Ever since I was a kid, I have pondered if time travel was possible? Old cartoons depict Superman flying faster than the speed of light around the world in reverse and causing the world to go back in time. While, time travel of the future will not happen because of super man, I think enough people have wondered about the possibility of time travel for me to research it.
First, time travel is real. We are all traveling through time right now. We are traveling at a rate of one second per second, one minute per minute, or one hour per hour, or however you would like to look at it. But, what if we could change this rate and travel at a different speed?
Einstein also had the same question as me and his answer to the question might blow your mind. He predicted that we could in fact change the rate at which we are traveling through time. This prediction was published along with his special theory of relativity. Einstein predicted that the rate at which something travels through time is inversely proportional to that things speed. So, if I were to travel through space at an extremely high rate of speed, close to the speed of light, the rate that I would travel through time would decrease. For instance, if I flew in a rocket ship to another galaxy at a speed close to the speed of light and by the time I made it to that galaxy and came back, I had aged five years. My friends back on earth may have aged 40 years. Thus, I would have traveled through time at a rate less than one minute per minute.
Next, most scientists agree that it is possible to travel “forward” through time at varying speeds, traveling “back” in time can get a little tricky. When Einstein first came up with various equations related to his theory of special relativity, no one could figure out a way for his equations to allow for time travel backwards. Since then, scientists and mathematicians have been able to crack these equations in hundreds of different ways and hypothesize about ways that people could travel back in time.
In conclusion, it is possible to travel through time at different speeds and even travel back in time. Traveling forward in time at slower speeds will require us to innovate ways to travel through space at speeds close to the speed of light. However, traveling back in time is much more complicated. One possible way to travel back in time is to drive through a worm hole, but this is estimated to require as much energy as is released from an exploding star. So, until we learn to harness energy of these magnitudes, I would say traveling back in time is way out of reach. Having said all this, time traveling is possible, but you will most likely never do it because the technology to time travel is way out of reach.
Good topic selecting! Maybe I just really want time travel to be possible some day (side effect of loving time travel movies as a kid), but I do think it’ll happen somehow. My own theory is that we’ll never know time travel is possible until it actually happens. In other words, we know it is possible until someone travel to our time from the future, but it hasn’t happened yet…
Time travel has always seemed like something so out my realm of knowledge. I never bother to research it because i figured I would never be able to understand it. Thank you for your great research and making it easier for me to understand!
I saw lots of movies about time travel. And most classical one is . And those movies are about time traveling to the future. In my opinion, I think anything could be possible, the time travel just need people to find the way to achieve it. Humans already done lots of great things, I think time travel would be available in next few centuries.
Time travel is such a complex but interesting conversation topic. I am a film major and if there is one thing films love to play with is the concept of time. It is tackled many different ways like in the above mentioned Interstellar or more comically in Back to the Future. This does bring up a question on whether the concept of time is natural in the terms of the involvement of gravity above or if it is something we can “solve” so to speak like Doc Brown. Very interesting blog!
I think time traveling into the future would be pretty cool and the fact that its possible. Although if you do travel into the future then there’s pretty much no way to get back so you’d have to make that decision yourself. In the movie Interstellar you see how time is longer or shorter depending on gravity so when the crew gets back into space from a planet the person on the space ship had aged a lot and the crew was only on the planet for about 30 minutes.