Time travel is a topic that has generated more controversies in recent times. Many argued it’s possible while many believe it’s a hoax and far from real. We have seen many people like John Titor claiming they are a time traveler and even telling the world what happened in the future.
The biggest question now is – Is Time Travel a hoax, joke, ruse, deception, fraud, and trick or it is real and original. We will get to know the truth during the course of this article if Time travel is a hoax or reality.
Time travel basically means moving between different points in time. You can either move forward into the future or backward into the past. The truth is we are constantly time traveling but only in one direction which is into the future. We are moving 1 second at a time into the future. You now have to imagine travelling 100 years in just one hour or 1 minute. It is mind-boggling to think about time travel.
You can travel into the future and note what is selling then, maybe bitcoin will hit $100,000 or the United States dollars will be non-existent. What if you went back in time and stop your mother and father meeting? That means you wouldn’t have been born! If you hadn’t born, you couldn’t have time-traveled to prevent the meeting. In the Marvel superhero film X-Men: Days of the future past, Wolverine traveled back into the past to stop the assassination of the President by Magneto. This is fiction, but is it possible to happen in reality.
Understanding Time
Time is something familiar to everyone, yet it’s hard to give a generally accepted definition. Science, Mathematics, Arts, and Philosophy all have different definitions of time. Time is often considered the fourth dimension.
According to Physicists, Time is a progression of events from the past to the present into the future which means in a static system is timeless since there is no progression of events. Time can neither be seen not tasted but it can be measured.
We measure time passage in seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, centuries, and millenniums, but this doesn’t mean time flow at a constant rate. Just as a river water gushes or slows down depending on the channel, weight of debris in it, time flows at different rates, in different regions or places. In scientific terms, TIME is relative. For instance the hands of a clock inside a speeding train, bus move more slowly than that of a stationary clock in your house, hostel, office etc. This shows that time is relative depending on how fast you are moving. It birthed the concept of Time Dilation. Astronauts who live on the International Space station are typical example of this. Astronauts move faster than we are on earth and that means they age slower than they would have been on earth. This is evident when Scott Kelly came back after a year in space slightly younger than his identical twin.
We have gotten a brief concept of time now, the next thing is how to time travel.
How to Time Travel
According to Albert Einstein special relativity theory which says that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. One way to achieve time travel is by breaking the cosmic speed limit and go faster than speed of light in space. Light travels at 299,792 kilometers per second in a vacuum. This mean that scientists will have to build a time machine that can break that speed. This requires the object or being to have infinite mass to continuing going at that speed.
Creating a Wormhole is another way to time travel which is predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity. A wormhole is a shortcut or tunnel that links two places in space-time.
So is Time Travel Possible?
Time is just like a river and it flows at different speed depending on many factors. Einstein realized 100 years ago that matter drags on time and that’s why there is a slight difference in space time and earth time with around a third of a billionth of a second being gained everyday by the space time. The slight change is what Einstein realized that matter slows down time and the heavier the object, the more it drags on time.
There have been numerous experiments on Time Travel. The Hafele-Keating experiment was a test to prove the theory of relativity. Cesium-beam atomic clocks were put on commercial airliners and flown around the world. The atomic clocks were compared to the one on the ground and there was a difference.
You may wonder about using humans as experiment and maybe time travel 30 years into the future or to the past. That does not appear possible NOW. Recent advances in quantum theories may help overcome time travel paradoxes like the Grandfather Paradox. I am very confident that time travel into the future is possible, but we would need to develop some very advanced sophisticated technology to accomplish it.
Challenges
Imagine you go out for 3 months and you turn around, and come back for three months. While you are travelling at the speed of light, time stays slow relative to the people who are staying back on earth. As a result, you will be going fast, while your clock will be going slow. When you get out of your ship, you will be 6 months old, but earth will be many years older. Earth would have gone thousands, millions of years depending on how close you are travelling to the speed of light. These are problems associated with time travel.
Getting a space ship that can go faster than the speed of light. The fastest manned vehicle in history Apollo 10 traveled at 25,000mph. A machine travelling at the speed of light will require an unimaginable amount of energy.
The sudden change in velocity will prove fatal on the body.
References
Hafele-Keating | Space | John Titor | Time travel | Time Machine
