Who introduced the Idea of Time travel?

[Anonymous]

Time travel today is so much debated and talked about but who actuall introduced this TIME TRAVEL idea?<br /><br />This I asked even in <span>Is time travel possible?</span> but did not receive reply! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <strong><font size="2"><p align="center"><br /><img id="a9529085-d63d-481e-9277-832ea5d58917" src="http://sitelife.space.com/ver1.0/Content/images/store/9/2/a9529085-d63d-481e-9277-832ea5d58917.Large.gif" alt="blog post photo" /><br /><font color="#339966">Oops! this is my alien friend.</font></p><p align="center"><font color="#ff6600">╬→Ť╠╣є ’ M€ ’<br />╬→ Ðôŵņ2Ëãřŧĥ ๑<br />╬→ ЙДm€ :Varsha<br /></font></p></font></strong> </div>

 

[dragon04]

If you mean "scientifically", General and Special Relativity were the first to suggest it, IIRC.<br /><br />Fictional representations date back to the early 18th Century. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <em>"2012.. Year of the Dragon!! Get on the Dragon Wagon!".</em> </div>

 

[yevaud]

^ True, in a published sense. ^<br /><br />However, you can go all the way back to classic Greek tomes whereby a God or some trick of nature has thrown a hapless soul backwards in time. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><em>Differential Diagnosis:  </em>"<strong><em>I am both amused and annoyed that you think I should be less stubborn than you are</em></strong>."<br /> </p> </div>

 

[silylene old]

See this Wikipedia article on the subject of who first introduced the concept of time travel.<br /><br />I had been thinking of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol", or HG Wells' "time Machine", or Mark Twain's "Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" before I found the Wiki article, but they have some stories that take the date a further hundred years back, to 1733. <br /><br />Not cited in the Wiki article is Dante's "Divine Comedy" (1634). The characters and settings in this book have some very novel views of time and its passage, and future and past. Hell and Paradise are timeless, sinners can see the future, yet Purgatory is timed. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature" align="center"><em><font color="#0000ff">- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -</font></em> </div><div class="Discussion_UserSignature" align="center"><font color="#0000ff"><em>I really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function.</em></font> </div> </div>

 

[alkalin]

Time travel speculation is more like pure fiction and an indicator that certain relativity notions are not valid.<br /><br />Picking and choosing events to visit in a time travel sense to the past is only wishful thinking, and amounts to mere recreation and entertainment in a historical local sense. The same situation occurs for future time travel. If you could create the past or future that is beyond your life span, you would not exist there, and here is why.<br /><br />Knowing some detail about a particular local past or future event allows us to recreate it as either historical or a future event. This I think is an entirely different situation to the notions of time travel to that event, which some might believe is possible. Lets say there was a past event, then that local event occurred within a time frame of the entire universe. As time is the progression of motion of all matter everywhere, you would need to reverse all the action of matter from the smallest to the largest everywhere in the entire universe to get to some past event to try to be there, but since this is impossible, what you have now done is not actually going to the past, you have merely recreated it in a virtual sense, unless there were actually multiple universes. This thought is based on the idea that such a complete reversal of time is also a reversal of all of what you were and are, in other words, if an event occurred before you were born, then you would not exist at the time of the event. And even more important, your technology of time travel would not exist. The same holds true for the future.<br />