An expository essay.

They say that time travel is impossible. Who are they and what do they know? If you get on a jet that travels half the speed of light on January first, 2002, and you stay on that plane until 6:00 am on November 13^th(according to the clocks and calendars on the plane), you would arrive on Earth on December 31, 2002. If you were to travel at the speed of light, (which is impossible, because your mass would become infinite, and you would become a black hole), time would stop.

 You are probably wondering from what crazy book did I copy this nonsense. I didn’t copy it. I calculated it by using the formula     ,   were t is the time for which an object is moving at a certain speed, v is the speed, and c is the speed of light. So, if v is the speed of light, than anything divided by itself is one. One minus one is zero, the square root of zero is zero, and anything times zero is zero, so time stops.

As you can see, according to this formula, until v is almost the speed of light, the change of t’ is not significant. But, when a particle reaches this speed, it’s mass becomes infinite. Also, according to this formula, nothing can go faster than the speed of light, because you can’t have a square root of a negative number. This is true, for most particles.

There are also these alleged time particles called tachyons. Nobody knows for sure if they exist. These particles would have zero rest mass and would always travel at speeds faster than the speed of light. Some scientists say that these particles can go back or forward in time. Most scientists disagree. I do too. But then this becomes a real problem. If they were particles, why would they travel only in one direction?