Technically we're already living in the future because of the time zones. Example where i am right now it's 8pm on the 4th may 2010, a time period that hasn't existed in America as of yet.
Not really. According to Einstein's Special Theory Of Relativity all objects within the same frame of reference are subject to the same physical conditions. To put that in normal terms all people on Earth experience the same duration of time, within a few milliseconds that are not noticeable to anyone by firsthand observation. The earth's time-zones are not a measurement of time duration, they are just a way to make it so that all places experience an equal amount of sunlight at a relative point, to compensate for the Earth's rotation.
In other words when you go outside and see the sun directly overhead in Tokyo and your watch says it is noon, it is also noon everywhere else on Earth. They just changed the numbers on everyone elses watches because when they went outside and looked up the sun was not directly overhead at that moment and they were confused as to what time it was because they thought that the sun should be up at noon. Now whenever anyone goes outside and the sun is directly overhead their watches say that it is noon and a different time everywere else.
If you hoped into a magical machine that Transported you from Tokyo to Toronto in five seconds and the clock said that it was nine hours later than your clock at home, you would be five seconds in the future, not nine hours.
Make sense?
Clocks do not measure time, the simply measure a synchronized set of numbers.
It's easy for us to take for granted the existence of time because we are used to living in an area that has predictable changes over a duration- such as the earth rotating 360 degrees in 24 hours, allowing us to always know when a day has passed.
But if you had an electron particle that never changes in an observable way in an area of space with nothing else how could you tell what time it was in relation to anything else? You couldn't. Take it a step further and assume that there was nothing there, not even yourself to observe it, then what would time be?
The problem with time is that is based on a premise that was never demonstrated. We just assumed that time was something that was everywhere and then developed a system to measure it, but the measuring system is all that there is, and underneath it there is nothing to identify what constitutes the existence of time.
My point with all this is that speculating about the laws of time are like speculating about the mechanics of flight with no understanding of aerodynamics.
Dunno why someone would find this far fetch when you got articles on CNN about an upcoming laser experiment in America that has the express goal of trying to create a miniature star (sun) in order to hopefully harnass hence solving the coming energy crisis. Bold, Ambitious and probably reckless but hell if they really think its feasible why not time travel?
There are also experiments on time travel based on lasers, based on the assumption that the speed of light is a relative gauge for time. If you change the relationship between light waves at a point, then you change it's position in time.
Just a reminder:
Hawking has stated (many times, actually) that travelling BACK in time is, in fact, impossible. He is only talking about travelling in the future.
So, calling him crazy for something he never did is crazy.
Future time travel is demonstrated by Einstein's equations, which is all Hawking is saying. There have been models demonstrating that backwards time-travel is possible, consistent with known physical law. Hawking believes that backwards time travel is impossible based on the the circular logic that no one has traveled back in time from the future that we know of, so therefor they must not be able to and has posited an unidentified law of physics that makes it so.
Whenever scientists can't figure out how something works they make up a set of laws that explain it. Then when they can't explain how their laws work, they attribute it to an unidentified law that hasn't been discovered yet, such as Hawking's Course Corrector, or the Non-Local Hidden Variable in Quantum Mechanics.
You guys should read the book The End Of Time. It's analogies are not so great, but it's premises are solid and they are en vogue amongst Physicists now. The idea is that there is no physical law that governs what we call time, but things like duration of experience, change, synchronicity, and memory are all real, they are just attributed to other things.
