Is Time Travel A Possibility

While it has long been achievable with the artistic licence of novel-writing or movie-making -- one of the earliest time travel stories, Samuel Madden's "Memoirs of the Twentieth Century", was written as far back as 1733 -- the idea of time travel as a practical reality has generally been dismissed as impossible. Over the last 25 years, however, with some starling advances in the field of quantum physics, an increasing number of serious scientific thinkers have come round to the view that not only is time travel theoretically feasible but also, in some circumstances, practically so as well. "In theory it is absolutely possible," says Neil Johnson, a physics professor at Oxford University. "It might seem to go against common sense, but one of the beauties of Einstein's Theory of Relativity is that it allows for situations that are against common sense." Dr. Cliff Pickover, a leading US science commentator and author of numerous books on the subject (including "Time: A Traveler's Guide"), agrees. "We know for certain that time travel is possible," he told CNN. "For instance, scientists have demonstrated that objects traveling at high speeds age more slowly than stationary objects, so if I traveled on a high-speed rocket into outer space and returned moving close to the speed of light, I could travel thousands of years into the Earth's future. "Time travel into the past may be more difficult, but there are still numerous ways in which time machines for past travel might be built that do not seem to violate any known laws of physics."