What does one struggle to obtain more of, can never have more than anyone else, and if lost, can never recover? Time. It governs our very existence. It flows ever forward with events occurring in a linear fashion one after another. As much as one would like to “re-do” an event, the best one can do is to apologize, make amends, ignore or recover and go on. Perhaps one reason that science fiction is so popular is because time becomes a commodity over which man has control rather than time controlling man. Man likes to be in control and feel that his destiny is within his domain. When one focuses on time, it makes one realize that they are not necessarily in control of their ultimate destiny (Jb 1:21) and there may be conditions under which they must live (Pr 12:28). Was that why time was created? Is time another method God uses to focus on His glory? Will it be one of the elements of nature that God will use to hold man accountable for his decisions (Ro 1:20)? As one gets older, one realizes that life is indeed short; it is a vapor that quickly vanishes (Ja 4:14). Therefore, one needs to understand how time can be redeemed (Ep 5:16) and what that means for an individual. What is time anyway? It is a subject of philosophers and scientists. To the former it is a subject to elicit emotion; to the latter, an enigma to the understanding of the universe. We move forward in it – whether willingly or unwillingly.

To a physicist, however, time does not advance forever forward. In order to make the universe make sense and to rationalize how all is put together, time is not only a continuous variable but can also go forward and/or backward. Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, states that energy equates to the mass of an object times the speed of light squared. This became part of his theory of relativity and stated that the speed of light is a universal constant, meaning that no one could exceed that speed, i.e., approximately 186,000 miles per second.  To enable someone to go back in time, one would have to travel faster than the speed of light. This was captured in a popular limerick:

There was a young lady named Bright,

Whose speed was far faster than light.

She set out one day,

In a relative way,

And returned on the previous night!

A.H. Reginald Buller

However, it is argued that as a mass increases its speed, its mass, but not its size, actually increases. Therefore, the velocity has to increase due to the increase in mass. Taken to its limit, the mass increases to infinity and the velocity never reaches the speed of light. Buller also captured this thought in another limerick:

To her friends said the Bright one in chatter,

“I have learned something new about matter:

My speed was so great,

Much increased was my weight,

Yet I failed to become any fatter!”

A.H. Reginald Buller

Some have touted to have broken this barrier, although there are still skeptics. In these experiments, if time appeared to have gone backward, it was only by billionths of a second – not enough to convey the idea of “time travel.” Although these experiments are not proof of time travel, others believe that these results support the probability of being able to travel faster than the speed of light by altering spacetime around an object, similarly to what is well-known by Star Trek enthusiasts as “warp drive.” At least for now, it seems that we can potentially get somewhere even faster than we can today, but not get there before we left. We are currently limited to time in one direction.

In our next post, we’ll see what God says about time.

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Visit Books & Words to Inspire by Randy C. Dockens