skilling is now turning his attention to how others can too. 

Being in jail is like being frozen in time, Skilling says. The world keeps moving but you're stuck at the moment of sentencing, emerging from jail in a futuristic world with skinny jeans and iPhones. 

Skilling says prisoners like himself are being released into worlds foreign to them. For decades, this hasn't worked to reduce recidivism. Now, the Government is changing tack with a promise to reduce the prison muster. 

Skilling says despite all the good intentions in Wellington, prisoners are ripe for reoffending the moment they leave the prison gates.

"They're starting to increase help around accommodation and things like that, but there's still not enough of that either. Some people just walk out of the gates and go to a friend's house and sleep on the couch."

In 20 years, neither National nor Labour have made a dent in prison numbers or reoffending rates.

Phantom Time Hypothesis Theory Says It’s Actually The Year 1720 Because The Early Middle Ages Were Faked

Heribert Illig, creator of the Phantom Time Hypothesis.

source http://allthatsinteresting.com

In a world where every idea seems divisive, it can help to know there are at least a few things that the world as a whole agrees on. Time, the calendar, and the basic idea that history as we know it happened pretty much like historians say it did are just a few of those things. I mean, after all, at the very least we can all agree that the year is 2017, right?

Wrong.

According to German historian Heribert Illig, the year is actually 1720, the Gregorian calendar is a lie, and a chunk of Middle Ages was completely made up.

No, this man is not crazy (at least not officially) and he actually claims to have archeological evidence to support his case.

In 1991, Illig proposed his theory, aptly called the Phantom Time Hypothesis. He claims there was conspiracy entered into back in 1000 AD to change the dating system by three world rulers.

Illig claims that Pope Sylvester II, Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, and Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII all got together and changed the calendar to make it seem as if Otto had begun his reign in the millennial year of 1000 AD, rather than 996. The reason being that 1000 sounded a lot more meaningful than 996 considering AD stands for “anno domini,” or, “the year of the Lord.”

Illig further claims that the trio altered existing documents, and created fraudulent historical events and people in order to back themselves up. He claims that Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne was not in fact a real ruler, but simply a King Arthur-type legend. He explains that through all of this tampering and forgery, an extra 297 years were added to history.

Two hundred and ninety-seven years that didn’t actually happen.

Illig says that an inadequate system of dating medieval artifacts, as well as an over-reliance on written history are to blame. According to his research, the years between 614 and 911 AD don’t quite add up. The years prior to 614 were full of historically significant events, as were the years after 911, however he claims that the ones in between were unusually dull.

He also points out that mathematical discrepancies between the Julian and Gregorian calendars further complicates things. The Julian calendar says that a full year is 365.25 days long, whereas the Gregorian calendar — the one we use now — says it’s actually 11 minutes shorter than that.

Furthermore, Illig claims that Roman architecture in 10th century western Europe is too modern for the time period in which it was supposedly built.

Though his Phantom Time Hypothesis seems far fetched, Illig has actually managed to find some supporters.

Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz published a paper in 1995 titled “Did the Early Middle Ages Really Exist?” in which he claims they did not.

“Between Antiquity (1 AD) and the Renaissance (1500 AD) historians count approximately 300 years too many in their chronology,” Niemitz wrote. “In other words: the Roman emperor Augustus really lived 1700 years ago instead of the conventionally assumed 2000 years.”

Some of Niemitz’s claims echoed Illig’s, such has the discrepancies between the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the lack of reliable historical sources. Though, Neimitz did admit that a counterargument could exist, as the Byzantium and Islamic regions were at war during the period, which was well documented.

Most historians worldwide are critical of the Phantom Time Hypothesis. Countless historians have chosen to argue it have used recorded dates of solar eclipses to do so, along with documented histories from other parts of the world that overlap the “missing” time periods.