Bee Boy — Fri, 8/11/06 8:04am

Certainly, the possibilities are endless. Unfortunately, as I see it, evidence seems to point to a lack of such discoveries. From the demonstration, it appears that instantaneous travel through time and space (and across parallel universes) would be possible if we were to gain control of the super-string. The fact that nobody has showed up from the future indicates nobody's figured out how to do it.

Also, it seems that the possibility of time travel is negated by the paradoxes it would create. For example, in Back to the Future, Part III, Marty travels to 1855 because he sees a tombstone in 1955 which tells him Doc was shot by "Mad Dog" Tannen. So, he goes back and saves Doc. But if Doc is saved, then no such tombstone exists in 1955, so there's no reason for Marty to travel back, which means Doc isn't saved.

If even the tiniest change in the past creates vast changes in the future present (e.g., A Sound of Thunder), then there's always the chance that traveling to the past would create similar paradoxes, even something as simple as preventing the time machine from having been invented, or preventing the time traveler from having had access to it to travel into the past in the first place.

Of course, it could be argued that these paradoxes are just a matter of perception. I am but a humble fourth-dimension flatlander, after all.