TIME TRAVEL AND THEORIES OF TIME

The intuitive outlook of the world is seriously threatened by many advances in modern sciences. The situation was quite different one hundred years ago. The common-sense view of the world was not at odds with the scientific theory until the last decades of the nineteenth century. Mechanics and phenomenological thermodynamics were almost intuitive in Western thought. After the first developments of statistical thermodynamics and electromagnetism and especially following the discovery of General Theory of Relativity (GTR) and Quantum Mechanics (QM) a disagreement arose between our intuitions about the structure of the world and the scientific descriptions of it. The existence of new scientific models questioned our ability to understand reality and our comprehension of understanding reality. But which one is the most correct: our everyday intuitions which are relatively stable and almost universally endorsed or scientific explanations of the world which are continually changing? From the beginning QM and GTR were beset by problems of their foundations so that there are many interpretations of them. The situation did not change too much in the meantime: QM raises problems of measurement an