Is Time Travel Really Possible?

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As a scientist (though not a physicist) I often ponder "is time travel possible?". The answer is, clearly, I don't know. Perhaps it is.

There are many time travel theories. On one hand if it were possible to travel in time, would we not be surrounded by millions of people from countless years into the far future who have come to say hello? Then again, why should they come this year when they have a virtually unlimited number of eras to visit instead.

Then again, maybe they are in fact here? Maybe it is possible to visit us, but there are rules? Time travel movies usually toy with these issues, with the complex link between cause and effect, past and future.

One great example is the movie Timecrimes. Although a large percentage of it is unsurprising and can be said to repeat the standard time travel genre, at some point during the middle of the movie it breaks from that and starts asking questions that aren't often investigated: what is cause and what is effect? It does so in a very effective and exciting way, and when I left the movie theater I couldn't help but ask myself why so few films deal with those fascinating ideas.

In most movies that are about time travel one or more of the following scenarios may occur:
(a) The protagonist may travel back in time and change something and cause a paradox (these stories tend to contradict themselves almost every single time).
(b) The hero may journey back in time only to find out he can't change anything - he is a part of history.
(c) The protagonist may journey back in time only to view an historical era (in a sense, this needn't be a sci-fi film).
(d) The hero may travel to the future - in a way this is not a time travel film but rather a futuristic film (think 'Buck Rogers' - an astronaut gets frozen for 500 years and wakes up in the far future).

All these are thought provoking notions. Until they are resolved by science, I will enjoy whatever films and novels are created about the subject despite any (obvious) flaws.

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