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Yes, in one scientifically precise sense. Einstein’s relativity allows a traveler to reach the future faster than people who stay behind by experiencing less elapsed time. This effect, called time dilation, has been measured. Traveling into the past is a separate idea: equations can describe exotic possibilities, but no controllable machine or human journey backward through time has been demonstrated.
What Neil deGrasse Tyson actually claimed
Tyson has made the distinction between forward and backward time travel in several interviews. In an ABC News interview published July 3, 2015, he said, “We have ways of moving into the future. That is to have time tick more slowly for you than others, who you return to later on.” He linked the prescription to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity and noted that the required speeds must be very high compared with light.
In the same interview, Tyson described a different possibility by saying, “There is a way to do it, but it requires extreme distortion in the fabric of space and time.” His example involved a trajectory around two nearby black holes. He presented that scenario as a theoretical solution, not as a working spacecraft design.
During an Arizona PBS Horizon interview, Tyson was even more explicit: “We can travel into the future, however, and we’ve been able to do that.” Asked about the past, he answered, “You’re right about the past. We don’t know yet how to go into the past.” On the official StarTalk Cosmic Queries transcript, he explains that the “very clearly identified and well-tested laws of relativity” can slow down or speed up one person’s time relative to objects around them.
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How relativity lets you move into the future
High-speed travel
Special relativity says that a moving clock runs more slowly relative to a clock at rest in another reference frame. The difference becomes substantial only as speed approaches the speed of light, which is about 300,000 kilometers per second. A spacecraft moving at ordinary aircraft or automobile speeds would experience an imperceptible difference. A vehicle traveling extremely close to light speed could, in principle, allow its crew to age far less than people on Earth. When the crew returned, Earth could have advanced farther into the future than their own bodies had.
This is not a way to choose an arbitrary date and instantly arrive there. The traveler must spend time accelerating, cruising and decelerating, and the engineering demands grow dramatically as the speed gets closer to light speed. Relativity also forbids an object with mass from being accelerated to or beyond light speed.
Gravity and clock rates
Einstein’s general relativity adds gravitational time dilation. Clocks deeper in a gravitational field run more slowly than clocks farther away. The effect is routinely included in precision timing systems and has been measured with clocks at different altitudes and speeds. Near an extremely compact object such as a black hole, the difference could become enormous for a distant observer, although surviving and operating in that environment is a separate problem.
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Future travel versus past travel
| Question | Travel to the future | Travel to the past |
|---|---|---|
| Physical basis | Time dilation from high relative speed or strong gravity | Hypothetical paths in extremely curved spacetime |
| Evidence | Measured differences between clocks; established relativity | No demonstrated machine, signal or human journey |
| Conditions | Near-light speed, or an intense gravitational field | Exotic spacetime geometries such as traversable wormholes or special black-hole trajectories |
| Status | Real effect, but large journeys are technologically impractical | Mathematical speculation with unresolved physical and engineering problems |
A mathematical model can contain a closed or looping path through spacetime without showing that nature permits the required materials, stability or energy. Tyson’s black-hole and wormhole examples belong in that category. They illustrate what the equations may allow under extreme assumptions, not transportation systems available to people.
Could a black hole send you back in time?
Black holes strongly curve spacetime, so they are useful in explaining why gravity changes elapsed time. That does not make them portals. Crossing an event horizon prevents a traveler from returning to the outside universe, and the tidal forces near many black holes would destroy an unprotected spacecraft. A trajectory involving multiple black holes can appear in theoretical discussions of unusual spacetime paths, but no observation has shown a controllable route that exits in an earlier time.
Wormholes raise a similar distinction. A hypothetical traversable wormhole would connect distant regions of spacetime, and if its two entrances experienced different histories, some solutions suggest a time offset. Physics has not established that traversable wormholes exist, that they can remain open, or that the negative-energy conditions often invoked in models can be produced at useful scale.
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Why the Back to the Future DeLorean is fiction
The DeLorean’s flux capacitor and 88-mph trigger are storytelling devices. Eighty-eight miles per hour is nowhere near the speed needed for a noticeable special-relativistic time difference. The film also treats backward travel as a controllable trip to a selected date, something current physics has neither demonstrated nor provided an engineering path to build.
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Tyson’s wording is accurate only when the direction and mechanism are specified. Forward time travel through differential aging is a consequence of tested relativity, and small versions have already been observed with precision clocks and high-speed particles. A dramatic human journey would require propulsion, energy, shielding and life-support capabilities far beyond current spacecraft.
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Backward time travel remains an open question at the level of speculative theory, not an established technology. No experiment has sent a person, object or usable message into the past. The absence of a demonstrated mechanism also means that familiar paradoxes—such as changing the events that led to your journey—remain questions for theoretical models and fiction rather than laboratory engineering.
Further reading and viewing
For a deeper look at the equations, see J. Richard Gott’s Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe. Official StarTalk programs including Cosmic Queries: Time Travel and Travels in Time provide Tyson’s broader explanations and discussions with physicists.
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