Time travel is an interesting theoretical subject, but has no practical application except in writing fiction. It’s perfectly easy for science-fiction writers to use it, but it’s just a novum. Nova are scientifically plausible inventions that stories depend on. By “plausible” I mean believable, not probable.
Actually, everyone can travel in time—one second per second. This “time” is measured by a clock that’s moving along with you. Let us call this time “real time.” Also, astronauts can move into the future, according to Einstein’s theory, which has been proven. After traveling at very high speeds and returning to earth, astronauts won’t have experienced the same duration that we have experienced. That’s called time dilation, and is really the only scientifically provable way to travel backwards in time that I know of. Finally, astronauts can travel forward in time just a little bit by being at a high altitude where earth’s gravity is weaker.
Everyone can seem to suspend time—by reading a good book, or by sleeping. Most people can make time go faster—when they’re having fun. This “time” that I speak of is our sense of time. This sense of time is completely subjective, as well as relative in the common sense of the word, but let’s call this “subjective time.”
In a way, time travel in science fiction is subjective time, because it’s not real. Similarly, if I didn’t exist, and you were reading this monologue written by Tom Sharp pretending to know what I would say, then you have traveled back to the time when I supposedly spoke it, supposedly, Tuesday 21 April 2026.
Monologues