Would we even know if we traveled back in time?
This is a little sci-fi.
I'm not a physicist or a philosopher, but I'm interested in how the universe works. One thing that interests me is time. Believe it or not, nobody really knows how time works, and phenomena like time dilation demonstrate that time doesn't work the way we intuitively think it does. Personally, I think time is like an undirected graph of cause and effect (or effect and cause), a directionless web of events. It feels like it has a forward direction, but that says more about us than it says about the universe.
When folks start talking about this, they inevitably mention that it's not possible to travel backward in time. There's a problem with that statement, though, and it only recently occurred to me. When people say it's not possible to travel back in time, or that entropy tends to increase, and so we don't generally see wine glasses unshatter and float back to their original resting places, they're really saying that it's not possible for external events to move backward in time while they themselves move forward in time. Why should that be possible? Why should someone be able to retain their memories and continue aging while everything around them reverts to some previous state? That would be like the food in my oven warming up and the food in my microwave cooling down, even though they were started at the same time. Maybe it's simply not possible for time to “move in two directions” at once; the events that led me to start the oven also led me to start the microwave. How could one of those be undone without the other? When we introduce memory and aging, the connection is less direct, but the principle still holds: the events that led the sun to rise also led to me forming a memory of the sunrise. How could we undo the rising without undoing the memory?
I should say, this assumes that we are living in a purely material universe. If minds exist somewhere outside of bodies, then all bets are off. In that case, perhaps the memory could be retained while the sunrise is undone.
If we do live in a purely material universe, though, maybe backward time travel does happen, but we don't notice it. By analogy, if we were living in The Sims and the “player” decided to jump back one hour, wouldn't our memories and experiences also be reverted to their states one hour ago? How would we notice anything changing? Even if the game were rewound, being played backward frame by frame, wouldn't our memory also be restored to previous states frame by frame, and wouldn't each of those frames feel exactly as it did the first time, when they were played forward? The universe may not have frames, exactly, but it does have cause and effect. In the real world, playing the game backward one frame at a time would be like undoing one effect at a time.
I know this is pretty out there, as far as my posts go. Maybe this is easily refuted by people who actually know what they're talking about. But it's interesting to me. And hey, maybe it would make for a fun Star Trek plot point! “We are going back in time, we just don't remember it!“