You’ve seen the movies. The DeLorean hits 88 mph, or a blue police box disappears with a wheezing sound, and suddenly you’re in 1955 or the year 3000. It’s a staple of our imagination. But when people ask are time machines real, they usually aren’t looking for movie trivia. They want to know if someone, somewhere, has actually built a device that can bypass the relentless "now."
Honestly? It depends on which direction you’re trying to go.
If you want to go to the future, the answer is a definitive, scientifically proven yes. We’ve already done it. If you want to go back to see the dinosaurs or fix that embarrassing thing you said in high school, things get a lot messier. Physics starts screaming at us.
The Astronauts Who Already Traveled Through Time
We should talk about Sergei Krikalev. He’s a retired cosmonaut who spent a staggering amount of time—803 days, 9 hours, and 39 minutes—circling the Earth. Because he was moving at such high speeds relative to us on the ground, and because he was further away from the Earth’s gravitational well, he experienced a phenomenon called time dilation.
When he came back to Earth, he was technically 0.02 seconds younger than he would have been if he’d stayed home.
He is a time traveler. It’s a tiny amount, sure. You can’t exactly use two-hundredths of a second to win the lottery. But it proves the fundamental point: time machines are real in the sense that time is not a universal constant. It’s flexible. It stretches and compresses depending on how fast you’re moving and how much gravity is pulling on you.
Einstein, Gravity, and Your GPS
Albert Einstein changed everything with his theories of relativity. Before him, people thought time was like a river flowing at the same speed for everyone. Einstein realized that space and time are actually fused together into a four-dimensional fabric called spacetime.
👉 See also: How to Reset My Algorithm on Instagram: What Actually Works in 2026
Heavy objects, like planets or black holes, warp this fabric.
Think about your phone’s GPS. It’s actually a practical time machine system. The satellites orbiting Earth are moving fast (about 14,000 km/h) and they’re further away from Earth’s gravity than you are. Because of this, their internal clocks run slightly faster than the clocks on your phone—by about 38 microseconds a day. If engineers didn’t account for this relativity, your GPS location would be off by several kilometers within 24 hours. We literally have to program "time travel" into our technology just to find the nearest Starbucks.
Moving Fast vs. Staying Heavy
There are two main ways to jump into the future.
- Velocity (Special Relativity): The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. If you could build a ship that traveled at 99% the speed of light and took a five-year round trip, you’d find that decades had passed on Earth when you returned.
- Gravity (General Relativity): Stronger gravity slows down time. If you hung out near the event horizon of a supermassive black hole—like Gargantua in the movie Interstellar—a few hours for you would be years for everyone else.
This isn't theory. We've proven it with atomic clocks on jet planes and the International Space Station. The "machine" part is just a matter of engineering. We just don't have the fuel or the materials to build a ship that goes fast enough to make the jump noticeable to the human eye.
The Problem With Heading Backwards
This is where the fun ends and the headaches begin. While the math for traveling to the future is rock solid, going to the past is a nightmare.
Most physicists, including the late Stephen Hawking, have been pretty skeptical about backward time travel. Hawking famously held a "Party for Time Travelers" in 2009, complete with champagne and appetizers. He didn't send out the invitations until after the party was over.
Nobody showed up.
There are several "paper-only" ways to go back. One involves "Closed Timelike Curves" (CTCs). If you had an infinitely long cylinder spinning at near-light speed (a Tipler Cylinder), or if you could find and stabilize a wormhole, you might be able to create a loop in time. But "stabilizing" a wormhole requires something called "exotic matter" with negative energy density.
We don't even know if that stuff exists.
The Grandfather Paradox and Other Messes
The biggest hurdle isn't just the engineering; it's the logic. If are time machines real meant you could go back and stop your grandfather from meeting your grandmother, you would never be born. But if you were never born, you couldn't go back to stop them.
Logic breaks.
Some scientists, like David Deutsch, suggest the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics might solve this. In this view, if you go back and change something, you aren't changing your past. You’re creating a brand-new, branching timeline. You’d be a stranger in a world that looks like your past, but you could never get back to your original "home."
Is Anyone Actually Building This?
Not in the way you think.
There’s no secret lab in Nevada with a chrome-plated sports car. However, researchers at places like CERN are constantly smashing particles together at speeds so close to the speed of light that those particles effectively "time travel" into the future before they decay. We are manipulating the flow of time on a subatomic level every single day.
Ron Mallett, a physics professor at the University of Connecticut, has spent much of his career trying to design a time machine using circulating lasers to "twist" spacetime. His work is based on Einstein’s equations, suggesting that light itself can create gravitational fields. It's fascinating, but highly controversial in the scientific community. Most experts think the energy required would be astronomical—way beyond anything we can produce.
Why It Matters Right Now
You might feel disappointed that we can’t just hop back to 1920. But understanding that time is a physical dimension we can manipulate is huge. It changes how we understand the universe.
We are currently in a new space race. As we look toward Mars and long-term space habitation, relativity stops being a fun "what if" and starts being a critical safety factor. Astronauts on a multi-year mission to Mars will experience time differently than people on Earth. We have to learn how to live in a universe where "now" is a relative term.
What You Can Actually Do With This Knowledge
Since you can't buy a ticket on a chronosphere yet, how do you use this info?
First, stop thinking of time as a rigid line. It’s more like a mesh. If you want to "see" the past, just look up. The light from the stars you see at night has traveled for years, centuries, or even millennia to reach your eyes. You are literally looking at the past every time you see the North Star.
Second, keep an eye on "Quantum Simulation." Researchers are using quantum computers to simulate "negative time" events—essentially seeing how particles behave if they could move backward. It's not a Delorean, but it’s the closest we’ve ever gotten to seeing the gears of the clock turn the other way.
🔗 Read more: Why the Belle Chasse Weather Radar is the Most Important Tool in South Louisiana
Third, acknowledge the "Chronology Protection Conjecture." This is Stephen Hawking’s idea that the laws of physics essentially conspire to prevent time travel on a macroscopic scale to keep the universe from breaking. It’s a great rabbit hole to dive into if you want to understand why the universe might actually refuse to let us build a time machine.
Real-world next steps:
- Check out the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) website to see how they sync atomic clocks. It’s the most "real" version of time management we have.
- Look up the Hafele-Keating experiment. It’s the classic 1971 study where they put atomic clocks on commercial airplanes to prove time dilation. It’s the smoking gun for why time travel is a physical reality.
- If you're into the math, look into Kurt Gödel’s solutions to Einstein’s equations. He was the first to show that the math actually allows for paths back to the past, even if the physics makes it nearly impossible.
We are all traveling through time at a rate of one second per second. For now, that’s the only machine we’ve got that works every time. But the fact that we’ve already proven that "now" is flexible means the door isn't just cracked open—it's off the hinges.