Originally posted by: K.Universe.
That's one way of looking at it.
If you take an event to be at a specific point in space and a specific moment in time, then of course the event occurs only once at a unique place and a unique time in a given frame of reference. You can only observe it (that too hypothetically) and not interact with it after it occurs in that frame of reference.
You could tell me how exactly did special relativity or similar disciplines mislead you there and if that's convincing we could end discussions on "time travel" right after that, without getting into light cones and world-lines.
from what i read ages ago, I think Einstein himself could not fathom how his grand theory could allow something as ridiculous as time travel. But he went along with folks like Godel who claimed that spacetime of GR allowed time travel through CTL. He was damned if he agreed and he was damned if he did not. If he did not agree, he would have undermined the geometrical interpretation of gravity that his own theory was built on, with possible loss of credibility.
i think GR is great math but where people have gone astray is in giving it a physical interpretation. We can now keep debating this, but the fact remains- for something to travel in spacetime, it has to also be able to travel in the time dimension and that's a self-referential dimensionless quantity. Ability to view things like "starbucks" and the napoleonic wars is great, but it doesn't lead to time travel. There's no physical reality that corresponds to "spacetime" which would imply a time dimension. It is just math which unfortunately a lot of great minds have taken literally as having a physical counterpart leading them to ridiculous science-fiction type conclusions.
comment:
p_commentcount