Maria Konnikova Quotes

Time travel is such a magic concept.

Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.

Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.

Time travel is a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.

The river of time may fork into rivers, in which case you have a parallel reality and so then you can become a time traveler and not have to worry about causing a time paradox.

I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?

Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a 'crank.'

Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.

Trust me: you make a movie about time travel, and you know for a fact humans will never travel through time. The paradoxes that come up just from trying to tell a story with time travel really illuminates the fact that it's impossible. It will never happen. We can barely get through a movie that involves time travel.

Time travel is a fantasy we all have. The 'Back to the Future' series really exploits that wish.

I think the idea of time travel is very seductive.

Einstein theorized that time travel was possible, but he was looking at it as unidirectional, going forward. Traveling into the past is much more problematic, as countless stories have demonstrated!

The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.

People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect - but maybe the universe doesn't insist on cause and effect.

I've always been a big fan of time travel, and I'm very into the notion that some day we'll be able to do it. Beam me up!

I only remember the future.

I'd love to time travel.

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

I think time travel is really tricky. But if there's a logic and a complete and well-thought-through paradigm for it, I think it can be really interesting. Some of my favorite time-travel movies just make me think and, you know, the 'what if' question becomes a big one.

The simplest way out of the puzzle of time travel is to say that it can't be done. That's very likely the right answer. However, we don't know for sure.