We are all familiar with the general concept of time travel from science fiction stories but is this concept coherent? The laws of physics do not rule out time travel — indeed, several physical mechanisms for travel (or at least information transmission) to the past have been proposed over the last few decades. Have these mechanisms stood the test of time? Do not the various paradoxes that are claimed to arise with time travel show it to be impossible? This lecture will review the proposed methods of time travel to see whether they remain viable, and what some consequences of time travel might be.

Dr. Peter J. Riggs is currently with the Department of Quantum Science at the Australian National University. He is a leading Australian researcher on the nature of time and the philosophical foundations of physics. Dr. Riggs’s publications include a variety of articles devoted to time and relativity, together with three academic books.