I also think general relativity isn't all it was hoped to be.
I think that's a somewhat more subjective way of putting it. General relativity is a very good theory, just like Newtonian physics is a very good theory. Simply because they're incomplete doesn't make them any less good for explaining a large amount of what we see.
Time travel means just that - back and forward. Linear time, although seemingly easy to measure, has some peculiarities about it.
Going forward in time at different rates is fairly easy and has been demonstrated. Traveling at speeds of a significant enough fraction of the speed of light will result in time passing slower locally, which is a result that has been measured and can be repeated.
Have you ever read any of Jenny Randles' books? I have
Time Storms: The Amazing Evidence of Time Warps, Space Rifts and Time Travel. Amazing true stories. You can read a few incidents in this amazon book excerpt page -
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0749922427/?tag=absowrit-21.
I believe we need to account for ALL incidents, not throw out the ones that don't fit in with what we think it means.
I haven't, but I checked out the link. It looks like mostly anecdotes. I'm not the kind of person to dismiss those kinds of things out of hand, but I hardly think they should be given the credence of repeatable results and phenomena.
As far as God goes, I always try to tie everything together. That's just me. I think that quote from Revelation is much deeper than people realize, and I think it implies something about time.
I'm not much of a theist, in the traditional sense, so I rarely think about that kind of thing.
If time and space are one, then why would we be able move through space but not time?
Or is that too simplistic a way of looking at it?
Maybe because time is a different dimension? Or maybe we can, but are not able to perceive it in this third dimension?
Time is traditionally thought of as the fourth dimension. In special relativity, we use four-vectors to represent vectors in space and time. We are indeed capable of traveling forward in time at different rates (though it takes an obscene amount of energy to do it enough to matter to human perception).
If we could travel backward in time, it would violate causality. And furthermore, because of space time geometry, it would imply the ability to travel at faster than the speed of light. From a practical standpoint, this is impossible because the consequences of special relativity mean it will take more and more energy to continue accelerating the faster you go, and asymptotically, it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light and, i.e., travel back in time. Theoretically, there's nothing that prevents time travel if you can jump across that speed of light border somehow.
Really, I'm going to wait until an actual physicst shows up in this thread before I think much more. I just don't have the grounding to say anything more than hobbdlygobbldy and flim flam.
I only have a minor in physics, and I haven't read much new research in a while, so I'm pretty out of the loop here, too.
Time is but a unit of measurement for the human experience. It is always now.
For scientific measurements, we usually use more reliable measurements for time, such as the oscillations of atoms or other particles than something as fallible as "the human experience."
