Time Travel to the Past, Possibilities or Impossibility

In our struggle to come to terms with our mental and physical reality, nothing vexes us more than the nature of time. For us mortals, time has been an enigma; a puzzle which holds tantalizing rewards of incomparable nature. If only we could go back to see where we came from or go forward in time to see what awaits us. To travel in time - could there be a more thrilling or exciting adventure than that?

Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity allows us to time travel into the future, but what about the past? We are capable of looking into the past if that is what you want. In fact, all our telescopes do exactly just that. If we observe our nearby Alpha Centauri star system, we are looking at it not as it is today, but as it had looked more than 4 years ago. The further we look away, the further back in time we look.

We may then like to see past events on Earth. Stand 5 feet in front of a mirror, the image that you see of yourself now is not an image of the present but is an image of you 10 nanoseconds ago. We are actually looking into the past. This time delay is due to the fact that even light takes time to travel small distances.

Princeton physicist Richard Gott used the idea of the occurrence of time delays to conceptualize his time machine which he dubbed, the "time mirror." His idea involves sending a powerful light collector to a black hole say a hundred light years from Earth. At the very edge of the black hole, light could slingshot 180o in an arc due to the immense gravitational forces at its edge. The light collector could help to direct and power the light rays back to Earth, creating a gravitational mirror 200 years into the past.

However, creating such an operational device would be technically very difficult. At such vast distances, light rays from the Earth will be very negligible. Remember that intensity decreases as a function of the square of the distance from earth to the black hole: I D^2. It would be impossible to view anything with significant detail. In addition, we would need to filter out all the other light rays coming from all sources, not to mention boosting the signal for its return journey back to Earth. Also, such a device would not be able to see the past prior to its construction. It would take at least a hundred years traveling at the speed of light to transport it there. It will need another hundred years for the first signals to be received back

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