Month: October 2017

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If you can tweet you can become president…

I was recently having a fascinating discussion with a CEO of a technology company around leadership, the weaknesses and social media as the communication link to their image, when the recently elected president of the United States of America came to mind.
It’s bizarre really, but the facts are: Donald Trump is the first Twitter president of the United States of America.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News recently, Trump put into words what many people have long been suspecting, that were it not for his mastery of hyperbole in 140 characters, he would not now be occupying the most powerful office on Earth. “Let me tell you about Twitter,” the president began. “I think that maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter.”
Combine together his followers on Twitter and Facebook, Instagram, @Potus and “lots of other things”, Trump said, and he has the combined ability to publish directly to as many as 100 million people.

All jokes aside, whilst the truth maybe the fact that Twitter, Facebook, Instragram @Potus and other platforms may attract his following of interested fans, the question you need to ask yourself is exactly what cost is his presidency costing the United States just as you could question a CEO of a FTSE 100 company that used Social Media to obtain his or her position in the same?

My company is often being approached by executive boards of companies that question their existing leadership decisions in people, it is clear that people love the title of CEO, but do they have or are able to execute the skills to the business that will make the change necessary to drive the company to profitability and growth?

If we take a look at some basic facts:
• We are in the worst economic circumstances we have faced in almost 100 years
• It is forecasted to get worse before we hit bottom
• There are many organizations who have already executed large scale reductions in force and they will be followed by others
• Layoffs, reductions in force, or whatever you want to call them cause anxiety, trauma and lost productivity

Here are some of the facts about poor leadership costing a loss in productivity to American businesses that I found out in an article published at Harvard Business Review

According to one of the workplace reports by Gallup, 50% of the working professionals in US merely put their time in at office, 20% often represent their discontent via missings their days on job, driving customers away or influencing the co-workers in a negative way. Only the remaining 30% are committed towards their work. What’s the reason behind it? ‘poor leadership’.

In fact, while researching for their book ‘Leading People’, the authors Rosen and Brown came up with the findings that the current state of poor leadership is costing more than half of their human potential to the American companies.

The numbers are self-explanatory as to how much does poor leadership cost a business in terms of productivity.

Loss of human resources
Loss of human resources does not only mean the employees leaving the organisation. Well, that’s the ultimate loss, but a big loss is when the employees are not being used as per their full potential.

Poor resource management is one of the key tell tales of weak leadership, that can bring a downfall for the company. No matter how experienced and expert your resources are, if they are not utilised rightfully they are not going to benefit the business. This will ultimately lead to loss of resources, more so it will bring the loss of your company.

Successful leadership is all about having the right people, with the right abilities, in the right place, at the right time!

Loss of revenues
According to the same report by Gallup that was mentioned in the second point it has been found that poor leadership alone costs American companies a loss of more than half a trillion dollar each year.

According to the Cost of Poor Leadership Calculator created by DDI, a leading firm that conducts corporate researches, it was found out that one poor leader costs leadership around $126,000 over just one year owing to loss of productivity, and employee turnover issues.

Corporations are victims of the great training robbery. American companies spend enormous amounts of money on employee training and education $160 billion in the United States and close to $356 billion globally in 2015 alone, but they are not getting a good return on their investment. For the most part, the learning doesn’t lead to better organisational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things.

In another survey The Conference Board CEO Challenge®, more than 1,000 respondents indicated that human capital remains their top challenge, with customer relationships rising in importance in the past two years. Also, operational excellence and innovation remain vitally important for driving business growth and ensuring a sustainable future. These challenges, albeit in varying order, were the top challenges in all four regions included in the survey: the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

When asked about the strategies to address the human capital challenge, 4 of the top 10 strategies CEOs selected are focused on leadership: improve leadership development programs, enhance the effectiveness of senior management teams, improve the effectiveness of frontline supervisors and managers, and improve succession planning. CEOs know their organisations cannot retain highly engaged, high-performing employees without effective leaders who can manage, coach, develop, and inspire their multigenerational, globally dispersed, and tech-savvy teams.

CEOs also were asked to identify the leadership attributes and behaviors most critical to success as a leader. The top five prominent in every region globally were:
• Retaining and developing talent.
• Managing complexity.
• Leading change.
• Leading with integrity.
• Having an entrepreneurial mind-set.

So how can leadership improve?
First, leadership capability efforts are not necessarily hardwired to business strategy. This will always lead to initiatives that are disconnected and inconsistent across the organisation, diluting the overall focus on the core leadership behaviors to cultural and business change.

Without properly aligning current leadership capability against business goals, you miss the opportunity to identify key gaps, running the risk of focusing on the wrong things.

Second, almost all of the focus is on quality of content; how well we execute takes a back seat. This becomes even more difficult when you are trying to scale efforts across the enterprise or across different countries and cultures. According to the Corporate Leadership Council, one-third of a leadership program’s success is related to content and two-thirds are determined by the quality of the implementation.

Finally, despite the best of intentions, many efforts produce no lasting change in terms of behavior and results. Don’t be drawn in by the hype of five-minute videos and digitized options. This type of learning can be engaging, but like a quick-fix diet, they don’t work.
Failure to examine the big data and analytics to help understand (and react to) the gap between existing leadership practices and proven value to the business is a detriment to leadership development efforts. Too often we are still content with the smile sheets and anecdotal data. To be effective, we all need data-driven analyses to execute informed decision-making processes and in real time.

This video on Leadership in the 21st Century and Global Forces by Dominic Barton, Global Managing Partner of McKinsey & Company, will give you another prospective to global and growing trends in ‘Global Leadership’ – The Darden Leadership Speaker Series kicks-off its 2016-17 season with Dominic Barton.

Talking with my business partner in the US, Mark Herbert, we created a check list of priorities that should be considered when making change, which include:
• Leadership development has long been viewed as a cost. It is an investment in your leaders and your business.
• The program is not adopted across the enterprise. If you do not predict and act on issues across geographies and cultures, there will be no consistency and implementation will not succeed.
• Development is seen as an isolated training event or the “initiative of the month.” That’s ineffective if you’re trying to achieve lasting behavior and change. Reinforce learning and sustain the momentum by investing energy and resources to diagnose your leaders and guide them through a targeted journey of experiences.

Marcus Buckingham, author of ‘First Break All the Rules’ and other management “bibles” stated:

“Today’s most respected and successful leaders are able to transform fear of the unknown into clear visions of whom to serve, core strengths to leverage and actions to take. They enable us to pierce the veil of complexity and identify the single best vantage point from which to examine our complex roles. Only then can we take clear, decisive action.”

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Do we really use our Senses, Imagination and Knowledge?

After reading an incredibly interesting research paper recently, named: “Berkeley’s Two Mental Events: Ideas of Senses and Ideas of Imagination and Memory”, authored by Tzofit Ofengenden, Tübingen University, the paper triggered some interesting observations and questions… ‘There’s no question that our ability to remember informs our sense of self and knowledge, however, the relationship may also work the other way around: so can our sense of self influence what we are able to remember through imagination and knowledge?

If you close your eyes and imagine an apple, an apple exists, but only in one place in your brain. That is the difference between perception and imagination. … comes from recordings from single neurons in animals and humans. … close your eyes and consider these questions: What shape is a Scottish Terrier’s ears? Which is a darker green: grass or a green tree python? If you rotate the letter “N” 45 degrees to the right, is a new letter formed?

In seeking answers to such questions, scientists say, most people will conjure up an image in their mind’s eye, mentally “look” at it, add details one at a time and describe what they see. They seem to have a definite image in their heads.

But where in the brain are these images formed? And how are they generated? Without hands in the brain, how do people “move things around” in their imaginations?

Using clues from brain-damaged patients and advanced brain imaging techniques, neuroscientists have now found that the brain uses virtually identical pathways for seeing objects and for imagining them – only it uses these pathways in reverse.

In the process of human vision, a stimulus in the outside world is passed from the retina to the primary visual cortex and then to higher centres until an object or event is recognised. In mental imaging, a stimulus originates in higher centres and is passed down to the primary visual cortex, where it is recognised.

The most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans; good activity, ‘too little activity or too much activity by our brain’ by Daniel Amen

Dr. Martha Farah, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, recently said: “People have always wondered if there are pictures in the brain,” More recently, she said, the debate centred on a specific query: as a form of thought, is mental imagery rooted in the abstract symbols of language or in the biology of the visual system.

Vision is not a single process but rather a linking together of subsystems that process specific aspects of vision. To understand how this works, Dr. Kosslyn said, consider looking at an apple on a picnic table 10 feet away. Light reflects off the apple, hits the retina and is sent through nerve fibers to an early visual way station that Dr. Kosslyn calls the visual buffer. Here the apple image is literally mapped onto the surface of brain tissue as it appears in space, with high resolution.

Imagination…..the creative power of the mind

Knowledge versus imagination. Einstein’s aphorism reflects a recurrent theme in human thought. The ancient dichotomy between what we know and what we dream, intuit or sense by instinct is found, in some form, in every field of human intellectual endeavour. It is seen in the contrast between rationalist and mystic interpretations of the world’s great religions, between realism and surrealism in the visual arts and between the brutal number-crunching of much experimental physics and the feathery abstractions of superstring and membrane theory.

Knowledge concerns itself with what is present to the senses, but is also a stored and shared repository of publicly acceptable thoughts, many frozen into physical symbols (written or spoken), transmitted through time and space. Knowledge coded, stored and expressed using symbols can, because of the entrancing flexibility of symbol systems, be broken up and reassembled in a multitude of novel combinations. It is this act of recombination which underlies the power to imagine. Our imagination is and must be grounded in our knowledge. The more memories we accumulate, the more material we have to work with, the richer and stranger are the fruits of our imagination.

Imagination, however, is not just the recombination of stored experiences. Such recombination happens every night even in organisms blessed with much less cortex than human beings. What distinguishes us is our capacity for controlled and wakeful dreaming. This is a useful survival aid, helping us to solve problems, anticipate challenges and conceive alternatives. But we have turned imagination into much more a good in itself. Like money, sex or drugs, we use it to satisfy our needs, flaunt our wealth and status, tighten our social bonds, or distract us from realities we would rather avoid.

Knowledge binds us to a sometimes-oppressive existence; imagination helps us escape it. However, imagination evolved as a tool for facilitating survival. Imagining, we take a step beyond what we know into the future or into another world. We see alternatives and possibilities; we work out what we need to reach our goals. Unhooked from reality, imagination no longer serves these life-enhancing purposes. Without new knowledge to feed it and keep it in check, it can become sterile and even dangerous: “nothing but sophistry and illusional”.

Another measurable way of thinking about the balance between imagination and knowledge is to consider each as private or public, individual or group. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued that language is essentially public, requiring consensus about the use of its symbols in order to maintain consistency in meaning over time. One might say the same about knowledge: it must derive from experience in a way which can in principle be reproduced by others. Imagination is a private thing, the leap of a single brain from established fact to exciting novelty.

Was Einstein right?

Is imagination more important than knowledge?

As our realities become more complex we seem increasingly to prefer imagination, but that preference is culture-dependent. Imagination flourishes when its products are highly valued. Leisure, wealth and a degree of political stability are prerequisites for the freedom essential to creativity and for the use of artistic products as indicators of social status.

So, is imagination more important than knowledge? It depends on whom you ask, what you ask about, and when.

Limiting our imagination, is limiting our knowledge and importantly our ability to communicate, as Ludwig Wittgenstein once said:

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

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Do we live as One, Whole and in Truth….?

I was recently having some very deep conversations with friends around life, the subject matter was ‘Do we live a life of One, Whole and in Truth?’, the general concensus of this conversation was that ‘life’ is incredibly complex, there are lots of things going on in our environments and in our lives and at all times, and in order to hold onto our experience, we need to make meaning out of it.

There is only one person to research depth on the subject and I found a quote from the great Albert Einstein that states: ‘A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security’
Like everything in life, it is entirely possible to be happy with just one person for your whole life, my belief is that this is based on two factors;
1. How much your motivations and purpose is for that person?
2. Is it a union of one, whole and are you being truthful to that person and yourself?

As humans, we are conscious of our own sensations, thoughts and feelings. We each have the sense of being a self-contained individual. What makes each of us unique? Our name? Our genes? Our environment? Or the person we have become as we inwardly determine every moment of our lives?

All people whatever their race, education and background are united because there is an infinite creative force for all that is humane in the world. This is the underlying divinity of love which integrates together all who receive this inspiration.

Do we live in truth?

We live in a post-truth world. The problem is in the technological world of information and importantly the way we humans communicate via online and collaboration tools and apps, do we communicate the truth?

It takes courage to be the person you really are. There really is no magic pill or solution to make this happen, especially in a world that constantly sends you messages about who you should be. All of this talk takes you away from being true to yourself. It leads you to live the life you think others want you to have.

This way of living takes you away from authenticity and truth. You ignore your desires and retort to what’s not even a best second on what you truly want to do or the person you really want to be.

Thinking you can fulfill your obligations first, then pursue your dreams, is an illusion. It may seem to be the best option sometimes, but this way of viewing the world diminishes your value and power over the long run.

A scary source of factual information now reveals one in seven adults in a long-term relationship, is with someone who isn’t the love of their life:
• 73% ‘make do’ with partner as ‘true love’ slipped through fingers
• A quarter of adults have been in love with two people at the same time
• 17% have met love of life since getting together with long-term partner
• Men are more loyal to partners
• 60% believe it takes 10 weeks to know if someone is right for them

The results showed it can be hard to find “the one” and although the general perception is that women tend to fall in love more often than men, it was intriguing to see that in reality both men and women fall in love on average two times in their life. What is alarming is that so many people claim to be in long term relationships or even married to someone who isn’t the true love of their life.

And if there are people out there who are genuinely in love with two people at the same time, they must face a huge dilemma.

Are you ready to live a life of truth and self-acceptance? Live your truth right here, right now. What does this mean exactly?

It means to live your most truthful self. Inside you are a person waiting to jump out and live in truth and openness. Most of us spend our days living up to expectations and definitions. In this way you, me, all of us are living to be someone different than who we truly are. This is a lie. It is time to live your truth and own it.

Mindfulness is one way of focusing on your inner self, what are my dreams, fears, what will it take for me to have unconditional love and what are my real needs for longstanding fulfillment? It is about taking time out to pay attention to the present moment, without judgement.

In a world where the amount of stress one heaps on oneself can be seen as a badge of honour, we need to recognise the ways of reducing the potential negative impact of exhaustion and mindfulness is a great place to start. It allows us to take a step back and refresh our perspective on the world, to decide on a better response to the challenges we face, and to really focus. Neuroscientists have proven that no matter how good we are, our brains are simply not capable of operating effectively on more than one complex task at a time.

The fact that we are all intrinsically connected is not some fluffy principle someone made up, it is something which you can experience right now in your daily life. But the way we usually live our lives in this heavily technological environment our awareness and individual senses are hovering right below the signs so to speak. So, we rarely, if ever, see it.

Once you begin practicing mindfulness you can begin to see the natural rhythm of life and how we all depend on so many different things just to come to be as we are in the present and to continue on living each day.

And this is not limited to people either. This includes all other living and non-living things- on land, in the ocean, and in the sky. This can be seen in very concrete ways – in the way we depend on the coral reefs or on the delivery of our local food and water supply for instance – but also in a much deeper way. In a very real way, we exist in the clouds, in the rain, and in the mountains. And they are within us.

This single realisation can change the way we live our entire life’s. From the way you treat others, to what you devote your time to, to the products you consume, and the causes you support.

Finally, having understanding and interests, we can join together in a common purpose. This idea is similar to the way different components of the human body fit together to form a whole healthy body. Each part depends on the others as long as they are not diseased, for the whole to function properly.

The million-dollar question is do we want to be One, Whole and live in Truth……

A great quote by Menachem Begin:

“Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth.”

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Can growing a vine teach us about a sustained life?

I recently visited a good friend and international wine expert in his province of Spain, I love spending time with Aitor and his family, there is always an amazing welcoming and its always wine-o-clock.

Recently Aitor has been occupied with Orange wines – this was a real education for me to learn about the uniqueness of this special wine and its verital.

So I asked Aitor, exactly what is an ‘Orange Wine’ he replied, ‘my friend orange wines are the most characterful, thrilling and food-friendly styles available today, with their deep hues, intense aromas and complex flavours. The counter charge is robust: orange is the emperor’s new clothes, beloved only of trendy sommeliers and hipsters who forgive their oxidised, faulty nature. These wines are unpalatable with curiosity’.

So, I responded, ‘what exactly is an orange wine?’ Aitor said ‘The term is increasingly used for white wines where the grapes were left in contact with their skins for days, weeks or even months. Effectively, this is white wine made as if it were a red. The result differs not only in colour, but is also markedly more intense on the nose and palate, sometimes with significant tannins.

Aitor proceeded to his wine cellar and returned with a Ronco Severo Friulano. DOC Colli Orientali Del Friuli. Friulano 100%. This wine is incredibly special and stays on its lees for 11 months in 30-hectoliter Slavonian oak barrels, and undergoes bâtonnage every 3 days. The wine then ages in the same barrels for about another 12 months.

After tasting this incredible wine I started to think about wine any experienced wineologist will tell you that sunshine is essential for the growth of vines. The sunshine warms the earth, so that the vines can be softened by moist soil, and then it germinates. Sunshine plays an important role in the growth cycle of vines. Germination does not take place unless the vine has been transported to a favorable environment where there is adequate water, oxygen, and a suitable temperature.

Differing species of vines germinate best in different temperatures; as a rule extremely cold or extremely warm temperatures do not favor the germination of vines. Some seeds require adequate exposure to light before germinating.

Orange wine organic bio-dynamic farming

From a biblical perspective and in the bible (John 15:5-8) “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away as a branch, and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you. By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and {so} prove to be my disciples.

This made me think about wine and its process for production, one fact is clear, you must have very good soil to grow such grapes that make these famous orange wines. However, I was stood corrected you cannot grow good grapes in good soil.

I thought this was incredibly curious and so when I got back home I looked it up on the internet. Aitor was right of course. I learned that bad soil yields higher quality grapes than good soil because, in poor soil, the vines have to work harder, branching off more roots to gather nutrients. Not only does this increase the amount of nutrients that ultimately get to the grape, but it also regulates how much water the plant gets. If a vine has too much water, the result is a fat, characterless grape.

This is a perfect metaphor for we humans as well. Trials and challenges rise before us like mountains. But mountains can raise us or bury us depending on which side of the mountain we choose to stand.

Vines and humans can create a legacy and can be in the same, certainly, a legacy is a contribution to humanity. A legacy provides value to future generations. However, if you are creating your ideal legacy, it will also make your heart bubble with passion and excitement today in the process.

Living our unique purpose makes us feel alive. It allows us to enrich and enthusiastically dedicate our time to worthwhile missions of our choosing. Living purposefully, we focus on our objectives with the resolve needed to finish our legacy or purpose in life for humanity.

We all have a purpose. However, it is important to recognise it and keep it clearly in mind. Think about the things for which you would like future generations to remember you. Give yourself permission to embrace and achieve them. Become the master architect of your life and those negative experiences you will leave behind.

Ultimately it’s a matter of choice. History and life teach us that more times than not we do not succeed in spite of our challenges and difficulties but, rather, precisely because of them.

Even a grape knows that…..

M.F.K. Fisher once said:

“I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.”

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Is human time travel truly possible?

I recently wrote a blog named ‘The Value of Time’ – the subject has always fascinated me and the more you think about time, without watching movies like ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Dr Who’ you start to think, just maybe time is a metaphor for many other possibilities?

I read an article recently which was indicative of time travel is theoretically possible, that scientists have said there is no mathematical reason why a time travel machine could not be able to disrupt the spacetime continuum enough to go backwards in time, they suggested.

The study, published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, is titled “Traversable acausal retrograde domains in spacetime”, which spells TARDIS – the name of Doctor Who’s famous police box time machine.

Gravitational waves find could let scientists build a ‘time machine’.

In the paper, mathematicians from the University of British Columbia and the University of Maryland proposed a mathematical model for a viable time machine, presenting geometry which has been designed to fit a layperson’s description of a ‘time machine’”, they wrote.

“It is a box which allows those within it to travel backwards and forwards through time and space, as interpreted by an external observer.”

One of the researchers, Ben Tippett, said: “People think of time travel as something fictional and we tend to think it’s not possible because we don’t actually do it. But, mathematically, it is possible.”

Any time travel machine would probably need to be able to warp spacetime – the connection between time and physical dimensions such as width, depth and height.

The subject fascinated me and I recently purchased a book called ‘Your brain is a time machine’ by Dean Buonomano, where he describes ‘Time’ as the most common noun in the English language. Buonomano states on the first page of his fabulous new book, despite fixation with time, and its obvious centrality in our lives, we still struggle to fully understand it.

Dean Buonomano, “Your Brain is a Time Machine”

Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano explains our sense of time in relation to physics. He’s in conversation with Ted Chiang, writer of “Story of Your Life”.

Could our theories about physics be informed by the very architecture of our brain?

From a psychology perspective, for instance, time seems to flow by, sometimes slowly like when we are stuck in line at the a supermarket and sometimes quickly like when we are lost in an engrossing novel. But from a physics perspective, time may be simply another dimension in the universe, like length, height, or width.

The human brain, Buonomano stated, is a time machine that allows us to mentally travel backward and forward, to plan for the future and agonisingly regret that past like no other animal. And, he argues, our brains are time machines like clocks are time machines: constantly tracking the passage of time, whether it’s circadian rhythms that tell us when to go to sleep, or microsecond calculations that allow us to the hear the difference between “They gave her cat-food” and “They gave her cat food.”

In an interview with Science of Us, Buonomano spoke about planning for the future as a basic human activity, the limits of be-here-now mindfulness, and the inherent incompatibility between physicists’ and neuroscientists’ understanding of the nature of time.

Why are humans unique in our ability to grasp the concept of time for the short- and long-term?

Let’s indulge in a little science fiction for a moment. Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveller, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy.

Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. They wonder if portals to the past or the future could ever be possible within the laws of nature. As it turns out, they think they are. What’s more, they have even given them a name: wormholes. The truth is that wormholes are all around us, only they are too small to see. Wormholes are very tiny. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time.

Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you’ll find holes and wrinkles in it. It is a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it’s easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.

Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimeter across. Way too small for a human to pass through – but here is where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.

Given enough power and advanced technology, perhaps a giant wormhole could even be constructed in space. I’m not saying it can be done, but if it could be, it would be a truly remarkable device. One end could be here near Earth, and the other far, far away, near some distant planet.

So, in conclusion and in theory, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past. Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing.

To physicists, time is what is measured by clocks. Using this definition, we can manipulate time by changing the rate of clocks, which changes the rate at which events occur. Einstein showed that time is affected by motion, and his theories have been demonstrated experimentally by comparing time on an atomic clock that has traveled around the earth on a jet. It is slower than a clock on earth.
Although the jet-flying clock regained its normal pace when it landed, it never caught up with earth clocks – which means that we have a time traveller from the past among us already, even though it thinks it’s in the future.

Some people show concern over time traveling, although Mallett – an advocate of the Parallel Universes theory – assures us that time machines will not present any danger.

As HG Wells said in ‘The Time Machine’:

“The time traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness and Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimentions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.”