Time Travel and Normal Travel

Everytime I sit to post, I wonder why so much of gap between my posts and what I can do to improve the situation.
Realized that I haven't given my mind, the requisite time for travel and exploration of the unknown. Life was just going on in one direction and without the wandering mind, one cannot expect fruitful creativity.
So, coming to this post, it is dedicated to the concept of "time travel"

I happened to watch one episode of Stephen Hawking's special on Discovery last Monday (9th Aug 2010, 9 pm to be precise). Well, apart from the regular complaint of 20 minutes break in an hour's show, it had all the ingredients to keep a person engrossed and guide one's mind to civilized wandering! . Let me just try to pour some of the thoughts below

1. Time can be thought of as the fourth coordinate after x y & z coordinates. This makes it difficult to explain, but gives clues to physicists about the concept of time travel.

2. One cannot travel into the past according to Hawking, because of the causality effect. A famous case to illustrate this fact is the Grandfather paradox, wherein a person who travels in the past and shoots his grandfather before the conceiving of his father/mother will not be able to exist in the present.

3. Hawking seems to dislike the idea of parallel universes, (since according to the Grandfather paradox, a person who shot his grandfather can return in a parallel universe as some other identity). Hawking dismisses the idea and says "one can therefore travel only in future"

4. Of the many ways of time travel suggested by Hawking (travelling on the circumference of a black hole, travelling into a worm hole, travelling at speed of light to a distant star), the only option which is feasible is the travelling to a distant star and returning back to find the Earth has surpassed more time than the travelling ship.

A click on wikipedia with the search as 'time travel' reveals a big tag stating "one of the biggest problems in Physics which remains unsolved". Although, the method may not be scientifically possible right now but one must not lose heart, atleast not now.

After watching, I switched on my memory to some of the Vedic and Ancient Indian theories of time travel. A scene in the Mahabharata depicts Arjuna listening to the Bhagavad Gita when time is bought to a stand still by Sri Krishna. This may be possible, may be through the mind because one's thinking can surpass the speed of light. Maybe, this is an answer to the omnipresence of God. All this is left for a challenging debate.

For now, my mind seems to have returned back to normalcy. Physically, I traveled normally to a nearby town named Mandvi last evening where I witnessed sunset at the beach and got back home very late. Hope, some day, one can enjoy traveling through time rather than taking time to physically travel distances.