Can We Travel Through Time? — SPT's Answer

Short answer. Going to the future: yes, partially, by slowing down your own subdivision rate (this is what Einstein's relativity already proves; SPT explains why). Going to the past: no, in any meaningful sense — the past is not a place you can return to, because the configuration that was the past has been subdivided away. Time is not a road; it is the act of splitting.

First, remember what time is in SPT

In standard physics, time is treated as a coordinate — a fourth axis perpendicular to space. You can imagine moving along it just as you move along $x$ , $y$ , $z$ . This picture is what makes time-travel paradoxes feel possible.

In Supreme Polarity Theory, time is something quite different. It is the direction along the time-string in which the One Tai Chi subdivides. There is no pre-existing “timeline” that future and past sit on like train stations. The future does not exist yet — it is what subdivision will produce. The past does not exist any more — it is what subdivision has produced. Only the present configuration of nodes is real.

Geometric metaphor. Imagine an icicle growing downward from a roof, atom by atom. The tip is the present. Higher up the icicle is the past. Below the tip is empty — the future has not been formed yet. The icicle does not contain a “timeline” you can walk along; it is the act of growing. SPT's time-string is exactly this kind of object.

Travelling to the future — yes, partially

If time is the rate at which subdivision is happening for you, then anything that slows your subdivision rate relative to others sends you into their future. This is exactly what Einstein's Special and General Relativity already describe, with two famous methods:

Travel near the speed of light. A clock moving at 99% of $c$ ticks roughly 7× slower than a stationary one. After 10 years on the spaceship, 70 years have passed on Earth. SPT explanation: when a node moves fast through the membrane, more of its motion budget is spent on translation, less on flipping — its local subdivision rate slows. Subdivision elsewhere keeps going at full speed. Result: when you stop, you are in the others' future.
Sit deep in a gravitational well. A clock near a black hole ticks much slower than one in deep space. Spend a year orbiting close to a supermassive black hole, return to Earth, and decades may have passed. SPT explanation: the membrane is bent by mass, which compresses the flip-spin geometry locally and slows local subdivision.

Both work, both are real. Atomic clocks on GPS satellites tick measurably faster than those on Earth's surface, exactly as predicted. Astronauts on the ISS return microseconds younger than they would have been. So “forward time travel” is already a routine engineering effect — just very slow at human scales.

What forward travel cannot do

You cannot come back. Once you have skipped 70 years into Earth's future, the past Earth is gone — its configuration has been subdivided away. You can only travel forward; never sideways back. It is also a one-way ticket relative to your own life. Slowing your subdivision means you do not experience those 70 years; for you, only 10 years passed. You did not extend your life; you traded local time for distant arrival.

Travelling to the past — no

Backward time travel is the romantic idea: rebuild yesterday, meet your grandfather, change history. In SPT, this is not just hard, it is geometrically meaningless. Three converging reasons:

1. The past is not a place

In standard physics, the past is sometimes pictured as still “out there”, just at a smaller value of $t$ . In SPT, this picture is wrong. The past is not stored anywhere as a configuration you could re-enter — it has been subdivided away. Yesterday's arrangement of nodes was used as the seed for today's. Today exists; yesterday does not.

2. Subdivision is irreversible by combinatorics

To send you to the actual past, the universe would have to unsubdivide — every photon Earth has emitted in 13.8 billion years would have to coordinate to fly back into its source atom; every galaxy formed would have to dissolve back into the primordial cloud; every memory in every brain would have to unwrite itself. Nothing in physics literally forbids this individual collision by individual collision, but the number of arrangements that count as “present” is astronomically larger than the number that count as “a particular past”. The probability is not zero; it is just so close to zero that no observable backward jump can occur in any cosmic time.

3. The grandfather paradox dissolves

The classical worry — “what if you went back and killed your grandfather before your father was born?” — needs a destination past to even formulate. SPT removes the destination. The past you came from is the chain of subdivisions ending at you; there is no separate past-time slot you could be inserted into. The paradox does not get resolved; it never gets to be asked.

What about “softer” versions of past travel?

Idea	What it really claims	SPT verdict
Looking at the past	Telescopes see ancient light from distant galaxies	Yes — light is just a propagating flip; old light is photons emitted long ago that are arriving here now. You see the past, you do not visit it.
Closed time-like curves (GR)	Some Einstein-equation solutions (Gödel, Tipler cylinder, wormholes) appear to allow loops back to your own past	No. SPT denies the geometric premise — the past is not a region the time-string still contains. CTCs are mathematical artefacts of treating $t$ as an extra spatial axis; in SPT, $t$ has no such status.
Quantum many-worlds “side-trips”	If the multiverse exists, maybe a copy of you in a parallel branch is your past self	Maybe, but useless. SPT's eight Bagua slices may host parallel branches with different subdivision histories. None is “your” past — they have their own pasts. Even if reachable (we cannot reach them), arriving is not returning.
Memory and causality	“Going back in your mind” through memory or simulation	Always available — but this is reading a stored record, not visiting a place. SPT explicitly identifies memory as a current high-entropy configuration encoding past low-entropy states.
Sakharov mirror universe	Across the One Tai Chi, a mirror branch with reversed time arrow exists	Possibly, in SPT's most speculative reading. But the mirror branch's “past” is its future from our side; you cannot reach it without crossing the One — and what would crossing even mean?

The deep reason — time IS the splitting

Backward time travel asks the universe to do the impossible: to be both subdivided (so the present exists) and not-yet-subdivided (so the past still exists to receive a visitor). These are mutually exclusive. Time travel into the future is just relative subdivision rate, which is fine. Time travel into the past is asking the universe to undo growing — and growing is what time is.

Summary table

Direction	Mechanism	Possible?	Cost / catch
Future, slightly	Move fast or sit in a gravity well	Yes — proven daily by GPS, ISS, particle accelerators	Microseconds at human cost; you cannot return; you also did not extend your own life
Future, dramatically	Spaceship at 99% c, or year orbiting near a black hole	Yes in principle — engineering not yet possible	Decades pass on Earth while years pass for you. One-way.
Past, by light	Look at distant galaxies through a telescope	Yes — informationally only	You see what was, not what is. You cannot interact.
Past, physically	Closed time-like curves, wormholes, tachyons, etc.	No — geometrically meaningless in SPT	The past is not a place. There is nowhere to arrive at.
Past, in mind	Memory, recordings, simulation	Always	You read a record; you do not return.

What this means in practice

If SPT is right, the romance of going back dissolves into a more honest picture: the past is gone the moment it has become the present. What remains of it is its imprint — the structure of the universe today, the photons still in flight from yesterday's stars, the memories in your brain. These are records, not destinations. The future, by contrast, is real in a way the past is not: it is what the One Tai Chi is about to subdivide into. We can shape it (within the limits of physical law), arrive at it (by slowing our own clocks), and wait for it (which we are doing right now). What we cannot do is step backwards along the time-string, because the time-string is not a road — it is the act of growing.

Time travel is not impossible because of paradoxes. It is impossible backwards because the destination has already been used as raw material to build the present. It is possible forward because the destination has not yet been built, and we are all en route to it together — some faster, some slower.

See also: The Arrow of Time for why time only flows one way, and Why c is the Speed Limit for why moving faster is what slows your local clock.