Today I'm wearing my mad-scientist's hat to explain the time travel theories in a way everybody understands. Read my article "Is time travel possible?" on http://www.pavartiktyler.com/is-time-travel-possible-a-guest-post-from-beguiled-author-urania-sarri/ and see why I love the (futuristic) time travel genre so much!
Read my post here BELOW:
Is
time-travel possible?
‘Our heirs, whatever or whoever they maybe, will
explore space and time to degrees we cannot
currently fathom. They will create new melodies
in
the music of time. There are infinite harmonies
to
be explored.’
Clifford Pickover
Traveling between different points in time has been a popular topic for
novels and films. From Mark Twain and H. G. Wells to Doctor Who, Back to the
Future and Star Trek or Terminator, some kind of timE machine or portal takes the heroes to new adventures in the past or the FUTURE.
But how close are such stories to reality?
To
start with, did you know that Albert Einstein
proved that time is nothing but an illusion? That’s because time is relative:
it either slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move in relation to
something else.
Do
you find this confusing?
Let
me help you.
Imagine
you had a twin and that only you happened to be inside a spaceship which
traveled almost as fast as the speed of light. When you got home you’d find
that your twin has aged faster than you. Strange huh? But you should know that
gravity bends time. This theory has been proven by GPS satellite technology and space stations where clocks gain
38 microseconds a day! So you, my lucky astronaut
twin, would be a time traveler who would return to Earth younger than your
twin! This is called the Twin Paradox. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? And do you
realize what this proves? That time travel to the Future is possible! At least,
it is theoretically allowed.
I’m afraid I cannot be as
positive about traveling to the past. Science has shown that you would have to
do this either travelling faster than the
speed of light (186,282 miles per second), which the majority of
scientists consider physically impossible, or through giant
wormholes which is again unfeasible as such wormholes would collapse very quickly and would only be suitable for
very small particles. Also, the technology needed to create a wormhole is far
beyond anything we have today.
The theory of Parallel universes fascinates me the most. With every decision
you make a new universe is created. In this version of time travel there are multiple coexisting alternate histories so that when the traveler goes back in time he ends up in a new
timeline where historical events have different outcomes. This allows the time
traveler to intervene. But as Steven
Hawking wonders in A Brief History of
Time (a must-read for fans of this genre), why haven’t there been problems
with history such as a traveler going back to time and reveal the secrets of
atomic bomb to the Nazis? This raises the issue of Ethics. Why didn’t I get my
heroine to go back in time and save her father? Why doesn’t Christopher reveal
the secrets of his world to her? Because this would change the flow of events
and the repercussions could be catastrophic. As it is stated in The grandfather paradox,
a time traveller cannot go back and kill his parents or his grandfather because
he’d never be born. If that were to happen, some physicists say, he would be
not be born in one parallel universe but still born in another. Others say that
the photons that make up light prefer self-consistency in timelines, which would interfere with your evil, suicidal plan.
But then, would Christopher give Emma the cure should she suffer from a
fatal disease? I strongly recommend reading Isaac
Asimov’s The end of eternity for more ethical issues on time-travel.
So, is time travel
possible?
Elizabeth Howell,
SPACE.com Contributor
concludes: “While time travel does not
appear possible — at least, possible in the sense that the humans would survive
it — with the physics that we use today, the field is constantly changing.
Advances in quantum theories could perhaps provide some understanding of how to
overcome time travel paradoxes.”
Urania
Keep being distracted by reading (not that Hugh is not enough to distract you!)
:)
Urania
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