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Time Travel - the disproof

by Peter 'Pierre' Liu   BA 

Time travel is a fascinating subject. In my salad days, I was a fervent sci-fi fanatic. Brought up mainly on reading sci-fi paperbacks, I was mesmerized by the concept of time travel after seeing 'The Time Machine'. Today the sci-fi realm, whether in the form of novels, television or cinema, is still full of escapades of time travel.
It was on one hazy day a couple of decades ago when I suddenly had a Damascene moment. For some reason, I asked myself this question : 'If time travel is possible, why is that no one has ever come back from the future ? If it is ever possible to build a 'time machine', then people from the future must have been able to come back in time, not just today, but throughout the past.' But there is no evidence that anyone has ever made it back from the future, ever! With this realization in mind, I was eventually able to formulate a definitive and rigorous disproof that time travel is forever impossible.

Incidentally in 1989 I wrote to QED, a BBC series of science documentaries produced by David Filkin at that time, and asked if he would be interested in doing a programme to disprove forever the concept of time travel. He wrote back saying he would be interested to see my disproof. Somehow I never replied because (a) I discovered that I had got his name wrong in the first place by writing to David Silkin : (   because I had got the F and the S muddled up when I rang the BBC to ask for the producer's name, and (b) I did not want to disclose my disproof upfront without a guarantee or surety of the programme being made.

Evidently my letter must have gone viral within the Corporation, because within a few weeks of my sending it bearing my crucial question above, I was sitting at home watching a then hugely popular BBC comedy show called 'Carrot Confidential', when suddenly out of the blue, the show host Jasper Carrot started to talk about my questioning of time travel that I had crucially revealed  in the letter, verbatim.

I believe I was the first person in sci-fi history to ask that question about time travel. But my crowning moment will be when my disproof is revealed either via a novel or a movie (probably as a sub-plot).

Some definitions:

t(n) time at present

t(f)  time in future
t(p) time in past

Time travel:  either to move forwards or backwards in time from t(n) to t(f) or t(p) by whatever means and where the time interval or discontinuity between t(n) and t(f) or t(p) is quantifiably significant e.g. hours, days, months, years, centuries, millennia or eons.

Time machine: any hypothetical vehicle which can transport matter from t(n) to t(p) or t(f)

Technical impossibility: something which cannot be done now, but may not be the case in future. e.g. it was a technical impossibility for man to land on the moon in the 19th century.
NB. Some technical impossibilities may be forever impossible e.g. accelerating a mass to exceed the speed of light

Logical impossibility: something which can never be done because it contravenes logic. This disproof will demonstrate that time travel is a logical impossibility.

Peter-Pierre © Copyright peter-pierre. com