Book excerpt: What do Scientists Say About Time Travel? It's fair to say that most scientists today will tell you that time travel is impossible. Three of today's top physicists - Charles Liu, Brian Green and Michio Kaku - all hold that time travel is, if not impossible, unlikely in the extreme. However, one of the most brilliant minds of our time, physicist Stephen Hawking, disagrees - although only partially. He believes that time travel is theoretically possible, but only into the future. …. But What Do Real People Experience? The opinion of science, however, has never stopped thousands of people around the world from reporting what they firmly believe are actual experiences of spontaneous time travel! Still others insist that time travel is not only possible, but they have already done it as part of top secret government programmes. Claims for time travel range from the highly flaky to the astoundingly believable. They are especially difficult to dismiss when time travel reports come from absolutely ordinary, rock-solid people who have nothing to gain by proclaiming they travelled in time. Many people who report time travel experiences don't necessarily believe it themselves. What happened to them was so strange, so unexpected, yet so real; they simply have no other good explanation for their experience. You will meet a number of such individuals in this book, most of their stories straight out of the headline of local newspapers. No doubt, a story or two will strike the reader as pure balderdash. On the other hand, some of these cases of time travel are tantalizing and unexplainable. They also come with a certain amount of solid evidence, such as stopped clocks, frozen machines and electromagnetic devices acting in inexplicable ways. Physicist and NASA scientist Tom Campbell said that scientific advances always 'come from the fringe.' Thus, even if you consider some of these stories stepping dangerously 'out there' onto that fringy edge, remember that many of yesterday's fringe theories are today's scientific fact. At the very least, it doesn't hurt to approach the idea of time travel with an open mind and a sense of wonder.